Open Thread: When Do You Walk Away?

One of our readers wrote in with a quandary: “How do other people handle clients that already have a website, and they say they just want a ‘facelift’ to the current site instead of starting from scratch. In my experience, it’s almost never worth it to try and go in and make changes to somebody else’s design. It’s
usually a bunch of image slices, and you’d need the original psd (and I’d prefer not to build a site that way) or their code is such a mess that I don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole.”

Personally, my response in such situation is to give the customer the best advice that I can, explain why what they’re asking for is unreasonable – and then to decline the job if they insist on having it done the wrong way. But where do you come down on this set of questions? Do you ever decide to just walk away from an unreasonable client? How do you know it’s time to pull the plug? Or do you just grit your teeth, remind yourself that the customer is always right, and tackle the work even though you know it’s going to cost them more and leave them less satisfied in the end?

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