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.
Last week after hearing a few comments fit for clientcopia.com from one particular client, I decided that I should start working out the 20% of my clients who bring in 80% of my revenue and focus on giving them a brilliant service, rather than having to justify why I have to charge for my services (yes, I really had to have that conversation with someone). Dropping your problem clients might make you happier but even the low yielding clients are bringing in income, and this income needs to be replaced.
I decided to ask a few internet friends their thoughts on job boards and whether the calibre of client on the boards are the type we’d all love to have. The good news is, apparently there are some lurking in there.
Out of the really helpful links that were sent to me by various people one that came up was 99designs.com. I clicked, looked at it and it immediately got my goat (not the fault of the person who sent it to me I hasten to add). A design contest, and not a small one a “thriving community of 15,689 talented designers” at that.
These 15,689 people are committing designers sin as far as I’m concerned. If a client said to you “Right, design me a logo, I want you to spend around 10 hours of your time on it, I want you to be at my beck and call day and night when I submit revisions and I want those revisions the next day….oh and I’ve got 10 other people doing the same thing BUT if I like your design, you’ll get paid a mediocre fee at the end.” - What would you say? I fear my response would be a little less than lady like and start with an “f”, however a simple “no” would suffice.
I have more experience than most when it comes to design contests. I used to share an office with a guy who used to do these as his main source of work. I’d watch him tear his hair out and bust a gut doing revisions and new logos, stay up late into the night to watch for other submissions and revision sets from clients in the USA and only to find more often than not, he wouldn’t win or if he did it was around £80. The upshot of this was he couldn’t afford his rent and he moved out - and, he was a good designer! By doing this he essentially hindered his own success, judging by his website 4 years later, he still hasn’t learnt.
When you are in the creative field your actions can directly affect another designer, you have programmed a client to think that the above is acceptable for a tiny fee, you have also introduced them to the world of spec work.
I recently lost out on a project due to the client wanting to see the entire website built before he decided whether he would pay for it, oh and he found someone who would do it for £150 - probably someone from 99designs.com. I’m not sad to have lost this client however the designer that did take him on should know better. Why is it deemed acceptable to do spec work at all? Even when we go to a restaurant and have a meal that we don’t like, we’ll complain, we’ll moan that we’ll never go back there and what dreadful service we had but 9/10 we pay for it!
The biggest question we face as designers when submitting proposals is “Ok, but what if I don’t like what you’ve done?” - your response will never be “Then don’t pay for it”. Design is a skill, a skill that many people do not have, you deserve to be recompensed for that skill the same a plumber or electrician would. If you have a design brief that can be sent out via email, send it and then go through the brief with the client over the phone. Ensure the client has filled out or discussed the design brief in full and not with one word answers, then you should have no problem and can tell the client this. A design brief will be your bible for each client and also gives you a benchmark of which to refer to when the client says “It’s too red” and they’ve written “Must be red”.
I’d like to refer to a paragraph from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) published article Design Business and Ethics - “The AIGA Standards of Professional Practise”.
“A designer shall not undertake any speculative projects, either alone or in competition with other designers, for which compensation will only be received if a design is accepted or used. This applies not only to entire projects but also to preliminary schematic proposals.”
It’s in there for a reason - stick to it!
In short, design competitions breed a bad client. This client will know he can push you around, expect work at a similar or lower price in the future, probably expect work to be free at some stage with promises of ongoing future work, or exploit your “spec” work to someone who will charge them less than you, and remember, there will always be someone who charges less than you. Educate your clients as to why you are worth the fee you are asking, set a benchmark price that you are not willing to go under, ever, and stick to it.
Oh and find the 15,689 designers on 99designs.com and tell them too… it’ll do us all a favour.
So, I’ve just freshly jumped off the plane from Malaga back to cold old blightly. I took some interesting books on holiday with me but some were far better than others. The first book I delved into was one I bought at the airport ‘Focus - The Power of Targeted Thinking‘ - I was really excited, grabbed a glass of Tinto de Verano and within 5 minutes was already bored of reading it. Nothing about it was grabbing, you’d spend more time over evaluating yourself on paper with the use of the diagrams and flow charts than actually just getting on with your work.
A classic example was “Name five times you have been productive, now evaluate what was different about these projects and times when you haven’t been productive”. I’d be there all day! In web design, you are constantly having to battle with a barrage of distractions, clients on the phone, clients on email, clients on your mobile (god forbid!), and…our incessant need for coffee/starbucks/food/twitter.
So, I got to page 57 or something ridiculously low and put the book down (I finished it after I read the 4 Hour Work Week, it didn’t get any better!) and picked up a book that I nearly didn’t take away with me, that I’ve had for ages “The Four Hour Work Week”. Tim got straight to the point and summed up nearly the whole book of “Focus” with - “say to yourself, if this task is the only task I get done today - will I be satisfied”, and “busyness is a form of laziness”.
What a totally different kettle of fish Tim was, I couldn’t put it down and found it a really inspiring way to deal with some of the above problems and distractions we all face on a day to day basis. Some of the most poignant chapters were the section about outsourcing, which could work extremely well if you found someone reliable and did want to travel the world for a while. The chapter on “Interrupting Interruption” said you should only check your emails twice per day (Midday and 4pm), the same with your phone to allow you to batch tasks together, be more productive and get your work done without interruption. I have already spoken with Leanda on Twitter who is saying it’s made a massive difference to her productivity.
As far as only working 4 hours per week, I looked into some of the sources available in the book and Tim Ferris has done extremely well from a body supplement called “brainQUICKEN”. I don’t know whether it was already a product and he has aquired the licence for it or as I think, it was made from scratch. Either way, it’s a unique product. Finding a unique product nowadays is becoming increasingly harder, especially on the likes of ebay where price is a residing factor. Dropshipping sources are also becoming less reliable with many new websites springing up charging people for “reputable” dropshipping companies that sell nothing more than “toot” you’d get at a local foreign market (not knocking those though, I got a great Olive dish in Caleta once!).
To sum up, this is a really great book to read if you feel like you need a kick up the bottom to be productive, the words “be productive, not active” have stuck with me, and how true they are, I feel like I have a fresh appraoch to my work that I didn’t previously. As Tim says, just because the world has decided that 8 hours per day is what is to be set in stone the world over as “work time” - doesn’t mean you have to adhere to it.
My book has now been eaten by my puppy, and dropped in the mediterranean sea, otherwise, I’d lend it to you…
I currently am working alone in my office, however, I’m not really alone - there’s the Twitterverse and I am constantly talking to 3 other people who are all crucial in the business. There’s Roger who is part of the YKW family (called Media Two in Australia), then there’s Kieran my trusty freelancer and Hannah my remote PA.
This has made me start to think, with the revolution of web cameras, the built in isight cameras on Macs and Skype I could easily build a true e-studio at the drop of a hat, if you are working on something do you really need/want the distraction of other people in the office? Although this can be great at times, as I’ve experienced, I’m sure most people, like me, would like the freedom and flexibility of working for yourself.
So imagine being an e-designer, coming into work in the morning, scheduling a time for a quick meeting to discuss the days work via Skype or ichat - then heading off for the day to do your job, all from the comfort of your own home and without being micromanaged. Finish up the day with a quick get together online and voila, you have an e-studio.
I might think seriously about doing this, I’m shortly going to be needing someone on a more permanent basis but why follow the run of the mill, they don’t need to be here with me, all I’m interested in is someone with great skills and can work proactively on their own without me holding their hands and the chances are they are outside the 10 mile radius of where I work, so why not?
Ok so it probably doesn’t bode well, my first blog post and I’m making a pun out of the great book title by Oscar Wilde…I hope you’ll stick with me anyway.
Last week I had an embarrassing situation crop up between me and one of my clients who hadn’t visited my work premises before, I won’t go into the whole story which involves me hiding under a desk, in jogging bottoms and my boyfriends jumper n.b. not my normal work attire, was feeling a bit poorly. The end result was me being embarrassed about working from home and embarrassed for my client learning the “truth”, that I didn’t have a huge shop front with space for three sofas and a coffee machine and tens of employees working on brand new shiny macs. The truth is, I used to have an office when my good friend and I worked together - they re-carpeted the building dark brown and made it look like a 60’s throwback office building, I didn’t like it all that much and now I work from home, a home that I have bought and work hard to keep.
All of the above made me a bit sad, I felt like moving out of the office had been a step back rather than forwards and that I’d lost respect with my clients, especially topped by two potential new clients ringing up and expressing their hatred for people who work from home.
Andy Clarke from Stuff and Nonsense decided to give me a bell out of the blue and teach me something very wise, that was that working from home is a filter for new clients and we shouldn’t be apologetic for working from home. If someone is not going to understand that you don’t sit at home watching LK Today ,playing Wii all day, and that you do actually work hard for a living, then they aren’t the type of clients you want to be attracting anyway, so let them pass by.
Today the phone rang, potential new client and then came the sentence I always dread “How about I come to your office and we can go through everything there”. Gulp. Do I suggest coffee out? Do I suggest going to him or shall I just be honest? I opted for the latter and said “Actually, I work from home - I find it to be more productive and a more easy going atmosphere for new clients to meet me, I hope that’s not a problem?”. The response back could have knocked me down, “I totally agree.” said the new client. It turned out he too was one of the ever growing army of people who work from home and actually had hoped I didn’t have an office with lots of people there as he found it too “daunting”.
This made me realise, there has been a flip side to working from home that I’ve never actually explored or thought about, all I had dwelled on was what “big” clients thought after the office move. In actual fact just being honest, doing great work and being myself was all it took to get this new guy on board. In light of this, I’ve decided to update the You Know Who website and make it much more personal, at the end of the day, it’s only me here now and I’m the one people have got to buy into not my premises.
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!
In web design, you are constantly having to battle with a barrage of distractions, clients on the phone, clients on email, clients on your mobile (god forbid!), and…our incessant need for coffee/starbucks/food/twitter.