Business of Web Design

The Business of Web Design

May 22, 2007

I just finished my first video (of a series) that I am calling:

The Business of Web Design.

Being clever nerds that you surely are, I’m sure you’ve guessed that the video has something to do with the web design business.

… You guessed correctly.

This first video provides an introduction to a course that will guide you in starting and growing a home based web design business. That means the course is targeting web designers who have little to no business experience at all.

Some of the topics the course will cover:

How to start a business.
How to create web design contracts.
How to charge clients.
How to get your first clients.
How to streamline the web design process to make it much more profitable.

… This is just a small taste, but I think you got the picture.

Check out my first video and send me some feedback … does it suck, was it interesting … or boring!

You can find it on my video tutorial site, idea22.com:

Business of web design – introduction

Many thanks,

Stefan Mischook

December 18, 2006

The ‘bargain hunter’ type of person, can sometimes be a reasonable sort of human being that respects you as a professional, and is only looking for a good value for their money.

… Then there is the other type; those who seem to have no respect for you and in the end, will just drain you of your mental and emotional energy.

PSYCHIC VAMPIRES

A long time ago, I read a strange (but entertaining) little book that warned of a type of person, a person that would drain you of all your energy just by being around them.

(We’ve all been around them before … after just a few minutes of seemingly light chatter, you feel tired and drained.)

The book referred to these people as ‘psychic vampires’ – leeches that suck your energy, much in the same way a vampire sucks your blood.

Bargain Hunters are often times psychic vampires, and should be identified and then avoided at all cost.

… it is better to be on the unemployment line, than to be in service of a psychic vampire client.

IDENTIFYING THE PSYCHIC VAMPIRE CLIENT

Everyone has their own thing, but there are some common characteristics found with this type of person:

They ask a lot of questions – too many.
They are whining passive aggressive whelps – little pathetic beast that will hound you endlessly.
They will suggest that the work you do ‘isn’t that hard … really’.
They will complain that your prices are too high … regardless of reality.

PSYCHIC VAMPIRES SEEK OUT THE WEAK

No matter how experienced you are, you have to always be on the lookout for this sort of person.

That said …

Unfortunately, these most vile of bargain hunters, tend to go after relative noobs to the game … the less experience the better.

They’re attracted to beginners, because they know that their chances of molesting a poor unsuspecting junior (web design) fool, are much better than if they targeted a crusty old web nerd, such as myself.

… So if you are new to the web design game, be extra vigilant!

CONCLUSION

I wrote this piece because I was just the subject of a psychic vampire’s attack.

Fortunately, experience has taught me well, and I was able to quickly identify the blood sucker, and fire his ass before he drained me too much.

Yes, it is OK to fire a client sometimes!

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

December 13, 2006

I’ve been asked this many times:

‘What are the steps to becoming a professional web designer?’

To make a long story short, you need web design skills (listed below) and lots of practice to develop your skills.

A NERD’S ROAD-MAP TO (BECOMING A) PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGNER

Learn HTML
Learn CSS
Learn basic design skills – how to make a page look good: color combinations, white space etc.
Learn how to produce images for use on the web. Photoshop or something similar will have to learned.
Build a portfolio of websites.

After you’ve mastered the techniques and technologies of web design, you will need to show your skills – that’s where the good portfolio comes in.

That means it is time to build websites for yourself, friends and strangers.

Practice makes perfect … with each new site that you build, and with each new ‘client’ that you work with, the better you will become.

ABOUT WORKING WITH PEOPLE/CLIENTS

You may have not considered it, but being able to work well with people, is just about as important as having good coding skills!

… You need to learn how to communicate well, because it is crucial if you want to get the job done.

I will get more into that in another article.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

December 10, 2006

Ah, web designing nerds, you have studied hard, validated your pages and now you’re ready to leverage your skills for fame and fortune … ok, maybe for just a steady paycheck.

When it comes to the earning a living, what matters most, is what your potential clients are concerned about.

The musings of ivory tower nerds (who probably don’t get too many jobs) often times does not help to pay the bills!

… Code is not beautiful (a fat bank account is) and the Web standards means nothing to the people who put the food on your table.

(Now I’m in trouble!)

THE HIERARCHY OF CLIENT CONCERNS

When it comes to web design, I think the hierarchy of client concerns are:

Price – everyone wants to save a buck!
Design – a website has to look good. Remember the job is ‘web designer‘ and not ‘web coder’.
Usability – though clients have no idea what ‘usability’ is, they just want the site to navigate easily.
Google position. If you can make a site rank on Google quickly (even with obscure search terms,) you will be god.

Notice that Web standards and code that validates is not on the list.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

December 10, 2006

Web monkeys are web designers who make their living designing websites. That may seem like a redundant statement, but there are many out there who are just casual web designers …

I wanted to point that out because this article targets the full time web designer (web monkey) and not the casual web-nerd.

SWINGING WEB MONKEYS

Swinging web monkeys are those few smart web designers who don’t rest on the laurels – they continue to learn.

.. If you want to stay competitive and pull ahead of the pack (of nerds,) you ought to spend time learning new technologies, techniques and even be brave enough to graduate to ‘code monkey’ status.

CODE MONKEYS

I defined what a code-monkey is in a previous post. But in a nutshell, code monkeys are nerds who are inclined to code and not design.

For these people, I strongly suggest that they learn to program – especially PHP. But even if you are a great web designer, I still suggest that you become a little ‘code-monkeyish’ and learn some PHP – it will make your web design better.

SWINGING: CODE MONKEY STYLE

It is even better to learn several programming languages because with each new language, you will gain a better overall understanding of programming – and that’s just the half of it!

When you learn a new programming language you will:

Gain a deeper understanding of languages in general.
Learn new methods of solving problems.

I was reminded of this just recently when I took a serious look at Ruby. As a played with this nifty language, I found that it expressed concepts (that I had trouble with in Java,) in such a way that it was finally made clear.

.. Because I bothered to learn a little Ruby, my understanding of Java got better!

Beyond the conceptual level, I also picked up some practical programming strategies that I could apply to both my Java and PHP programming.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it; it makes sense to learn new techniques and technologies, if you want to stay ahead of the game.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

December 2, 2006

Recently on the killersites.com forum a question was put the the group:

“Do you use a template as a web designer, it does save time, and you can add your own design on a template etc……”

You can read the other members comments on this, but for me, I found that templates are an essential tool in the web design process.

–

Back in the late 90’s, when I ran a web design firm, we actually developed our own set of web templates that cut down our production and cost considerably. At the same time, the web sites themselves became better and better since the code in the templates got more and more refined.

So if you are a web designer and you want to save time and money, build your own mini-collection of web templates or start shopping at a web template shop.

Once again, I’ve included a podcast / mp3 for those who like to listen.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

November 24, 2006

With all these Web standards zealots running around proudly placing W3C validation buttons on their websites, you have to ask yourself:

Does anyone really care about web standards, clean code (xhtml, html and css) in the real world?

THE SAD TRUTH

Only in large companies (if you’re lucky,) and government might you find someone that may care. Sorry zealots, you can take down your little W3C buttons now …

🙂

The web design community codes itself into an academic dreamland sometimes. That’s why I attacked the web-standards-movement in the past … the leaders were misleading the ‘faithful’ down the path to the unemployment line.

PAYING WEB DESIGN, IS ABOUT BUSINESS

At the end of the day, all this web design junk is there to do, is to get out a message.

As for business, they don’t care about code validation and other nerd stuff that the web design zealots have fooled everyone into believing really means anything in the real world.

A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL FOR CODE-MONKEYS

But in the programming world, code quality moves to the front – well near the front of the line. This is because good code means faster more adaptable software – this has a bottom-line ($) affect.

… On the other hand:

Clean, standards compliant web design code (html/xhtml and css,) does not have any financial impact for most sites:

In the days of super cheap hosting and bandwidth, saving a few kilobytes on a web page amounts to nothing – most of us are not building sites that have millions of page-views!

So if you’re a frustrated web designer who is obsessed with code, you should get into php programming!

By Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

May 1, 2006

I have had two major problems with Ruby and Ruby on Rails:

Hard to find Ruby/Rails hosting.
Not too many clients looking for Ruby programmers.

One thing has changed:

A major hosting company (GoDaddy.com,) has stepped up and now supports Ruby on Rails hosting – there goes my first argument against learning Ruby!

Quote from GoDaddy:

“Our customers are finding Ruby on Rails to be incredibly valuable in shaping their online presence,” said Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder. “We are pleased to be able to offer support for a framework that increases the utility of the sites we host.”

With GoDaddy.com jumping in, this will force/influence other hosting companies to adopt Ruby and as such, I believe over the next year, Ruby hosting will become more and more common.

BUT EVERYTHING IS NOT PERFECT WITH RUBY… YET.

Even though it looks as though the hosting thing is resolving itself, we still have the issue of the number of Ruby gigs/jobs floating around … not that many yet.

There is still so much PHP out there (hosting, frameworks, products) that I think for next few years, PHP will continue to dominate with regards to small to medium size projects.

That said, I think that Ruby will be a player for a few reasons … most important, is the strong acceptance of Ruby (and Rails) by the Java community.

Another problem with Ruby and Rails, is the stability of the fastcgi plug-in that works with Apache 2.x.

Basically, there are still some lingering issues with how Ruby ‘talks’ to Apache. This is major, but there are many high profile, high traffic websites that seem to be running fine anyway … ?

CONCLUSION

Despite the aforementioned issues with Ruby and Rails, I am actually involved with putting together a major project with Rails … I know, I know, I’m a bit of a hypocrite!

My reasons?

Ruby and Rails are compelling – there’s some good stuff in there that should make the project much easier to build.
I wanted to explore Ruby and Rails with a real project – I’m just a ‘Curious George’ I suppose …

I plan to come back to you and give you my impressions as to how easy (and useful) it would be for web designers (not programmers) to learn at Ruby vs. say PHP.

Stefan

April 20, 2006

These days people are really interested in web traffic – big web traffic. But one thing that many web designers don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.

NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ‘search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.

NOT ALL WEB TRAFFIC IS CREATED EQUAL

People love counting page-views and unique visits but from my perspective, if the traffic sucks, who cares if you get 100 000 visits a day!

HOW TO DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC

How long people stay your website
Your conversion rate – if you sell stuff.
How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.

You know your traffic (probably*) sucks if are people leave right away, don’t buy anything, never bookmark your site etc ..

You can determine what the numbers are for the above points, with a good stats program.

* People could also be leaving because your website sucks – bad usability etc.

THE MORE SPECIFIC THE SEARCH TERM/PRASE – THE BETTER

Let’s say you sell Irish Setters and you have good rating for the key word: ‘dogs’. And since lots of people search using the ‘dogs’ key word, you get lots of ‘dog’ traffic.

I called it ‘dog’ traffic because what you find, is that the vast majority of your audience is NOT looking for Irish Setters, most are looking for information about (all the) other types of dogs in the world …. and that’s if your lucky!

Who knows, maybe they are looking for information on bad stocks (a la stock market,) or maybe on not so attractive women … it’s hard to say with such a loose/broad search term.

OK, LET’S GET BETTER TRAFFIC

With this understanding, you now decide to target ‘Irish Setters’, and with work and luck, you get good position in the search engines. But now, you’ve lost your top ‘dog’ position … dog dangit!

But is it really bad news? Well no, because you now find yourself getting people who are actually interested in what you are offering (Irish Setters) and as such, sales go up AND you get more return traffic.

WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS

To the point: people who reach you from other websites are typically ‘browsers’. These people are not ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on anything specific, they are simply snooping about not ready to commit … that’s why search engine traffic CAN BE much better.

HOW WEBSITE CAN DELIVER GREAT TRAFFIC

That said, some websites can deliver great traffic, if they are designed to filter/clean up traffic properly.

For example: if my website has a link to your Irish Setter selling website, and the link text reads:

‘Buy superb Irish Setters’

Chances are that people who click through from my website to yours, will be more likely to want to buy an Irish Setter from you. If on the other hand, my link text read: ‘free Irish Setter Information’, the quality of the traffic will decrease – you’ll be getting a bunch of free-loaders!

CONCLUSION

Don’t waste your time chasing sucky traffic … go for the ‘killer’ traffic.

Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)

KillerSites Blog