While cleaning out a big stack of magazines recently, I came across this article in Print that I’d marked as potential blog fodder.

In part, this article is about the current proliferation of design tools that help non-designers create something all their own - a t-shirt, a set of thank-you notes, business cards, and web sites. It brings to mind a recent article in another magazine that discusses how a few small businesses built instant web sites using tools found on GoDaddy, Homestead, MSN and other services, and became overnight sensations.

I can see why this might be a scary trend for us professionals - giving the potential clients the opportunity to make something themselves for which they might otherwise hire one of us. The tools are better, more readily available and easier to use. They have ‘built in skill’ - the results can look pretty good, even without design expertise on the part of the client.

But think about it. These folks that utilize GoDaddy’s Website Tonight - are they creatiing something truly special? Is it unique? Or is it something that looks more or less identical to 5,000 other sites that used the same template? True, it’s inexpensive. But is it accessible? Is it search engine-friendly? Is it ‘good’ as in high-quality design?

Do non-designers know the difference between homemade design and professional work? I think that many do. Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s not.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky to gain a client last year who is a business and life coach. Every so often I’ll run into an issue in my web design business that needs an outside point of view and I give her a call.

I’m happy to refer to her as my business therapist. She has this strange ability to understand aspects of my business better than I do - she always comes up with something that I never thought of, and that is totally obvious once it’s out in the open.

For example: I have a new hosting client that’s in an office full of Mac users. I’m not a Mac user myself. This client has repeatedly had problems with email on her account, and I can’t replicate the issue. They have no in-house IT, so my business coach suggested that I establish a working partnership with 2-3 IT professionals here in town so I could make reasonably informed suggestions in cases like this.

Well, duh…. I’m working on that this week.

One of the other things that I like about working with her is that the first few times we met, she made me write a list of characteristics of my ‘ideal client.’

I have yet to meet this ideal client, but whenever I get together with my business therapist she has me rethink and refine this list of features. What started out as a fairly general checklist has now become a tool that helps me answer the question ‘is this a client I really want to pursue or not?’

It’s helped me focus my target clientele more precisely. Although I wouldn’t say I’ve really established a niche, I’m certainly a lot more aware of what kinds of clients I’d rather not have. The list is really more a way to weed out un-ideal clients than to find perfect ones.

Last Friday I met with the owners of my latest site design, C and T Iris Patch, for a launch meeting. It went really nicely. I like it when clients are gung-ho to learn something new, and enthusiastic about the fact that I try to use applications that make it as easy as possible for them to conduct their business.

In this case, I used OptionCart for their 3000+ item catalog, with the Mal’s E-commerce backend. I’ve talked about both before. I really can’t say enough about OptionCart - I love it because you can drop it into any existing HTML or PHP-based site using includes and it works. It looks pretty good right out of the box, but with a minimum of customization it blends right in with the look and feel of the site in general.

The admin panel for OptionCart is very simple, compared to other products like X-Cart or ZenCart. It’s intuitive, doesn’t have that many functions, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This client in particular is selling a product without a lot of options associated with it (i.e., the flowers don’t come in multiple-sized containers) and just needs an easy way to manage selling online. OptionCart is perfectly suited to a catalog that’s very robust, works great but doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. Clients are comfortable with it because it has an intuitive interface and the choices on what to do are well-defined and fairly obvious.

In short, it’s a cart that makes the administration end of things easy to deal with and kind of ‘invisible’ - it works without you being aware of it most of the time. That’s my favorite kind of website functionality.

Today I finished up my five-day stint for TCG, and my supervisor asked me to continue working for them on a 15 hours-per-week basis indefinitely. That’s great for me, it works well with my other client work, and they said they were very happy with what I’d produced for them so far. Good all around.

I’m in the middle of my first week of working for a creative staffing company and it’s really pretty enjoyable - particularly now that I can telecommute instead of driving for two hours like I did last Thursday and Friday.

The work is fun and easy - I’m designing a series of ad banners for the client. All graphics work so it’s a nice change from coding, plus it was nice for me to be in an office environment again last week.

The company that I’m temping for has another TCG employee working with them now plus they hired a previous temp for a permanent position. It seems like a good place to work, and I’m looking forward to the possibility of continuing to temp with them part-time occasionally.  It will be a good reference for me if nothing else, but I feel like I’m doing something really valuable for them and it’s different than web design - it’s more of a you-see-the-results-fast kind of thing and I do like that.

When I started my web design business and was looking for a host, I first learned about reseller accounts. The host I’m with now has a great one, but not everyone may be familiar with what this entails…

What is a reseller hosting account? Generally, that means that you purchase web server space with a host, then you’re free to sell that space in whatever increments you choose and at the price you set. And typically you’ll have some kind of hosting control panel where you can set up hosting packages and prices and manage your hosting clients - up to the point of monitoring the bandwidth they’re using each month, and upgrading/downgrading or suspending if necessary.

For example, if I purchase a reseller account with 20 gb of space, I can sell 20 1gb accounts or 40 500 mb accounts and so on to my web design clients. I pay for the original account, but my clients all pay me for their accounts too. It definitely pays for itself very quickly, and the ability to oversee my clients’ hosting accounts all from one control panel is a big time saving benefit.

This is so much easier than just setting up a client with their own hosting account and of course keeps me in the loop when they need to upgrade and renew!

I had an interesting issue come up with a client recently. The client had already chosen one of the mockups I’d given them for their new e-commerce site, and we were ready to meet to discuss minor changes before coding started.

The day before that meeting, they sent me a layout they’d drawn up and wanted to know if they could use that instead. I told them we should meet to talk about it and they agreed.

What they had come up with was something they really liked. They felt it suited them perfectly and I could respect that.We discussed the idea and our mutual feelings about it, and it became clear that they were really into this idea and definitely wanted to use it.

Awkward moment - I felt odd about it, being the contracted designer. And they recognized that; it was clear that this kind of just happened and was definitely not planned from the beginning, but it was what they wanted. They asked if I wanted to continue with the project given that.

I’m not a programmer and don’t really have any interest in taking someone else’s idea and building the backend for it - that removes all the fun from the work for me. My enjoyment comes from putting together a well-crafted site from beginning to end that reflects the personality of the client, respects the audience they want to attract and then functions without too many glitches to deliver the promised results to the customer.

Web design isn’t primarily about money for me - I love the front-end work, and if you take that away, then, well, it does become much more about money. I tried to explain this and that I would have to apply an additional fee to make up for the lack of exposure, since I wouldn’t be able to show this site in my portfolio or have my link at the bottom of it.

So they thought about it and decided to go elsewhere and seek someone who would just code their idea. I think that was the right decision, and certainly better for me. I would be bored out of my mind doing something like that, honestly.

So in this case I’m okay that it worked out this way - but I’m interested to know if other designers have encountered something like this, and how you dealt with it?

I won two jobs this week - one doing maintenance and content updating for a medical office, and the other translating a new graphic layout into a functional web template for the local university. I’m really excited about the academic work - I spent a lot of time in upper-level academia and enjoy working with researchers as I have in the past on other projects. Plus, the university has a working style guide and strict ADA requirements. I always make an effort to address accessibility issues on the sites I design, but have never actually had to do it before. I think that will be a good learning experience for me. Read the rest of this entry »