There’s always something to learn from projects we’ve had to abandon. Today, we’ll be sharing one such project with you about a web design project we had to cancel for a client.

You see, three years ago, we were contacted about a web design opportunity for a company we will simply refer to as “Globe Mix”.

Globe Mix was an interesting client in that they displayed red flags almost immediately by asking if they could pay us once the website was generating revenue. Bear in mind this was a web design client, not a marketing client.

Ordinarily, we would not work with a client who does not pay us up-front, although we made an exception in this case as their web design project had some very unusual, yet interesting requirements we just had to experience for ourselves. So, we told them we’d take a crack at building the website on their terms.

Reason #1: “Branding Guidelines”

We’ve worked with companies both big and small, casual and corporate; yet, this was the first and only time we’ve come across a client who had “branding guidelines”.

If you don’t know what branding guidelines are, they’re simply guidelines on how a logo or a company’s brand should be represented in various media. For whatever reason, this particular client received some half-baked branding guidelines from the rinky-dink company that designed their logo.

Now look, there’s nothing wrong with branding guidelines; you should consistently know how to present your brand online. However, what made these particular branding guidelines noteworthy was that they also had very, very specific requirements on how their website should be designed. Like, “Header font 3 on page ‘About’ hex code #A53922 Font-family: Times New Roman bold underlined last word italicised” specific. The hell, right?

Every little thing you could imagine on the website was meant to follow these branding guidelines. The owner of this company knew them by heart and could not wrap their head around why others struggled to follow them. It is a mystery…

Reason #2: Working With Wix

When we design websites, we often work within the budgets of our clients. At the cheapest, this means setting up a basic WordPress website and creating a child theme.

But with this web design project, the client insisted on us designing her site on Wix because her website was already on Wix. If you haven’t used Wix before, then all you need to know is that, at least back in 2022, you were heavily restricted by their site builder, which wasn’t particularly good in the first place.

As you can imagine, we ran into quite a lot of issues with the design limitations of the site builder because the client wanted features that were not possible to add to a Wix website.

Speaking of which…

Reason #3: Request To Copy Another Site’s Design

This was arguably the worst part of working on the Globe Mix website. So, the client sent us a link to a website and outright told us that they wanted to copy the entire design.

By itself, the request was ludicrous, but combine that with doing this on a Wix website with their branding guidelines, and you have something that is impossible to deliver.

Even still, we made the attempt as best as we could, just to see how far we could push the limitations of Wix.

To our surprise, we managed to get quite far with essentially copying the other website whilst following their branding guidelines. Of course, we did run into some brick walls when it came to some of the design features we just couldn’t add in.

Reason #4: Request To Do Search Engine Optimisation

This was ultimately the final straw for us. Those who know anything about SEO know that it’s not just something “you do” as a side thing when you’re building a website. There’s a lot of planning and work that goes into a proper SEO campaign. Therefore, when we’re asked to just do SEO as part of the web design service we’re already doing for the same price, then this is where we part ways.

Conclusion: Knowing When To Abandon a Project

Aside from the abrupt SEO request, we realised this was not a project for us due to the following reasons:

• The budget was too low for what was required of us.
• We’ll take design ideas from websites, but we don’t like to outright copy entire designs; there’s no creativity in this.
• The branding guidelines were too restrictive, and often conflicted with the design we were asked to copy.
• The client was rushing us to get the work done.

It’s for these reasons that this was ultimately a project that nobody else would want to pick up. In fact, three years later, the half-complete website we built for them is still up exactly as we left it.