Before:

After:

I will have to do the CSS and image slicing once more of the content is finalized, but it’s fun to already have a sense of what the sites are going to look like. It was also fun to work on such disparate sites right after each other. The feel couldn’t be more different. :)

I’ve been working on a number of creative projects recently. In addition to my amigurumi crochet blog and store, I have also started selling jewelry that I’ve been making. I started making jewelry when I was in junior high and high school, then set it aside until about 2003 when I began making a few items for myself and for friends. I recently picked up the hobby again and am greatly enjoying it.

My line, Left Bank, is carried by Coupa Cosas in Palo Alto, CA and Renegade Handmade in Chicago. It’s a fun mix of vintage and modern elements. You can see my portfolio on my blog.

10. Always Use Protection
Most everyone enters into business relationships with good intentions. Along the way, however, things can get complicated. The best protection is a comprehensive contract and adequate insurance. For a freelancer, this can be as simple as running a sample contract (check professional associations or online legal sites) past an attorney to customize it for you and adding to your existing insurance policy to cover business liability. There are a number of companies that specialize in insuring small business owners, so look around to find a competitive rate.

9. Show Me the Money
For any project that will take you more than a day, you may want to consider charging a percentage of your total estimated cost upfront as a retainer. I bristled at this idea at first, fearful that clients might balk. Think of how much time you put into front-loading a project: meetings, writing up a proposal, possible contract modifications, research about the company or new technologies. If you’ve dealt with flaky clients or project delays, you’ll realize the benefit of recouping some of these costs early on. Consider charging a flat fee or a percentage (twenty percent is a reasonable figure) as a retainer, and you’ll feel better about working towards the balance.

8. Expect the Unexpected
No matter how carefully you’ve planned a project, surprises are inevitable. I’ve been both a client and a freelancer working on projects that have been delayed, put on hold or even terminated before completion.  Make sure that your contract specifies a turnaround time for any materials, content or reviews that will be provided by your client. Consider including a clause to cover any hiatus requested by the client; for example, you might want to include the ability to draft a new proposal if the project is delayed for more than three weeks and be able to bill for the portion of the project that was completed. Lastly, be sure to allow a way out for both yourself and your client by covering project termination explicitly in your contract. You’ll want to specify how much notice you’ll want to give and receive, and how you’ll handle billing if the project ends before it has been completed.

7. Lock, Stock & Barrel
It takes a lot more than HTML and CSS to produce a working website for a client. You may be surprised how many clients will need to be lead through the process of finding an ISP, hosted e-commerce solution or even licensing images. Think about your long-term relationship with the client when determining your role in providing these services. Consider acting as a trusted source for vendors and encourage your client to contract directly with the service provider. For example, you may charge a markup for sourcing stock images, but your client will license the images themselves. This will save you the headache of license transfer later. Similarly, think about whether or not you want to deal with uptime hassles before you act as a mini-ISP. By guiding your client to a reliable service provider, you engender trust without assuming liability.

6. Play 20 Questions
Before any of the design fun can begin, you’ve got to come up with a proposal to best serve your client’s needs. In addition to learning about your client’s business, you may also have to educate the client about YOUR business—building websites. Often, this involves you asking the same questions over and over again each time you start a new client relationship. Consider putting together a list of questions to “qualify” your potential clients. Sales people do this all the time; it’s called lead qualification. This can be not only a sales technique but a way to discover what the client actually needs (as opposed to what they make think they want). You’ll be able to better assess the scope of the project which will ultimately lead to a tighter proposal and more accurate budget and timeline. Questions to consider might cover budget, technical dependencies, potential project delays, existing vendor relationships, or branding guidelines. By asking a client to do their homework, you’ll free up your time at the beginning of the project and help them to really understand their requirements before work begins.

5. Work the Phones
Working online, we often immediately go to email to communicate. Email is efficient, but impersonal. When you’re setting up a project, you’ve got to balance the needs for speed and efficiency with establishing a personal connection with your clients. Some clients want to text you from an airport; others will want to sit down with their extended team for a face-to-face meeting. A happy medium is that old standby, the phone. When you’re first trying to figure out whether or not you can provide services to a client, you’ll want to be as open to communication as possible. At the same time, since you don’t have a signed contract, you’re not going to be billing for the hours you’re putting in to preparing a proposal. Rather than driving to a meeting or exchanging emails, schedule a time to find some quiet (especially if you’re working out of your home) for a teleconference with the appropriate contacts. This may be a great time to review your 20 Questions list and establish the project scope. Make sure you communicate upfront that this is your “initial consultation” and that future meetings will be billed to your clients (including any travel expenses you may charge).

4. A Day at a Time
Whether you generally charge your clients by the hour or by the project, it can help your business to establish a day rate: the amount of money you would charge for a full day’s work. If you’re used to setting your own schedule and working part-time, you may find yourself working 12 hours one day and 2 hours the next. By coming up with a number for a day’s work, you’ll give yourself another tool to calculate project costs. Think about how long it would take you to complete a project working full-time (8 hours a day on this project only), and you can often come up with a more accurate ballpark figure than trying to shoehorn your project into “man-hours” (especially when juggling multiple clients/projects). Establishing a day rate will also help you to fight the temptation to tune your hourly rate to your client, a mistake I made early in my freelancing career. Your fee should be based on the cost of your time, not the ability of the client to pay. Every time you say yes to one client, there is the potential to say no to another. Trying to scale your rate to attract a client ends up being a losing strategy. Figure out the value of your time by looking at the marketplace and establish a consistent rate accordingly.

3. You’re the Expert
Decide what you will do and won’t do before you engage your clients. Some clients will trust you to do whatever it takes to get their project done, regardless of whether or not you’re the right person for the job. Love Flash but hate copyediting? Make it clear upfront that all content will have to be ready for publication before it’s given to you. Are you an avid blogger who’s never sold anything online? Spend some time researching hosted e-commerce solutions that are plug-and-play with your favorite blogging platform. You may find a way to extend your area of expertise, or at least define what you are and are not willing to do.

2. Be a Referee
Freelance web designers almost always have subject matter expertise in more than one area. This is precisely what makes us so valuable. But when your client is asking for something you really don’t know how to do, it can make sense to have a stable of trusted partners to whom you can refer work. The time and energy it will take you to become fluent in a new area of technology or a tangential skill is time that can be better spent working in your area of expertise. You’re very unlikely to recoup the costs, and it’s ultimately rather unfair to your client have them subsidize your education. If you see enough demand in a certain area, consider spending time outside your billable hours to gain new skills. We work in an ever-changing medium, and ongoing learning is part of the fun.

1. Just Say No
Sometimes, your gut reaction really is right. When you’re getting the runaround from a client before you have a signed contract, you can bet that you’ll be treated the same way even when there’s money at stake. You treat all of your potential clients with respect and should demand the same from them. Any freelancer is essentially a brain-for-hire and every hour is potentially billable. If you’re already having problems getting answers to questions, phone calls returned or contracts reviewed, you’d best cut your losses and move on. There’s an opportunity cost to every “yes”, so it can pay to be stingy and learn to say a strategic “no.”

I recently completed another client project using WordPress. Due to the timeline and the client’s budget, I chose to source a freeware theme rather than create something from scratch. After scouting around, I came across CorporateMag, a slick but appropriate theme from WP Junction.

I spent some time modifying the theme to work for my needs, including removing the image carousel and changing the way that posts are displayed on the main page of the site. The way that the plugins were included was a bit wonky, but I think I’ve massage the theme sufficiently to produce a nice result. Just waiting to pour in the content once the client is ready.

I’ve found that modifying existing themes can take almost as much time as designing one from scratch. Sourcing attractive, professional and original themes can be difficult, and the quality of free themes is highly variable. There can be hidden pitfalls, especially with the implementation of sidebar widgets which is broken as often as not.

Here are a few questions to ask when deciding whether to modify or build:

• Does the client have existing imagery or a strong brand? Look for templates that are color rather than image-based or consider creating your own.
• How design-oriented is the project? If design is as important as content, consider working from scratch. You may need just as much time to source one or more options than you would to present a couple of variations on a theme of your own for your client to choose from.
• Does the design have to be absolutely unique? If your client has a problem with any other site using the same template, you’re better off starting with a clean slate rather than trying to strip down an existing template.

Regardless of your client’s preferences, it’s a nice exercise to review themes by other designers. There are some amazing free themes out there for implementation or just inspiration.

During my time as an engineering manager, I made sure that we had a development, test and staging server set up as part of the QA process. Recreating these exacting conditions as an independent contractor can be challenging, but a local development server is a great place to start.

I’ve used a lot of different rigs in the past, usually involving one or more dual-boot Linux/Windows boxes. I’m now working primarily from my MacBook and enjoy the portability. Having a local server has several advantages, not the least of which is not having to ssh into another box. I also like being able to work offline; this allows me to truly work anywhere.

Now I can get that same LAMP goodness for my Mac without tedious installs of Apache, MySQL and PHP (which replaced Perl for me once blog software became the CMS of choice). Cue the MAMP!

MAMP is Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP and it is glorious. One download, one install and it works. That’s it. If you can follow an install wizard, you can be up and running with the MAMP in a matter of seconds. There’s an easy control panel that indicates server status, so you always know what’s going on without opening up a terminal. I laid WordPress over it, and was testing a client’s new blog in just a few minutes.

Aren’t Apache and PHP already installed on OS X? Here’s what the MAMP FAQ says about it:

At the moment, when using OS X, only Apache 1.3.x with PHP 4.3.2 is pre-installed. PHP has to be activated by changing the configuration files. The Apache/PHP versions provided by Apple are not always up-to-date, and the Apache-PHP combination is quite slow. In addition, MySQL has to be installed manually.

With one click, and in just a few minutes MAMP will install Apache 2, current PHP 4, current PHP 5 and MySQL. Using the included eAccelerator, PHP-scripts are executed up to ten times faster compared to Apple’s pre-installed Apache/PHP. When you use the MAMP programme, you can easily start and stop the server. Thus, the server does not have to be running in the background all the time, wasting precious resources. To “uninstall” MAMP, you only have to delete the MAMP directory and everything returns to the original state (MAMP does not alter anything on the “normal” OS X).

If your development work involves more than Dreamweaver and Photoshop, I highly recommend checking out the MAMP.

I’ve finally turned my on-again, off-again relationship with knitting and crochet into a full-fledged hobby, complete with its own online presence. :)  I spent a shocking number of hours this weekend setting up my PayPal account, Etsy shop and designing the template for the patterns that I will be selling. It was a great chance to brush up on my Adobe InDesign skills, but I’m sure glad it’s finished!

I’m really enjoying the design process. Designing for crochet feels at once sculptural, but also a little like programming. Add that to the cute/kawaii aesthetic, and I’m definitely “hooked”. :P

The 2010 campaign of Ronald “Scott” Owens for District Attorney of Placer County is kicking off next month, and the website I’ve built to support it has launched at scottowensforda.org.

I built the site in WordPress and designed a custom template. I think this will allow for easy updates, and the blog platform feels appropriately conversational for a campaign. I’m using PayPal for tickets and donations, and Flickr for the photostream.

I’ll be supporting the site on an ongoing basis and am looking forward to keeping pace with the campaign.

I’m now working with a stealth-mode start-up in the security space. I’ll be able to discuss more about my role a bit later. Right now, I’m working on getting a blog up-and-running for the founders.

I’m looking forward to travel later in the month. Happy Holiday Hiatus!