the web designers curse

As a self-employed web designer, one of my greatest headaches is when I get a picky client who has no idea what they want in a website. It doesn't seem to matter how often I meet with them and we discuss design ideas. They invariably wait until I have cooked something up to determine what their "vision" of the site is going to be. I guess I can't really blame them. After all, they came to me to help create that vision. But it sucks when you waste time working on something that you may or may not get paid for. Granted, I could charge them on a per-hour accrual basis, but it seems like that generally scares away new web clients. Everybody wants a firm price quote. I'm the same way with just about any other service, so why should I expect my clients to be any different. I guess as web designers, part of our job is to assess what our clients are going to be like during the design process. If we suspect that they are going to be difficult to please or extremely high maintenance, we had better pad our estimates accordingly.