Update: 'The launch is next week': Entitled client messages web designer 50 times, website gets filled with typos and inaccuracies

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jun 7, 2024 3:00 PM EDT

It takes a thick skin to be your own boss, especially when you're working with the craziest clients imaginable. U/boobook-boobook knows that all too well after their run-in with a client who knew exactly what she wanted, no changes allowed. 

It's baffling that a client would enlist someone to build them a website, only to then insist they know better than the designer. It's like they're paying hundreds or thousands of dollars just to tell a web designer that they're doing things wrong. If the client is so great at making her own website, why doesn't she just do that herself? 

The client in this person's malicious compliance tale is a big bundle of red flags. One of the many insane things she did was email, text, and call her web designer 50 times in just one work week. It turns out that while the client was spending time bothering her web dev, she really should've been focused on the actual content of her site. After you check out the story below, you'll see why no one is going to take her or her site seriously until she decides to fix it. 

While we're on the subject of hilarious misspellings and misunderstandings, check out these very funny ones, like one person who tried to sound out "grand scheme" and instead wrote, "It is a very small issue in the gran stephen things."

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  • 01
    View Go Run dotti cat.php prodotti cat.php (lempty($terms_list)): ? <div id="content-btn-pro <div class="contain <div id="box- <button pr 27 28 29 </but 30 <?ph 31 32 33 34 35 </di <a href </div> 'She blew my inbox up: "PLEASE use the copy exactly the way it is" Antti">
    via Michael Baccin on Unsplash
  • 02
    Use the content exactly as written? If you say so... I run a small web development business, and as anyone with a business (or marketable skill) knows, there's always acquaintances sniffing around for cheap (preferably free) work.
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 03
    Helen is one such client, a friend of the family who called up begging for us to build her a website as the person she had lined up had dropped out unexpectedly.
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 04
    I felt bad that she'd been left in the lurch, so I asked her more about the project. She took this to mean I'd definitely build her 'state of the art interactive web app' by August 15 for a fee of zero dollars. I explained that I had other clients and I'd only be able to work over the weekend, and in the time she had there was no
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 05
    way anything 'state of the art' could be built. She seemed to come around to the idea that she only had enough content for essentially a brochure site, and that I should probably also be paid for my time.
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 06
    So with that apparently settled, I stupidly agreed to build her site over the coming weekend. That was Monday. Between then and Friday, Helen sent me 50 emails and called and texted numerous times. When I finally got to sit down with the copy she had written, my heart sank. Her
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 07
    whole idea relies on securing donors and government grants, as well as users submitting paid submissions to the site, so you'd think the copy would be edited, proofed and oozing legitimacy, right?
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 08
    Nah, son. Typos. Grammatical errors. Constant references to young people as 'Youth' with a capital 'Y'. Extra spaces and line breaks. Random bolding. Borderline word salad in places. Every web-friendly content rule broken numerous times. I won't post the actual content, but here are some notes from the insane content package I received.
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 09
    So I thought, well, before I go and dump all of this nonsense online, I'll at least fix the typos and weird formatting so it doesn't look like a barely literate person wrote this.
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 10
    Big mistake. I sent her the link to the home page and she blew my inbox up. 'PLEASE use the copy exactly the way it is in the Word documents. One of our team members works in advertising and he went over it all,' she wrote, across about eight emails, none of which used the phrase 'thank you'. (I totally understand why her last dev ghosted her.)
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 11
    At this point I was tired and fed up and couldn't be bothered asking whether that included the word 'photogragh' or the mention of kids', so a quick copy/paste addressed her woes. I cannot overstate just how insane the whole site now reads, but some people just don't want to be helped, you know? The
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 12
    launch is this week, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on Google Analytics for my fix of schadenfreude (especially since I'm 90% sure she's not going to pay me).
    via u/boobook-boobook
  • 13
    UPDATE: Nothing exciting about the website yet, but after six more emails I did just fire her as a client and point her to oDesk.
    via u/boobook-boobook

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content work stories work story email work customers client writer emails update website typos writing malicious compliance malicious-compliance-reddit malicious compliance reddit
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