Is the customer always right?

The answer of course is: Yes. The customer is always right. If the customer tells you to do something, you do it, and you do it without argument, without complaint, and without a single thought as to how such a request might reflect on you. Don’t be shy, put your hand up if that’s the way you deal with your customers. I’m willing to bet that a good number of people have been told that that is the way to treat your customers, and have taken that advice on board and never deviated from it. Right?

The customer always has ideas. Sometimes you’ll get a customer who knows exactly what they want, quite often you’ll get a customer who knows they want something, but they don’t actually have much of an idea as to what it is they want. No matter which type of customer a person is, there will always be a moment where they ask for something that you don’t think will be a good idea. How you to deal with that moment is what defines you as a business, and as a person.

There is a fine balance to maintain between creating a professional product, creating the product the customer wants, and creating a product that you yourself are happy with. That balance is very, very difficult to achieve, and it’s amazing to see just how many people keep that balance by doing things that they don’t want to do.

The bottom line is this: Your products reflect on you just as much as they reflect on your customer. Sure, your customer might want a full Flash website that sings and dances and uses cryptic symbols copied from the inside of pyramids as navigation links, but will giving them all of that help them? Will giving them what they want help, or hurt them? Sure, they might love that site. They could spend hours telling people how you did exactly what they wanted and how you could do everything they asked for, but is that always a good thing?

Part of being a web designer is having knowledge of the web. It’s knowing how long people browse sites for, what the most efficient form of SEO is, and, most importantly what is visually impressive but still works. There’s no point having a website laden with animations that doesn’t give the user any information. You that, I know that… but the customer might not.

The customer is not always right. How you deal with that… that’s what defines you as a designer, as a website developer, and a business.