1. Buy a Sheep … on Their Behalf

Do something good for the world on your client’s behalf and purchase something from Oxfam’s Unwrapped service. You can pay to have a poor farmer’s land irrigated, buy books for school children or invest in a fair trade coffee coop. Last year Cyan and I bought cows on behalf of our clients and named them after major projects we’d worked on. It was amusing, heart warming and something that gets your clients talking and mentioning your name at every christmas and new year party they go to.

2. Print some Custom Tshirts

Thanks to services like Cafepress, you can print out custom tees, hats, cups and all sorts of things for your clients. Add your brand or even better, add something quirky, clever or personable like a phrase (”Best Client Ever”, “I Give Great Briefs” …) and even if your client never wears it, they’ll appreciate the thought, the effort and the uniqueness.

3. Print some Postcards

Customized postcards make a great way to say thank you and happy holidays and with Cyan’s list of Six Clever Postcard Promotion Ideas you can easily use a service like Moo and some photos from Flickr or iStock to print out some gorgeous cards even if design isn’t in your skillset.

4. JibJab Them!

If you haven’t seen JibJab yet, it’s a highly amusing way to send an eCard. You paste someone’s head – yours, your client’s, your client’s boss’ – into a card and send them the ensuing animation.

5. Photoshop your Client into a Famous Movie Poster and Mail it to Them

Have some l33t photoshop skills? Just grab a photo of your client and photoshop them into a famous movie poster, alter the name to something humerous and email it to them with a holiday message. For a photographer I know – Marmaras Shoots, I once photoshopped his head into a Matrix poster and retitled it to the Marmartrix, which got a good response. It takes a little effort, but done with someone who appreciates a laugh will be worth the time.

6. Give a Laptop to a Child, Get a Laptop

The one laptop per child project has now officially launched and for $399 you’ll send a laptop to a needy child as well as one to your client’s less-needy child! The laptops are pretty cool, have everything from a web browser to an RSS reader and they run on Linux. The project has to be one of the most innovative charities I’ve seen in a long time.

7. Get an Engraved Item from Amazon … like a Silver Plated Yoyo

When it comes to gifts, even the most common place item is made extra cool with some customization. Amazon stocks products that come with a free engraving including a Engraved Silver Plated Yoyo for $14.95 or a Variety of Other Products.

1) Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer? No.
I fell for this once when I was young and naive. I made no money and wasted lots of time. Don’t do unpaid work for the chance to be paid — this wouldn’t fly in any other industry, so why web design? The best case scenario (though rare) is that you get a job with a client who knows that you’ll work for free when necessary. The worst case scenario is that they don’t pay you, and still use your stuff, knowing you don’t have the legal resources to do anything about it. Most likely though, you’ll just waste time.

2) Can you give us a discount rate? No.
There are A LOT of companies out there that do not see web design as a service worth more than $20 an hour. These should never be your clients. In my early post-college years, I used to value “getting the job” so highly, I would take on an inordinate amount of work for the pay. Let me tell you that it’s not worth it. Ever. Remember, you may be doing this company a favor, but on the flip side, you’re hurting your own future, and your family’s. Nowadays, I give my hourly rate immediately, and it weeds out many potential clients. It’s simple math really — if doubling your rate loses half your client work, then you’re still making as much in half the time. If you do excellent work, get paid for it – there will always be comparable “firms” charging double what you are.

3) Will you register and host my site? No.
Sure it seems like a good idea — free recurring revenue right? Well, maybe… if you can first get them to pay, and then if you can justify making $10 a month for the endless phone support you’ll have to give at all hours of the night. You see, once the client thinks that you are responsible for their email and website functionality, you WILL get called all the time when their email shows the slightest wavering or their website 404s for any reason on their home computer. Believe it or not, I’ve even known someone who had a client call about his cell phone functionality just because my friend hosted his site. Don’t do it…it’s not worth it. Give them a registrar and hosting company and let them sign up themselves.

4) Can you copy this site? No.
Now you may think that I answer “No” strictly from a moral standpoint, and although that is true, there are other equally important reasons. First, if they’re copying a site, they have shady ethics themselves and the chances of you getting paid on time and in the full amount are unlikely. Second, doing this type of work reduces you to a monkey, and although some of your work may be like this to pay the bills, why purposely pursue it? Third, if it’s a true copy, the only benefit you may receive is payment – you really won’t get to use it for a portfolio or example work, and furthermore, this type of client is one you do not want work from in the future.

5) Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales? No.
I hate to be the pessimist, but when I am asked this, I want to tell them that they most likely won’t make any money so they might as well ask me to do it for free. Yes, I know there are exceptions, so sometimes I will ask them about their business, marketing, and revenue plans, which 99% of them don’t have. They just thought that selling t-shirts would be a novel idea for the internet. I usually go into a spiel about having to support me and my family, and I can’t do it with speculative work — I then recommend Yahoo! Shopping or CafePress, and 9 times out of 10, they never get their site up anyways.

6) I have a great idea. Do you want to…? No.
Not much different from #5, but could be a much larger time waster if you buy in. Again, not trying to be a jerk, but if the person adds little to the potential business outside of speaking an idea, then any work you proceed to do is mere charity (which may be okay with you). But to be honest, I’d rather be charitable with my family and friends and make them partners for free versus partnering with a stranger. Trust me, if someone really has a great idea, he will make you partners AND pay you as well.

7) Do you have an IM account? No.
I might give it out if it’s to a person I can trust during an intensive project, but as a general policy, I tell clients that it’s my general policy not to. The reason here is obvious — you have a life and other clients beyond them. Many clients see you as an on-call employee, and this is bad. This is why you quit your day job…

Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done? No.
I require 50% up front (unless it’s a huge job — then maybe 33%). I need that assurance that they have “bought in” on this project, and that I can plan on the income, pay bills, and eat. People who want to pay at the end are much more likely to back out after you’ve done tons of work.

9) Is there any way you could get this done tonight or this weekend? No.
Once they know that you helped them out one time, they will expect it in the future. Now you might choose to get extra done at night (I do all the time), but don’t start making promises about getting things done at night or on the weekends/vacation. I know a lot of freelancers that charge night/weekend hours as well, so that might be a possible route to take. Because the reason you freelance is for the freedom, right? Right?

10) Can I be sure you won’t use this work in anything else? No.
This is a very sensitive subject because most clients misunderstand it (intellectual property is a tricky subject anyways). In my Terms and Conditions that I require all new clients to sign, I make sure they know that (1) their code has utilized code from other projects which I haven’t charged them for, and (2) I will probably use code from their project on other projects, and (3) they own the code and implementation of the project (finished website), but not the actual code pieces (login system, image uploader, etc.). I pride myself in productivity and speed, and I need to use other code all the time to accomplish this. Not to mention that I sell stock Flash which I may need old code to help build. They’re not paying you to create code that they in turn will sell, so make sure they know that it’s the implementation and not the coding that’s theirs.

There are others I’m sure. Feel free to add your own and remember, it’s the opportunities you avoid that will define your success just as much as the ones you take…

Brought to you by Page Alive Web Design

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990’s when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he’d had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn’t available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that’s who. I’ll save the company some embarrassment and won’t reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I haven’t let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

“404 Error. You’ve obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists.”

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendatíon to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the “back” button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don’t understand the “Back in 15 minutes” sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and drop them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn’t that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Bíz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I’m putting up my hand on this one. I’m not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot bíz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot bíz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I’ve ever seen (and some that I hadn’t) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacatíon

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacatíon over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? “Why didn’t you TELL ME this could happen?”

And the dumbest web site decision I’ve ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There’s only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don’t even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It’s tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don’t let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren’t in the hands of dummies!