Clients posts

I recently received a call from a young designer who I met when she was in art school. I reviewed her portfolio and several years later at a local graphic design group meeting, she reintroduced herself and thanked me for being kind and helpful in that review. She became an avid reader of my articles on the design business and on one occasion told me that when it came to clients, she needed to “borrow [my] bastardness”.

Apparently she thought I was tough in client negotiations and thought...

Who said that? Both parties often do. Both the client and the designer often accuse each other of ruining a web project. Why? What is it both parties expect that the other can’t or won’t fulfill. Is it a breakdown in communications, and if it is, what can be done to prevent it?

You know all of the funny horror stories. The client doesn’t know what they’ll like until they see it, they have an eight year-old niece who won a finger painting contest when she was only five and is a creative genius, they thought the whole site wouldn’t cost so much to design because their great-great grandfather had an entire web site designed for a nickel in 1903, blah-blah-blah. Well they have their stories and complaints about us, too, only they aren’t creative enough to...

As I put the phone down, I was still shaking quietly. It was one of the hardest phone calls I’ve had to make. I had just told the client that I was tired of him messing me around, that the way he worked was making it impossible for me to produce good work, and I was fed up of haggling over every nickel of every invoice. I’d previously raised all these issues with him, but nothing had changed. So I told him I no longer wanted to do work for him. For the first time, I’d just fired a client.

Every web designer who wishes to get paid for their efforts will almost inevitably need clients, and work for a fee on the client’s website. Building a good working relationship between client and designer is essential for a good outcome and for job satisfaction. But what if things don’t work out, and you find yourself hating working on a project? It’s time to terminate your client relationship.

Firing a client might sound like committing professional suicide, and in...

Have you ever just finished a project and wondered: How can I do more for this client? or perhaps you were thinking: Oh darn, now I have to look for new clients.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The most valuable clients are the ones that stay with you, not the ones that provide one-off projects. So how do you get valuable clients that want to stick with you for the long haul?

In...

Are you trying to grow your freelance web development or design business? Do you want to spend more time designing websites and less time trying to figure out what the client really wants and needs?

By finding the right web design niche, you can increase productivity and revenue and make your freelance business more profitable.

Web design is a competitive industry, but there are excellent opportunities for those with clear goals. A Google search on “freelance web developer United States” yielded over 51 million results, yet the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook reports that IT jobs for web developers, information security analysts and computer network architects are expected to grow by 22% between 2010 and 2020. According to the website, “Employment of web developers is expected to grow as e-commerce continues to grow. Online purchasing is expected to continue to grow faster than the overall retail industry.

“Whew!” exclaimed a recent client when he finally agreed to pay his entire fee, “I didn’t know artistic-types were such tough businessmen.”

“Oh, we are,” I said calmly as I put his final check into my pocket, “We have to get tough with clients when they don’t want to pay for a professional job.”

With that I walked out with a smile on my face, knowing this client would never call me again but I felt the self-satisfaction of having stood up for myself and having won. Usually, a great many freelancers live with the ulcer-inducing...

This post examines an important part of the design process that, for some reason or other, is often omitted from community conversations. Its aim is to get the design community talking about the ‘whys’ — including why they are important.

One advantage the design industry has going for it is its helpful, giving community, and that community’s desire to learn and grow. Just look around at the conversations had at conferences and online. Experiences are shared, techniques are passed along, and so many helpful hints and tidbits are blogged. But one...

Clients are an important part of any business. But when it comes to web design, clients are everything! Whether it is an individually run enterprise or an establishment owned by several stakeholders; acquiring new clients and retaining old ones is an essential aspect for maintaining your web design business.

With increasing competition on the Internet, it can take a great deal of hard work to expand your client base and continue to retain existing jobs. Businesses invest a lot...

Building stuff for the web is fun. Want to know what isn’t? Waiting on a client to give you content so that you can launch their bloody website.

Before I founded my startup, I worked as a freelancer and built websites for all kinds of clients. I often found that my entire process would fall short when it came down to the delivery of content. Worst of all, I would find myself not getting paid because their website “hadn’t launched.”

It didn’t matter who the client was or how much planning had...

Today I’m going to show you some interesting ways to make money as a web professional.

Before I do, let’s clarify something: the best way to make money as a web designer is to develop a portfolio of clients.

However, as a professional in this saturated industry, you know as well as I do that there will be times when there’s a drought of work. There are so many designers, developers, freelancers, studios and so on, that there’s only so much work to go round.

But fear not my young Web Jedi, there are many ways in which you can earn yourself...

An interesting thing about working as a freelancer, while the area of expertise may vary, is that many of us will share the same experiences time and again.

Even without a connection in the fields in which we freelance, there are some lessons that are universally relevant, and that certain experiences will come to teach us.

When working in any field the last thing you should ever expect is to reach a point where you have nothing left to learn. So we tend to approach each experience with knowledge hungry arms wide open. Looking to learn whatever this new project or interaction will teach us. Only sometimes, the things we learn are not always pleasant. Or easy to take.

In fact, in a turn which makes their impact even more...