Posted by Phil on August 15, 2008 – 9:55 am
It’s always fun to do a little show-and-tell. So class, today I want to show you my latest WordPress site. It’s for the IEEE EMC 2009 Symposium that our company, ETS-Lindgren is serving as one of the principal hosts. The site is just gaining steam and will have some pretty nifty code features in terms of scheduling, interactivity, visual tours etc. The graphic design was outsourced which was a real help in getting things moving. The niftiest feature on the site so far is the promo video which is a nice look at Austin. I had the pleasure of working with a local studio to manage and provide the creative direction for the project. The video imported nicely into Flash with progressive download enabling a higher resolution than embedding the video. This method of import resulted in a fairly nice end product for the web. The event takes place next summer so I’ll do a revist to the site sometime down the line when there’s more to talk about.
Posted by Phil on March 30, 2008 – 4:41 am
Calculating what to charge for freelance work on the side is a question I wrestled with for a good while. Search the internet and you’ll come up with everything from vague answers to complicated formulas. What I’ve landed on is a simple formula: Take your yearly salary working full-time and drop-off the last three zeros. That means if you are just starting out in web design or development and making $35,000 let’s say, then you you’d charge $35 or possibly $40 per hour. As your income goes up, so does your hourly rate. This rate assumes a yearly compensation in the private sector. If you work in government or higher education you may need to boost this rate in congruence with the market. As you become more accomplished in your work you may also pad the number in kind.
A Worker is Worth His Wages
As you move-up in your career you will find fewer customers that will pay $75 to $100 per hour for web development or design. Those customers however will be very serious and the compensation will be worth your while. As your salary continues to rise your need for side work will continue to diminish and your hourly rate will actually prove to be a protection for your time.
This formula assumes you are picking-up side work in addition to full-time employment. I would not use this pricing structure to launch a business. Running a business full-time will entail much more overhead.
It’s All or Nothing Baby
A year ago I devoted a good deal of time launching a site for our start-up church CedarRidge. I told our pastor that he couldn’t pay me for the work in any form. I’ve made the decision to never do discounted work. There are three distinct categories in my mind:
- Pro Bono – This type of work is only done for causes in which I have a high degree of vested interest and only on a limited scale.
- Limited Free Consulting – My line in the sand is when my hand touches the keyboard to configure, design or implement any changes for a friend or acquaintance. I’m always happy to engage in conversation even for a couple of hours to help someone out. That is one of the motivators for this blog. I find it stimulating and enjoy the process. Two or three hours is about my limit in this category. If the person needs more time than that, they will need to start compensation at my going rate.
- Full compensation – If someone is ready to pay my hourly rate in my field for their site, then they are very serious about the project. I don’t by-the-way charge or engage in related work such as system administration. Though I’ve worked as a system admin, I’m not up-to-speed to the degree that I would charge someone and not interested in working in that area. I’m happy to lend a hand on occasion to a neighbor in which I classify that as free consulting.
The “going rate” for web design or development is all over the map. In no way would I want to take advantage of a customer but in the same vein, if I am going to spend night and weekend hours, I want to be compensated well for that effort. If you, like me work professionally in any given area you will become an expert in your field. That knowledge has value that should receive compensation. Don’t sell yourself short.
What’s your experience with side work and compensation? How have you figured what you would charge?
Posted by Phil on March 5, 2008 – 7:01 am
In an ideal world there would never be any do-overs. One thing I’ve learned from being a web developer in a corporation is that this is no ideal world. When the scope of a project or marketing campaign changes so must the web.
TechTourSite.com was originally a very small microsite of just a few pages with limited capabilities. I inherited the site from my predecessor a couple of years ago and it has been fascinating to see the scope of this initiative grow each year. Last year the site was redesigned to refine the look and feel and include more information on the site. Shortly thereafter it became obvious that the site needed a major overhaul as scope creep continued. Tech Tour is now an international event.
No surprise to any regular reader of
thoughtsparks.net, the site was rebuilt in WordPress. It features some nifty plug-ins and functions:
- Expandable side navigation
- Eloquent form submission
- Templates which allow for some nice multi-lingual options
- Custom fields which come in real handy for unique datasets
The site will continue to grow incrementally with new features such as a photo gallery and other bells and whistles. I think I will truly enjoy not doing a major redesign or redevelopment of the site next year (knock on wood).
Lest my PhP development skills get too rusty, I’m starting on another microsite for the IEEE EMC Symposium for 2009 that will be hosted in Austin. More about that one as the project moves along. One cool feature will be a dynamic schedule configurator for attendees to select their workshops to attend. Will be a hoot to develop for sure.
Posted by Phil on August 19, 2007 – 1:10 am
A developer friend of mine turned me on to the Firefox Add-on Firebug. This tool, not only is invaluable for troubleshooting code for developers, it proved invaluable for revising thoughtsparks.net. This nifty plug-in allows one to walk through the code and stylesheet on the fly while looking at a page. In the sea of WordPress styles, it helped to sort out what div was affected and allowed for fairly rapid revision to my blog. I’ve used this tool in a more robust environment as well and can testify to it’s utility across the spectrum. Check it out at: getfirebug.com.
BTW, any thoughts on the newer look for thoughtsparks.net? I take an evolutionary approach to site revision…a little at a time.
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Posted by Phil on March 22, 2007 – 8:59 pm
After working probably too many late nights,
CedarRidgeChurch.net is live. The site was built using WordPress which made it technically easy to install. It just took a while to get the right direction and think through the future development of the site. Eventually the site will be extended-out as the church grows. It’s been fun to help start this new fellowship in a growing part of town and using tech skills for God is always a joy for me. The site will continue to go through visual refinement and development, we just needed to get something functional up quickly as we are moving to weekly services at a local middle school the beginning of April.
The rest of the church communication infrastructure is run on Google Apps. For more info on Google Apps and what it can do for an organization, read my blog entry "Why Google Apps is so Cool".
Posted by Phil on March 20, 2007 – 1:21 am
OK, that may sound like an audacious statement to make. But disabling the back button on a website is a major no no. It is Hotel California, "You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave." Cool lyrics to a song, bad concept for web design. I wouldn’t rant about it, but that tactic is too alive and well on blog sites. Blogging has unfortuanetly revived some lost arts to poor web design and that would be the top of my list.
