I arrived home form work one evening. My 5 year old son approached me and asked me if I would make him a website. I thought this was funny because only a year ago he actually thought I made webs for a living. So I asked him to tell me more about his little idea. He told me that he fell over in dog dirt when he was going into the park with his mammy. And he wanted to make a website called Put a nappy on your dog.com. I asked my wife if she put him up to this, and she said she knew nothing about it.
Being a web designer I bought the domain name straight away just in case and I showed him the domain working. Great my work here is done, or so I thought. Then he said "We have to tell people what happened so that this wouldn't happen to other children".
I asked him how we were going to do this and he said we can put a video on YouTube and put it in the website. I thought this was really funny and did no more on it.
A couple of weeks later, he asked me "How is the website getting on?". Woah! I don't remember a timeline being set on the brief.
I said to him "eh... It takes time to make a website especially with video. You have to make a storyboard and stuff". And told him that I'd do it soon.
The next day I got home from work and low and behold a storyboard waiting for me. Lots of stick men versions of himself and everything that happened. I thought this was the funniest thing. I built the storyboard out mainly using his own dialogue and frames. With of course the client over my shoulder making edits.. Talk about Micro Management.
I put video together, put it on You Tube, and made the site and put the video in, job done!
Or so I thought Again! He said now we have to make a game, so that people will send it to friends. Ok so I'm now blown away. I made the game over the weekend and now it's live. Again the little Micro Manager made sure that the game had a huskey and an Irish wolf hound.
I was really surprised with the whole project. My 5 year son as a client understood a couple of things about marketing
I honestly couldn't believe how much of a grasp on things this 5 year old had on things. I tried to push it and see if I could draw a little more out of him. I asked him how he was going to pay for the website. Of course he threw the pro-bono thing back in my face by reminding me that he was a special client. So I said that my work was free but you need to buy a website from a company so that it goes up online. He said that you could make an Ad and put it on TV and then people would pay for the website... Ok that's where he slipped up a little because he didnt think about the cost of advertising... but that's forgivable being only 5. Although at the end of the day I thought it was brilliant that he didn't go running in to his piggy bank to dig out the cost for his hosting. I told him that we could let other people advertise on our site and they would pay us to do it.. He thought this was a brillant idea... He's finally put this site to bed, and asked me what other websites can we make and put advertisements on them.... I've created a monster!
All the best
Paul