This is going to come across as a bit of a rant, but it’s a rant with purpose, it’s a rant that I feel every single person in the web design field can contribute to abolish.
Let’s get one thing straight, we might be creative, artistic, any other word that fits your persona but we are in a service industry. However we dress it up, we are a service industry. I feel like we, as designers must be doing a bad job of branding ourselves as our clients don’t seem to agree.
I’ll put my rant into context, our freezer broke down a couple of months back, we called a specialist who came round to our house, pulled out our freezer and took a look at the back and promptly told us it was unrepairable, charged us £45 call out fee and promptly went on his way 5 minutes later. This is how I expected this to work, I was calling this guy out from doing other paid jobs, to come and look at my freezer and use his skills, that I don’t have, to tell me whether I need to buy a new one or not.
I have had two incidents crop up in the past month, both have been from clients who think they can just not pay their invoice. Can I have a refund on the time I spent on your project please, then you can have a refund.
The first has just decided it’s “ok” to ask for a deposit refund because “they” don’t want the website anymore. The second, a logo design where the client said they had a “great idea” of what they wanted, that turned out when they saw it in the flesh, they didn’t like. I had banked on completing it in the allotted time but then couldn’t allocate anymore time to them due to the other clients that week, so they went elsewhere, but decided that because I didn’t complete the final design, it means I shouldn’t be paid for the time I did spend on their project.
Why is this? How has this crept into our industry and why, when it’s accepted in other service industries, is it so hard for our clients to accept our time is just as valuable? In-fact, we aren’t as bad as solicitors, who I’ve been in regular contact with about one of the above projects this week (I will post about this at a later date), who charge not only by the hour for their time, but also per email/letter read and for time spent on the telephone.
How can we hammer this point home? It’s our time, and time spent working on projects that they ask us to do, is time that we can’t spend on another project and our invoices should always reflect this. It’s that simple, but what are we doing wrong as an industry that means our clients are thinking differently?
This never ceases to amaze me. I had a project enquiry come in yesterday, the client initially asked for a ‘Web 2.0 website built in flash”… to which I had to explain that those two words don’t really belong in the same sentence. Maybe this was a warning sign however, I forwarded my website worksheet to try and gauge a little better just what exactly they were after …. sent in two seconds and no harm done.
I get the worksheet back and they do have a great idea of what they are looking for, a site identical in functionality to a well known CBBC website. They have thought about colours, brand awareness, the actual users of the website, everything. It was one of the most detailed design briefs I had seen in a long time. I skip to the part where I always ask about budget, curious as to how much they have put aside considering all other aspects of the site have been well thought through, only to see…
Ballpark around £500
My reaction is always split down the middle when I see ridiculous web budgets. I normally start off annoyed and then come round to the fact that it’s just down to the client being misguided by someone or something or having no knowledge of the web industry whatsoever. This is normally when I respond with a very diplomatic email and this one was no different, here’s an outline of what I said.
Thank you for the prompt reply with the Website Worksheet. I have had a good read through and I totally understand what you are looking to achieve.
However, the budget you have set for the site is unfortunately not enough to build a site of this calibre. I do understand it’s hard when you are not in the field to know how to gauge a budget correctly, it’s my job to try and give a little insight into budgets and why, in this particular case, you will struggle.
The xxxxxxx website you are comparing your new site to, is large. I know you will be starting off small and building up to a large website, but the infrastructure still needs to be in place to enable you to add news items and video every day and gradually build up the content.
I then went on to explain the process of web design in brief, how we start off on paper or wire framing, then turn our hand to design then eventually the development side. How we have to inevitably go back and forth on the design until sign off and then deal with stumbling blocks with cross browser compatibility and so on.
I estimated the site would take 4 weeks solid work with 2 people working on the site. I then explained the following:
£500 over 4 weeks divided by 2 people works out at £1.56 per hour – I’m not showing you those sums to be patronising at all, please don’t think that, but I’m just merely trying to point out why it would have to be increased considerably before we could look to producing the site for you.
I don’t need to go any further into details, the client can work out for themselves that £1.56 an hour is below minimum wage and that our profession is highly skilled, therefore it would take a lot more than £1.56 to even get us to our desks.
I then signed off the email with the following:
I know you said £500 as a ballpark, I’m just trying to give you an idea of what a professional web design firm would charge you to get the standard that I know you want to achieve.
Inevitably, I never hear from the clients again, or if I do, it’s for them to say they “don’t have the budget” to use me. I still feel like it’s my job to try and explain why I wouldn’t be able to help them rather than just sounding cocky or not responding at all. I feel like the only way we can stop this from happening is to break down exactly why their budget is insufficient rather than leaving them in the dark about it – for the sake of the client and the next designer they approach.
NB. I have just received a very appreciative email from the client in question thanking me for my helpful breakdown and that explaining to them in basic terms was exactly what they needed. They have been able to increase the budget to a reasonable amount, possibly still not enough however it’s a good step in the right direction.
This weekend saw one of the worst client interactions I have had. The intention of this post is not to expose who the client is or to show them up, but to highlight an industry problem that I want to campaign to change across the board. I will therefore not be saying who the agency or the client is, as this is irrelevant to the topic.
A brief history, I was hired to create a website back in October, the project bounced back and forth between me, the agency (they’re not a digital agency in the sense we all refer to it, but for arguments sake we’ll call them an agency) and the client, largely due to the fact the client withheld information for weeks on end or simply didn’t provide it at all, even re-designed their own website in publisher at one stage only to revert to a hybrid of our design and theirs at a later date. Say no more.
So fast forward to launch day, a Friday at the end of March (I had completed a further 4 e-commerce sites in the time it took to complete this one!) , the site is completed, against all odds, they had had the final invoice and they were aware of my terms and conditions;
“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred”
My clients pay 25% of the total project at the start and the remainder 75% is paid upon completion prior to launch. I have done this for the past 3 years due to an incident a couple of years before when a client locked me out of the server, changed the passwords and ran off with a brand new website. I have never had a client complain or question this clause before – possibly because it’s common sense, you wouldn’t walk out of a car showroom with a brand new car without paying for it, why is this any different? Milestone payments are not a new thing, in fact I will probably change them to smaller percentages more often to defer that risk even more but, enforcing them before site launch is less common and something I want to campaign to be the “norm” in web design.
Again, without going into too much detail, on launch day I had the agency demanding the site to be put live. I referred back to the T&C’s and explained that I had made people aware of this prior to launch day and that under no circumstances would I put the site live prior to the balance of the site getting paid, that it was nothing personal and something I do with all my clients. To this I received a very icy response from the agency and I asked that they send me an email with how they want to proceed. I go out for the evening, come back and grow suspicious that I had heard no more communication, I check the site in question only to find it live. Not only live but they had already changed the FTP passwords for the site. so that I was locked out.
N.B. We had been dev’ing on the agency server towards the end to test all the SSL encryption and the payment gateways properly, this is where some people would argue the files had already been transferred and as such, payment should have been due the minute we placed the files on the clients server, the way I was thinking – there was still a holding page up so, until the final tweaks were done and the index file uploaded, it wasn’t live or completed. In actual fact looking back now and considering what happened, I think you would be right that the minute the files were on the clients server would have been the right time to at least collect a milestone payment. Live and learn…
The agency putting the site live really got to me, a lot, however I was not about to let it slide and nor was I about to do anything in anger. I calmly thought about what my choices were and decided the only thing I could do would be to remove the MySQL database that was feeding the site. So that’s what I did, in turn I found out what the new password to the FTP was and placed the holding page back up so that it didn’t look unprofessional to any visitors and shut down for the evening..well by this time it was 3am.
The following morning, Saturday, I awake to a couple of strongly worded emails from the agency. I re-explained that these were my terms and conditions, that my contract was with the agency and that I expected my terms and conditions to be adhered to. They were aware of the circumstances but thought for whatever reason intentionally or unintentionally, they didn’t apply to them. Here is the explanation I sent to the agency to explain exactly why I use this clause in my contract:
This is how I see it, and why my T&C’s are laid out this way:
“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred.”
The reason for this is so that;
a) the developers/designers are paid for the work done on the project prior to any files being transferred because it’s too easy for clients to do what (agency) did last night and lock people out of the server once they’ve got the files then disappear, OR define their own payment terms, as they have no incentive to pay on time once they are in possession of a live site.
b) You tend to have a transition period where if the client has 2 weeks to pay or a month they think any further significant changes are included in the website price, I’ve seen it happen years back and you loose hundreds of pounds just trying to keep them happy to ensure you get your money.
This is the reason the industry turned to milestone payments, ie. where the bulk of the money or all of the money is transferred before the site goes live. This protects the designer/developer and it’s also fair, you get paid, the client gets their site.
I just don’t see what the problem is with paying for the project, and the fact there has been so much uproar about it makes me suspicious. That’s been in my terms and conditions for 3 years and this is the first time I’ve ever had a problem with it?
I can’t help but feel the time spent going behind my back and putting the site live would have been better spent doing a BACS or Paypal Transfer of the balance so it could be put live through the correct channels?
Once I am paid what I am owed, the site will be restored.
Further emails followed, and I’m sure you can guess the tone. I have never felt bad for asking clients for payment prior to the site going live, the way I see it is business has to be a two way transaction, the client is getting a brand new site, you are getting paid for the work you have done. It really does seem simple.
My reason for highlighting what happened to me is that the agency’s defense was that other web designers they had worked with did not have these types of terms and conditions, to me, other peoples terms and conditions are irrelevant and this is the way I’ve done business for 3 years without any problem whatsoever.
I would like us, as a web design community, to make something that is common sense – concrete in our workflow. I do not think any website should be put live without prior payment of some kind, and I know I’m not alone or the only one working like this. Whether you choose to do milestone payments whereby a percentage is paid upon launch (ensuring it’s a majority percentage) with say 5% balance left over as a fixing fee for any bugs or errors they might find. Or whether you take the stance that if a website is live, the client is happy with it, therefore it is signed off and the full balance is due. You might choose to take a different point of view if the site is being hosted on your own server, but on external servers it really is too easy to have a fight on your hands – and a fight that takes up yet more valuable working time and becomes ridiculously unproductive, trust me.
If you do not already take some form of payment prior to launching a site, no matter how difficult you think it might be, I urge you to re-think as I have never lost business due to it. While you are in posession of your hard work and while the client wants posession of their new website, the ball is in your court.
I strongly believe that credit terms should not apply to completed websites unless it’s exceptional circumstances and would be interested to hear your views or how you currently deal with these issues.
Note: As of Monday, I have now been paid for the site and the site is live.
Your school life, whether you had a happy or sad one there’s bound to be times you can look back on fondly. Whether it be the fact you ate all your sandwiches in morning break which left you nothing for the rest of the day, or that Friday feeling that seems to feel like no other when you are at school.
But what can we take away as adults from our school life that we’ve forgotten about? Plenty.
1. We prepared the night before. Whether it was as simple as putting our pencil case in our bag or making sure we had the books we needed for the next day. We negated that tiny element of stress that can now creep up on us as adults when we find we’ve lost our favourite pen or iPhone headphones as we are walking out the door to work.
2. We arrived to work at a clean and tidy desk each morning. I am really bad at this, and I bet I’m not the only one. At school we were forced to clear down everyday, remove everything off our desk and start a fresh the next day. I get to my home office desk in the morning to find at least a coffee cup and random pens, paper and bank cards strewn across my desk, which I envariably end up tidying up each morning, why didn’t I just do that when I finished yesterday?
3. We took regular breaks. Ding ding -end of morning session, nip outside for some fresh air and come back in again 20 minutes later (after a packet of crisps) feeling refreshed and ready to start your next lesson. Remember that feeling after morning break? As adults, especially adults that work infront of screens all day, remember to take a break, and get some “Skips” or “Wotsits” in just to be nostalgic.
4. We had a schedule we had to stick to. Double French. Possibly many peoples nightmare, my personal favourite oh oui- by the by…we had an hour and 15 minutes for double lessons, and looking back now, it’s amazing how much we got done by just focusing on one task. Section your day into smaller tasks if you’re the type of person who gets easily distracted working on one large one.
5. We took an hour for lunch. Working from home, I rarely take an hour for lunch, I tend to grab a sandwich and work straight through sitting at my desk. I need to go back to taking an hour for lunch, walking the dog and coming back in ready to start work for the afternoon, and so do you if you don’t already!
6. We read books. Remember in English Literature when you had a whole hour to read a book? Ok so it might have been “Animal Farm” and possibly not your choice of reading material nowadays, but how often can you say you took an hour out just to read? I know I don’t do it enough.
7. We were able to explore ideas without feeling stupid. Remember doing a brainstorming session at school? Envariably all sorts of weird and wacky ideas would come out, often genius ideas, because no one was afraid of looking stupid. We were young, therefore didn’t know any of the answers we now think we know and threw caution to the wind.
8. We looked forward to 3.30pm. How quickly 3.30 can now come around in the adult working world, I feel somedays I can wake up, blink and it’s that time. Whenever you get to 3.30pm remember just how much you would have done in one day had you been at school, and then take a look at what you’ve achieved that day, somedays it can be a real eye opener and a boot up the bum to get going again.
9. We never wanted to do homework at weekends – and quite right too, I always thought weekends were sacred, our time to relax from the school week however, too scared to have not done my homework I always ended up doing it on a Sunday night while my parents watched “Heartbeat”. As an adult, I now try to limit my working at the weekend, for the same reason. If you have to work at the weekend, make sure you schedule something nice to do that gets you away from the screen to balance it up a bit.
10. You hated Monday mornings. Well…..I guess some things never change.
We’re heading for a recession, there’s no question about it. Now the doom and gloom is out of the way, I’ve been thinking for the past couple of weeks that I might revise the way I do business in 2009. Hourly rates are great, don’t get me wrong, but they give us no incentive to work fast do they? Someone who has no idea what they are doing could theoretically get paid double/triple what we do yet we get penalised for being quick and efficient, that’s not right.
I think a lot of it is to do with mindset for the client. I’m going to use a really girly example here, forgive me but I hope you’ll see where I’m heading. When I book to have my nails done once a month (£25.00) I think of the service and end product I am getting – which are gel nails that last and look beautiful all month, I bet loads of you men notice females in meetings with chewed nails, chipped polish etc., which is more than worth £25 (in my opinion, anyway!). I don’t think of the beauticians time to complete that service, if I thought of it like that I might start being cynical that £20.00 per hour (£5 for materials) is a lot for an hourly rate for that service.
I think in 2009 we are going to be much better placing our services as products as much as possible, sell the end product to the client rather than telling them how many hours it’s going to take to complete and what that will cost them in your hourly rate. A more techie example, if you say to a client “Hey, I can install that CMS system, fully rebrand it, it’s going to enable you to update your website as much as you want without the need for additional charges from us for maintenance, it’s going to cost £450.00 to complete” – you’ve sold them an idea, a solution and a money saver all in one. Against saying to them, “Installation will take me 10 hours at £45.00 per hour” for example. This suddenly becomes a questionable idea, I’m sure amongst other things, they will question whether it will really take you that amount of time to complete the project, suddenly you’ve put doubt in the clients head and the project has gone, or at least been put on the backburner.
Clients are of course a great breed who want to add to their projects as they go along, so I can hear you saying as you read this “but if we fix our prices and then the client wants extras, we’re screwed”. Wrong. If you have a plumber round to fix your tap and he’s quoted you for these works, then you decide you want your shower mended, you expect to pay more. Clients should be no different and we should treat our industry no differently. I think as long as we are upfront, honest and polite, of course you can ask for more money when they are asking you to complete more work. It seems such a simple solution but one that fills many people with fear for some reason.
The other fear with fixed pricing is if something takes you longer than anticipated. I’d suggest sitting down at the proposal point and thinking of the maximum time it’s going to take you to complete the project, place a limited amount of revision sets that come part and parcel with the project and then specify a price for extra revision sets should they need them. With no hourly rates to be seen. By all means use your hourly rate as a guide for pricing though but I would refrain from writing it on the proposal itself. The following example would be for a logo design project for a client, and this is how I always lay out my proposals – you tend to find you can cater for everyones budget a little better then.
A list of what I’m going to do:
1. Corporate Identity Development
Optional Extras
2. Stationery Design
3. Extra Revision Sets
1. Corporate Identity Development. Use this paragraph to explain exactly what you are going to do and how it benefits the client, followed by how many revisions you are including in this price. PRICE
Optional Extras:
Stationery Design. Another paragraph to explain what’s included in this package price. PRICE
Extra Revision Sets. Another paragraph to explain what consitutes one of your revision sets. PRICE
Place tick boxes next to the optional extras and let the client work out how much their budget can stretch to. By doing your proposals this way you will find your pricing becomes a lot more accessible to clients. They can see the benefit of what you are proposing and can clearly see the cost involved.
Daily rates would also be a great way forward, I personally would prefer this method, however there are times when you are going to need a solution for smaller projects, and that’s where I’d suggest, for 2009, we’re all going to be much better off placing our services as products as much as possible.
Credit Crunch and Global Financial Crisis have become somewhat buzz words over the last couple of weeks, buzz words they might be but they actually reflect something very real happening around us and seemingly getting worse.
I have read a few articles online about how high street retailers are being hit badly however, online sales are up in comparison to last year. Does this mean for web designers the credit crunch is going to gently pass us by? I fear not.
From my experience with my clients over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen some interesting patterns emerge, aside from them changing banks and their cheques being written on mostly one banks chequebooks.
They are definitely taking longer to pay, without a doubt. A nightmare when trying to keep hold of cash flow on a business. There is also a hesitancy around new projects, not that they’re all holding back but it is taking them longer to get their wheels in motion. When they do decide they want to go ahead, they are looking for cost cutting measures, especially with e-commerce, and opting for a lot of Paypal driven sites with the option to upgrade to Worldpay and the like at a later date.
One client asked for their FTP details so they could get their little sisters friend to make them a website – a terrible shame after nailing their new branding last year it is now a great advert for Comic Sans. No matter what I said to this client or however much I tried to educate her, cost was the driving issue. I’m lucky in that the main bulk of my clients are very loyal and are staying put but others just starting out might find this a cause for concern.
So what do we do? We always know there’s someone who will be cheaper than us out there, that’s not a new problem but should we loose a client to someone, we can’t afford to just let that client go, they need to be replaced. Dropping your rates to ridiculously low, and filling your days with double the amount of clients than normal, not only makes you stressed for less or the same money, undoubtedly the standard of your work will drop.
How do we go about replacing clients or gaining new ones at a time when people are at their most cautious? Does being a studio with premises give you an advantage over someone who works from home? Being a freelancer at this point could give you an advantage over a studio as you have fewer overheads, but studios have the physical presence which acts as a 24/7 billboard advert to draw in new clients. Who knows, only our clients can make those decisions. In my area, traditional local newspaper advertising has rock bottomed and you can now pick up a quarter page advert for about £30 per addition – I’m guessing others must be the same, which means this could be an affordable option for some people.
How are you finding the credit crunch? Some people are reporting being busier than ever while others are finding things slowing down a little. Do you have any plans in place or are you taking each day as it comes? I’d love to hear your thoughts to try and gain a bigger picture of how the web world is feeling right now…
I’m always interested to hear other web designers work flow processes and the tools that help them along the way. I had the pleasure of meeting a few of my Twitter friends at FOWA last week and it’s sometimes inspiring to hear alternative methods or ways of approaching work that you may not have thought of before. For instance, Andy Clarke who likes to ring me up for random chats sometimes, has told me that he uses Keynote for wire framing websites. A use perhaps unthought of by the masses.
So I thought I’d run you through my work flow process and what tools I use along the way. I’d certainly be interested to hear other peoples too.
At the very start of a project when an enquiry comes in I always gather all the information I can about the new project, whether this be by email (Apple Mail App) or by telephone, I want to get the most specific information I can and jot it down. I always provide a ballpark figure on the project first, before any formal proposals are drawn up, just a simple email stating roughly how much the project, based on the brief so far, will cost and what is included in that cost (such as hosting, cms integration, the cms itself). This is something I’ve only been doing the past couple of years but ultimately can save you many wasted hours on long formal proposals just to be told at the end of it “Right, well my budget was around £200 for the whole site” – which can be quite common.
Once I’ve sussed out that the ballpark figure is ok – I then draw up a proposal template that I have saved in Adobe Indesign. This has pre-written paragraphs for every eventuality that a client could need, I simply swap the parts relevant to the client to their details and any specific needs for their project can be added onto any of the pre-written paragraphs. Although this took a good day to get right and is constantly being tweaked, it’s well worth it to save hours in the future. At the end of each section I put a total cost for that section so that they can see exactly how their budget is being spent. I also ensure I split the web design concept cost from the web development cost so that should they have not provided enough design brief, and come back to you after you’ve gone away and designed the site only to say “Well, I was thinking it would be more along the lines of insert very specific design brief here that makes you scratch your head and think, why didn’t you bloody provide me with this in the first place” - you can simply point out the website concept cost and explain that will need to be charged again. It’s much easier than having the whole thing bundled in one and then trying to backtrack and explain exactly how much of their budget is going on the initial concept designs.
Page 2 of my proposal I put my terms and conditions, Page 3 I detail very clearly exactly what I need to get started on their project, I always take a deposit of 25% of the total cost + any software costs such as Expression Engine, outright – that way, I’m never likely to be out of pocket should they jet off into the sunset.
I then bundle all this up as a nice PDF document and pop it over to the client. They always look awesome when they go out and give you and the client a great reference point for the future.
As far as design and development goes, I’m probably about to get my knuckles wrapped for what I’m about to say, I’m a big fan of Adobe Creative Suite. When I start wire framing a website, which I’ve only started doing recently – and to be honest, I’m not sure whether it actually helps the client or me more – that’s perhaps another topic. I use Fireworks. Once this has been approved I move onto Photoshop and use a hybrid process of straight to xhtml/css or pure jpg flat concepts (nb. Andy Clarke has written a great article on presenting static visuals to clients) depending on the site/client.
For web development I use Dreamweaver – but, for nothing more than a text editor really, it’s what I’ve used since 1998 to build websites, although granted back then, I let the tables do all the work and it more than likely outputted very messy code, but hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere – it’s just what I’m used to. I’ve tried Coda, I just can’t get up to speed with it, I’ve tried Coda with Transmit and found that even more cumbersome so always end up back in Dreamweaver.
Other bits and bobs I couldn’t do without are Adium, for instant messaging, Twitterific, Things and good ol’Skype. I use iCal to keep track of meetings and events, personal and work, and MobileMe to sync some work up with the studio. I also use Skitch, Typeset and an app I couldn’t do without that comes with every mac, Digital Color Meter. For printed brochures/materials I use indesign and Illustrator.
I’m still looking for a better mac address book. For some reason I’m not a fan at all of the present one.
If anyone else has some great apps you think I’m missing or if you want to know more about my work process, I’d love to hear from you.
After the hustle and bustle of launching Olive 10 days ago I thought it was about time I wrote about the launch and the trials and tribulations of web app development and testing. This whole post is me thinking out loud, so to speak, it’s not intended as a step by step guide of how to set-up a web application. I will post about this at a later date.
My active Olive account for You Know Who
Olive has had a large amount of interest, undoubtedly the most sign ups being on day 1 of launch as expected. Since then it’s slowed down, as expected, but still gaining sign ups daily which is great.
A large proportion of sign ups are on the Free account, and of those signs ups I am not able to see any personal information (of course) but I can see how many clients (out of the 2 given on the free account) they have used. Lots of people seem to have signed up but then not added a single client, without adding a client they can’t even see what Olive is, or how it works. This is quite baffling, are they just being nosy and seeing what it looks like or just registering their domain “just in case”… who knows?
I have made some mistakes whilst developing Olive, I quite expected to do so and it’s a learning curve as always. I made the mistake of not beta testing someone from outside the UK so when we launched a problem that was specific to our American friends cropped up (has been resolved now). I should have also tested the app live with my own clients prior to launch, this hasn’t been too much of a problem though and has seen some exciting additions that make the process 100% automated in terms of communication between you and the client.
The hardest thing I’ve come across is marketing it, it’s so different to anything out there at the moment. It can also be used in multiple ways, web designers, graphic designers, remote pa’s etc. Google adwords has been a nightmare as there’s nothing that performs particularly well that is targeted to specific users, to drive enough traffic to the site.
I’ve taken an ad spot on Just Creative Design which is driving some traffic to the site and also the CSS Galleries are also doing their bit to send traffic my way but as a whole, how do you describe Olive? It’s not the sort of app people search for, but if they see adverts for it, they are likely to click through and take a look when directed specifically at web designers, I know I would. Time for some serious thinking.
I’ve been really interested to see how my own clients have adapted to using Olive, I can honestly say they love it. They really enjoy the feeling of managing projects themselves as well as not having to email for status updates, my inbox has been clearer and it’s all been working as it should. I’ll be doing a large blog post on the Olive blog early next week to show exactly how I’ve got clients on board and how it’s starting to increase take-up on monthly maintenance contracts. There will be a step by step of how you can do the same to increase your monthly revenue through maintenance and support contracts.
The thing that is still niggling me, I’m not 100% sure people understand what Olive is, looking down the stats of sign ups and the proportion showing 0/2 clients added, it seems clear that either people are getting stuck or have just come in for a nose around, either way, I’ll be looking into different ways to market Olive so that it’s 100% clear what it is from the moment you hit the homepage. On the other hand, by the amount of people who have signed up to larger accounts and are using it on a day to day basis must understand and “get it”…
Olive is still so young, there’s loads that can be changed and improved upon with the first major update scheduled today, I’d love to know how you are using Olive if you have an account, feel free to send me an email, sarah at youknowwhodesign.com.
Thank you all so much for your interest in Olive, it’s great to have you here. Olive is currently in private beta and there’s lots of things that need adjusting before public release, however for those who are interested, here’s a little sneak preview video, a very quick run down of the basics of Olive.
The video doesn’t go into the credit system that much as Paypal is still in sandbox mode for testing however, you should get a good idea of how you can use Olive with the day to day running of your business.
About 6 months ago I found myself hunting for an app that did just what Olive is going to, I couldn’t find one so I set about developing it.
Olive is a web app that allows designers to bolt on additional maintenance services quickly and easily, thus quickly increasing your monthly income with your clients. I’m very excited about Olive, it’s an easy, intuitive solution that fills a void. The chances are you possibly already offer your clients web design maintenance contracts, if you don’t, Olive is the perfect excuse to start.
If you do already have maintenance clients you will be familiar with the amount of emails you get in relation to a single update, they’ll first send you an email to say they need an update, you’ll then send an email back asking for the files before you can quote, they will send you an email with the files, you’ll send an email back with the quote for the amount of time it will take you, they will send you an email accepting and saying go ahead, then give it a day or so, and they’ll be emailing you to ask when they should expect their update completed. That’s a lot of inbox clogging for just one client!
‘Olive’ gives your client a “one click” access to your services with a custom branded app that suits your business branding. Your client will log in, type their update, attach associated files which get sent to you – you will receive a notification in your dashboard with the files and what the update is, you will then assign how many credits the update will need. Credits? I hear you say….what are these credits you speak of?
Olive works on a unique pay as you go system, you set how much a credit is worth to you ie. 1 credit = £10.00 ($ or €). Your clients can pre-pay blocks of credits to use with the services you provide, you can also set a client as “unlimited” and set your monthly charge for unlimited access accordingly. This captures both types of common client, the one who does not want to be on a rolling monthly contract for small frequent updates, and those who do. You may choose not to use the unlimited feature at all and simply use it as a “pay as you go” system. For example, the pay as you go clients may need you to fix something they have broken using their CMS system (we’ve all been there!) or create a new graphic for a promotion they are running, perfect – introduce them to the ‘pay as you go system’ and keep all their requests in one place. You can also use the credit system for client support, lost password requests or changing name servers for example, set the amount of credits that suit you.
The beauty of Olive is the simple interface client side, this gives them all the information they need about their updates at a click. Lights next to their updates mean different things, red means it’s been sent to you, the designer, and is pending credit allocation, yellow means it’s being worked on and green, completed. No more emails back and forth, they can log-in 24/7 and see the status of any given project at any time.
As an Olive user, you will have your own unique sub domain name, set by you at sign-up, to point your clients to, you can also upload your own logo and customise the overall look of the app to suit your business. I’ve realised how important this is as a designer myself. Your dashboard shows you all incoming updates and the status of those updates in one easy to view screen, you can also message the client and receive client messages on each update request. You can also add additional users for use with other designers in your office or freelancers should you wish.
Olive can literally be what you want it to be, a credit can be £40 for one designer and £1 for another – use it for web design maintenance or client support, it can be used for any service you want to provide to your clients. Your clients will love the informative interface, simplicity of updating and the feeling of having you at their fingertips. You will love the ease of having everything in one place, a clearer inbox and getting paid right away for the updates in your dashboard. Create your own custom packages and advertise them to your clients, for example; new image creation 5 credits, name server change 2 credits. Advertise in your next newsletter or send an email out to all your clients, manually add a few credits to their account as a promotion to get the ball rolling, I guarantee from my personal experience, they will love it!
To summise, Olive is a great way to increase your monthly income, using the skills you already have to sign up clients who feel a monthly maintenance package may be too expensive for them or not the right solution, for the few updates they need per month, but a quite a few clients with a few updates per month equates to many pounds in your pocket!
Olive will be available to beta testers shortly and general release in the next month.
Thank you for reading, I really appreciate the interest you’ve shown.
The Olive website is currently under construction aka. fiddling.
If you do already have maintenance clients you will be familiar with the amount of emails you get in relation to a single update, they’ll first send you an email to say they need an update, you’ll then send an email back asking for the files before you can quote, they will send you an email with the files, you’ll send an email back with the quote for the amount of time it will take you, they will send you an email accepting and saying go ahead, then give it a day or so, and they’ll be emailing you to ask when they should expect their update completed. That’s a lot of inbox clogging for just one client!