One $client has gone from bad to worse to absolutely rotten. Imagine, if you will, the following:
As one might suspect, our simple, elegant design has become increasingly bloated by clients making ridiculous requests and changing their minds so often that if I told you what happened, you'd be accusing us of bilking them of thousands of dollars. Frankly, it's an embarrassment.
The I.E. only drop-downs were a particular sore spot for me, but somehow they managed to make that worse, too. At the top of every drop-down, you could click on the title to go to the appropriate page in the event that your browser didn't support the menus. However, our clients expected clicking the title to make the menu appear, not take you to the page. So they asked for the hyperlink to be removed ... and we did it. Now, if you don't have an IE browser, you can't even navigate the site, which is pretty sorry for a site that's averaging about 36,000 hits per day.
whats worse is that so many agencies lower themselves to producing utter rubbish as asked for by clients, rather than giving them good advice and showing them the benefits of good practice.
This is why so many good companies go out of business or get hacked off with the industry - to make real money you have to produce crap that idiots want, rather than decent products that your studied your degree and mastered your technology to produce.
The beneficial side effect is that a lot of people vent steam by producing decent open source tools with decent code that was produced for its merit instead of because of an ill-informed clients wishes.
Funny, I was just mentioning how I was going through a similar thing.
I wish I could offer you a solution, but I'm looking for one myself. If you find a good answer, please post!
