Watch what you ask!

You can easily get into tricky situations sometimes. Take, for example, when a customer has emailed a set of photographs for you to use in building their site. Most of them go into the photo gallery, but maybe one or two get dotted around every page in key positions - making sure that the site looks special to that customer.

You choose your photos carefully, try a couple of different shots in the positions you are thinking of and make your choice. You probably chose based partly on colour matching, or match the colour palette of the site to the chosen photograph.

And then you pass the completed sample over to the customer. The list of changes comes back, along with 'please change the photo on the side to the one of...'. You know instantly it's not going to work, but can you say that?

So, you cut, crop, manipulate and whatever to prepare the photo for its position. Then along with the rest of the changes the next draft goes back to the customer. And what's the response - "That photograph doesn't look as good there as the first one - what can you do to make it look better?"

What can you do? What can you say? You can't exactly say "Well, I chose better than you!", but that's the answer to their question. It might be that changing the site's colour scheme will help it match, but there's usually an amount of experience that straight away gives you that gut feeling as to which photographs will work in key positions, and which just won't. And it's unfortunate when the customer chooses a photograph not based on cold, hard, technicalities, but on their own emotions of which photograph means the most to them.

But that's the world we live in. It doesn't matter that the favoured picture won't mean anything to their visitors, it's their site and they want to see that picture for a reason. So just get on with it!