I was in a meeting Friday with this super nice lady that had a small e-commerce website and some other informational pages.  It was a typical Friday afternoon and I thought was going to be a typical meeting.  Boy was I wrong.

The lady came to us very frustrated and upset.  I would have been the same.  She was very professional and kept her cool even though you could tell her web project had taken a toll on her.  She just wanted to get it done and move on.

She walked us through her website and store and I immediately started to see why she was not happy.  Then she told me it took 2 years to get to this point.  I was flat out embarrassed for all programmers in the world.  This was just not cool.  I would have felt behind if it took us more than 5 months…

She had spent countless hours in meetings with her web team and they could/would only seem to get a fraction of what she was saying.  It was horrible and I felt really bad for the lady.

The company is here in Louisville, KY, but I will not mention their name.  I have never heard of them, but there are small web type companies popping up all over (and usually disappearing quite quickly).

I wanted to apologise for the company myself, but I was not sure what went on.  So I bit my tongue and moved through the meeting.  I just really felt yucky after that.  How could a company/programmer let someone down that badly?  I was just embarrassed for all programmers.  This company definitely gave us a bad name.

Or did they?  I had just met the lady and she seemed very organized and nice.  I am only speculating that she was this organized and nice previously…  Just to give the other web company some credit, we get clients in sometimes who seem to have it all together, but constantly change their mind and make changes to the project.  She had let out a few comments about not knowing what she wanted and needed changes.

I can only speculate what happened in this situation but this is normal for clients to want changes and we don’t like it, but it is part of the beast of web development.  We are nice guys here at Media Marketers, but we have a limit on how nice we are going to be before it costs you.  We understand things change and the site will change once we get into a project, but constant changes are not good.

And we get some clients who know what they want or aren’t that picky about their site.  Those are great to.  Everyone seems to be very happy with those projects and they go very smoothly.

Anyhow, I just wonder if the web company she was working with just got fed up after 2 years of changes or something.  Or are they just incompetent?  That, I am sure, I will never know.  I would bet it is a little of both.  Put an incompetent web developer in front of someone who doesn’t quite know what they want and you are looking at a mess!

We will get her all squared away (if we get the project) and I will let you know how it turns out.

As always, feel free to drop me a line at the office.

Chad Rainey
Senior Web Developer
Media Marketers, Inc.