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36 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+31This is the usual drivel, nothing new. Plus a very simple example.
Its so blatently obvious, that most of these "Articles" are designed for mostly getting business for the writer/blogger/designer, so the Author never mentions the dirty little secrets of how to actually survive in an unqualified competitive market and the cut throat world of global design business. Probably because these "Articles" are really meant to attract prospects than actually relay much of the real deal. Thats why the Author never has the much of the real goods.
For example:
Talk to each prospect for an hour?
Yeah, if you want to be eating on the street in a couple of months.
- Never talk to a prospect on the phone longer than 5 minutes unless you already know the basic purpose of the site, whos involved and how much they have to spend and over what period of time. Find out their annual profit margins if possible. You can usually ask for these. Use an egg timer if you half to when talking to people on the phone. For every second that 98%-er wastes your time, you could be hunting down the 2%er who will pay you what you are worth. Don't let these people waste your time. Most of the inquiries freelance web designers/developers recieve go nowhere and have zero or little money behind them. Have a solid copy and paste email reply system to filter out people who will help you go out of business.
Heres the goods that will help you survive and feed yourself (not exactly in priority):
- If you are Freelance in anything, you are a collection agency first, a design firm second. Never forget that.
- Require half down before beginning any fundamental work.
- Keep all files and do NOT deliver source until final payment is made.
- Copy and paste is your friend. Very rarely should you spend to much time replying to prospects through long, hand typed emails or on the phone. Most prospects will waste your time and pick your brain. This kills your production. Send out pre-made email replies for the general type of responses you get and speckle the pre-made male with the prospect's personal or corporate name throughout to get emails off fast, but they still will feel personalized to the recipient.
- Make sure 40-50% of your time is marketing and searching for quality projects. You will work less and find more successful and fullfilling projects.
- If you are freelance, don't waste your time replying to job postings by recruiters or headhunter. These relationsships go nowhere except the angency might try to steal a client or two.
- Don't give quotes or estimates unless the client provides you with adequate specs to do so.
- Don't create specifications for clients who are unwilling to pay for them. Spend that time finding and creating relationships with people who will pay you.
- Avoid replying to job postings promoting "exposure" or "equity" in the company. If a company can offer you equity thats worth anything, they can offer you capital up front.
- Don't be afraid to simply drop and walk away from a project if the client refuses to pay or demands more than you originally outlined.
- Study the psychologic of marketing and American consumer psychology and use it yourself, it DOES work.
- Ask for client testimonials even if you write them yourself and have the client endorse it.
more when I have time... - bzkt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17I must say this were really basic. If you haven't though of this earlier, you probably shouldn't be in web design.
This is alot better: http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web_design_process.cfm - br0ther, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16I like using a large whiteboard when designing the GUI and the database for my projects. pen and paper is a second best for the task.
- chris4buffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Wow that's amazing...
1. Ask client what they want
2. Draw it
3. Make it
Who would have thought of that?! Hardly detailed and not 'fully functional'. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Now show us a web application "work-flow".
1. Meet with client.
2. Find that client is completely disorganized and wants an application to magically make them more organized.
3. Dispel unrealistic pricing expectations.
4. Design a nonworking mock-up/framework.
5. Watch client stare at the mock-up and pretend to know what is going on.
6. Meet clients incompetent IT department who thinks that Active Directory and IIS are magic and Linux is the devil's work.
7. Present functional mock-up tied to data.
8. Stare in disbelief as client asks for modifications that were never discussed and are completely contrary to the overall goals of the application.
9. Hold the clients hand as you guide them toward the light.
10. Sweat blood to meet the arbitrary application deadline.
11. Watch as client's Microsoft Office addicted employees sabotage your application that is rapidly revealing that they are no longer needed.
12. Collect fee and cackle like a madman. - skrapek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I like how the sketches show where "gradients" are going to be with arrows and everything. That's a pretty important step.
And it's completely ridiculous. - Mongoose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Ending seemed kinda abrupt, but it's a worthwhile article nonetheless. Good little overview of one of the many variations of the design process.
- webgeek2point0, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I (almost) always use pen and paper for the basic design. It's a quick way to get an overall visual feel for what you want the layout to look like. I don't go into quite as much detail as the tutorial though.
- 3zero3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Isn't this stuff terribly obvious and high-level? I don't get why this is so dugg.
- xamox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Wow so that's how you design something. You make a draft first? I would've never guessed.
- yongfookathome, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Sorry, but pingmag's "The Website Development Process" which was dugg into the thousands in 2005, TOTALLY pwns this article:
http://www.pingmag.jp/2005/12/09/the-website-development-process/
(p.s. I wrote the article and took the pics. heh) - smitting, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3jaded? If you're reading this and thinking about freelancing while paying for a mortgage, expect something closer to crackmoney than the process described in this article, especially if dealing with a brick-and-mortar company. If you can't keep up your sense of humor about this sort of stuff, no matter how annoying, don't go freelancing, or at the very least, stick to small web sites.
- Moocat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's a pretty nice writeup :)
I wish my area followed even half of those, especially with my current project. We never got solid requirements (barely any at all) and when we gave them the final product they thought it was going to go through some magical process where it would look completely different from all the prototypes we had shown them, all the way down to the layout. We've been doing ongoing maintenance for 6 months now and it has grown into some monstrous beast nobody wants to touch, written in a scripting language that nobody knows anymore because it was originally intended to be a simple web page, not an application. I would have at least 3 more levels of sanity if I wasn't the only coder working on it as well :( - groovymarlin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I guess it's OK from a design standpoint, but there's a lot more to standing up a completed website. What about code review? Testing? Maybe he's lumping that into the "code into XHTML/CSS" step that's slapped on the end, but you should never underestimate how important it is to have your design/code reviewed by another human's eyes. :)
- malaak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"fully functional coded site"
That part seems to be lacking - tomarocco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You guys really need to be writing your own articles...
- tomarocco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2That's how it works. The process gets permutated if a friend refers you to the client. For the sake of brevity, let's just say that you need to add a step: 13) Try to salvage your friendship.
- lancert, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If only my clients sites were that easy to implement...
- KyleMistry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I hate how clients ask for a design, but refuse to give any idea what the content is. Shouldn't the website be designed to suit the content, not the other way around?
- jonbon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Initial Meeting
Proposal/Documentation
(payment)
Company Research
Competitive Analysis
Personas
Sitemap
Wireframes
Task Flow
payment)
Design Comps
Revisions
Programming/Coding
Quality Assurance
Revisions
(final payment)
Final Product
That's how it breaks down for me, of course some things may be cut out depending on the scope of the project.
I also use 2 big whiteboards to get out ideas for the site, then turn the sketches into wireframes with OmniGraffle.
@foxifiednutjob
Most of your advice is good advice but it's said with the frame of mind that you can't trust a client, and that they owe you something. I'm sure you've been burned quite a few times, but I disagree in this frame of thinking and I think that often times it creates problems that your advice is preventing. Doing work for somebody is mutual, their not doing you any favors and neither are you. If you create a solid relationship and bridge the gap between 'designer' and 'client' most of these problems are solved.
Sorry if I misinterpreted the tone of your post, but it came off bitter to me. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ jonbon
My post seems "negative" because it is. Because it cuts through the BS, because it leaves out all the "positive selling in a blog" BS of the author.
It IS better to not trust the client first. Let them build your trust with commitment and timely payment. Are you a freelance designer or developer? For how long?
Your listed methodology follows the same basic fundamental mistakes that most amateurs make.
For instance how are you going to provide a legit proposal that is going to maximize and optimize your client's marketing goals and give them the best bang for their investment if you are providing proposals before you do any company research or market analysis?
The biggest mistake to the designer and the client's success rate is not charging for the "needs assessment" process and guessing what the client can spend.
If I could post only one rule of thumb to surviving and actually making a living, is - Mirror your client. If they are late, lazy and cheap, you be just as late, lazy and cheap. - theadvinci, on 05/27/2008, -0/+1Good list crackmonkey.
- stevenstclair, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2This is all pretty obvious
- Mith, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That's where the consultation comes in... some clients can be idiots, but if you talk with them for a while you can generally get a grasp of what they want.
- eclip5e, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This post is basically a high-level look at the basic design process, not the development process.
Paper prototyping is a great way to come up with a basic design while talking directly to clients. It gets the basic outline of the site down, and any major conceptual differences between the client and the designer will immediately come to light. Whiteboards are also great for this.
A great book out there on this topic is: Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder. - noah45, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1this is one of my favourites: http://book.airgid.com/
read it! - leohart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You see, that is why you don't deliver final products to customer. You deliver multiple times as you progress so in case they want to change their mind (and they will), you will react fast enough. Look like another water-fall project to me.
Maybe you should get the management team on of those books on Agile Development. - helloraj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Here's a better article: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/design_process/
- tomarocco, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2@foxifiednutjob: Do you have a special bandwidth arrangement with Digg?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1oh this one is easy:
step 1: suck d**k - jbzd, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3those mockups were pretty good... nice start to finish approach. i use to design and luckily i'm out of it, but this will help those young'ins get started.
- daleeburg, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3http://www.duggmirror.com/design/Web_Design_Workflow_Complete_Overview/
- dvandewalle, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0wow, jaded much?
- digidogstudios, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1lol gotta love the drawings ...digg this people!!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -13/+3This info isn't anything special.
Talk to each prospect for an hour?
Yeah, if you want to be eating on the street in a couple of months.
- Never talk to a prospect on the phone longer than 5 minutes unless you already know the basic purpose of the site, whos involved and how much they have to spend. Use an egg timer if you half to. For every second that 98%-er wastes your time, you could be hunting down the 2%er who will pay you what you are worth. Don't let these people waste your time. 98.9% or the inquiries freelance web designers/developers recieve go nowhere and have zero or little money behind them. Have a solid copy and paste email reply system to filter out people who will help you go out of business.
Heres the goods that will help you survive and feed yourself (not exactly in priority):
- If you are Freelance in anything, you are a collection agency first, a design firm second. Never forget that.
- Require half down before beginning any work.
- Keep all files and do NOT deliver source until final payment is made.
- Copy and paste is your friend. Very rarely should you spend to much time replying to prospects through long, hand typed emails or on the phone. Most prospects will waste your time and pick your brain. This kills your production. Send out pre-made email replies for the general type of responses you get and speckle the pre-made mail with the prospect's personal or corporate name throughout to get emails off fast, but they still will feel personalized to the recipient.
- Make sure 40-50% of your time is marketing and searching for quality projects. You will work less and find more successful and fulfilling projects.
- If you are freelance, don't waste your time replying to job postings by recruiters or headhunter. These relationships go nowhere except the agency might try to steal a client or two.
- Don't give quotes or estimates unless the client provides you with adequate specs to do so.
- Don't create specifications for clients who are unwilling to pay for them. Spend that time finding and creating relationships with people who will pay you.
- Avoid replying to job postings promoting "exposure" or "equity" in the company. If a company can offer you equity that's worth anything, they can offer you capital up front.
- Don't be afraid to simply drop and walk away from a project if the client refuses to pay or demands more than you originally outlined.
- Study the psychological of marketing and American consumer psychology and use it yourself, it DOES work.
- Ask for client testimonials even if you write them yourself and have the client endorse it.
more when I have more time... - boeingdrew, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3Great article. Thought it was pretty funny that he was using paper and pen to make mockups though. :)
Can't say I haven't done that before though...
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