One of the biggest learning curves I’ve encountered with my services-based business is how to get paid for a reasonable about of work performed. It’s very easy to go in polar opposite ends of the spectrum: charge for every little thing, including e-mails and brainstorming; and charging for 1/4 of the actual time spent on a project. Neither way will work for long and will have disastrous results for the business.
Pro-Service, not Pro-Bono
You know you’re in for a reverse sales pitch when a client says they “don’t expect you to work for free” and follows that by the word, “but.” There are plenty of people around who want and expect freelancers (especially designers) to trade their work for less than their services are worth, or even for free. Here are things to look out for and what is not acceptable to agree to:
- Free labor expectations from non-profits or churches. Nothing in the Bible says it’s right to pressure a professional to work for free. That is their discretion if they want to offer their services as an offering.
- Free or discounted labor because the client is an “A-lister.” You may or may not get additional work just because you did work for a major corporation or Joe Blow Blogger with 1M pageviews per day. Feel free to offer rebates or commission if additional work does come through, but don’t get pressured into it.
- Free or discounted labor in return for referrals based on the success of the work you did for them. Once you hand the work over, everything is out of your control. Even if you have control, that’s a miserable deal because you are slave to them to ensure your paycheck and no longer working for yourself.
Tips for a Real Win-Win
I’m still learning the ins and outs, but in the last 6 months, there have been plenty of opportunities to learn lessons and improve the way things flow. Here is a small list of what has worked for me:
- Set a project price rather than hourly rates if you can. Account for the time you may spend in a 70/30 worst-case scenario. Make it more than an easy project with no problems, but less than a disaster. If you are going to succeed in the business, you’ll end up ahead 90% of the time and send you packing to get a job soon enough to not fool yourself longer than necessary.
- Set a clear cut-off point for work included in the project price or other included services. For example, my projects end after two revisions after the first draft. If there are still client issues after that, then communication is an issue and it is creating unnecessary work, which will be paid for on their dime at my hourly rate.
- It’s okay to offer a discount for publicity for your work for them, but don’t work for free, under ANY circumstances.
- If your initial call/correspondence with them annoys, bothers, or offends you, turn down the work. With very rare exceptions, this is the best indicator you have of how the work will go. I’ve returned one person’s full payment because of this coming true and brought out one potential client’s true colors with a reasonable proposal counter-offer to cement my intuition about them.
Remember, if you’re not happy running your business, you are handicapping your success. You deserve to work under the best possible conditions, so make it so.
Posted in Design on Jul 26, 2009
Tonight I decided to check my professional sites in the “other” browsers; those being IE6/7/8. I was pretty sure Chrome was okay, but I checked it anyway. I was aghast when I saw nearly every version of them going wonkers with a web-based browser compatibility site. Not believing their stuff, I came upstairs to my PC and checked IE8 and Chrome. Sure enough! I had a crappy site. The image was on the wrong side of the text, the text was white on white, and the footer was pushed over. What the heck!?
I was fearing the worst: I totally screwed up the theme styles compatibility-wise, so I checked the theme’s demo site to be sure it displays correctly out-of-the-box. Yup, it did. So, I took the home page PHP into my fancy new (and FREE!) editor called PSPad for Windows to view it with some syntax coloring.
I started to count the number of opening <DIV> tags with the number of closing </DIV> tags in that relatively small file. It didn’t take long — 6 for 6. Since that was the easy fix shot down, I went to the stylesheet to look at my CSS. Was the image ambiguous as to its float command? Was the text also ambiguous? Nope. Had I mixed up the order of the PHP from the original? Nope. Everything was in order on the surface.
Then… WHAM! It hit me square in the eyes, like this image.
There must have been some point where I was in the file and hit Delete when I thought the cursor was somewhere else, because there is no other reason for that closing > to have been missing. I put it back in and almost yelled when everything snapped into place like it was supposed to in EVERY browser. Of course, I have such a passionate hatred for IE6, I don’t care what it looks like there. Things lining up in IE6 is just a bonus.
Now I am fully-equipped to sell my services with a completely modified home site AND portfolio site. Both were modified heavily from the same theme designer, Jason Schuller, at Press75. The main site was from Cafe Press and the portfolio site was from Photo Graphic.
If you are interested in a professional modification of a WordPress theme, please contact me here: WordPress Customization.
Posted in Design on May 07, 2009
I wanted to share my revisions of my own Twitter background at http://twitter.com/jpetersen so I’ve uploaded a gallery of my revisions.
Sorry for so many posts in a row about American Idol. It’s time to write something for once, but I’ve been working all day every day doing my design work for clients. Thankfully, I’ve got work that I can see all the way through April as far as projects go. I won’t be working all day every day between now and then, but work is still trickling in consistently enough that this venture looks like it’s going to work.
About a month ago, I finished a site using Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Pro theme for Inter-Disciplinary in the U.K. for Dr. Rob Fisher. The site has over 1,600 pages (that’s not a typo) and needed some server intervention to allow the WordPress pages.php to load without a white screen of death in the dashboard. Wild! We ended up using a javascript menu tree in the left sidebar, but it does tend to crap out in Internet Explorer, which he was okay with since no one should be using that stuff anyway.
Last weekend was an exciting time as I launched Phil Gerbyshak’s new site using Thesis by Chris Pearson as the framework. It was my first time using Thesis and it was like re-learning theme design all over again, but now I LOVE using it. That project stretched my CSS knowledge to the max and I often spent 4-6 hours figuring out how to implement the design in my head, but I came out on top with ridiculous skills that I can use on other sites now.
On Tuesday, after months of office and personal frustration with my church’s website theme that I installed last February, I decided it was time to pull the plug on that theme and do a quantum leap to the latest and greatest one company has to offer with Church Life and get the Oakwood Community Church site going with something kickin’, modern, and functional. They’ve started with Facebook and using video communication, so this was the perfect time to get something to allow that to happen with minimal training and (hopefully) little or no assistance from me to make them look like web pros.
After more than a month in development for content and graphics, I wrapped up FT Press’s newest division and launched FT Press Science today. I used WP Remix for this theme, which looks really good, but I do not recommend it for people who do not have patience or pretty advanced CSS skills due to the vast number of CSS and PHP template files (in the neighborhood of 100 files) that tend to override each other from time to time.
That’s what I’ve been up to, and I have about 5 sites on the calendar for the next couple of weeks, so I think that my portfolio will begin to round out nicely with a good variation of clients, themes, and content to show my design and customer service skills. Here’s to the future!
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