If you lose a friend over it, you’re better off because a friend who stops talking to you over this isn’t really a friend to begin with

And the very worst are friends who ask for “small favors” and as a starting freelance: “Sure I can get something SIMPLE done in my SPARE time” and then you get flooded with emails and phone calls rushing you. And when you get the work done you’re asked to rework some “issues”…

One episode is currently happening to me: last week my friend said he needed badly a web page just to have some info… now i get phone calls everyday to check if I’m still working on his website, now with CMS capabilities, photo galleries, document upload, etc, etc, etc.

SAVE ME!!! (at least i don’t have trouble sending suspicious clients away… but friends just stay away!)

That’s what i went through recently – with a friend!!!
A friend who wants to have 60 million blogs on every topic possible, asked for some advice. I gave her some free advice (what is rong with me?) and told her i could create a simple page that would link off to all these blogs. It would take me less than an hour. Suddenly it began to turn into an actual website, instead of a page. She was sending me 10 page docs with content and a site map and images so the page wod look exciting. After liking the simple page i created, she sent me the url to a site that she wanted it to look “just like”. OMG! Was i annoyed! She gave me the color scheme – hospital green background and the standard red and blue links with black body text – Oh my word, i couldnt believe that she wanted to drop my design for this crap that looked like someone had done it in MS Word. I did it and told her not to affiliate my name with this as i really dont do work like this. She looked at it and then said that i should go bk to my old design. By then i was like, no i cant keep going back n forth changing stuff – this was supposed to be a quick job. I really think that this was a lesson for me. I try to “help” friends but they are the worst but expect the most – and then blame me.

Yes! I respond the same way. If the client truly thought they would get what they wanted for $200, they would have gone with the other guy and would have never made it as far as you. In the end, they want super cheap work that looks professionally done. Realistically, they have to make a decision: cheap work that looks cheap or professionally done work that comes with years of experience. Of course there are exceptions, people who are starting out tend to have lower rates, but when you want a website for $200… you’re going to get a website that looks like you spent $200 on it.

I have found, however, that when you explain to the client the work that goes into what they’re requesting, or when you call them on it (“That sounds like a great deal! You should go for it.”), if they’re reasonable, they’ll stick with you.

It’s always good to have back-up (articles, web posts etc) to justify (I’m not sure that’s the word I want to use, but it’s the only one I can think of at the moment) what they might consider to be higher rates and when they realize they want quality not cheap labor, they come back. Let’s face it, because there are so many $50 logo sites out there, sometimes the client just doesn’t know better. The only way to change this misconception is to educate them and spread the word!

I get that one semi-frequently, and it always strikes me as a sure sign their business/project will fail before it starts.

I swear, I’ve heard every one of those phrases you presented in this article there. The clients on such sites know or quickly find out they are in the company of starving designers from poor or developing economies who will charge an exchange equivalent of $65.00 American dollars for an entire brochure or book cover, so yes, the cheap skatery is prolific.