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Another designer trying to take over your project?
An ex-designer colleague of mine came to me the other night and asked me for some advice. He’s a freelance designer and has a set fee for a project he’s working on, but has ran into some trouble over the final design. This was his situation:
- he was two months into a big project
- the project involved one sole contact of the client
- the project involved one developer, who also does design
- all management and communication is through Basecamp
- he is almost near the end of the project and the developer (who also does design) asks “hey, mind uploading the PSD? I want to try a few things…”
There’s two clear paths to take here in my opinion:
The worst: go crazy, get paranoid
State very clearly you want to control the design, it’s yours, hands off. Do it on Basecamp and in front of the client. Make sure you well and truly make the client regret hiring you.
The best: think it through
Approach the client 1-on-1 and tell him you’d rather not adhere to the developer’s request. You think you’re close on the design concept and want to follow through with what you’ve done. Then, once you have worked something out directly with the client post a positive reply essentially saying “I’ve discussed this with the client and think it would be best for me to remain 100% in control of the design, I should have something up shortly”.
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Take control of hectic, out of control meetings
Meetings are a necessary part of life when working with web sites, especially when a freelance PHP developer. But sometimes they can get a little out of control and they take up more of your time than you wanted to give, they go off topic or just end up being the horror of your otherwise excellent workweek.
This article is a few of the steps I use to make sure meetings aren’t the hell they could be when a client comes over for a chat.
Allot a set amount of time
First off, make sure there’s a time limit. “Let’s meet at 10″ is an open-ended invitation to stay for the day, “let’s meet at 10 for an hour meeting” sets the deadline straight away and ensures it’s known from the get go.
Put together a manifesto of what to go through
Make sure there’s a reason for the meeting. What needs to be covered? What needs to be said? Ensure you go into the meeting knowing what’s going to happen instead of letting it simply roll off your tongue. As soon as you do this the meeting tends to drift off into a long conversation rather than covering the points that the client came to have taken care of.
Make notes and make them often
There’s no need to stop meetings to give direction or discuss whether a development is possible. Make sure the client knows you’re going to discuss and get back to them and they will be happy. Make a list of everything that needs taking care of and what you need to look into. Then after the meeting you can go back and place everything onto your project management software appropriately.
Involve the relevant people
Often it occurs that the wrong people at sat at the interview. Did the designer need to be there to discuss design? Did the developer need to be there to cover development responses? Prepare this before you go into the meeting and ensure you’re prepared with the right staff or contractors sat beside you.
Have you taken control of your meetings?
Let me know if you’ve got any other ways you have taken control of your meetings. Either through leaving a comment on this post or by posting an article up on your own blog or website and pointing it to this post so other users can find it easily.
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Start developing smarter and stop yourself working late
Let me start off by saying if you’re proud of being a workaholic, have no goal for a life and/or are simply “building up your business” then this article probably isn’t for you. This is (in part) how I stopped myself from working 10am to 2am every day of the week and actually went outside for a change after being in exactly the same position.
I’m the first to admit I’m a self-confessed workaholic but I’m also the first to admit that being workaholic to the point of work being the only thing in your life is a boring when you look back at it. Work is great and it sometimes leads to fantastic rewards but it shouldn’t never become the basis of your life.
The things in this article are all things that led to me becoming a significantly better programmer and lead developer. They also made me become a significantly better freelance developer whilst I was freelancing.
Nine-to-Five
Start out by actually forcing yourself to work between 9am and 5pm. Get all early morning browsing in between 8:30am and 9am and make sure you’re ready to immediately start. When you’re forced to work within a time period that “isn’t enough time” you’ll find ingenious ways of cutting time out of your day and solving regular issues so you can do more in less time.
You will be able to reflect on parts of your work life during this time that you’ve never thought about. Are you charging enough? Do you need help to get the work done? Are people taking advantage of your time?
Know when to apply the breaks
Set out when and for how long for your breaks are going to be. Your lunch needs to be at a regular time and two other 15-20 minute breaks can be scheduled either side of your lunch. This breaks things up and allows you to remove yourself from problems that can be fixed with a few minutes of simply thinking about it.
The same applies here for time that isn’t spent working. Don’t go out on a three hour break because you’re not in an office and work from home “because you can”, it just doesn’t get you anywhere.
Inbox nirvana
Cut out all of your e-mails as soon as they’re coming in. Make sure you reply to the e-mails that are asking you questions and for help within a suitable amount of time. Either set a certain time period aside for this or break it down into 10-15 minute periods throughout the day so you can spend the rest of your time focusing on the job at hand.
I find Gmail’s built in labelling feature is great for this, I can simply scan an e-mail and mark is as “quote to do” or “reply needed” and make sure those labels are completely cleared out by the end of each time slot so that everyone receives their responses.
Trim the fat, throw out what isn’t working
Simply enough you need to trim out all those activities that take minutes here and there but add up to an hour, maybe more, over the period of your work day (outside of the standard breaks) that stop you getting what you need to get done. Rescue Time is perfect for this as it allows you to see exactly what is distracting you from working properly and shows you how you can be more efficient.
Determined enough to get work done, you may even consider installing parental controls to stop yourself accessing these applications during your scheduled work hours. It sounds funny now, but if you’re a World of Warcraft addict or love your RSS Feeds, you know how much that will cut from your day.
Make some plans, don’t expect them to just happen
Arrange weekly events you would have look like a complete idiot to pull out of, plan things a few days or week(s) in advance so that it’s definite that it will happen. Make sure to get out and experience something else other than the computer once and a while.
Thought of something else?
If there’s anything else you’d like to suggest to others facing this problem or you would like to share how you’ve got over the same issue then feel free to leave a comment or post it up on your own blog with a link to this post so that others can find your suggestion.
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Students: gain valuable experience for free
Most students have come into our offices talking about what’s covered in their modules at college/university. They’ve come in, sat down and spoke reasonably passionate about what they want to do within the roles they’re applying for. Though there’s no depth knowledge when questioned, no portfolio or diversity in what they say and no opinion about how that role should be done.
Here’s a few tips as to things you can do to get this experience to enhance the theory behind your degree in the real world:
- Do your own projects, set your own goals. This is a basic one but something that a lot of students don’t do. You need to set out what you want to learn by the end of the year and break it down into deadlines for when you’re going to learn it. Follow that plan as a base before any of the other things in the post and stick to it.
- Approach local companies involved in your area of desired service. It’s something that most students are afraid to do but it’s potentially a big opportunity to learn a lot about the role you want to work within later on. Observing the way people communicate, joining in on office banter and simply becoming comfortable in an office environment lends a big help towards how easy it will be to hire you. Most importantly here: work for free. Company’s don’t want to pay, but they will throw you the odd project if you work for free to gain you extremely valuable experience. If there’s an extra desk in the corner, why the heck not let you sit there and learn?
- Search out online teams There are plenty of online teams for areas like 3D, illustration, Flash and others that are dedicated to learning as a group and growing as a talent. I find myself lucky to have found myself within a team like Pixel2life early on and it gave me an extremely good base of talents to move on forwards from after I left.
- Approach local charities/business. Focus on people that wouldn’t be able to afford the services you provide if they wanted to. (But of course would find it of benefit to have those services in the first place). You offering to give them your services for free in aid of some experience and a reference may just get you another project in your portfolio/CV come interview day.
- Read a lot of blogs. It sounds basic, but you need to get yourself an RSS feed reader and add an RSS feed from every site you can find of reasonable quality into it. Read the articles that come through and study the latest trends and issues in your field. It makes you a more valuable candidate and cements your role within the team should you get a job.
What’s most important here is for you not to sit and take your college or university course as gospel. Yes there are people who get jobs straight out of their course with little help and there are courses that obviously don’t need this post. But you only increase your chance by getting up and doing something outside of your usual routine. It doesn’t have to be a full-time 40 hour workweek for free, do it a couple nights a week. Even a few hours a week is going to improve upon what you’re doing already.
If you’re a student yourself and have any comments about how you’ve prepared yourself for the outside world upon leaving your course or if you have any more advice for the students out there, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear it.
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A quick note on the CV
Out of the past 20-30 designers I’ve received CV’s from only one has been designed well enough for me to get a good impression of the designer, and it wasn’t created in Word. It was two pages and contained links to his recent work, some thumbnails and was fully branded.
It didn’t contain: his education background as far back as when he attended Nursery, his grades breakdown and ten pages of reading material padded out with lots of stretched truth to do with what they did at their last job. Example:
McDonalds – Senior Beef technician
Lead a team of three people processing and preparing beef for use in gourmet food ate by thousands daily. Designed a unique technique of packaging that is used for top customers to this day.Translation
Was in a team of four saying nothing, doing nothing but unpacking pre-shaped burger meat and passing it down the queue. Figured that spitting just underneath the cheese in annoying customers burgers before packing them could never be found, and that tip is now passed down through remaining staff to new staff to this day.Essentially:
Stop blabbing on, don’t send 100 URL’s with no explanation but send four or five latest pieces of work with explanations for each. Realistically I don’t have ten minutes for each applicant, so if your e-mail or application contains more than a minute or two of reading then it’s not going to get read.1 Comment » -
Why learning web development at college is good for you
I constantly hear people complaining that they aren’t getting what they want out of college, that they can do it alone and that they don’t want to be taught ‘behind the times’ ASP and that their college needs to be brought into the ‘current day teaching techniques’ – so here’s why I think all that is a load of crap.
With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have
With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.
You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?
If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves – why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?
Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money
There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?
If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach
I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.
At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it – just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.
Presenting
I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why – I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.
The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.
It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another – and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.
In conclusion
Stop whinging – stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?
At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.
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Qualities of a great freelancer
The following are qualities that I consider core things I look for in freelancers I use when outsourcing work and getting things done. They are also the things that each and every freelancer working on jobs for Rolled At possess.
Personality
You may remember the guy who bored you to death on the phone, but you’ll remember the one you related to and laughed with a whole lot more. They’ll also become a pleasure to work with and you’ll use them more often. I can’t tell you how put off I am by the lack of a personality in some freelancers I talk to.
A love for the job
Clients don’t want their leg humping, but they do want someone who wants to do the job they have available. Someone who wants to see the product of their work come alive at the end of everything.
Chances are if you don’t love making websites, the ones you’ll be creating won’t be very good once your finished. The first question I ask anyone when I talk to them the first time when I’m adding a freelancer to my list is ‘do you love what you do?’ and if the answer isn’t yes with a convincing follow up statement then they don’t last passed that first question.
Patience
Can you wait for a job or are you going to be asking me every day about it? Are you going to blow off a huge list of insults at a client when they merely suggest a small change? Patience in my mind, is something that every freelancer needs in order to be a freelancer. You need to be patient in order to wait for a client getting back to you, to hear back from a job follow up and patient with your work too. If your forever complaining that something is going wrong instead of simply looking for a solution then your going to be closing doors instead of opening them.
Flexibility
Don’t work with frameworks? Someone else’s code? Pre-built scripts? Other people’s CSS/XHTML? These are all basic examples of lack of flexibility in some areas. Whilst they aren’t vital ingredients of a web development freelancer they do effect your ability to get work if you aren’t a specialist or established.
A speciality
The freelancer who specialises in one area and becomes a guru is someone that can – providing the speciality is of importance – become a cornerstone of a business. A talent in one area can be what gets you hired over someone else for a particular job, and it can be something that allows you to make more money that someone who generalises over multiple areas of knowledge. They do a better job, they have more experience and in most cases they take less time to get things done.
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My five golden rules of freelancing
I find I come across a lot of freelancers who don’t enjoy their job as much because of a variety of different things. They aren’t living by a set of golden rules as I do, so I thought I would share the rules that I live by whilst freelancing in order to benefit future and current freelancers a like experiencing problems in their day to day work.
Golden rules are simply something that you stick by, they are your code of ethics and they are how you conduct yourself in day to day business.
1. Keep it interesting
Working the same job over and over is always going to get boring eventually. That’s why I tend to diversify what areas each job is in and the specifics of those jobs. Occasionally i’ll see a job which is completely out there and send a message about it on the spot. This will either allow me to meet somebody new or just experience what it’s like to work with that area of the web.
It’s all about breaking the routine that every freelancer drops into from time to time. It shouldn’t feel like your copying and pasting what you did last week for a new site and changing the name on top – it should be that your adding something to your skill set, experiencing something new and dealing with different people on a week to week basis.
2. Don’t work with people that you don’t like
There’s nothing more aggravating than working with people you don’t like. It demoralises you, makes work a chore rather than a passion and basically makes you question why you do what you do.
Always be sure to save up your money in the background and have a backlog of pay stored away. This gives you a position where you can turn down clients you aren’t sure about and pull out of deals that are making your life hell.
The last thing you want to do as a freelancer is to break a relationship with a client by pulling out of a deal. But I feel that if it’s no longer fun or interesting to work (or even aggravating to work) with that client then you should be moving on and finding work else where.
3. Know when to escape
Knowing when to take a break and when to stop working is a key part of freelancing. Otherwise we’d all be doing 12 hour days every day and just get burnt out all the time.
Take weekends off, read a book, get some DVD’s, join the gym, walk the dog, visit the local shops to get a sandwich … all of these things you can do to escape working.
(This is all of course outside of work hours and during breaks.. not to avoid working in the first place.)
4. Treat every job as if it’s your first
Don’t get comfortable with a long term client, your standard should be as high as it was when you first worked for them. The day you decided that if you did a good job on the first project there may be more in it for you. This should be how you treat every job – as if your out to impress in a job interview and need that job to survive. That hunger to impress the client and keep them happy is how you deliver consistently and how you keep that client wanting to use you in the first place.
Think about this – are clients going to refer you to a friend if a friend needs work? Are they more likely to refer an excellent freelancer, or one that delivers average results?
Of course there is a twist to this rule – we all know our first jobs weren’t the best and where possibly even sloppy. That is something you’ll have to refrain from doing with this rule of course.
5. Communicate beautifully
Spell checks and grammar checks are vital for the less than able English speakers here. I often find clients talking about how poor ex-hires where with their English and it will always be off putting when a client wants to deal with the client with long conversations about jobs.
Another important part of this rule is to put communicating with the client as a priority. If they send you an e-mail it’s not ‘I’ll do it later’, it’s ‘OK I’ll respond now’. This is any time of your day your at the computer and this is what can set you apart from the rest. Having an instant reply or instant action towards the e-mail they’ve sent (if they want/need something doing) is always going to be something that a client likes – and it’s something that’ll win you over if your trying to impress them.
So there we have it, my golden rules of freelancing. I hope to have benefitted a few freelancers with this articles and I welcome any comments you wish to leave.
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