“The client is always right” said the client.

Imagine a man goes to the hospital with a stomach ache, and informs the doctors, “I have appendicitis, skip the CT scan, and prep for Laparoscopic Surgery.”

Silly right? In the same respect (although not as life-threatening), when a client (let’s say an electric company owner) demands certain aspects of his website be built his way based on personal opinion or emotion, he is telling the developer that his own knowledge, training, and experience as an electrician is more extensive in the web industry and supersedes that of the web developer.

The patient needs the doctor in order to live, and the doctors need to understand the patient and his problems in order to know what techniques to apply.

So the next time you find yourself thinking “the client is always right”, consider the patient and where he would be if he had said something like that.

Let’s be clear, I am not saying your opinion doesn’t matter, it does. Without your insight into your own business your developer has nothing to go off of. But you did hire that experienced web firm to help you mix your vision with some industry experience and ingenuity, and create you the best website for your users. You did want a website that was best for your users, not you, right?

Start simple, then make it great.

Building a new website is sort of like building a new house. You start with a plan, talk with an architect, create drawings, hire a builder, and so on. When you build a house, or a website, it’s a good idea to plan ahead.

When building a new house, it would be a good idea to plan for your future needs. Maybe you don’t have kids, but one day you want one or two ankle-biters. It would be wise to tell your architect, “I would like to have two extra bedrooms.”

Now let’s imagine you are building a start-up website based on skateboarding. The main purpose of the website is to provide training videos and articles about the topic. It would be wise to concentrate on developing the content management system necessary to allow you to control the content on the website and easily add new content. Then you can focus on the content, and driving interested users to your website.

Here’s the twist.

You have a great basic concept for the website, it’s all based around a topic that’s popular and you plan on having a lot of content for users to read/watch. But the next thing that comes out of your mouth throws us for a loop; “I also want it to have a MySpace-like profile for each user, a YouTube-esque method for users to share videos, oh and one of those instant messaging thingamajigs like AOL has!”

Back to the analogy of the house, the last statement is sort of like telling your interior decorator to design the two extra bedrooms for one boy who likes Transformers and a little girl who loves Winnie the Pooh. So many detail for kids you haven’t even had yet.

Now my anology of the house and the unborn-yet-already-defined children may be a little extreme, but look at it from your user’s perspective. Are you really 100% sure that your idea is that great, and that you can really steal your user’s attention away from MySpace? Why build something that you think might work, when you can build the basics, then ask your users what they want. If you can’t handle that, and you think your website needs everything else to be great, then maybe your “great idea” really isn’t so great afterall.