Advice to new designers
thinking of setting up in business

Herewith. May it be a happy and prosperous career for you too.

They will tell you how to do many things. Not least that you ought to have a foldie brochure to hand out widely to anyone you meet.

The Waller Brochure

 
Present a Portfolio
You will need to have an attractive and well promoted website yourself. I use mine to try out all the techniques in my armoury that I will eventually use in anger for my clients.

We have to accept that at first the big clients who can afford to pay fat fees are not going to come to you. You have to spend time building up a portfolio of good websites for small organisations, getting satisfied clients who will recommend you, and time also to make yourself known on the Internet.

You may have to do the first few websites for free, or for a very low price. Only when you can quote some experience can you start ringing up potential clients, print your brochure, do some mailshots.

Life is learning experience
What does the job involve?
The cynics would say that a deb developer is the person in charge of typos, grammatical errors, broken links and tediously long downloads and/or plug-ins to distract from content. Someone with a true gift for the job can sometimes avoid content entirely.
But to be serious:

• It could be just the task of putting the design into HTML code, viewing the result and uploading it.
• Web Design would include laying out the pages and the whole website attactively and in a technically efficient way.
• Web Creation would be organising hosting and mailboxes, submitting to search engines and directories.
• And then someone has to get the new business, go and see the client, explain the facts of Internet life, brief a team of the above, get approval for the draft, answer clients (word-deleted) questions, ignore the more idiotic suggestions, send out bills and get paid. Then to keep the books, pay the value added tax and other taxes, fill in government forms, know about employment legislation, worry.
• For advanced students someone could do graphic design, animation, CGI scripts in languages like C++, Java, and Perl, use of forms, Flash, video, sound, ASP (Application Support Processors), shopping baskets, database, and all the new things that come and go as the day of the week.

All the time you learn. There is no such thing as knowing the trade; every project has a new challenge, and it will take hours or days to master a new feature - a cost you will have to wear since your client is not concerned about your problems, all he wants is the result.

There are certainly different skills. There is Webpage design which is what I do. Then there is graphics, CGI coding, installing and fixing software in PCs, Database, E-Commerce, business knowledge, marketting, selling.

Whether this means you should have chums so you can sub-contract the things you don't have skills or time for, or whether you attempt to learn more and more about more and more I have not yet resolved. .

Not your problem?
I think you have to accept that there are going to be hassles and extra time spent. Some of these hassles are outside the brief.

• Why has his hard-disk crashed?
• How do you install the new software that comes from his new ISP?
• Why has the Compuserve software now collapsed?
• How do I install this new colour printer?
• Do you charge for this?
• Do you still charge for this when YOU make a mistake and corrupt his computer?

What can I charge
Whatever you charge there will people who will offer to do it for less, and people who will charge much more, even if it is not as good as you would do it. It is probably not going to earn you a living just by writing HTML.

Your prospective client wants to know how much it is all going to cost - your fee, the ISP fees, domain name, access to the Internet. You may have to research these topics for each new client because your knowledge, and the ISP products change from day to day.

My current thinking is that you you should quote a fixed price. And that the £600 +VAT price I quote on the website create page is the way to get the business. Charge more and small prospects will be frightened off. Then do whatever is necessary to make the site something you (and the client) are really proud of. When you have more work than you can handle you can put your prices up. The largest webcreation companies charge very large sums, but they have the established reputation and resources to justify this.

Website Creation Page

 
What is certain is that if you work by yourself you can eventually charge £40 per hour, while if you work for someone else you will earn less, but the charge-out rate by the larger companies could be as much as £100 per hour

What goes in the Proposal
There will be at least two client visits. I am trying to do a website for a man in central France and the length of the Emails grows and grows in the attempt to get him, and me, to understand the problem....

It is key to find out the Objectives. And how will he know he is successful. And to agree the keywords that will go into the META statements. Your proposal to your client should clearly state the objectives.

More on Objectives

 
In the proposal there ought to be a list of the pages you think will be necessary, identifying any that are more tricky than the normal. Like Forms with CGI, or a lot of complex tables. This will in due course form the basis of the Site Map.

Is the client providing all the art work? If not, do you have to pay an artist. Or can you pinch the graphics from elsewhere?

Is there a deadline for getting this up on time? If it means you working evenings and nights the price should double.

Have you got all the material? If not then you are going to have all sorts of problems getting him to write it. And it will be late. And you cannot really bill him until you have got it and created the pages.

Showing the first draft
He can see the material as a sub-directory on your own site. Or if the client's webspace is available and there is a delay getting the domain name, spend the waiting time uploading the website onto the default address at the server.

Search Engines
When the site is up with the proper domain name then you can register it with Yahoo (which takes me a long time) and about 8 other major search engines; this does not take long at all.

Search Engines

 
And make sure the hit-counter is working.

Hit Counters

 
It is worthwhile to give the client the standard Search Engine Health Warning. Clients always think that they will appear on all the search engines immediately the site is live. This is not how it works. Alta Vista and Hotbot may come up in a couple of days. Infoseek takes a couple of weeks. The rest may take 4-6 weeks. Yahoo you will be lucky if it happens at all. And then you may be way down the list of references. Some search engines are now charging a fee so that they will look at your site within the foreseeable future. Some will charge a fee to get you to the toip of the list. I do not recommend paying such fees.

After the Go-Live
He MUST do a lot of PR, press releases, tell all his friends relations, customers, suppliers, profesional societies, passers-by-in-the street.

He should pay you immediately after the site first goes live. If he really doesn't like it, delete the site from the server, and write off the cost to experience. But normally you have to make a thousand trivial alterations for things you think are not really very important. Sometimes you have to say that an idea of his is not practical, not a good idea, or is going to cost him more money. Tough!

If he should pay, and then doesn't try a letter as follows:

Payment is now considerably overdue and we shall have no option but to place this matter in the hands of our solicitors unless your cheque in the sum of £............. is received within seven days of this communication. You should also be aware that in such case, you will be liable for all legal costs incurred in any action that follows.

Promoting your website

 
Which ISP
ISP costs vary enormously. I am currently into http://www.newnet.co.uk who are proving excellent. About £150 / year including a domain name

For Internet access you can keep your free service going and have your mail forwarded to that mailbox. For as long as the service remains good. If it degrades then the standard rate for access is about £100 per year.

Choosing an ISP

 
The ISP should send you a disk with software. New users are going to want some help to install the software.

On-Going maintenance
What he really needs is a scheduled monthly visit from you to collect new things from him, and something new and exciting each month on the website. £100 per month. Or perhaps £100.00 per quarter. But then he does the sums and says gosh that is more than he is paying for the website itself. But with a regular fee both you and the client are motivated to keep it up to date. If you do not work at it then the site will rust away and achieve nothing. And if you do not make a regular monthly charge, he is still going to ring you up and ask for help and what shall you charge him then? Suggest £35 for each maintenance session, doing all that is necessary. If it is a lot of work then a quote is nessary before you start.

At the time of a monthly visit you may want to include a training session. If billed separately then I think I would charge £40 for a two hour session . To me it is an opportunity to get closer to the clients concerns and problems, and to find out if he has friends who want a website too.

I routinely have a Website History page on my client websites; when we started, when it went live, major changes, when we submitted to search engines, the date when the hits became significant.

On-Going Maintenance

Situations to Avoid
Do not get into the situation where you have to place material in a holding area for the client to put into the live site. There is always a delay, you cannot immediately check, as you should, that the live site is correct and has no broken links, and you cannot immediately correct spelling mistakes as you notice them.

And try and avoid the situation where you AND the client are updating the site. You would have to negotiate at every turn, and in the end you routinely download the latest version before you can alter it. But small typos and price changes are a pain.

Do not move a domain name or a website unless it is absolutely vital. It will take far longer than your would believe, and always ends in tears. Some cheapo domain registering services do not actually have a way of transfering a domain name from them elsewhere. It will be better to think of a new name and start over.

Good luck!