I’m sure many of you had have had the customer who fancies themselves an interface and design expert. The kind who will put their nose to the screen and request a logo be moved “an eighth of an inch to the left”, or wants “a little more blue in the link color”. That’s all well and good. After all, it is their site.

A little background.

I’m working on a commerce site for long-time customer. One of the requirements of this site is that the design has to be “as close as possible” to the parent companies site – which is developed by an entirely different company. Usually not a problem, but the corporate site is completely flash, while the commerce site we’re developing is XHTML/CSS. The site has progressed nicely. Every other day or so, I’ll receive an email from the client requesting a pixel change here, a color change there. Nothing exciting. But today one of his requests made the entire group about fall out of their chairs laughing. I won’t quote exactly, but here it is:

“In the 3-box area add the little “click to activate this control” boxes with the lines drawn through…”

By show of hands, who sees the joke here?

That’s right. It took a little bit of persuading, but I finally convinced the customer that this was not a design feature of the parent site. So in summary, I will not be adding title tags to my design displaying the message “Click to activate and use this control”.

First blog post. Ever.

So what does one say to his non-existent readers? There will most definitely be some design changes. There will be random chatter about Macs, web development and web development using Macs. I’m sure there will also be a whole sloo of random. I hope this site will find its voice in short order, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Thanks for dropping by.