For my fellow Web Designers out there...it's a new episode of "How Clients Think."
I had a client back in California...in the mid-to-late 90s, I did a site for them. My method of doing it at the time, a common one for Web Designers who preferred the WYSIWYG method over writing raw HTML in Notepad, was to lay it out in Photoshop, slice it up in Fireworks, and finish it off in Dreamweaver. At the time, it was a pretty nice site. My client like it too.
The man who hired me passed away several years ago. He was, as they say, a gentleman's gentleman, and I really felt a loss when he left this world. I had several changes of contacts after that, the last one being somewhat high maintenance. She'd send me an email, there would always be information left out, so I'd have questions. I'd reply the same day, wait two weeks for a response, forward my email to her, wait another two weeks, and I'd do this a few more times before I just gave up.
Then, six months (or longer) after that, she'd email me and tell me she was concerned about my ability to serve them since I had moved 3000 miles away.
Their domain was up for renewal this past summer. Rather than pay her domain and hosting fees, she told me she wanted to "go in a new direction." Today I found out exactly what that new direction was.
They signed up for a Weebly template account and simply copied all of the content I created into a new, plain white, uninspiring template. At first I thought "WordPress," but then looked at the source code and found out that it was Weebly. I saw no new content whatsoever...just a site I built sitting in a Weebly template.
I was expecting something magnificent, based on her description of the organization's needs and her lack of faith in my ability to deliver. Instead, it's like Joni sang...they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
Client loyalty in the realm of Web Design is a rarity. I do still have clients from California that I serve faithfully, while others just revamped the site and never said goodbye. It's their right to make changes as they see fit, but it does sting a little when you go out of your way to do the most professional work you can, and you're treated as something disposable.
And because the client was so high maintenance, I'm OK with it, just a little disappointed that they went for the low-hanging fruit.
End of sad story...thanks to anyone who took the time to read it.
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Hated to do it, because there went one more site from my portfolio (and I'm not putting Squarespace sites in my portflio).
If you've ever seen my food porn shots...I used to post a lot of them when I was Amerigo Vespucci, not so many as Miles Archer...you know I do it with the intention of cruelly tempting people to the point where they can't resist that food. The new Squarespace site has no food photos...the owner is posting those on Facebook. So in terms of every other restaurant Website out there, he's in the top tier in terms of a professional look, but it just leaves me cold. I much prefer professionally shot food porn.
Weebly is like Wix. It's crap. If Squarespace is steak, Weebly is a bag of pork rinds.
Back then, I was a little less bombastic than I was now with the photos, but the previous owner had an odd reaction to the photos..."sometimes less is more." So I had about a dozen photos for the whole site, and they went on there SMALL, at the owner's request. Wouldn't have looked right at all on the new Squarespace site because the new template is big, slick, and I no longer have the originals.
I did a site recently for a hot dog / hamburger place, and in the banner at the top of the page, I have a life-sized photo I took of one of their more creative dogs. It's probably bigger than life-size on a monitor larger than my laptop. But people LOVE it, and I know this because the owner has shared customer feedback with me several times. His comment was "You can count the onions on it!" And my philosophy has always been that the food photos have to look exactly like what is brought to the customer's table.
Squarespace has its time and place, and in your situation, I'm glad that's the option you had, because it provides the best final result I've seen, even though I am opposed to them for other reasons (it undercuts the ability of professional Web Designers to make a living).
For anyone reading this whoever finds themselves in a situation like the one you were in, I'd say that in the realm of "do it yourself" template sites, Squarespance is an acceptable option, WordPress depends largely on finding the right template and creating a site that doesn't look like a blog (unless you're building a blog), and Wix and Weebly are pure, unadulterated garbage, and the easiest way to guarantee a site that is garish, outdated, or both. GoDaddy's "Site Tonight" or whatever they are calling it isn't a lot better. The hot dog guy I mentioned above decided to hire me to do his site because he had a GoDaddy template up...I saw it, very plain and basic...and said "I want more." So I gave him more.
could have gone another direction, then there's not much else you can do. My working background is Oracle's JD Edwards, and I would sometimes come across something similar.
I had previously done a very basic website for my local Residents Association, so at least I had an idea of what I didn't want ! My biggest concern was trying to future proof it, especially because a Shop is required. That's why I was relieved to have been informed about Squarespace.
I completely understand your concerns, about diy products like SQ. In my own area, we have increasing competition from India where they can supply thousands of programmers at a fraction of our cost. It is what it is I guess, and we just have to adapt...somehow ! 
...the "old school" method of Photoshop->Fireworks->Dreamweaver had become somewhat antiquated. The new CC 2017 Dreamweaver bears only a passing resemblance to the one I had been using (the final Macromedia release).
So I do have Muse, and I've played around with it a bit. I use the tutorials on Lynda.com to teach myself new skills, so I have worked through a couple of tutorials. I just didn't feel like I was in the zone, you know? A good example of this is the current default WordPress template...it has parallax scrolling (BIG images in the background and a text layer scrolls over them, for those who aren't familiar with the term). I have mixed feelings about WordPress anyway...I only do WP sites when clients specifically request them. But now everybody's cranking out WordPress Parallax template sites, and they'll do it until the public gets sick of them.
I think the key to success with a Muse site is to have an original idea, rather than try to emulate a lot of what's been done already, because the sites I've seen just look too template-y to me.
Some good news to balance all of this out...one of the new clients I've gotten here had a site done by the main company in town that cranks out WordPress templates. And he was paying them $175 per month for "Website Maintenance and Search Engine Optimization." He showed me the invoices.
First, no updates were being done on the site, period.
Second, hits to his site had FLATLINED.
So he brought the sales rep from this place in and asked me to attend. I did. I was responsible for the worst day of this guy's life.
He pulled out a chart and showed a sharp spike in the hits.
I said "You know what that is? That's ME, hitting his site 20 times a day for the last week while I have been building his NEW site."
The guy was speechless and agreed to tear up my client's contract and void his current invoice.
It had become one of those situations where seeing this woman's name in my caller ID resulted in an instant "Oh. HELL" from me.
So yes...greener pastures indeed.
An existing client referred me, "She needs help."
She had a partially completed WordPress site, and wanted to delve into Social Media.
The WordPress site clearly looked like it had been put together by someone who didn't know what he was doing (she admitted as much), but it violated the CARDINAL SIN of Web Design...non-intuitive navigation including too many clicks to get to the gold.
Also, the Home Page wasn't engaging. Think "eCommerce site" without the actual shopping cart. The products she had on the home page were "so what" products, all of the good stuff was buried WAY down in the site.
Now, I know I have good ideas and bad ideas. Nobody's perfect. Short version of the meeting was that she argued against everything I proposed, and essentially wanted to just keep doing what she was doing, even though she knew it wasn't getting the results she wanted.
I was there for an hour, and at the end of that time, she wore me out. I stood up, said "I'm sorry. I can't help you," said my goodbyes, and left.
I seldom do that. In this situation, anything else would have been counter-productive and a poor use of my time.
When I was back in California I had approached a small restaurant / Deli about re-doing their site. They had the most old-school template you could imagine...blocky, as you said, but the biggest issue is that for the color scheme, they used all of the primary colors, and in neon brightness...big yellow, green, blue and red squares sitting side-by-sides, and they used several different fonts (not a Helvetica / Arial in site...if memory serves me, one of the fonts might have been Comic Sans. Now, with the advent of Web Fonts and other methods of delivery, you can imbed a "non-machine" font on the site. Then, you had to place something like Comic Sans in a graphic, rather than text, to make sure it displayed on all computers. Font sizes were grossly mismatched too. He didn't want to do it, didn't want to spend the money ("I already have a Website" .
I started building sites as soon as the tools became readily available...my first site was on GeoCities, later sold to Yahoo, and they retired the brand. The first computer I bought had Adobe PageMill in the bundled software. I graduated from that to Dreamweaver and it's what I still use, although I do write raw code from time to time. But the first site I built was ugly as hell too, but I was proud of it, because I did it, and it kicked my ass to go get started on building something better.
I totally get the need for security. It seems like 99% of websites now cloak your password and username. However....sometimes you ARE alone, truly, and there is no danger.
Is the prevailing thinking "We need to protect clueless users" ? I also totally get that. Thank you in advance! 
I'm of the belief that if you can memorize a password, it's too weak.
I used RoboForm for years, but they went to an annual pricing model, and I decided I didn't want to pay.
I now use LastPass, which is similar, and free (although they do have a paid version).
You can generate secure, lengthy passwords using combinations of upper/lower case characters, numbers, and symbols. You enter a master password to start the program and as you go to Websites you normally visit it automatically fills in your user ID and PW.
My current and preferred antivirus program is Avast. When you do a Google search, they put a green checkmark next to the sites that are considered "safe." I also have the trial of Malwarebytes premium, which I intend to pay for once it expires, because it runs in real time and blocks attempts to redirect you to malicious sites or install malware.
So my advice on the issue of security, for the average Web surfer, is be careful about the sites you visit, use a highly-rated antivirus program that auto-updates itself, spend the $ and get Malwarebytes Premium, and use a password manager like LastPass that generates and stores secure, strong passwords.
Anyone doing that is doing more than half the people I know.
Last edited Thu Sep 28, 2017, 02:36 PM - Edit history (1)
I guess what I was really driving at is, most of the time I am alone, so there is no need for a site to cloak or mask my password and username. I know some people are always around other people when they use sites. I just get a bit frustrated when typing in a password and I get it wrong, partially because I can't see what I typed. With those sites, I just type super slow and make sure every single digit is correct when I enter it.
I asked if she had done this kind of thing before and she said oh yeah, she's great with computers. 
She even paid the OM on top of her regular salary as a side job. Basically, instead of paying a professional. I can't even recall how many hours it took but the OM got way behind on it at a time when it really needed to go live.
OMG! I wish I had been there to see the look on my sister's face when she clicked on it for the first time. She sent it to me to look at and it was worse than something a 7 year old would have done. Things were flying across the page. The phone number and address weren't anywhere. I think the background was sky blue and the font was 6 pt script or something. No blocks or anything, just script across the full length of the page. I mean, it was BAD.
My sister opted to put up a nearly blank site with just the critical information AND THEN HIRED A DESIGNER.
Her site has morphed over the years and some versions have been better than others but I guess it gets the job done. It's like you said: you get what you pay for and sometimes when you don't.
