Tag: clients

Here’s a funny story

A while ago I was hired to do an eCommerce site for the owner of a stationary shop in Carrol Gardens,Brooklyn. We met up, she showed me some mockups she gotten from some design students at FIT and then I went to work. Unfortunately, at the exact same time we began the online shop project the owner was also opening the brick & mortar and it was also right before the holiday shopping season and, oh well she didn’t have any time at all to give me input or feedback on they way my design was shaping up. So I ended up working entirely on my own. And also (this is a big one) she never sent me any photos or gave me any page content.
Yeah, that happened.

Anyway she did not like the site I showed her (too boxy she said) oh, well it was based on the boxy mockup, after all. I whipped up another template design out of the goodness of my dumb heart. Yeah, I care if they like my work. She didn’t like it. I ended up selling that template design for $750.00, thank you very much.

I went on working, making 4 more differently designed templates and (in the end the client received at least 7 unique design deliveries) she didn’t like any of them. Later I was told that industry standard is to deliver 2 designs, tops. Well!

Eventually my other projects with people who were actually invested,motivated and serious took precedence over this project which had devolved to the point where I practically begged her to hire this other design company and let me off the hook. She said nope, she’d paid me and I was indentured to her for life ( just kidding). Quite a lot of time went by – communication came to a standstill. She had a baby. That should tell you just how long this thing was taking!

At the beginning of the next year I wrote to her and asked her to either let me go or approve one last final design. This time she sent me links to other sites she liked (all very boxy) and I delivered using those sites as inspiration. We always had that sticking point though of her not giving me any professionally shot photos to use on the home page. What is up with people who won’t pay for a professional photographer??? The ones I got were grainy, blurry,totally low res.I didn’t want to use them. I know the quality of the photos can make or break a site.No matter how great the design is the site is going to look awful if these horrible photos are front and center. So, everything was done just the home page needed some serious photos.

More communication standstill. Finally she wrote me to tell me she was going with some other folks. I let out a whoop – I was free!

I recently went to take a peek at what these geniuses, these paragons of web design had come up with and lets just say I was not impressed. They’d actually used that woodgrain background image tile that everyone was using in 200 9 – a big design trend back then. But now it looks dated. Plus what does a stationary shop have to do with woodgrain? Because there are wood floors in the brick & mortar? Do me a favor!

So here’s the funny bit. About a week ago, my awesome colleague and often my project manager called me to let me know that the owner of this site had contacted the owner of another site I’d built and wanted to know who their designer was! We had a good chuckle over that.

I Charge For My Time,Design Work & Support (Not For WordPress)

Long before I understood GPL & before WordPress decided to yank over 200 non GPL-compatible themes from its Theme Viewer, I struggled with the seeming hypocrisy of charging $ for a theme when what you were really selling was WordPress, itself. Lets get real. Nothing I design to be used with WordPress could be more than static html pages without WordPress. Without WordPress I would have to write my own CMS and database queries and PHP code which I don’t know how to do. Without WordPress it might take me up to 6 months to make a dynamic website. Even then I would have to practically live at PHP Classes and SourceForge. It would be slow and painful. Why? Because I am not a programmer. I am a designer. And I know very well how the 2 things are not the same thing. Lets just say I have been down that road and the results as well as the experience were not that nice.

If YOU SELL YOUR THEMES AREN’T YOU ALSO SELLING WORDPRESS?
If I wanted to I could act as if I was the one making the client’s website so awesome. I never did act this way. I steered clear of any ethical monkey business, I felt, by making it very clear to my clients they were paying me for design and the limitless, call me on my personal cell phone Sunday night at 12 midnight kind of support I provide not for the CMS powering their websites.

CASE STUDY
A woman contacted me asking for a custom theme for her already set up WordPress powered site/blog. She had been given a comprehensive list of instructions and actions to follow on how to get a WP site up and running and she had followed them successfully. What she was stuck on was how to get a better theme. She’d seen the free themes available and she know she could install them directly to her server just by downloading them from the built in theme viewer and clicking activate. What she didn’t have was a theme designed just for her using her logo, her font-choices & colors and her desire to have a fully fluid width website. And when it came to knowing about plugins, well lets just say her list had not included anything about plugins.

When she paid me she paid me for what I know about WordPress and my design made expressly for her website.
The end results made her very happy. She not only got a website that doesn’t look like “just another WordPress blog” she got a website that doesn’t look that much like other websites. And if I have learned anything doing this job people want a unique looking website. Because she had already installed WordPress she know she was not paying me for WordPress! She knew what was available on the WordPress Theme Viewer and she knew that what she ended up with was not available on the WordPress Theme Viewer!

BUT THIS IS A BUSINESS! IF I CAN’T SELL THEMES WHAT CAN I SELL?
Well, actually I could sell my themes. I could pack them into a zip file and sell them using PayPal. There is nothing stopping me from doing this. Because not a single theme of mine is in the WordPress Theme Viewer and my business does not depend on luring people to my other “Premium” (Paid) themes using a free theme as bait.

WHAT I GET PAID TO DO
When I get a new customer we work together on developing the feel of the design which I then create.I train them how to use the site. I also perform upgrades and updates and maintenance. If they have the willingness to learn how to use WordPress I don’t have to do updates for them at all. Depending on how complicated the theme is to use (I strive to keep it simple) most times everything just depends on using the right category to publish posts.

WHAT THEY GET FOR THE $$$$

  • A Unique Design
  • Support
  • Maintenance
  • A unique design speaks for itself.
  • Support can mean anything from design refreshing to SEO to fixing a page for them when they don’t close a list tag.
  • Maintenance can mean anything from setting up a cron job to stop their Apple Mail.app from flooding the Process Manager with never ending IMAP processes thereby taking down their website every hour on the hour (true story) to transferring their database and files to a new host.
  • I code by hand, no templates pre packaged and re sold here. Consequently nothing I code was churned out by Dream Weaver.

CAVEATS
I hate working on IIS.
I hate TABLES FOR LAYOUT
I will NAG you to Update your Website!

Design Fail

I might be many things but I am not a mind reader. But for the last week I have been attempting to do just that for one person who contacted me through my website about help with their online shop. At first I thought it was going to be a matter of offering a little advice via email. When their next email suggested the prospect of a redesign, a mock up was requested which I designed and installed on my demo site and sent a link. The demo was actually a test drive of a fully functioning website wearing the mocked up theme. It makes sense to me that a person will better be able to tell me what’s right or what’s wrong with it this way. Unfortunately in this case it did not happen. The email I got in reply mentioned nothing specific about my design and said nothing about what they preferred instead. Further exchanges were consistently unenlightening. Beyond 3 links to other cookie cutter fashion blogs and a color scheme limited to 4 colors they never let me in on the secret. Eventually I got the message that what they wanted was exactly what they already had. And the project went fizzle.

Although unpaid this week long endeavor was not unproductive for me. Not only did it get me started on a WordPress theme specifically for use in conjunction with the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin and a new banner for my own site it also got me thinking on how I might best avoid getting into another situation like this one. I’ve also got to post a price list that might encourage the people who like getting things for free to resist contacting me better weed out the time wasters.

How do you get paid?

I have difficulty pricing my work. If you have worked out a price for what you charge and for what kind of web design work-I’d love to hear it.

I really love this work and I would and have done it for free. But money coming in is a good thing and keeps my cell phone on so I actually have to charge.

I kind of freeze up when people ask me what my rates are. I don’t want to say a price that might be too high but I don’t want to quote too low and end up doing a ton of work for free because I said it would be that much and I have to stick with that price.

I work around it by asking what they were thinking of spending. This is not a good method but I am not established enoguh to say thiat is my price take it or leave it.Which is what the more hardcore web designers seem to say over and over.They have other customers lined up around the block and can afford to turn people away. Or they just enjoy being arrogant. I do not.