Muahah, f* great thread ever. Ok, here's what I can remember...
Clients sometimes can be stupid enough - in thinking THEY can do the work for you.. but sometimes the problem is in your own company, with the sales rep. that don't know anything about design or web.. it goes something like this (happened to me)
[We were designing a portal site, that was to be used by nearly every kind of person on the country - it was a phone company's portal site, with phone services and news and information and all the stuff]
Sales rep: let's make it nice, let's produce a site entirely in flash because it's new and fresh and young and the client will love it [he doesn't know what flash is about, it's just, it's just another "fashion word"]
Me: heck we just can't, this is a portal, a services site, have tons of text information, tons of cgi and stuff on the backend, has to be fast, has to be easy to browse, we can't use flash in it
Sales rep: but we must, I told the client we would be using Flash
Me: ...
Then we do the site, we - me and another friend at work - suffer like 3 months programming the entire stuff, I learn ASP just to implement it on the site, learn Flash Generator just to use it on the site, and by the end I've done so much stuff and learnt so much that it's the best result possible combining flash and live content (I've even wasted a week coding the most wicked custom scrollbar for dynamic text loading I've ever seen in flash 3) - and then:
Sales rep: why is it taking so much time to load?
Me: because it's in flash.
Sales rep: ok. Make all the sections HTML text then
Me: !@#$%
Then we convert everything, the menus and stuff are still Flash, but the content is HTML.
Then the site is on, it's total shit - as I told it'd be way before we did the project - they come to me...
Sales rep: we need some banners on the site, because we will get a % of what the client sells on banner ads...
Me: there's no space for it, the menu is in flash, it's fixed, there's no space
Sales rep: what about this space, and this, and this? [points to total random spaces ON THE MAIN MENU BETWEEN THE SECTION NAMES!]
Me: ...
I then resigned and gave up working with people who says that "sell web design" but doesn't even SURF the web.
Last thing I heard from the design company is that they're already selling a new "redesign" for the site... which is way cleaner, easier, faster. No more flash 4 + generator 2 + asp + cgi from different servers (it has it all) site.
And the funny part: the site costed, like, X00.000 to the big telephone company. They payed me way less than 1/10 of it to be done.. and I did 70% of the work. Their work was just to sell crap and make the product - and my work - shit.
Clients can be insane, but when they have stupid sales employees to rely on, you'd better get a new job.
- rorshack
[This message has been edited by rorshack (edited 11-20-2000).]