CREOtive Thoughts

It was a rather unconscious decision to do a whole series of about-clients-stories. In fact, I hadn't even noticed that I had done just that. I was using the blog-features of Textmate to post to my blog, and if I went through my articles again at all it was via Bloglines, so I really couldn't see the series develop. It's interesting to see though what's obviously the biggest issue when launching an enterprise. It's the clients. It's how to find clients, how to make them trust you, how to make them understand the advantages of your product, how to make them value quality more than cheap&dirty-hacks, how to make them understand why they can't have their way if they want a decent product (because what they have in mind is no good at all), what to put into a contract so you can still have a life and actually earn some money, how to deal with your client in a general manner (what a client expects is sometimes far from what would be logical), etc., etc.
During the past few months we've certainly learned a lot, but it wasn't so much fun at times. I wish we could have avoided one error or the other.
The latter wouldn't have been impossible, I think, if only all the business-stuff we're told at university didn't suck so much. In our study programme we have to do quite a lot of business/economics-related subjects. But instead of telling us about how to get a company going (in a real sense, not the "Once you have your many thousand Euros together, decide about who's going to be your CEO and start renting offices and hiring employees"-kind-of-sense), how to find clients, how to deal with clients, what's expected, what's necessary and what's avoidable, we're told lots of things that simple aren't applicable. They're either too theoretic, or too simplistic. It helps of course too have a general understanding of things so that when you delegate that kind of jobs to specialists you can still understand what they're doing - but here we need to learn things by heart that we'll have forgotten 3 days after the exam, but we're never told about basic real-world stuff.
I'm totally aware of the necessity of finding your own way of doing things, and making your vision of things what makes the company tick. But I still think a hands-on-course about the basics of starting up would have helped (wheres I can't see myself EVER applying the stuff we were actually told about in the courses we had).

"I want an accessible website"
"No, I don't like it this way - I want popups!"
"No, I don't like it this way, I want you to take this image and put it online. No, I only want the image, nothing else. Why wouldn't that be accessible? I can see the image just fine. Enough of it now! Image!"
"No, I dont like it this way. I want a layout just like the paper-flyer I had designed by a graphics artist. Well of course I know that the medium is a different one, of course I know that the possibilities are different and you need to adapt - what d'ya think, that I'm stupid? But frankly - I don't care. I want my paper-flyer online. And I want it to look exactly like it would on paper. 'nouff said"
"No, I don't think you heard me. I don't like it this way. I don't want to scroll down. And please, I want the page to fill the screen horizontally. On the other hand I want the text to be even narrower. Would you please work some magic?"
"I believe you're incompetent. I said I don't want to scroll down. I prefer to have all the content in a little, tiny part of the window, and when there are unusable, usability-nightmare-scrollbars there that's just fine with me. I probably just wanted to make a point."
"Yes, I'm aware that you're probably beginning to notice that I don't care a single bit about my handicapped readers and that I don't even know what accessability means, it's just - when I was talking to the CEO about the website-project I thought it sounded pretty cool"
"Yeah well, I kept bugging you for weeks to come up with a color combination that at least wasn't soooo ugly, because it was really hard to find colors that would match the pseudo-gold from my paper-flyer. But now that I have my CMS I'm using all the features it has to make the site look ugly by using 10 different colors (that don't go well together at all) on every page. I guess you can't use my site as a reference after all, huh?"

Should clients really have their way? Is it better to refuse and to lose a customer, or to deliver a product where you know it's bad, but it's exactly what the client wants (and despite all the consulting we did he didn't want it any other way)?
This project taught us a lot. I'm not sure it was worth it, though.

So...we were asked to deliver a proposal for a new website including a CMS for a real-estate agency. We really were interested, because a short while ago we'd been discussing a row of nice features for that kind of clients, features that the competition doesn't have yet (at least not the relevant, local competition). So we sketched up a 10-pages offer with a detailed description of the features, in simple, non-tech-language, pointing out all the advantages for the client. And we weren't just trying to sell something - far from it. We truly believe that the feature-set we came up with would simply transform our client into the real-estate agency with the most useful, most usable website in the whole city, which according to our beliefs would give them real advantages in terms of satisfied customers, returning customers, happy customers less reluctant to pay a (usually steep) price for good service - in short, we think the system would have helped them to make money. I believe that the (very justified and relatively low) price we would have taken for the project would have been amortised in a few weeks, months at most.

Well...we neither got a "hey, we like that", nor at least a "hm...it's a bit expensive, but interesting". No. What we got was a "cut the crap! I don't want any of that fuss, I just want the same website I had before and I want it to look better. And I don't want it to cost anything". Well, not in that words, I'll admit, but in the end it amounted to the same thing. "We want low costs. No, lower than that. No, you're not quite there yet, lower! Features? Naaah, we've been doing quite well without those for the past 50 years, why would we start having them now?"

I can't imagine how someone who's incapable of thinking more than a day ahead can lead a business, and explicitly demands a mediocre product for a low price, when for 50% more money they'd get a really decent product, and for twice the price they'd get a really good product with probably all the features they'll need during the next five years. (And when I say twice the price I'd just like to remind you that we're not talking real money here, the project's size equals one or two month's salaries of one of our client's (lowly paid) employees.)
It is equally mysterious to me why "traditional companies" can't seem to make the little step across their old-fashioned ways of seeing things and accept that for a large fraction of today's customers getting information and further services using the facilities the internet offers is a necessity, not an option. It's what Herzberg calls dissatisfiers in his famous theory about satisfaction of employees (1), something that makes you rant and complain when missing because you just expect it to be there. I strongly believe that customer satisfaction equals money, at least to some degree. Our client obviously disagrees. For them, only money equals money.

(1) Herzberg's theory

Well, it's been a while since my last post. I've neither been lazy, nor on holidays, but I've been doing lots of work.
I've even managed to prepare the first few lines of several blog posts, but I never got around to really finishing any of them.
So what I'm up to now is no technical article, but a POR (plain old rant - did I just coin an acronym? Gosh, I must be half-french already (1)).
On a sunny day that made every sane being go to the nearest pool, two of the not-so-sane kind were sitting in their dark offices, trying to get some work done. Task of the day: To finish an underpaid project by deploying a web-application. Bonus-Task: Get it done quickly, so we could have the first relaxing weekend in what seems like a century. Well, what can I say - we failed to do the bonus-task. And it wasn't our fault.
Now, in order to put stuff onto a web-server the email you get forwarded by your client should ideally contain the appropriate login-data. The one I got didn't. It did contain username and password - and I could have used it to give a free email-address to all of my readers, because what I had received was the login-data for a mail-administration-web-interface. Useful stuff - if giving free email-addresses to all of your blog-readers is what you do for a living. For us...not so terribly helpful.
As fate would have it, it was 6 p.m., our client was not in his office anymore, and the next day was a holiday. Holidays are good. If you can enjoy them because there's no big black cloud on your mind.
The day after that day I was thrown out of bed by an angrily ringing phone - our client was demanding to know why his website wasn't online yet. I kindly asked him to give me the proper login-data, which he agreed to do. A while later he came up with a telephone-number and a name that I was to contact in order to find out about our client's web-space. I tried to do that, but the girl on the other end of the line wouldn't put me through to the guy I'd been told to get in touch with, company policies and stuff. It didn't matter, as it turned out our client had 10Mb of html-web-space, no database, no nothing. About as useful to us as a pigeon when you're trying to fly across the atlantic ocean.
I called our dear client again, told him about the bad "news" (hm...I'm not going to say obvious things about clients now), and he agreed to get a web-space-package with inode. That's because it was urgent, and inode already maintained our client's domain, so there we went.
Now, inode must be one of Austria's biggest internet-companies, and their slogan is "Wir sind die Guten" - "We're the good guys". Hm...good at skiing, repairing cars or cooking? Good at what? BECAUSE THEY POSITIVELY SUCK AT WEB-HOSTING! They also do a pretty good job of delivering the worst possible service to clients. Anyway - I called them in the most positive spirit, ready to beg them for clicking onto the button that would create a web-space-package for our client. Well, that was a no go. "I'm sorry, I tried to put you through to the lady responsible, but as it appears she's not in the office right now. Can I take your number so she can call you back?". He certainly could, so from 10:00 to 12:00 I was waiting for my blind/deaf date. It appears she'd gotten cold feet though, because it was me who was trying to call her again at 12:30. The lad talking to me this time (they seem to rotate shifts in order to avoid having to listening to the same complaining clients again and again, this way they can always blame it on "the other" (now I finally understand why they were so afraid of those in the Lost-tv-series)) was so very sorry, but the chick I'd been waiting for still wouldn't pick up the phone. I kindly asked to be put in contact with some other person able to "push the button" (hm...maybe I should stop watching tv-series...or maybe inode should) - and the lad put in some effort. Just to tell me a few seconds later that the other guy wasn't there either - though he should have been - and it was utterly mysterious to him where they were, for they should have been sitting in their offices at that precise moment. Was I waiting in vain, would they really call me back? "Certainly - the call is in the system" (right where it should be, huh?) "they should be back any minute now - but I have to say the time's a bit unfavourable". Yeah, right my lad...I'd only been waiting for 3 hours. (I would just like to point out that Inode's "business hotline" (as amateurish as it gets, and as cold as the arctic ocean, but hey, it's all about the show) claims to be reachable 7/7, 7h-22h. But this is only about being able to reach an automatic responder that tells you (in german AND english, hey hey!) that "currently all lines are busy" (euphemism for "Dude, I'm watching the simpsons now, don't bug me, will ya?"). They never said anything about real-life-people that would talk to you, now, did they? Typical case of stupid customers who can't read!)
In the afternoon I tried again via email, and it wasn't a friendly one. No response, though.
Anyway, to make a long story shorter, until this very day nobody of inode has ever made an attempt to call me back. They just didn't care. Not a bit.
In the end I had our client keep calling them until he managed to directly reach one of the girls responsible, he did so on monday afternoon, for they hadn't been in their office on friday at all - a minor thing they'd probably forgotten to tell the intern at the front-desk about. (For those who care to do the numbers: taking into account the 7/7-reachability of inode's support-"team" (why is it so en vogue nowadays to call a bunch of people that don't like each other and are so terribly unsuccessful at working together a "team"?) this is a response-time of about 3 days and a half. And this is for ordering a product, mind, a thing that gives them money and almost no work. I don't even want to know what happens when you have a real technical problem).
We received the login-data, and what had taken several days happened in 2h, the website went online, and everyone was happy.
Until we discovered that inode had blacklisted our mailserver - but that of course is pure coincidence and can't have been the result of a certain email of mine. I will spare you the details of the following calls to inode's technical support team (a.k.a. clueless-internship-playground) but let me just tell you: Technical competence is overrated. Just have your company be bought by a really big player, and you can stop caring about quality and customer satisfaction.


(1) Frenchies love acronyms!