There are clients who think they 'know' how it works to build that site of theirs. The more they think they 'know', the less they do. How to recognize such a client from the very beginning:

1. He will slap a PDF file at you and demand a 'perfect' reproduction of the design in the PDF over the web site. Anyone having an idea about web design and Content Management Systems, or CMS, will smile at that demand.

2. He will send you color data in CMYK.

3. He will force you to stack in there, over (almost, at best) every 'sub-page' that lorem ipsum text ad nauseum. Like no one but you are called to fill and fix the lorem ipsum, align them, bold them and craft few more paragraphs under fugia nullat pariatur...

4. He will randomly ignore any pertinent advice you dare giving, mostly if this would slip a pixel away from the worshiped PDF design.

5. Oh yes, this client won't take web safe fonts for granted, no way! His Adobe InDesign has a font named Utopia installed and that means that any computer on planet earth will have that exact same font for its Firefox.

6. Fluid AJAX menus will be forced in fixed pre-press thought dimensions. No escape.

7. And here comes the hammer: after a couple months of "move that up a bit", then "oh no, too high, move it back a bit lower" and "make a block and center it to the right", it comes the request to finally set it up at "11.5px away from that and 9.5px away from that" other...

Yes, your eyes are in order, I couldn't believe mine when I was reading the half a pixel for the first time either.

In order to spare our clients from the half-a-pixel utopia, we're gonna write some blogs with tips, for both buyers and providers, about the competent art of communication and against the dictatorial design in web development.

Actually, the one asking for a half-a-pixel can hardly be considered a designer, be it a pre-press or a "web-press"... So here some tips to help you out with solutions on the above mentioned issues:

1. Be politely firm in indicating the client, from the very beginning, that a PDF is destined for print, for paper, as opposed to a web site which is destined for display, for scrolling up and down on a screen. Gently tell the client that web development is closer to television than to typography, newspaper prints, leaflets or booklets. Your casual argument: both tv and web run on same LCD screens!

2. A web site's performance gets measured by the speed of download, by conformity to the many browsers and operating systems environments out there, by friendliness to search engines' crawler robots, by usability for the end user, by page ranking, by traffic and so on and so forth. Lots of parameters that rule against eccentric designs or "stuff that looks good on paper, in Photoshop, in a PDF". Best doing sites on the current web have the least design elements in them. Repeat with more gentleness: a computer screen is not a paper but rather a sort of TV screen. Oh yes, beware of the over-Flash dangers when you do this comparison!

3. All in all, a team works better when there's a positive team spirit roaming from one team member to another. Once the client, or his paper mockup designer, participates in the web development process, he should leave at home the helm of stubbornness, the absolutism of the PDF rule over the web and, yes, the kind of attitude that usually turns a good project into a bad one. Because, during the web site build process, chances are immense for him to learn a heap of tips about running his own web business. And this without paying any other extra 'special' marketing agency. Just listening to the whisper of the coders who care to deliver a competitive and highly performant site.

More rants to come on this theme...