After I finish speaking or emailing a client, especially one that almost always changes there mind to follow my direction; I can’t help but wonder to myself, am I educating the client and therefor they are making a wiser choice? Or are am I pushing my vision of their product on them?

I have to admit, I really like getting my way. I saw this plugin was being discussed and I really wanted to give it a go… well it goes back further than that. I love custom Google maps, I think they look cool. More than that I think if you are listing off a gigantic list of places, instead of keyword overloading, put them in a map! Surely Google isn’t going to penalize you for putting a list of hundreds of locations (that are relevant to the site) in a custom Google map?

Back to the plugin… it’s Stellar Places, which is one of the nicest implementations of custom Google maps on WordPress. This isn’t a review of that plugin, so if you want to learn more about it, read about it here. So I really wanted to use this plugin, and I had a distinct vision where it would fit in this site. The client didn’t see a need for the map, I of course disagreed.

I provided a fairly straight forward explanation of why I thought the map was helpful, at no point did I mention the map was my own pet project or that removing it would be more work, I put together three evidence based points which I clearly stated were hypothesized. So the client agreed and the map stays!! Yay! I win!

But this brings me to my point, finally, I know. Was what I did really in the clients best interest? I could have easily come up with an argument to support getting rid of the map if I had wanted, it really wouldn’t be hard. By the way, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t provide information about the possible negative effects (mostly load time, but that was minimal.) SO I supposed it really comes to a question of ethics? Where do you think? Let me know below or on twitter.