Well, it’s happened again! After having put in hours of work on a site, the client has changed their mind & sneakily built themselves a “do it yourself” site, using elements of my design in their “creation”.

This happened to me a while ago when I was building a HIPS site & has now happened with the escort agency I was building a site for. Despite putting in hours of work & even having the client visit me to discuss how to progress with the site, all of a sudden they had gone very quiet! Upon checking the domain that I was supposed to be working on, I found a very cheap and tacky looking site, developed using doyourownsite.co.uk, which costs £5.88 per month to use & the resulting site certainly looks worth no more than that!

The client did explain that she wasn’t educated & this would explain the spelling mistakes that proliferate the site. However, I suppose the sort of people who will be using the service won’t care too much about that, but the client was saying that she wanted the site to look professional, along the lines of www.vogueescorts.co.uk. However, the one she’s come up with looks total rubbish – I won’t put their domain here as I don’t want to give them any publicity!

I think I’ll have to start assuming that everyone will try to rip me off by default & charge people a deposit up front from now on, as I can’t afford this to keep happening…..I’ve spent the last month working on 4 sites & have not yet been paid by any of the clients – I know I will get paid by one of them, it looks like I won’t get paid anything by 1 and the other 2 are an unknown quantity. The only solution seems to be taking part payment up front to prevent this happening again. Interestingly enough, the two people that have done this have both been self-employed business women! Contentious I know, but is this because women tend to change their moinds more often?!!!

The escort agency client did mention to me that she pays no tax on her business, yet makes a shed load of money (the girls get £110 per hour, before any “extras” are negotiated), so I contacted the HMRC Tax Evasion hotline, with as many details as I could supply, as she’s made it quite clear I won’t be getting any money out of her for the work already done!

First rule of business these days seems to be “don’t trust anyone”!