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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me that you get paid either way. It's the client that loses if they don't provide the content they promised.

Every day you wake up in the morning, work, and then you put your head on your pillow at night. You never get that day back, it’s gone forever and your life is one day shorter. You’ve either done good work or bad during that day. How many days of bad work can you tolerate before you decide to make a change in your life?

I think at some level people either decide that they don’t care about their work or they care enough that bad work is painful. It’s not for me to tell you or anybody else which way to go with this, but for me, bad work is painful and it’s up to me to work things out with clients such that I do good work and they are happy with the results.

And the alternative is to go to bed frustrated and hateful because a client didn't deliver on a promise? You can't change the client's past actions. You can't even improve them. The best you can do is go to bed knowing you did your best.

If a client does something such that I do bad work once in a while, fine. If one client in a while does things that make me do bad work on their project, that is regrettable but I’m not going to an early grave lamenting it. But if this state of affairs becomes normal, such that I am doing bad work nearly every day, for nearly every client, that is not fine with me personally.

That's great, now you've got another crap looking website to add to your portfolio. Eventually you'll stop being paid. Just because the client's paying doesn't mean they've got a clue. It's our job to steer them towards great software, not take their money and produce mediocrity.

Actually with the exception of the copy, which may or may not get straightened out, it's a pretty decent little WP design. And like I said, I used the opportunity (which was basically a favor for a buddy) to take Compass for a spin, to fine tune my own little Sass library that I've been working on, and to get to know and work with a new designer. Building a cathedral was never the idea.

My main client is the one I'm obsessively steering toward great software.

Your past work is the only tangible evidence of your current ability. A good design with bad copy looks like a template, which may be OK if you design templates, but if you design websites, copy is extremely important.

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