Category: Business
Business tips, ideas and techniques for a professional and efficient workflow as well as round-ups, tutorials and articles that will help you improve your personal daily routine in the web design world.
Popular tags in this category: Freelance, Tutorials, Tools, CMS.
As an entrepreneur who has been on the client’s side of the design and development process, I’d like to discuss the thought process of the client, as well as some effective ways to interact with them. For example, why do they ask for Shakira music on the home page? And how do you respond to that?
I was recently referred to Sam Barnes’ piece on Smashing Magazine “How to Explain to Clients That They Are Wrong.” The article was well written and made a lot of sense to me, but there are two sides to every story, and I’d like to add value to the argument by responding from the client’s point of view.
For the most part, Sam did a great job of discussing how to evaluate and act on poor decisions made by clients. What he missed, however, was the impact that the nature of the relationship between clients and creatives has on how decisions are made by both sides. By “creatives,” I mean anyone involved in the design or development of a website or application. Understanding this relationship will enable you, and your clients, to make better decisions about the product.
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In the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web presence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce new coffees, events and so on. However, during the course of the first meeting, the client mentions that they don’t have a budget.
Being the inquisitive businessperson that you are, you say, “Well, we work with budgets of almost any size. What price range were you thinking of?” The owner of the coffee shop reveals that he has only $1500 to spend on the website. Thinking it would be a waste of time, you walk away.
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If you like the idea of being your own boss (I certainly do), chances are you get the itch sometimes to create your own product — a product whose direction you control, that you do not have to compromise on with someone else, and whose fruits you get to fully enjoy, instead of being paid by the hour or a flat rate. It could be a Web service, a WordPress plugin or a desktop application, but the core problem is the same: how do you pick an idea that will succeed?
Most of us take a very simple approach: we stumble on something that doesn’t work well for us or we identify a problem that we have a lot of experience with, and we think, “All right, I’ll just build x for y and make a mint.” The problem is that we don’t have any indicators of whether others feel the same pain and would be inclined to pay for a solution.
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There comes a point in the career of many Web designers where the logical progression in that career is to take on a leadership position. A logical step or not, when a designer "assumes" this type of a position, there is often another "assumption" happening at the same — that wizard-like proficiency with HTML and CSS, coupled with a number of years in the industry, equips someone to take on a leadership role. This is, of course, not always the case.
Over the past few years, I have gone through this transition myself, moving from a Web designer to a Creative Director to my current role as the Director of Web Development. During this transition, I turned to the blogs and other resources that I had found helpful in my career to that point, looking for tips and lessons that would help me in my new role. I quickly realized was that while there are countless articles to help you become that aforementioned HTML and CSS wizard, there are precious few that deal with the move from designer to director.
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Have you ever had someone flirt with you and they did nothing but demean themselves the whole time? Did that make you attracted to them? Doubtful. Yet, this is how so many individuals seem to handle their business today. With the advent of social media, the Web has been overflooded with individuals claiming that they are experts at everything. It has become so rampant that whenever I come to see someone label themselves as an expert I immediately believe they are trying to pull a fast one on me.
Unfortunately, many times these people get business because there are people out there who really do believe that they are experts. How many great designers do you know out there who struggle to find clients, while the world's worst Microsoft Frontpage jockey can't keep client offers out of his inbox? I know some of you reading this are dying to get more clients or more users to the app you created. Obviously, to get more people you need to let more people know about you and that doesn't happen unless you say something.
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Users will always need support. You could have a bulletproof product and the most excellent tutorials and documentation, and someone will find a way to break it or just not read the information staring them in the face. Later in this article, I’ll explain some ways to minimize support requests and the time spent in dealing with them. But you should expect to offer support and build it into the price of your product.
Your support systems should also help you track the amount of time being taken up by support, so that you can plan for future requirements. If you are a small company whose product developers are supporting the product at present, knowing the amount of time each license or user requires for support on average will enable you to project when you might need to hire additional support staff.
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Making an eBook is easy, regardless of your coding experience. This is good, because 99.9% of your time should be spent on writing and getting your book out there, rather than on technology. Any electronic book can be called an eBook, but because over 90% of all eBooks are read on Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod) and the Barnes & Noble Nook, I’ll focus on the formats for those platforms: EPUB, Kindle and PDF.
The current version of EPUB is based on XHTML 1.1, which was officially proposed in 1999. That was the year when Internet Explorer 5.0 was released and grabbed over 50% of browser market share from Netscape Navigator. This is great because XHML is an open standard that many developers know; unfortunately, it’s very old.
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Pricing your own product is always a tricky proposition, and the more critical the price is to your product’s success, the more difficult it is to set. It’s easy to look at another product and say how much you would be willing to pay for it, but how can you know how much people would be willing to pay for yours?
There are no absolute truths or perfect formulas for finding the best price, assuming that the “best price” even exists. Instead, take a structured approach to finding a good starting point, and improve it through feedback and testing. But first, you need to understand what the best price actually is.
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We spend a lot of time learning and thinking about the designs we see online, yet what we miss quite often are practical insights into the design process and workflow of our colleagues. This is why conferences are great for our industry. We meet people who think very much like we do and most probably struggle with similar problems; and perhaps they've found a solution which can inspire others.
We learn how our colleagues work and what they have experienced; we can exchange our thoughts and ideas directly — something that we might struggle finding time for on Twitter or via email. Networking is great, and it's powerful. And this is why every now and again we present an overview of upcoming conferences on Smashing Magazine.
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