In the past two weeks we’ve gained two clients now and stories that match multiple clients who came to us after some bad experiences with other web designers.

So I send this out to all web designers, specifically as some in-field advice:

Firstly, never assume your customer doesn’t know the difference between a real hosting account and an FTP account you give them shared on a budget hosting provider like Godaddy or Bluehost. It is unbecoming, their website and company ultimately suffer from it, and you give the field a bad name.

Secondly, if you’re going to charge the customer by the month, some astronomical fee such as $150-$500, you better let that customer take their stuff anywhere they want at the end of the year. I’ve read your TOS, and it specifically says

“you’re hereby granted a LEASE”

And before you fly off the goats rear end and tell me its just technical wording, those customers beg the differ because I had to redesign those sites from the ground up because you completely shut down their website when they alerted you that they were moving to prevent, and I quote again

Copyright infringement on leased content

How about you put this information out there in front of the customer on your fancy service pages?

Third and last, if you can’t figure out the difference between SEO and Marketing, please don’t tell your customer you’re an SEO expert because they’re going to find out you’re a fraud.