Dropping this here: https://appsignal.com — looks great, works even better. And it's one of the few tools that treats exceptions and performance both as first class citizens (full disclosure: I'm a co-founder).
It is, with IE9 handling just over 7,000 operations per second (based on the jsPerf test: http://jsperf.com/long-selectors-vs-data/2) vs. 25,000 in Chrome. Don't go all out I'd say, but in most scenario's even that number of operations will be acceptable.
I should maybe have indicated that the clients we're talking to usually have between $20,000 and $70,000 to spend. They employ people who're expected to be experienced.
All great tips, thanks for sharing. I didn't put a disclaimer in the post, but our experiences are indeed based on larger projects, typically at least in the $20,000+ range. Those are always tailor made apps, nothing off-the-shelf (apart from the framework and all the open source components we use, but nothing like Wordpress). What we do is often pretty specific.
I think your comment, as you said, has some great insights when it comes to smaller projects.
I've been there and I know how that sucks. In those cases I figured it was best to take my loss and get it done and over with as soon as possible (I'm sure that's what you're doing).
In my experience there's one thing you need to watch out for, and that's being a nice guy. You might start feeling sorry for your client because stuff is taking longer than planned, which makes it harder to say no to just minor changes to the scope. They will only take you 5 minutes each, and it keeps the client of your back. Those are the things that really get to you when it comes to staying motivated I think.
I completely agree. It's tiresome to repeat yourself over and over, specially when you know it's also in the clients' best interest to not work with someone who guesses (and therefore often overestimates to be on the safe side). I'm hoping our prospective clients will read this blog post first and then -still- want to contact us. They are the gems you want to work with.