I very much liked what IA on Twitter said about The Practice of Web Design:

In my eyes, web design is neither an artistic exercise nor a scientific discipline but an economic practice…

He has a great point here as and this is a team who really excels in the niche that they belong to – WEB DESIGN.   Taking inspiration from this singular quote i’ve listed some items that might help you start developing your design work into a full time business – so you can earn the money you worked so hard for.

A little background here before you read onwards:   I started out as a freelancer taking on all sorts of projects – it took me about 3 years to understand the game and build my client base, and i registered my company in early 2009 – www.fluidnewmedia.com.  From small Flash Micro Sites, to the Joomlas and WP’s of the world we can now build our own applications from ground-up for our clients.  I couldn’t have gotten this far without concentrating on the following points:

1. Don’t Give Up Your Freelance Work: With the state of the current economy going freelance is your best bet, people these days are turning to independent freelancers for quality projects and you can charge a good amount of money – this depends on your client and the scope of the project.  For now stick to it until you position yourself as a company.  Take into consideration your day job as well and how many hours you can set aside for your freelance work.
2. Keep Your Eyes On The Money: We all have the tendency to over involve ourselves in design work – Point is to find a happy medium with your quality of work and amount you charge your clients.  Don’t let yourself get carried away with the details – concentrate on charging your client for the quality of work you bring to the table.
3. Start Thinking From  A Business Perspective: Not everyone is a business man/woman by heart but this is an area to concentrate on now.  It’s more important than design itself, chalk out a plan, meet with people – start mareketing your services and products to a targeted market;  look for your niche in the market and supply the demand.   You can do this I know, so start now!
4. Learn How To Outsource Work and Keep Your Margins: Interestingly enough most passionate web designers don’t like to outsource to Third Party’s – they get too emotional with their own work.  While i can understand this, my advice is for projects that require alot of work (coding, design, database) try and find a team or another individual that can cover the areas you can’t. This way you can manage the project, do what you best within the scope of the project and still have room for other work on the side.  This is the first step to thinking like a business person – You might not like it (I didn’t) but you’ll reap the benefits monetarily in the long run.
5. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: This is an extremely important point.  If there is a system out there that you can use, use it – there is no sense in designing and coding up your own.  Especially when open source developers from all over the world have worked hard at one platform – use it to your benefit.
6. Concentrate on Re-Occuring Income: There are two ways of looking at this.  One is a income generated on a monthly basis from maintenance fees, or finding a good client who can give you a certain amount of work every month.  The point here is to have income in your pocket from your design business every month.
7. Learn How To Say No: Saying “No” is tough at times but extremely necessary in the design business.  If you always say yes to your clients then they will expect that each and every time they ask you to do something – then if you say no after agreeing with them time and time over you’ll look like a hard-ass.  You don’t want that to happen..
8. Learn How To Tone Down Your Ego: Even if you are a top notch designer try to be humble with clients.  Ask them what they want first, then give advice where appropriate.
9. Always Charge 30% More Than What The Project Is Worth: Simple equation here.  Most people like to bargain with the price and will bring you down off what you quoted initially.
10. Provide Bullet Proof Documentation: Show your clients where their money is going, list out the features and activities of the web design and development practice.

Try sticking to these steps for a couple of months.  You can only try, and it doesn’t matter if you fail (if you haven’t failed then you won’t be a leader; I’ve failed time and time again till i got it right).  Get up and try again till you get it down to a science.

By applying these steps i really feel you can bump yourself up to another level.  End of the day we are all passionate about our work, but it all boils down to the dollars at the end of the day – no matter how skilled or awesome we are at our job.  You could be the best designer in the world, but if you have no clients you’ll be there twiddling your thumbs asking yourself what went wrong.  Know what i mean??

As a bonus feel free to download THIS SAMPLE DOCUMENT to get an idea of the structure for a project over $3,000.  Keep in mind this is a rough draft of the final doc, but its a good start.  Feel free to use it any way you like..

If you feel you can add to this list feel free to do so, would love to hear your opinions.   What do you think will help your business grow besides whats already stated?

This is a real quick and dirty post. I love twitter and wanted to quickly share my thoughts on the Twitter application, its beauty, reliability and performance. Note: This isn’t a Dig on third party apps, just an honest opinion to my approach.

You might be thinking why would you want to make it harder on yourself? Wouldn’t it be easier to RT people you have grouped and how do you remember all your cool friends? Well that all depends on perspective and I’d like to share my strategy with you guys in a follow up post.

1. Updated Follower UI Design Feature

Today Twitter updated its follower User Interface feature. My personal perspective is: (1) This feature is widely used and should stand out amongst the rest (apart from the updating!) (2) Twitter would like more people to come directly to their application, and they do but many people opt out and go for a third party app.

One thing i find remarkable about the engineers at twitter, is that they sure know how to keep things simple. I love that as I myself eschew complex approaches to simple solutions. I’ve seen so many sites with a toggle like feature (list to expanded), however twitters solution is pristine!

2. Performance and Reliability of the Twitter App:

Very simple concept here. The TRADITIONAL WEB is the most reliable and combined with AJAX its extremely powerful. I’ve used tweetdeck, I do admire the amazing app however it takes longer for the tweet to appear. With Twitter (the app itself) you hit the update button and 99/100 times it’ll get updated into the stream! Now thats impressive!

When i first started tweeting, I met a really cool Social media maven @doshdosh who brought this to my attention. Since then I haven’t looked back. Thanks Maki!!

3. Favorite Tweets

I read an article a while back stating that most users don’t favorite their tweets. It further stated that the one region that does favorite their tweets are the Japanese, and you gotta love their thought-process for that!! For some time now i have been adding all the cool tweets to my favorites, and think you should too. There have been so many times i have seen tweeters asking other tweeters to find that one tweet that they are desperately looking for. *So be clever, fave yours and others cool stuff for future reference.

All in all, my personal opinion highly favors that of the Traditional Twitter Application itself (even though i am a big lover of grids and columns). The engineers over at twitter sure have done a remarkable job with the application and i feel we should appreciate their work and effort.

Good information is where its at. Filtering out that information can be a little time consuming lest you know where to go so I just wanted to share what I thought would be useful to designers out there.

If you check slide # 51 in Object Oriented CSS you will see that you should never specify an element first. This is a practice i didn’t know about. Sometimes learning yourself can lead into bad practices and thats why I like to learn from the pros. Thanks Stubbornella..

Though some of the slides are a little old, you can still learn a whole lot from them.

Also for more slides and interesting presentations check: http://www.slideshare.net/andhttp://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

Thanks to everyone for helping me learn….

NaviStudio a leading Turkish Design Company has received a prestigious Web Site of the Day Award from the FWA.

NaviStudi has created one of the best websites ever says FWA for the site Egofoto.

These days i am spending alot of time learning the Open Source MVC Framework:  CodeIgniter. It’s awesome using some of the classes and libraries that ship with the package.  

All you have to do is load them from your controller or use the autoload feature in the config file.  I still do love my design work, so i spent some time later on at night trying to figure out this CSS FullScreen bacground thang.

SCHEDULE OF MY DAY:  

1. 8.30 am – Woke up had some brekky and took a nice warm shower!
2. 9.00 am – Onto the CodeIgniter forums and Google Reader to check out the latest news.
3. 11.00 am – Conference call with a client
4. 12.00 pm – Getting kinda hungry so i had a snack
5. 12.30 pm – Back to some ?php development with Code Igniter.
6. 2.00 pm – Lunch:  Fish and Chips
7. 2.30 pm – Emails and general communication with present and future clients
8. 3.00 pm – Work started for a newer client.
9. 5.00 pm – Updating a site for a current client 
10. 6.00 pm – Back to Code Igniter
11. 7.00 pm – Itching to use some css techniques to design a Full Screen Splash page.
12. 8.00 pm – Done with the css homepage.  Nice and darkish look with a great background.