2Fish 4Business

What happens when you f*** up a business relationship?

Confession: I just pushed away a client who has been a friend. She was one of my earliest website design clients, she’s referred several other people to me, and she’s also been a cheerleader for me in the past. At the beginning of May I asked her to find a new web host and also laid down new rules about our business relationship, including radically different payment terms. Today she sent me an email that she has found other hosting and someone else to take over work on her website. She’s gone, and I doubt the parting is amicable on her side.

Why in the world would I do something like that?

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Jesse Chambers at Birmingham Weekly just posted

We stumbled across another cool green web site, called www.grist.org. Based in Seattle, Grist is a clean site, displaying a lot of content without looking too busy. Grist bills itself as having “the most recognizable voice in environmental journalism: funny, opinionated and intelligent.”

On looking at the site, my first thought was “Gah! CLEAN??!!”

Jesse, unless you are looking at a different grist.org than I saw, I don’t see how you can call a site with a 300-pixel-high header, two banner ads across the top, three horizontal menus, a double column of ads, links, and stuff down the right, and no breathing room around the elements “clean.”

Not to mention the horrible orange/green mustache image and the naked woman with painted boobs front-and-center on the page. (Ok, now I just sent them 1,247 more pruriently curious visits.)

While I’m at it: I did not post this comment at Birmingham Weekly because their comment system requires joining Disqus, which appears to track all your comments across all sites to “allow you to manage comments in one place.”

Come on, Birmingham Weekly. Even Blogger gives you the option to post using name and email address without registering — and without such a direct invasion of privacy. Don’t make people jump through hoops to share their opinions.