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Do As I Say, Not As I Do and Test Everything

February 19, 2009 - Filed under: web design — Tags:

I was working on a site for a new customer and they asked for a contact form on their site. Not a big deal, it’s something that I have done dozens of times before. This time I did something that made me quite embarrassed.

Let me start by saying that when I design a site for a new customer I usually start in a private folder inside my site. I usually design the first page only. I’ll get some idea of what they are looking for, then put up a page or two for the client to review. They can ask for changes and then I’ll put up another first page or two. This process keeps repeating until the client is satisfied then I can put up the rest of the site pretty quickly.

This does two things that I like. First the client gets to see what I’m doing before they have to send me any money. I have many clients that I have never met in person and several have been burned by designers who took their money and never delivered what the customer really wanted. This way they see that I am going to deliver something that they will be happy with, then after they pay me I move it to their domain name. Because these pages are on my site I get more control over the site itself until the client does actually pay me. It’s not infallible, but what is?

Today we got past that point and the client wanted to see the rest of the site. Because it was still on my site I just started putting up the rest of the pages using the first page as a template. That brings me to the contact form. I decided that the form was probably not going to be used until we actually moved the site to the customers domain. I set up the form and when I got to the form action section I just typed in x.com and moved on, not thinking about the repercussions of that. I told the customer that the form wasn’t set up to work yet, but they went ahead and tried it anyway. When they did they were redirected to a porn site. I felt like a hack.

My advice is to do what I say and not what I do and TEST EVERYTHING before you post your work. I also got the idea to add this story to my blog when I read this post.

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