Signal 7
Quick link
Tara has a nice list of tips on hiring your clients. I’ve run into trouble not following some of these tips in the past.
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Recent work
Reading back over this blog, I think I have failed to mention the things which have gone well. It’s useful to be able to revisit success and achievments in the times when I struggle for self confidence or inspiration.
So here are some of the things I’ve worked on recently:
Total Performance Concepts – Bill Nelson has coached Olympic athletes to gold medals, and is now coaching businesses and individuals to achieve their goals. I worked with Bill to create a new look and new structure for his website, and he has had immediate success with it. CUSCAL – For this site I took a graphic designers mockups and built the xhtml and css. It’s a great way to stretch your markup skills, trying to exactly replicate a photoshop file, even if I don’t always agree with it. ABC Science Online – I’ve just finished up helping the fantastic people of ABC Science with some ongoing content changes and maintenance work, including some flashbacks to legacy table based html that reminded me of the benefits of css layout 
Daily Telegraph – again, building html and css to match a design concept. This group of sites had some of the hugest css files I have ever worked with.
A nice range of work and some good results, I think.
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Another html production service [9]
The number of html factories continues to increase – I’ve mentioned one before, but I’ve come across a slightly odd one.
They are called psd2HTML and their name is in the great tradition of programs named by developers – you know phpThis and kThat. The service is pretty obvious – send them a Photoshop psd file and get back html.
The oddity arises from their package options. You can get what I would considerthe standard xhtml and css, for $220 or so. But you can also go for a budget option of $59 for old school table based layouts!
I was going to say I’m in two minds about this, but I’ve decided I’m just plain against it. No professional service firm capable of offering semantic html, css layout and separation of content and presentation should even offer table based layout as an option. In some ways it makes sense – there is a higher time cost for some layouts, but mostly it seems a confusing message.
It’s like saying ”$10,000 for this house, built beatifully out of straw. If you want wolf-proofing though, that will be $30,000”. Why even offer the straw house?
What do you all think?
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A conference for Australian Information Architects
Eric Scheid tells me of the upcoming Oz-IA Conference & Retreat (ozia2006) in Sydney this September. If you are an information architect (or want to be) this looks likely to be a good investment of time and money.
No registration yet, but you can check out the list of presenters which includes Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path fame. The organisers “will also be organising some group participation sessions and even leaving a slot or two open for some self-organised sessions”, which is an interesting concept.
Wireframes at the ready!
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Marketing while busy [2]
Right now I am busy on several different projects, which is excellent. I’ve sensibly obtained 50% up front payments, which avoids the late payment trap I fell into before.
This is great – working from home, money coming in, trackdacks being worn…Just as it should be. However, I can see looming a time when these projects finish and I won’t have money coming in anymore. So I need to be working now on finding new clients and new projects to start after my current ones. This is hard – it’s hard to make time to work on marketing when I have paid work that needs doing. I also worry that I’ll get clients wanting me to start straight away, which I can’t do.
That particular worry can be beaten down by reference to past experience. Nearly every client I have done significant worked for has had a ‘first contact to actual work commencing’ time of at least several weeks. If I wait until I have nothing to work on, I won’t have anything to work on for the next few weeks either.
So I’m doing several things:
Continuing some adsense advertsing Contributing to forums and email groups in my target markets Working on a mystery new project that will raise some profile Meeting with people to talk about how we could help each other Watching out for short term contracts in my area
That last point has become a lot easier since the major job boards in Australia now give me access to custom RSS feeds that push any contracts matching my search right to my reader. So much nicer than dealing with the actual websites. Now if I could avoid recruiters all together, I’d be much happier; It is going to happen, and soon.
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April 5th, 2007 at 12:53 am
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