It’s 8.20 pm, the popcorn is warm, and a bottle of beer is glinting in the light of the Netflix search screen.
The evening is looking good.
And then your phone chirps to let you know that a client has just emailed you.
Then your phone whistles to make you aware that they’ve also messaged you on Slack.
After which your phone belches out a few more high-pitched warbles to inform you that another client ‘urgently’ needs some updates made to a website. But it’s okay because they’ve shared a link to a Google Drive folder containing a 25-minute video of them walking you through the sketch they’ve made in PowerPoint of how the pages should look.
Meanwhile, the 18 web pages you finished a month ago are still sitting in the client’s ‘pending approval’ queue… and you begin wondering where it all went wrong.
Take a step back. Let’s be real for a moment and remind ourselves that we are not an emergency service. We are not dealing with buildings on fire. We’re not needed to save someone’s life, chase down bank robbers, or even rescue a kitten from a tree.
We’re website developers.
We build and maintain websites.
And despite what our clients may think – updating some website copy, changing the color of a button, or adding a new navigation menu item is not life-changing, or life-saving.
In other words, it can wait. And it should wait. Because frankly, if you don’t start setting boundaries with your clients, you’re in for a short, rough, and ultimately disappointing journey.
I’ve been involved in website development for well over 20 years, and have worked with many different types of clients. And based on my experience I can honestly say that if you don’t set clearly defined boundaries with clients, then it’s not just you who will be suffering. It’s inevitable that if you don’t look after yourself and your sanity, the quality of your work will suffer, and your clients won’t be benefitting from the best of you.
So what boundaries are we talking about?
Forget any negative connotations you feel the word ‘boundary’ may suggest.
It’s not a dirty word. In fact, it’s the key to a more positive you, a more productive workflow, and more satisfied clients. So let’s identify the boundaries we need to consider here.
What Boundaries Can You Set With Clients?
Great, you’ve made it this far. That suggests you recognize that there may be scope for some improvement in your work/life balance, and in the control and hold your clients seem to have over you.
So let’s consider what aspects of your life and your design business can be structured in a way that sets clearly defined boundaries that your clients can work within for mutual benefit:
- Project Scope
- Communication Methods
- Your Availability
- Milestones & Page Approvals
- Client Obligations
Based on both my experience over the past couple of decades, and from talking with many other design agencies and web design business leaders, here are some practical strategies I strongly recommend you use to set clear boundaries for your clients.
(You can thank me in the comments section!)
1. Defining A Clear Project Scope Boundary
We previously wrote a complete guide to defining project scope, and making sure you do this is incredibly important.
For us as web designers, it’s easy to compartmentalize the different aspects of design, to know the likely amount of work required to undertake certain tasks, and the time these will take. But our clients almost certainly won’t be familiar with this sort of thing. To them, the difficulty involved and the time required to…
- increase the size of an image
- change the font style throughout the entire website
- add new copy to a page
- modify the database so that all products include an additional field
…are much the same!
This is why ‘one little extra change’ can be requested on top of a previous task that, to them, is indeed just a small change. However, these small changes can potentially have widespread consequences that will require considerable time to undertake. Not to mention that if several stakeholders are involved in providing feedback, these ‘little extra changes’ can quickly add up to a lot of extra work.
And if that extra work isn’t in the original project scope, then your web design business has just decided to become a charitable organization that performs not-for-profit work for clients for free.
Not the best business move, even if it does give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
For a complete breakdown of how to prevent this situation, read “The Complete Guide To Defining Project Scope In 6 Steps”, and keep business and charity separate!
2. Setting Clearly Defined Communication Methods
You are not an octopus.
The thing is that octopi (or octopuses if you prefer to acknowledge the Greek, rather than Latin origin of the word) not only have eight arms, but also nine brains.
Which, frankly, makes me think that their evolutionary ancestors were web developers.
Because with eight arms and nine brains, we could more adequately handle the obscene variety and frequency of communications from clients.
One arm is happily applying some edits to the CSS file, while another arm is responding to an email from a client with some notes referring to a screenshot they forgot to attach. Meanwhile, your third arm is dealing with half a dozen Slack notifications, while your fourth is handling the requests coming in through WhatsApp mentioning something about making the tabs bigger.
Your fifth arm is rather usefully capable of answering the phone when clients call asking you to add something they seem to vaguely remember seeing on another website somewhere, while your sixth and seventh arms are busy typing new website copy that five of your brains are working on.
Which of course leaves your eighth arm to wave a white flag.
Remember… you are not an octopus.
The trouble is, if you’re being completely honest, the scenario above isn’t terribly far from the truth sometimes.
It really doesn’t make sense to have them contacting you about website changes through half a dozen channels. Using messaging apps, or even email, is fortunately something most of us have moved on from.
Rather than playing email ping-pong, the next best thing to teleporting the client to the seat next to you so that they can point at the screen and tell you what they want changing, is to use a visual collaboration tool such as Atarim.
The intuitive way in which Atarim makes it easy for clients to provide feedback means it’s a win-win. Clients can explain much more easily exactly what they want you to do, because all they have to do is click on the bit of the website they want to change and leave a quick sticky note right there to explain their wishes.
Meanwhile, you and your team get an automated task in your dashboard with a direct link to the right part of the right web page, along with the client’s note, a screenshot of what they were looking at, and other useful bits of information.
Once you’ve seen how simple, easy, and effective this is, you’ll certainly never consider allowing email, phone calls, or messaging apps to be an option for client communication about this type of task!
3. Set Your Availability Limits
As I mentioned at the start, no matter how important web maintenance may seem, you are not an emergency service provider.
As web developers we do not qualify for having flashing blue lights, sirens, or hi-viz jackets.
For that reason, we need to be strict about when we are actually going to be available for clients. Most businesses have opening hours, and this isn’t something that should surprise anyone. If you allow yourself to be reachable 24 hours a day, then not only will you never experience true ‘downtime’, but your clients will quickly accept that you will be on call at any time – and therefore willing to work at any time.
And it’s surprising how quickly that acceptance can become expectance.
By all means, provide ways for clients to send you messages out of hours – but make sure you don’t reply to them until you’re back at work. If you wish to, you can set up out-of-office responders so that clients know their message has been received, but also that you will be unable to respond until the next working day.
In this line of work, it’s highly probable that you’ll have clients in various countries, spread across multiple time zones. This can make it more difficult to manage these expectations, but I strongly urge you to stick to clearly defined working hours (and days). Otherwise, you will burn out and go mad, and the quality of work your clients receive will inevitably suffer.
If you work as part of a team, it is essential that everyone sticks to this principle. If clients get used to some team members being available at all hours, they will easily expect the whole team to be available.
Using a tool such as Atarim makes handling client communications significantly easier.
Since the majority of these communications relate to website updates and edits, it makes no sense to rely on messaging apps, calls, or emails.
With clients able to simply point and click anywhere on the page and leave a virtual note for you, knowing that this will automatically generate a task your team will pick up, there’s far less need for them to message you directly at all.
4. Create Milestones & Implement Page Approvals
When you jump in the car and set off on a journey, you generally have a pretty good idea of where you’re going. You might use a satnav, but you’ll certainly have a clear destination in mind.
And if it’s a long journey, you’ll probably have a few stops planned for ‘relief’ breaks and meals. In other words, you’ll have milestones planned for your journey.
And this is exactly how you should approach any web design or website-building project.
If you don’t have clear project milestones in place right from the start, how will you know when “you have arrived at your destination”?
Milestones might typically involve the completion of specified pages. But here, too, there can be an issue. Because what exactly constitutes ‘finished’? After all, in web development, pages are constantly being updated. There is no real ‘finish point’.
Rather than thinking of pages as being ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete’, within the boundary of a single website project, there need to be set cycles. If a new page is being built, then once the page is finished, it must be approved for that milestone to be marked complete. If updates to that page are required, then this will be an entirely separate task, and may even be a new project (one for maintenance, rather than development).
If you’re using Atarim for collaboration with clients, then page approval is a fairly straightforward process.
Any page on which the client has left notes will have an ‘Approve Page’ button at the bottom. Once all tasks for that page have been completed, the client must be encouraged to click that button in order to allow measurable progress toward the next milestone to be determined.
We created a video demonstrating the page approval process within Atarim, which you may find useful:
A common objection from web developers to this process is that clients never stop leaving notes on web pages. Because of this, there’s never an opportunity to identify that all tasks have been completed and that the page should, therefore, be approved.
Fortunately, Atarim has your back here as well.
You can set timeframe windows during which the website is open for comments by the client. They can browse, click, and leave notes anywhere on the page, creating tasks in your dashboard. However, once the window of opportunity is up, this ability becomes locked, and the client can no longer leave further notes.
This has the double advantage of creating clear milestone opportunities for page approvals, as well as motivating the client to get on with leaving comments promptly.
Of course, if the commenting window closes and the client requests more time, as long as the duration of this commenting/feedback window was clearly stated in the original project scope document, you’ll be well within your rights to grant them an additional few days, but for an additional cost, as this now goes beyond the original agreed-upon project scope.
It’s a win-win once again, with Atarim!
5. Client Obligations
Of course, it’s important to remember that any website project is not all about you and your team. It’s a partnership between the client and you, which means that they have just as much of an obligation towards the eventual success of the project as you.
The client’s obligations and responsibilities need to form part of the project brief and be tied into each milestone.
This could include providing you with text, images, logos, graphics, data, or other necessary resources, leaving comments and feedback on designs, or approving pages or graphics to allow milestones to be reached. All of this needs to happen according to an agreed-upon schedule and within specified timeframes.
This really underlines the vital role a good project brief plays in ensuring everything stays on track and that project creep doesn’t happen.
Clients need to know exactly what their responsibilities are, what they need to provide, to whom, by when, and how.
Providing you with assets can be done easily using a shared Google Drive, for example. With Atarim as your collaboration platform, getting feedback from clients and having them submit page approvals is easy and intuitive. This is why so many web development teams have found projects taking significantly less than half the time they used to – making the entire experience less stressful.
Conclusion
After more than twenty years in the website development industry, I’ve seen far too many brilliant developers and designers burn out or find their businesses struggling to achieve profit because projects that should take days end up consuming weeks of their time.
Setting clear boundaries with clients is not a negative thing, and it shouldn’t be seen by you or your clients as anything other than a structured way of ensuring everything is delivered to a high standard, on time, and on budget.
That’s clearly in everyone’s interest, and fortunately, with Atarim as your visual collaboration and task management platform, this process is intuitive and incredibly time-saving.
Ready to experience the Atarim difference? Start your free trial of Atarim today!
