There is a common belief that we avoid doing things that make us feel out of control. Upgrading our business and personal websites seem to spin many people into that dreaded feeling of being out of control.

Our web guru tells us to write and format content and ftp it to a host on a server. Well when I talk with people they tell me what they really hear is a lot of terms and phrases that make little or no sense and that leads to the feeling of being out of control.

When I first started creating websites I would give long technical spiels about the server hardware and how bandwidth affected the pixel size of the images that could be presented on the website. Ya right! There was more glaze covering the eyes of my clients then on an Easter Ham and if you don’t eat Easter Hams take my word for it they are glazed all over. I’d finish my spiel and open the floor to questions. What I was really doing was opening up the dreaded bottomless pit of silence that every person giving a presentation dreads. Finally someone would ask a question, “ will we be able to send email from the website?”

As a presenter I was crushed when the only questions I would get would be about trivial issues that could be answered in one sentence. I would yell inside my head “ please ask me about how we can bring traffic to your website” or some other such question. But because I was no more in tune with my clients thinking then they were with my thinking I could not understand why the good questions rarely came. I would chalk it up to a whole list of excuses that did not take into account my own thinking.

It took some time but the light bulb finally went on and I realized that I was not listening to the concerns of my clients and not recognizing their fears. Yes, they did not tell me their concerns in terms I could really understand but then again it was not their job to make me understand how they thought and felt. (Lightblub) It is my job as a guide to creating and maintaining a web presence to listen and to figure out what they are looking for. Sure they might not have a clear path they can lead me down, that does not matter. As the person selling the service I have a clear duty to hold the clients best interests in the forefront of my thinking and actions. I can guide them and maybe push a little but when all is said and done I work for them and they need to know this.

So how do you go about easing the fears of the client? There are no flip answers or quick tricks I can impart but there are a number of strategies that I will lay out in the next 3 articles.

Craig Daniels is a web designer living in New Hampshire, his website is http://www.theopensite.com

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