I’ve been in this industry for as long as I can remember and one thing I’ve struggled with that clients in Malta still view new media as a synonym for ‘no budget’. Happy to throw €480 on a web banner that gives them 40% exposure for 5days with no demographics on how it’s being targeted….
However, what with the current economic crisis and the emerging evidence that traditional forms of advertising are not working this must be the best time EVER to be part of this rapidly moving industry especially in Malta.
Bandwidth finally allows us video to make a stand, Apple set the standard for mobile development and the government grant from Malta Enterprise last year helped to push more Maltese SMB’s onto the e-commerce market so you can expect that 2009 is our year.
So you have decided that you want to go it alone or are just setting up a company, what I can do is offer a brief example of my experience and how I learned the hard way. The intention is also to get as much feedback from other professionals in Malta to comment on this post and enrich you with collective feedback.
Build your own ‘customer focused’ website.
Don’t spend all your time and effort trying to impress clients about yourself without promoting your skills and services with your own website. Motivate your customers to want to work with you by adding call to action statements throughout your site. List testimonials and customer statements about the value of your services.
If you work from home you need to be organized and constantly motivated.
One trick I recommend is you set your alarm at a fixed time, get ready and leave the house and walk round the block. When you return home walk through the door with the frame of mind that you are going to do a FULL 8 hours work. When you don’t have work you should be networking and marketing.
Dealing with clients at briefing stage.
Remember when you take on a client you make a commitment, this commitment needs to be respected from both sides, both you and the client need to know the long term game plan and it’s YOUR responsibility to make sure you communicate your brief and terms of payment beforehand. In the beginning this is tricky, you want the job and the client often knows this and dictates how payment will be made, as you establish yourself don’t be afraid to reject or drop clients that waste your time, this is your profession and people need to respect that. The majority of clients that come to you will have little or no direction at the beginning of the project and no idea of how long something will take to develop, you will need to justify time vs costs for the requirements and give the client options to stagger the development to suit the budget. You also need to establish if the client has the time to provide you with the content needed, if not then you need to factor in time to dedicate in helping the client gather this information before you proceed otherwise you could find this dragging on and affecting your time on other projects down the line.
Dealing with clients at concept stage.
Clients might want you to produce the design of the site before committing, personally I have always rejected this approach for good reasons, for example, content; most clients fully accept that content is king, yet few are willing to consider this before committing to the design. Insist that you establish the objective of the site first, if you can prove to the client that you understand the concept then you are half way to sealing the deal. If not and you proceed with the design then anything you do at this stage is time out of your pocket and the client may take advantage and make revision after revision to suit personal taste, don’t forget if you already have a portfolio then the client can see the standard of your work. Your individual approach to the clients project should come out of understanding the persona or its target audience/s and if a new design or revamp it should always factor some A/B testing elements to see what gives the client the best ROI. You need to communicate to the client that it’s not wise to stick to a design just because it looks good to him and his wife’s friends nana, you need to develop, tweak and monitor. I’ll go into how to hammer this home in another article soon.
Breakdown your costs and estimate the time.
If this is your first job you need to be prepared to make a loss and you will find yourself spending more time on fussing on the elements, researching and testing….once you start recording time taken on ‘billable’ segments of your work you will be able to quote more accurately.
Dealing with the client during development.
Keep the client updated, informed and engaged in the development BUT DON’T let the client micro manage you otherwise you will end up feeling undervalued and frustrated. Explain the reasons why you did what you did and how this will have an effect on the clients users. YES you need to understand your clients business, both your design and your clients image of you will benefit from this.
An important point to remember and you need to cultivate is that your clients identify problems, you provide solutions.
Delivering the project.
Quality test, quality test and get others to test, I can’t stress this enough setup a mini beta test especially if its e-commerce and test on different browsers and platforms working to your own checklists
Ok I’ve said enough now, let me know your feedback.
