Website Design Client Mistakes

I want to talk about ex-clients mistakes, I dont get a kick out of seeing clients move away from us and then have trouble as there website’s visitor numbers have fallen and caused them problems but it does justify my thoughts that its a real big gamble to take your website design work and SEO work into your own hands if you are not an expert at it.
Previous Conversations with the few clients that have decided to make their website work on their own or with a ‘friend’ website design person (which always means someone in their bedroom)
We informed our client that
If you want us to just update the prices page along with the fees page then that will take about 2 hours and cost £50, on reflection I would prefer to have a yearly contract between us and would accept £275 for all the changes mentioned previously. We worked out that this is very good value for you as have worked out that on e a yearly basis this is 39 page updates plus every page on all three sites will need to be changed and updated to take into account the new schedule menus / testimonials and news every year. The 39 pages to be updated Include the big ones of materials / schedule which take about 4 hours between them.
client replied
Anyway won’t bore you with the details : ) but I’ve decided to give the offer to update the site a miss this time, previously you have done excellent work for us and been quick and efficient we really cant fault you but at the moment I can’t afford 50 GBP just to change two pages (even if it takes you 2 hours) and have got someone here that I met that wants some scuba classes for free so I can get stuff like these changes done for free – no offence, we will now save money doing our own website updates ourselves.
we then replied
Actually a bit disappointed that you are putting something so important in someone else’s hands especially when we took over your websites and improved them and their rankings massively, we have done updates for you without being paid for the last year, you have repeatedly started then stopped the new website project and kept telling me it will be sorted shortly only to now put it with someone else.
Are you sure you can count on a ‘new’ person thats just come on the scene to be there to update your site anytime anyday (the way we have done it so efficiently for you over the last 18 months? the only reason I didnt insist on a charge for maintenance earlier is because I was hoping that we would be doing your website for you and wopuld include your website update charges in with the new website invoice.
We are very busy but have enough staff to handle anything, creating another hosting account and re-registering all the domains will cost you £130-£200 approximately which is a cost you can do without I guess and the hosting account you get may not give you the flexiblity to have databases / php that you will need to create blogs and other things like a mailing manager that you may want / need in the future.
Additionally it seems strange that after spending  £40k GBP you are now making such a gamble with £275 and another £1000 for the new website but that is your choice as a friend I would suggest you are acting illogically, trying to save? a small amount of money in one of the most important things for your business you will ever do. Whatever you decide im happy for you and as I said earlier you dont need to transfer them just to do small changes you can just sent the changes to us and we will update them, actually we already done your most recent change thinking that you would want us to complete your updates.
Additionally, to keep your costs down I would like to suggest that we are  happy to do the work (either changes or the new site or just the changes) and get paid later for this. if you are finding it hard to find the money at the moment, I say this as you are a long term client and happy to trust you. Also happy to do the updates and let your ‘friend’ do the new site and keep the hosting with us (will give him FTP access to the new site only)
After the client took a while to decide what to do
We are upgrading our hosting accounts and need to know if you are finished with your website and email accounts, you told me that it was urgent that you got your websites moved and we tried our best to get them zipped up and to you on time as you was quite insistent on them being done, checked your site  yesterday and its still with my hosting account. If you need extra time I can work around it and give it to you no problem but iwould be good to know when its being moved to allow us to upgrade our hosting accounts.
Additionally going forward we need to sort out some issues, We are assuming you dont want any website update and / or SEO work done by ourselves in the future as you have got a guy thats going to do some courses with yourself to take care of that for you. This still seems so weird that you are gambling your internet future on an unknown after we made such a difference with your sites visitor numbers / SERPS from the beginning of the SEO project. Speaking as a friend and not a SEO / Website design company I hope you know what your doing here as I have taken over many websites that have been almost destroyed with amateur SEO / Website code.
The final result is that the client now has only 70% of the website visits they did the last full year they were with us. The moral of the story? ‘If something isnt broke then dont try to fix it’