Re: Closing the Deal......

Ascertain the level of interest by whatever method you use to size up your
clients.
Meetings, dog and pony shows, questionaire. etc.

Personally, the questionaire works best. This immediately gets the prospect
buying into the process as they need to be able to explain why they want a
website, and focus on what they think it will do for them.

The more of this you can do on the web the better. You are getting them into
e-mail, looking at sites and educating them at the same time.

Your design of the questionaire, look feel and focus will also help you by
being able to separate the 'hi mom, i'm on the web' folks from those people
who will become your best advertisers. It will also get your butt out of the
mud when you get a questionaire back with a zipdisk and 200 pages of "i like
this about this site, i like this about that site".

Very few designers get any money for the meetings and the dog and pony
shows. It is an expense and should be figured in as part of the design
price.
You must decide how much time away from your keyboard your prospect is
worth. Do yourself a favor and stick to that time.

I have done website closings taking 2 min. in a parking lot, to two years.
amazed in the first case and validated in the second.

One other thing that helps is that i charge 50% more for copywriting and let
my clients know that i am a sloooowwwwwww typist.

the head lemur-alan herrell
http://www.lemurzone.com
Member Web Standards Project
http://www.webstandards.org

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