Hello everyone! First off I am really sorry for the major lack of article posting in the last 2-3 months. Sean and I have been extremely busy with freelance work (which is a good thing I'm thinking!). I will be working on changing this problem by setting aside more time for this website. Also if you would like to write for us please check this out for more info.

In this article, as the title suggests I will be talking about the major mistakes that can be easily made with web design and development for clients. I became very inspired after reading a article about this over at boagworld and wanted to take the idea a little bit further. I think sharing our mistakes is a great way to become a much better web developer, why? Well we all learn from our mistakes and can share what we learned from that mistake with others so they do not make it themselves.

Now these are just some mistakes I have personally made. Please share your mistakes with us as well! Just post them in the comments.

Under pricing a project

If I had to guess this is a really common problem for freelancers. Having a  slow month? Need money? Under price... not fun

This is something I will still do at times, or sometimes I just miss quote a project and it takes much longer then I thought. A lot of the time this is not good. It just leads to cutting corners and a unsuccessful website in turn.

-over worked, under payed.

Trying to hard to please

I used to do this all the time. I would try so hard to keep the customer happy I would do any change they asked for...stupid or not! I found this led to a few things. One and probably the most important is the client figures out you will do anything and constantly keeps using you, the changes are endless. And once this starts it is extremely hard to stop. The other is the website starts to fail. Clients hired you for a reason, to design them a website. Making every change the request, even the stupid ones is a bad idea. You should be able to give your expert opinion and let them know why it would be wrong.

Freebies and favors

This was a bad habit of mine, that I have broken I am happy to say(I have a hard time saying no). Doing work for free is great and all but as I said in this post it is not going to pay off. The problem is it just never stops. You do a website for a friend, and your other friend will want one for free as well. You make one major change for a client for free and they start to abuse it and begin to expect it to be free every time.

Biting off more than you can chew

This one in a way goes hand-in-hand with the first point.  Sometimes this can still happen, but I am much better at taking on too many projects at the same time.

I used to make this mistake a lot when I first started out and needed the money. Helpful tools also help to solve this problem.

No one likes em flat!

How many times now have I flattened a .psd and saved it now? I am not even going to tell you.

Keeping a good backup of your files is a must! I don't even goto bed at night anymore until I know that my important files have been backed up on my home network, and dropbox.

Ok so what about you? What kind a mistakes have you made in the past or still make? Please share them in the comments below, I would love to hear them!

About the Author

Adrian Balkwill is a web designer and a user interface designer for a software/web design company located in Canada, he is also the founder of Blogfullbliss. It is his goal to make Blogfullbliss the best source on the web for design/technology related articles and tutorials. 

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