I need the site live - in 7 days

Now a request such as "I need the site live in 7 days - I've paid for the advertising in a national magazine" isn't necessarily a problem. Work with your web designer; answer emails and phone calls; tell him (or her) what you want and generally get on with the project and as long as there aren't huge complications then it shouldn't be a problem.

But when the project has stumbled along for 3 months already and the customer has changed their mind several times not only about the look and colour scheme but also the content, then the task starts to get more difficult.

Then when I hand over draft versions of the page and I hear nothing back for 2 working days (and still waiting) then the task is becoming more complicated - we have to be live this time next week and I have to build the database still and the customer has to load the products...

Also, ask for "That thing that Amazon does with other products". Erm, what? 2 days later the answer comes back "You know, show products people also bought". Not a problem, usually, but the clock is ticking and we still haven't had an agreement on what the pages will look like. 3 months in and I'm still producing new versions. At least there haven't been any major re-writes for a week.

Hopefully, one of the variations of buttons on show will be satisfactory, else it's back to the drawing board for them. To be honest, I don't like any of the buttons I've been given to work with - but if the customer loves them then so be it.

Think of what you are saying...

A customer this week sent me a rather hotly worded email telling me that if I wasn't up to the task why couldn't I tell him and why had it taken me so long to get the website back to him. My reply, in rather a few more words, was to remind him that 4 weeks ago I'd sent him the links to the live site and asked him to review it and that after my emailing him several times, he said he was too busy with his garden to review the site.

Why then am I getting the blame for the delays - when I've been waiting 4 weeks for a reply? He also said he didn't like the look of the site, which is based exactly on the slides his graphic designer sent to us. Looks like this could be a fun site to finish off over the coming weeks... A possible redesign and goodness knows what else, at least this job is not on a fixed price.

Whereas another job that has taken most of my time this week is a fixed price contract and my sales guy is letting it run away. This customer is desperate to go live the middle of next week, let I'm still waiting for the latest changes to the items page, which need to be completed before he'll sign the pages off and I can actually build the site. Even if I get the latest changes lsit on Monday and can get the changes done the same day, it's not leaving me much time to build the database interface, especially when I have other customers wanting work from me.

But that's life - and the sooner we reign in these daft customers the better - the more new sites we can go live with.

Let your webdesigner do their work...

Whilst it's actually very nice when a customer arrives knowing what they want, along with drawn out screen prints to work from, it can be taken too far.

One guy I'm working on at the moment took my first sample and put it into photoshop and moved things around a little to explain how he wanted it to look. That's great, but then when the instructions start to tell me how to optimise the site and what I'm doing wrong - then the instructions are going too far! It's especially awkward when the instructions are based on old information - "put in loads of keywords in the keyword metadata", "put some text at the bottom of the page in the same colour as the background", "list all the keywords in the picture alt tags".

Fine, thanks for that help, but the ideas you are suggesting at best don't work, at worst can get your site banned.

Here's the simple truth. If you are getting a webdesigner to build and maintain a site then don't go for over the top on page optimisation. Just go for well built, well designed pages. If the page is over optimised using dirty tricks then when the search engines change their algorithms your site is going to drop, and maybe get banned. If you want to be tricking the search engines using the latest discoveries then you need to be in a position to be able to change your site at a moment's notice - not join a long queue of work to be done as maintenance.

If you are paying someone to do the job for you, then let them use their knowledge and build the site for you - don't tell them their work, no matter how much you have researched. Or will you be telling the pilot how to land because of your research next time you go on holiday?