Clients often don’t pay attention to their responsibilities with a project.  They see the developer as working for them, therefore the developer has to work in with them and their other commitments.  Cooperation is essential to the success of any project.  If a client agrees with deadlines then unless anything untoward has happened stick to the schedule.

“Late delivery of content is one of the greatest headaches for the Web development team, as it throws schedules off or out.  The format and structure of the content is also often a problem.” – Ashley Friedleim, Web Project Management.

I’ve experienced clients going overseas without providing what was needed before they left or in one case not paying the deposit before they went.  Then there has been delays caused because they have had children home for the holiday’s, good weather for skiing, as the deadline approaches passing the content writing off to a new person who would need to have extra time (I was passed along through 4 writers in one company).

Then there are clients who are on time but what they have provided is insufficient or unusable. I had one client fax me his content, his writing was indecipherable and include helpful pointers “use the same as so and so’s website”. (This is a breach of copyright for those who haven’t realized whats wrong with this approach.) And the ridiculous number of hours needed to type out page upon page before it could be used for the website.

I’ve had emails where there have been no formatting just one paragraph for the content for the whole website. (I’d like to think this was a software error but when I asked for another copy in another format I got the same again… few capital letters at the start of sentences and one paragraph.)

Then the never satisfied client who perpetually chops and changes what they have written long past the final deadline and keeps emailing the latest version for me to include in the website.

Needless to say, your probably paying your web developer more on an hourly basis than your doctor so treat them with respect and your sure to end up with better results and a project within budget.