Theme Discussions with Clients

Sent to me from Dave: (Note — this client wasn’t a STW client, but I think the convo is useful for other high maintenance clients!)

<Client name> is going to be a handful. She wants an overview of the Chameleon theme so she can understand all the possibilities. Not sure how to respond to that….

My answer:

Dave – I see that you’ve already had 3 1-hour calls with Susan on themes. Wow. Her SOW states that we’ll do 2 1/2-hour calls (total of 1 hour) discussing theme changes, etc. So… please let her know that we’re going to be billing her for the extra 2 hours of phone calls on themes. That will hopefully bring this issue to a head.

Re how to answer her question on the the chameleon theme — I’d show her some of the sites we’ve implemented with it, and tell her that these are our recommended page layouts — that we use them because they are best from a marketing perspective.

Sites include: thecouplesdoc.com, adam klein’s site (as you know). There may be more – you could ask Juliette.

If she wants to know more, she can look at the page templates on this page: http://www.elegantthemes.com/demo/?theme=Chameleon

But that we’re already charging extra for the time spent on the theme discussions and will keep charging as we factor only an hour into the price of the website for this as stated in her contract.

If she gets [nasty] and wants to end with us, I’m probably fine with that. I’m NOT willing to lose money on her.

We are totally willing to create sample pages for her and to have tons more discussions with her, but they’ll be billed at $xx/hour.