Please consider the travails of an "Archiwebdeveloper", if Architects were like Webdevelopers this is what they would be facing.

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Client address,
15 October 2009

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year.

Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: Get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers.

Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house that he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, of course, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. I'm sure you are making a lot of money from this project.

Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans. I have only 2 weeks for the entire construction, because I am having a party in 3 weeks and I want to have it in the house.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: I am thinking. Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.
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Copyright information: This work is not entirely original. I saw a similar note on the internet, as far back as 2002 when I ventured along this path. But I have expanded on the overall idea,

This really interest note. whenever you meet a perfectionist clients who do not know what he or she want .Personally I try to guide and give recommendation based on the the company objective and if the person is still given me "World almanac" like your write up above. I do tell the person that I do not have the time that he should try another person.
Because most of the times this type of clients in the end of day either they get confused(as a result not known which area to go) and suspend the project or would not be willing to pay the cost you would give to them.

go to smashing magazine dot com and search for "How To Identify and Deal With Different Types Of Clients , "

good luck!

yawa-ti-de:

go to smashing magazine dot com

bot!!!!!! as she be babe abi?


Nice article, i couldnt read everything (i dunno what that phobia for lengthy articles is called) but i got the gist of every cuz i read the opening paragraphs, scanned through the rest in seconds and down to the closing paragraphs.

For clients like this I'll redirect them to Omni, he has a high level of tolerance for this kinda stuff.

@Poster are u a developer or a designer

an architect

@smartsoft: I was an interface-developer / designer for close to 5 years (2003 to 2008) using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML, Javascript (eventually jQuery) and I used to dabble into PHP once in a while. I also did some Joomla and Wordpress jobs. In 2009 I went full-scale into PHP and I hardly do any front-end development as such any more, I do much more of web application development (and as usual, I like dabbling into stuff, I am now dabbling into c# and .NET). I can still do front-end work, though, it's just more interesting to do web apps. Front-end development is no longer so exciting since you can get just about any front-end template online and tweak it to your own use, within the terms of agreement of the license with which it's supplied. Yeah.

@webdezzi: LOL. Very funny!

I heard so much about C#, can you share things you find interesting with the language?
especially C# over C and C++
am planning to dedicate some time to learn C, the only reason being that, it is claimed to be the basic of C++.

@webdezzi:
I did some little C++ in my sophomore year at the University, and I had to make do with some few C wrapper functions, so I dabbled into C too. Agreed, C and C++ are blazingly faster than C#, but C# is generally smoother at integrating with .NET (I am joining the .NET bandwagon) than C++ (you know there is C++.Net, right?).

There are other things I love about C# with respect to C++ (I can't really compare to C, but since C++ is an improvement over C, I believe that the problems with C++ were engendered way back in C)

1. Memory management: C++ developers have to bother about not only the algorithmic aspects of the code, but ALSO the memory aspects. They need to figure out who owns objects and who cleans them up, and how to clean up in the presence of error checking. With C#, the memory management is automated, just focus on your algorithmic coding. On the other hand, one may argue that C and C++ give you ABSOLUTE control over your memory to do as you will, and that is very true, too.

2. Exceptions and return codes: In C++, some functions return VOID, some return HRESULT, some return a bool, some return another set of status code, and some return a number and use an out-of-range value as an error indicator. The developer has to successfully convert back and forth between the various kinds of error handling, which can be very tedious and hard to manage.

3. "Coherent libraries": C++ is like a refuse heap when it comes to libraries. Some libraries are from C, others from C++, all with various levels and types of documentation, different philosophies in how you use them, how they're organized, how you handle errors, etc. With C# it's just the .NET and you're good to go!

4. Compilation model: Although C and C++ programs run faster than C#, the build time is by far slower. This is because they use the C compilation model, which was instituted in the early hey-days of programming against very tight machine constraints. The separate compilation of files, separate header and source files, and linking slow things down quite a bit. I have a friend, Robin, who is a C and C++ addict, and Bayo, a C# addict. They each wrote a similar program some weeks ago and Robin's program took 1 minute and 5 seconds (65 seconds) to compile and build, wheres Bayo's C# program took just 6 seconds! Imagine that!! Okay, of course, in execution, Robin's program ran roughly 2 or 3 times faster than Bayo's own.

I'm sure there are others, but I'm still a novice. I assure you, it is far simpler to code in C# than in C++ or C, at least for a beginner like me (not a beginner to programming, but a beginner to the entire C, C++, C# family). So, it just depends on what bakes your beans!

That was nice and witty.