When working for a web development company you'll often find yourself dealing with complex clients, or clients whose knowledge of what exactly is Internet and a website is close to nothing...
This is a compilation of REALLY stupid client quotes, and what you or your company should answer:

  1. CLIENT: "I want everything to be bright blue and bright red."
    Us: "Light blue and fire engine red do not go well together (unless you've intentionally taken LSD and/or put on a pair of 3D glasses to watch Cat Women of the Moon.) Trust in the fact that we all went through design and/or art school and have been doing this since 1995."
  2. CLIENT: "I was in that cgi bin thing noodling around the other day and changed a few things in there and now the system doesn't work."
    Us: "Please do not go into the cgi-bin on your web server and "noodle around" unless you know what you're doing. We will have to charge you the hours it takes to reinstall all the scripts running on your site."
  3. CLIENT: (after site is in production) "Can you make me 5 or 10 more designs to choose from?"
    Us: "If you feel like you need to, please ask your spouse, your neighbor, your colleagues, your friends, etc. what they think of your mock up designs before you approve one to be transformed into your website. Since you had already approved this design, we will have to charge you additional fees to redo the site."
  4. CLIENT: "Just pull some picture off of google and put in some dummy text for the movie."
    Us: "Creating Flash movies and multi-media CD-roms is a complex and time consuming process. There is a reason why we want you to create a script and select your images and text before we start your movie. Ten seconds in Flash could equate to 10 hours in development time depending on the complexity of the movie. If you really can not come up with something and hand over the reins to us, when you ask us to remake what we've done, you will be charged the hourly rate."
  5. CLIENT: "We'd like to see about 10 more designs. You know, just to see the possibilities."
    Us: "If you really like a mock up, go with that gut feeling. We will charge you to create additional mock ups past 5."
  6. CLIENT: "Can you make it more edgy?"
    Us: "Can you give us your definition of 'edgy'"?
  7. CLIENT: "I need to get a website, but I don't have a computer or the internet."
    Us: "If you want to have us design a website, please at least have access to the internet. We can not fax you mock ups."
  8. CLIENT: "We want our site to look exactly like ******.com. Can you just copy that site?"
    Us: "Please do not ask us to procure images and/or information straight off an existing website or copy the design of an existing website exactly. We do not work like that and each one of the products we undertake is unique and original."
  9. CLIENT "Can I have some nice animations, blinking text, and flashy stuff to 'Catch the eye' of my customers? I just want to have something original":
    "No, you really don't want to use multiple frames, big animated gifs, flashing text, a cute wav that starts playing when your page opens, cryptic and "artsy" menus, "splash" pages with lengthy Flash movies or have every page of your site look "just a little different". You don't. Really. Now stop asking."
  10. CLIENT: "I don't see our content in these pages. I faxed that over, didn't you get it?"
    Us: "Please do not print out your Word docs of your web content and fax them to us. There's this thing called email ...

And the bonus one:

CLIENT: "We need a 15 page website with a 10 second flash movie. We've gotten quotes on elance.com for $200, can you beat that?"
Now simply hang the phone, or mark his/her email address as "Junk" or something of the sort... :)

Client quotes from: clientcopia.com

Enjoy,