[a_m_kelly]

I did something similar the summer I also got my first on-the-books job. My mom had met a local business owner at a party and she's recommend my "skills" as a "web designer," I put together a slick looking splash page with the company logo and a stock photo of camera lenses. He hired me and I set to work building an embarrassingly bad site in (oh god I'm sorry.) Dreamweaver. He didn't really have content or any clue about what he wanted the website to do and being an idiot 16 year old, I couldn't help him. I was making ten dollars an hour in cash in 2004, which was great when my other job was paying me 7.50 to push shopping carts. I built him a new computer with parts from newegg that managed to get screwed up inside of 6 months. "I agree you _do_ need a lot of RAM if you're using photoshop!" I had a lot of fun spending the guy's money on hardware but he got very little out of the deal. A quick Google reveals he still doesn't have a website but has a presence on a number of local-listing type sites. Likely doesn't really need one.

It was a valuable lesson in figuring out that you should make sure everyone knows what to expect going into a job and has clear ideas what they hope to get out of it.