I feel like I’m taking Crazy Pills!

[JoshWhite]

I’m just kind of venting here, but I’m wondering if anyone has really had any success with this scenario.

We have a client that uses an in-house custom build CMS that some programmer made, and frankly it’s just terrible. And somehow even through illustrating how much easier WordPress is to use, they simply will not budge from this buggy piece of awful programming.

Fast forward to now, I get a call and they want to design everything in Modx. Now, I have nothing against Modx, but Modx is still much more complex to use than WordPress, plus imo harder to make it do what they want to do. They even outlined the kind of functionality they want the site to have, and I was able to show how WordPress deftly can handle each piece pretty easily, having no major experience with complex Modx sites I wasn’t sure. And they still move forward with Modx.

Is there any real hope of explaining common sense? I mean, I’ll do what I need to do, but why reinvent the wheel???

[Chris Coyier]

Some people just love picking technology over solutions. They sound like pretty bad clients to me, so I’d get rid of them as soon as you can afford it without hurting your business.

[kevsyers]

“picking technology over solutions”….couldn’t of said it better. I had a client have me setup a static website in drupal. They didn’t do anything with. They just wanted to say it was in drupal. I got paid more for it so ultimately I won in the end.

I wonder if it’s still at the point were people don’t actually understand the internet? They still see it as a gimmick or as the “new thing to do.”

[Luminated]

^ That’s a very good question. My partner and I are doing some market segmenting and looking at who our target audience is (and how they behave) and there are certainly groups of people that simply want the “latest and greatest” more than the most functional and cost effective solution.

[Will_Powered]

Its an interesting scenario. I’ve had similar experiences in the past.

I usually follow a few simple steps:
1. Double check that I am correct when I say WP is a better solution than what they are suggesting.
2. Politely walk the client through why WP is the better solution
3. Politely walk the client through the problems their solution has – and how it will affect their profits.

The client will either be swayed into using your solution or continue to press for their own.

In the case they are swayed, good. Everyone wins.

In the case they aren’t swayed (like your client), the next steps are fairly simple too.

4. Determine how much time it will take to fix the programming they have currently and add it into the original proposed cost. Be generous with the hours added. Explain clearly and politely that keeping the current system isn’t going to lower the amount of work required, its going to increase it, and then give them the new copy of the proposal.
5. Provide a copy of the (lower cost) proposal of your solution as an alternative for them.

Its not uncommon for clients to see the cost difference and rethink their decision.

If the client *still* chooses to pursue the lesser technology, then you are bringing in more work – and are compensated fairly for having to work with poor code – not to mention you’re given an opportunity to make the web a little better by rectifying a hack’s previous coding. The client keeps their terrible CMS. You get $, experience, and improve the web. Everyone still wins.

The only other outcome is that the client gets frustrated and looks elsewhere for work. If this is the case then the client isn’t worth keeping – but if you disagree you have the opportunity of offering to do the project at the lower cost and suck up having to work on terrible code. Its important to keep in mind in that situation, he’s not hiring a professional designer/developer, he’s hiring you to point-and-click and spit out code as he sees fit.

Really interesting topic. I’d love to see how other folks handle this!

[ImpInaBox]

Your approach is spot on Will_Powered. Charge them the going rate for the work they want done. It’s their own choice then.

I had an ‘experience’ last year when a local IT company asked if I could help them out of a PHP hole. I had a suspicion there was more work to be had from them so agreed to bug-fix their project pretty much at cost. I got their code working again (tho it was still pretty horrible) but since then I’ve refused to develop it further unless they pay the going rate for a re-write to do the job properly.

One thing I never got to the bottom of – why would anyone write an invoicing system for a single office small business in PHP/MySQL inthe first place???

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