Three Websites, Five Years: What Happens When a Client Refuses Features

I was contracted to build three websites. Technically, that work had an end date. What happened was the opposite: the relationship ran for almost five years, through Women's March Jakarta, FemFest, and a number of other campaigns, each with its own needs.

The work included pulling editorial content, events, and resources into a single mobilisation hub — and moving them off Wix Editor onto WordPress so they could manage their own content without depending on anyone.

This client knew exactly what they wanted. What I didn't expect was how firmly they refused what they didn't want. Every time I proposed a feature that sounded clever, the question was the same: who will use this, and what happens if no one does?

Most of my proposals didn't pass that question. They wanted it simple, they wanted it to work, and they wanted decisions made from the input of the people actually using the site — not from me, and not from trends.

For a while I saw that as a limitation. A few years later I realised it was the discipline I've most rarely found in other clients.

The consequence only showed in year three. A site built with few moving parts is a site a new person can still pick up when staff change. No feature nobody understands. No section everyone is afraid to touch because they don't know what will break.

The trade-off is real: a few things take more manual steps than they should, and I still think some of my old proposals were right. But surviving five years is stronger evidence than my argument.

This became the foundation of how I work now: ask first who will maintain something, before agreeing to build it.