Inevitable Success if you Understand the Client

Hopefully you will find thousands of blog posts about Client - Designer communication, so I'll try to add few things we should all practice and help provide better production process. Understanding this simple and basic steps is very important. The successful freelance/professional graphic and web designers out there also try to improve and maintain the relationship with their clients at best. Not always the great design is the bail for keeping the client pleased.

First Contact

This is the most important part of every service provider. Especially when the competition is enormous. The first impression with the client should be fine both ways. This means you should see the client face-to-face. If there is chance to meet in person you should take it. He will show you what he wants, and what industry the Company covers. You will get information about the target he is aiming for and you can provide him with quick sketches to narrow the field of the design proposals. This way you can produce the project with great comfort and most important, the design proposals will please the client. If there is no chance to meet the client in person try Skype-video call, or any kind of video conference.

Questions

For a creative work where you have the client wishes in one hand and the designer ego in other, there should be a balance. This balance can be achieved only if you have asked more and more questions at the beginning. Remember, the client knows his target audience better than you do. If you have this in mind the rest of the process is very easy. If there is a problem you should ask your client, what is his main goal with the ongoing project? Understand this and the problem is history. Technically he is paying you to design his ideas.

Finish

The finishing process sometimes can be very long. To avoid this, send the client list of the services you provide and the steps you are planning to take for the project to be completed 100%. If you have the list written down you can remind him that he accepted these production steps, and the finishing part is taking too long. He will know when the project should end, and understand that he hired you to do this job. If the client is too involved in the process his Company may suffer lack of supervision. This means that you reckon the client so the result is next time you won't be hired again.

Maybe you know these things already or maybe you don't, either way every project and every client is a story for itself. But following some simple ways of doing things may help you as a service provider gain more success. Maybe you will find out that you are not the right guy for the job, or maybe you will have bad communication with the client and be ready for the problems at the begging.

Web 3.0 the next concept

Today we are witnesses of the changes that arrived in the Internet World. In 2009 the concept Web 2.0 (2005-2008) is sort of dead. The new approach today from the users and companies, is very different. The Web 2.0 concept is oriented in sharing content, personal blog, XML and RSS, tagging, Google, Wikipedia, web applications and community oriented. There ware also some design approaches that ware different from Web 1.0 concept.

But what we have now?

• Personal Web
• Focusing on the Individuals
• Lifestream
• Widgets
• Open & Structured Data
  
• Filtering & Dynamic Content
• Semantic Web

Lots of people already tagged Web 3.0 as a semantic web. Web 3.0 will be all about semantic web!? What is semantic web (Wikipedia):

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.^[1][2] It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.^[3]

Also the concept of Social Network will be replaced by People Search. This means that if I put a proper name into the search engine of Web 3.0 it would provide the running profile of your presence on the web. This would show everything in the web that has been tagged as belonging to you, ordered by community validation and relevance. Your page would contain both information that you have written about yourself. I think this concept is very close to what we have now in 2009, but for more clear head about Web concepts and the difference between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 you should visit this links that are listed below.

• Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman
• How To Define Web 3.0
• Web 3.0 or Not, There's Something Different About 2009
• Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web
• Web 3.0 in Plain English
  

Hope this will bring the idea closer to what really is happening on the net.

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