That Web Man

Don’t you just hate people who sign up for a paid listing service on a website you run – £25+VAT pa – and then when you finally get around to billing them for just one year (nearly four years later), these wankers try to claim that we never told them it was chargeable.

Now it gets worse when they are supposedly IT and computer consultants who claims to be able to – let’s say – work with your PC and Assist Online maybe and they forget there’s such a thing as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which shows clearly that the site has always plainly stated it’s chargeable.

Never let the facts get in the way of an argument, eh?

I’d received some copy text and some photographs from a friend who’s asked me to do his business a web site. He’s a hands-on guy and marketing brochures aren’t his forté so there wasn’t a great deal to work with.

So I sorted out some crops, re-sizes and thumbnails, decided to use WordPress just because, added a few tweaks like a “lightbox”, put together a formmail page (with a “thanks” redirect) and Bob’s your uncle: one classy web site in just a few hours.

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.

This site amused me a lot: Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Now this blog may be pretty ‘busy’, but I’m a big fan of white space and the “less is more” approach to design without being too heavy (or should that be ‘light’) on the minimalism.

I have two clients who were presented with clean and attractive web site designs that they slowly chipped away at demanding bigger, bolder fonts, in-your-face images and more “stuff” until they ended up with sites that frankly I’d rather I wasn’t featuring on my client portfolio.

Maybe they should buy some of these products

This morning I received an e-mail from my hosting partners telling me the client’s domain names had been renewed and that they’d had a call directly from the non-paying client demanding to know when it would be back up.

By 10.00am, the .com had been renewed and the site was serving up the hosted pages again – the .co.uk had never stopped doing so.

I had also received an e-mail from the client which as a postscript asked if the cheque had arrived. Needless to say, it hasn’t…

I billed a client back in November for some site updates during October and for the renewal of his two domain names (a .com and a .co.uk) together with another year’s web hosting.

This was due for payment a week later…

Now this client has a history of being a slow payer. The company I use to host his domains and site – I am a reseller rather than paying for the necessary infrastructure myself – has to wait for me to pay them too, so they now don’t renew domain names until I have paid, billing me a month before they are due for renewal and these days looking for payment on invoice.

So by today, my invoice was already three weeks overdue for payment and I got an e-mail from the hosting company telling me they’d had an e-mail from him over the weekend as some e-mails to him had bounced. Hardly surprising, given that the .com had expired a week ago and the .co.uk four days ago.

I popped him an e-mail this morning to tell him what was going on and then at 6.00pm tonight got an irate phone call from him demanding I renew them! It was apparently my fault for not reminding him.

I politely pointed out that the invoice states what the payment terms are and gives both cheque and BACS payment details. I also pointed out that the covering e-mail gives a date when payment should be made by, just in case people can’t work out when “today plus seven days” is.

Clients, eh?