Oh I curse the day I ever said I would do a site for a bellydancer. The woman is unreasonable! After monthly battles to get her to respond to my emails both asking for input and requesting that she pay her growing bill, I quit doing anything for her site. Why work on something I'm not getting paid for? When she finally did respond to me I was more than generous in offering to let her make whatever payments she could towards her bill. I got two small check from her and then I heard nothing from her for ages. I pretty much wrote her off. My emails to her were bouncing, no replies to my phone calls - nothing. I tried last week to email her one last time, and the email went through. And I got a response! However I told her that I would be resigning as her webmaster and that she needed to pay me the amount owed in full. Her response was a very snotty 'well I never could get the site to load' and 'I'm working 12 hour days for very little money' or 'I never got one response from the website'.

Well to those I said 'How come you never mentioned to me you were having site problems?' and 'Well I don't exactly live the life of the rich myself here in the mecca that is my midwestern town.' and 'The website has been live for about 4 months. You cannot seriously expect the money to roll in just because you have a website. You have to promote it, and you never did. I did all i could with search engine submission and attempts to reciprocal-link, but advertising is what you're meant to do. If you don't, of course no one's going to go to your site.' ARGH! Every flippin' email she sent me these past few days have been one long guilt trip and veiled insults at my work and my price for the work - which she agreed to the day we met for lunch. She didn't balk at my fee then when I was very up front about how much web startup was going to cost her, why is she balking now?? Grrrrrr. I cut her a lot of slack because I knew she was trying to start up her own studio etc etc - I let her make payments on her bill, payments which were sporadic and small at best, I didn't charge her for half the stuff I'd done.

So this morning I fired off an email (something I really should not do just after waking up) and said as plainly and as nicely as I could that I did not appreciate the guilt complex she was laying on me but if she really wanted to have a pity competition, I would have no problem competing because my finances aren't exactly the greatest either. I told her I'd done everything I could possibly do with very little communication and input from her, and for far less than I would normally charge. But the headache of trying to get her to pay *anything* on her bill was just one headache I didn't need.

She asked for her HTML files 'because she deserves them after the great expense she went to to have me create them' and her pics back, but frankly, she can wait until I receive her final check. In hindsight, I think the silly woman has absolutely no head for business. She should not have jumped into website development right as she was trying to begin building her studio up from scratch on very little money. She should have established herself first and ensured that her studio would be a success before hiring a professional designer to enhance her business with a website. I don't believe she timed it right and if this fiasco is indicative of the way she runs things, I doubt she will succeed in her venture. I think she was counting on the website to bring in money from the original costumes she creates and sells, and she expected the money from sales online to happen almost immediately. But, she did not have the funds for me to setup any sort of sales system where people could buy what they wanted from her online. All I could do was put together pictures of her stuff along with prices and hope people would be bothered enough to call her long distance and order something. She said she wanted to reach people in other states and even internationally. Well I hate to say it but there are a gazillion bellydance sites out there, some of them very professional, and that do allow people to buy online and I think if someone is going to shop online, they are going to want to do the entire transaction online because it's convenient. Someone in France is not going to want to make a long distance call to some woman in Lincoln, Nebraska and order a coin bra. Puh-lease.

Argh. I just had to vent. The woman pissed me off no end this weekend with her whiny, guilt-inducing emails. From now on I will: Not do websites for anyone just starting a business, Only work for established companies, and Make sure I have a contract next time. And I need a business partner to handle all the money crap. I hate squeezing people for money.