One part of this job (designer/ developer) is to give your professional opinion as to why something is a bad idea and present alternatives.
Take the counter as an example.
Client - "I want a counter on my site"
You - "Why"
Client - "So i can see how many people have visited"
You - " Having a counter on your site is a very crude and unprofessional method of obtaining visitor statistics. I suggest using Google analytics ... ( GA demo etc ...)".