Upon starting freelancing I made the bold decision to do my own taxes. The forms seem relatively simple and by reading up online in various sources I’ve been able to piece together what I should/shouldn’t be claiming for.

Honestly, I’ve avoided using an accountant for fear that any money they may save me may have simply ending up being their fee. So it was great to have some questions answered and for the most part, to be told that I (along with the other participants who filled in their own returns too) were doing it correctly but could probably save a few more pennies as well.

Best practice

With regards to the tax the second best thing I’ve done is to keep quite meticulous records of how much money has been coming in and how much money has been going out in the form of expenses. Keeping hold of all those bus tickets and purchase receipts is an arduous task that I’d rather not have to do but I’m rather do it as I go along instead of collating it all a week before my tax is due.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the best thing I’ve done is to save all the tax money in advance. Whenever an invoice is paid I automatically put a percentage of that away into a separate bank account and do not try not to think about it. I even, and this is where you’ll hate me, put in more than I need to — roughly I should be saving 25% but I very strictly save 35% which is admittedly a struggle but that extra money is a welcome bonus at the end of the tax year when I need new equipment or a holiday.

I also try my best not to think of an invoice’s value as being all mine. If the invoice is worth £1000 I do my damnedest to only think of it as £700 (or even less). Sitting there thinking ‘I’m getting paid £1000 next week so I can go and spend £1000‘ would only lead to a tragically short-lived business career.

Admittedly, it can be an absolute wrench to be paid a sizeable sum of money only to realise a significant portion of that simply is not mine. This way of thinking definitely has to be factored into the rates I charge to people which is another reason why I turn away requests for websites at rock bottom prices.

Summary

I was very happy with the course and I’d be very interested in similar courses like this that help with my business. I got to meet some very interesting people who weren’t web designers including make-up artists and TV directors and that made it even more interesting.

‘Saving Time and Money for Freelancers‘ was put on by Northwest Vision and Media and presented by Jonathan Ford.

A good reputation takes a long time to build and during this process I do not advocate bypassing other marketing methods; in fact, blogging and twittering can actually be a big help in building your credibility.

Reputation through reliability

As a freelancer, the biggest thing I can offer the web agencies I work for is peace of mind. They’ll often contact a freelancer when they’re understaffed and need a piece of work doing quickly. People who are efficient, friendly and professional will keep getting the work because agencies are terrified of handing over a job and not getting the results back.

The best way you can offer that peace of mind is to:

• Quote realistic timeframes and deliver on time
• Communicate your progress effectively
• Alert them to any issues you’ve found

That last one is important. You have to make sure if you run into anything e.g. an unsecure application, an inaccessible interface or a HTML email that looks pants in Outlook 2007, that you let your client know. They may be aware and not care but if they are not aware you may save them hassle later (whilst covering your own behind). If your client hands you a design featuring 9px red on black Comic Sans for the body copy — it’s your duty to let them know why in your professional opinion that it’s a bad idea.

The more reliable you are to perceived to be, the more your reputation swells; supplement your engorged rep that with a dash of networking and you’ll soon find not just more work but you’ll actually start to see the work come to you instead of you seeking it out.

Reputation via your client list/portfolio

Another way to build your reputation is to work for big name clients. If you find yourself freelancing at one of London’s most well known agencies don’t be surprised to find the other big agencies becoming a lot more interested in your services. The same is true for the actual pieces of work you do — if you find yourself working on a project for a large commercial client that will always stand out far more than doing work for a local ecommerce business.

Let’s put it this way, if you were interviewing candidates for a new web developer role and one of the applicants had a 2 year stint at digg or facebook on their CV I would think the vast majority of employers would be very impressed by that. Does it mean the applicant is any better as a programmer? Yes, it’s possible but it’s not a given.

Damage limitation

It’s very important to be seen not to be making a mess. If you work for a company who are continually delivering poor quality to clients you need to get out of there. This is not the same as abandoning ship on the way down — far from it. In fact, if you’re building your reputation up it’d be a good idea to stick around for a bit and gets yourself a reputation as a web firefighter rescuing cursed projects.

In my career to date I’ve worked for a couple of companies who were consistently botching projects and I left. Imagine how all those banking executives from banks like RBS are now fairing in the jobs market. Even if they did sterling work I wonder whether the mistakes of their superiors are now counting against them in interviews.

Last year, I went to FOWD as a full-time employee – I didn’t know anyone and although I came away inspired I felt I missed out a lot by not getting involved socially. This year however, I knew a few people courtesy of the Manchester-based meetup group, Northern Digitals. Having people I knew in close proximity to discuss the talks with did make a huge difference and definitely made the time more enjoyable.

Anyway, onto the talks. Some of the talks were great and some weren’t so great. I suppose this is obvious: inevitably, some of the talks will be good and some will be bad. I thought some of the talks gave me some real inspiration and some bored me to tears. I don’t wish to focus on the negative aspects so I’ll briefly get that bit over with.

I felt that some of the lowlights were:

• Presenters displaying their portfolios when they should have been making a point
• Presenters having exciting talks ruined by the fact that they were reading the presentation from a piece of paper
• Sponsors Microsoft, heavily labouring the point with their presentation about their new product Surface

Okay enough negativity, here’s my highlights:

• Talks that inspired me to go away and think about my personal design process
• Talks that gave me the fuel to tell clients no and how to explain why
• Talks that re-opened my eyes to the accessibility issues on the web
• The open bar at the after party

In particular, I thought the talks by Robin Christopherson, Mike Kus, and Mark Boulton were fantastic and justified the ticket price on their own.

Sponsorship

A quick point about sponsorship. FOWD is a sponsored event and allows its main sponsors a small presentation spot. These spots went to Microsoft and GoodBarry. Microsoft’s presentation was dreadful – the speaker was a good presenter but the topic was dull and frankly annoying however I felt that GoodBarry’s presentation was excellent – it was not a heavy handed sales job rather it really seemed to offer something entertaining. Any companies thinking of sponsoring an event in the future would do well to listen to/watch GoodBarry’s presentation for pointers.

The point of conferences

Overall, I felt 2008’s conference was ever so slightly better: Certainly this year there was no knockout talk whereas for me last year’s Designing the User Experience Curve by Andy Budd blew me away and actually changed my thought process but I don’t feel it fair to compare different years to each other – they were different and offered different things but they did have a few things in common:

• I came away from FOWD feeling inspired – just like I did last year.
• I have talked incessantly to my (long-suffering) girlfriend about every little detail of FOWD since returning home – just like I did last year.
• I left feeling part of a community and not like I was alone struggling to make the web better place

Therefore, I conclude that FOWD did its job and there’s a very good chance I’ll attend next year also. It’s also reconfirmed to me that conferences and in particular, presenters can be interesting so in that aspect, it has definitely encouraged me to go to further conferences.

Other reviews from the web

• How To Always Enjoy A Conference
• FOWD ‘09 – Let’s look forward, retrospectively

Did you attend this year’s FOWD conference? What were your thoughts?

It’s a strange scenario having a day or two off in the middle of the week but it very often happens. Usually I spend this down–time worrying that I’m being lazy or that I don’t have enough work on in spite of the fact that I do. The very fact of the matter is that with freelancing you have to set your prices to cater for the fact that half the time you aren’t doing billable work therefore I’ve catered for slow periods financially but my brain can’t quite appreciate that.

This month I’ve been working two days a week on site for a client and supplementing that time with a further day of work for other clients and probably a few hours of business housekeeping (blogging, client contact, accounting, etc). This workload is more than enough to ensure that I have decent month financially yet I haven’t managed to stop fidgeting on those days where I’m not had work in.

But from now on if I find myself with a day off, like today — I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to take a walk or watch a DVD — of course, I won’t be able to switch off completely but I won’t feel guilty if I only spend one–two hours doing web related work. Frankly, I think the time spent not working will actually make me feel a bit better when I actually do work and give my brain the freedom to think up new ideas.

Are you a freelancer? What do you do in the days you’ve not got work booked-in? How do you stave off the guilt that you should always be doing something productive with your time?

As icky as I feel writing such self-indulgent posts, the whole point of me entering these awards was the hope that I’d get nominated and be able to use said nomination as a way to get noticed (and taken seriously) by more potential clients so if I were to put on a cloak of false modesty I’d be depriving myself of some much needed marketing (and potential revenue.)

I’ve followed the Big Chip Awards for a few years with great interest but I’ve never attended the ceremony nor worked for an agency that has been nominated (whilst I worked there).

In fact, it wasn’t until meeting last year’s ‘Best Freelancer’ Matt Booth that I found out I could nominate myself. Prior to that I had presumed that the judging committee simply picked whomever they’d wanted/heard of hence why the same agencies kept winning year in year out.

My entry

Preparations for my entry began about a month ago, when I attended a Big Chip evening in Manchester at which the award ceremony’s organisers told us exactly how to enter and they detailed pitfalls of some entries and told everyone what we needed to have successful entries. They also provided a free buffet which was surprising good.

My entry consisted of the following:

1. a quote from a client
2. a string of hyperbole and sales pitch from me
3. a list of the clients I’ve worked for

I do believe the first and last items where the most important elements: the quote I received was from a very well respected person from a very well respected agency, in the region, who have won their fair share of Big Chip Awards and I have no doubt this swayed the judges’ decision in my favour.

The client list is something that I always trot out when approaching other new media agencies for work as the mere mention of the en vogue creative agency is often enough to win you a job on the spot in an industry where everyone is looking over their shoulder at the competition and constantly checking out who is working for who and which agency has won which account.

Of course this is all very political and truth be told I am firmly playing the game. I am very careful about the agencies I approach for work as picking the right ones not only pays the bills but helps out my career too.

Finally, I also think this website may have had something to do with my entry being successful. Every now and again I’ll strike it lucky with an article and get ten or more comments and I can’t help but hope this gives the impression that I have a strong voice in the industry; whether or not this is actually the case.

The competition

In the category of ‘Best Freelancer/Micro-Enterprise‘ there are two other nominees: last year’s Winner Matt Booth aka Flash Temple and Vanilla Storm… make no mistake the competition is fierce.

Here is the job posting in question.

In the past, I’ve written about the low wages people can realistically be expected to earn during their first foray into web professionalism, but I can’t help but believe £6.25 to be an insulting figure which will ultimately harm the employer as much as the employee. Whilst, I do appreciate that there is a recession going on I also think that copywriting/editing is worth more than that amount. UK minimum wage is currently set at £5.73 an hour so this job pays a mere 52p more than manual labour.

Ultimately, I think the employer is operating under a false economy. It looks as though they have presumed they cannot afford more than this wage but I think this low wage will cost them more in the long term because they will have to:

• Use the below par work of a £6.25 per hour member of staff, or
• Go through this recruitment process again in three months time when the person they’ve hired turns out to be brilliant but leaves for a better paid job

There’s also the likelihood that they’ll miss out on good quality applicants who are put off by the low wage or they may sift through a multitude of applications from people who think the low wage means that their low skill quota will be sufficient for them to get the job.

In defence of the employer

At least this company are actually advertising their rates of pay for this they can be commended – for one, it has allowed for this debate to start. Sadly, many companies in web world neglect to put a salary on their job adverts and this invariably means the salary is low.

Whoever gets this job may make little money but, potentially, could gain a raft of experience which could effectively kickstart their writing career.

Summary

So what do you think? Is this wage too low or does the opportunity it represents more than make up for the low wage?

Cart45 was built (in theory) to rival Actinic – as an easy to use ecommerce platform that would be as easy to install and operate for a online shopkeeper as WordPress is for a blogger.

The product was built, it had some great features but it didn’t sell like hotcakes… so why not?

1: A lack of features

If you’ve read Getting Real, you’ll know it’s good to launch a product with fewer features than your competition, but sadly our web app was lacking in some really important areas – mostly payment gateway integration. Launching with only Protx/Google Checkout was a big problem and, although I may be wrong, I think it made a lot of people not want to buy an online store that couldn’t process payments with their bank and/or Paypal.

I have to take a share of the blame here; my lack of API integration skills at the time meant that it took a long time to get those APIs working and with no budget for extra developers – that played havoc with the schedule.

2: A lack of time

I wrote Cart45 on my own, in its entirety, within 7 months, with around 2 months spent working on other projects, that is a long time but for a one man development team it wasn’t long enough. For a piece of software where the target market involves people downloading and installing the product upon countless different server setups – there simply wasn’t enough time to cover the test base and get everything right.

By the time the product was finished, we had just about run of time (I suspect, we’d run out of budget too but that was not my area so I can’t confirm that.) Consequently, there was no steam left to power on with the most important aspect of the launch – sales. There wasn’t even time to launch a proper demo version of the site and populate it with products/content.

3: A lack of time management

More important than the aforementioned lack of time was a lack of a proper time/project management. Having never written a full web app before I could only estimate the time it would take. We also lacked a definitive feature set – and as such, time overran whenever someone came up with a new feature or a new way of doing things. Failing to document, at the start, the exact requirements and define a schedule (that couldn’t be interrupted by other projects) was a major flaw in the plan.

4: A lack of budget and resources

As much as I like to work alone, getting things done efficiently without having to worry about fixing other people’s errant code – I can struggle at times. During development there were times where I had to do things I wasn’t 100% confident with: Protx’s API was one such thing but there wasn’t anyone else about I could outsource to and so it took longer and wasn’t done as well.

Now that I work for myself, I always factor into project quotations the cost and time of a subcontractor to perform specialist tasks.

5: A lack of interest from the world

My boss took on the task of promoting the app and did a fantastic job driving traffic to the sales site but after a week or so that traffic trailed off quite sharply and, sadly, never picked up again.

The people we contacted to try and get buzz weren’t overly interested and didn’t share our enthusiasm. Once again, this wasn’t my role so I can’t really state how well oiled our PR machine was but it’s clear that we didn’t gain the necessary trust and therefore exposure in blogs, trade magazines that would be needed to sell to hundreds of people which would have made the venture profitable.

The fact that there was very little marketing budget, meant that sustaining a promotional campaign without paying for advertising* wasn’t possible. I’m not saying that paying for advertising is the only way to market your product – you can do it in other ways but, whether you pay for marketing with your time and effort or with bank notes – it’s never free.

* Disclaimer: We did take out some banner space on some targeted websites which did bring in some good traffic.

Summary

I think a lot of people, myself included, think that creating a web app is an easy option. You can code it for free then post a link to it on twitter and suddenly you’ll sell thousands – but it doesn’t work like that. Some web developers with huge blog subscribers can work on an app/ebook and rely upon those followers to spread the word and keep marketing costs down but most people can’t do that.

Also, the success of a web app does not depend solely upon the greatest and/or uniqueness of the idea. It’s how well you apply that idea along with hard work and a little bit of luck that will make it successful.

I hope this has been good a good read and I hope it encourages some wannabe web app developers out there to perform a little bit more professionally through the process of conceiving and launching a new business.

One dream: one column

When I first launched this redesign and the blog theme Dylan, I had this overwhelming dream of the one column blog post with large images (460px wide) accompanying each post. At 9am today that dream was pronounced dead.

Two weeks ago Brett Shegogue, emailed me with this question:

…I didn’t have a problem reading [your site], but I did notice that most of your paragraphs span the entire width of you [sic] page. A lot of people have wrote that this is bad typography/design.…

Brett seemed to be asking – why when so many typographers tell us that the ideal measure is around 60 characters was I ignoring that rule so blatantly?

After much deliberation and denial I decided I’d entertain the idea that I had made a bad typography choice so I sat down and tried to read one of my articles and sadly, I found it a little more difficult to read than it should have been. So thanks to Brett’s intervention I started to think about realigning the article pages to make them more readable.

One sidebar to rule them all

I think that a lot of blog designers are lazy by not bothering to differentiate between different types of pages on a blog – not every page needs to have a complete blog roll for instance. I’ve always tried on this site to create a format that matches the content of each page so the home page differs from the portfolio and the article archives differ from the search results – they are different content with different goals – therefore they need a different design approach. I thought the one column blog post was a solution to that problem but it turns out it wasn’t… not in this case.

When I designed the site, over a year ago, I wanted lots of images – hence the name ‘image is everything’ but, in practice, it’s very difficult to come up with a unique image that represents each article with zero budget and zero photographic talent. Furthermore, those secondary actions like the add to facebook/digg/etc links, related articles and subscribe links were hidden below the article and I doubt many people found them – so by putting them up a little nearer the top hopefully they’ll see a wee bit more action.

Issues

There are some articles that do have 460px images on them and with this realign they aren’t looking too hot. As of yet I haven’t thought of a reliable way to remedy that but I’m working on it.

Readers of this blog will know I’m partial to beating myself up over mistakes I’ve made but I’ll always try and take the positive out of the error and learn from it. You may also know I like to be as open as possible about how much things cost, hence me writing ‘How much does it cost to be a freelance web developer?‘; this burglary started out as a major inconvenience but has slowly escalated into a major financial loss.

Values of good stolen

The thieves, clearly Apple fan boys at heart, made off with an iMac, a macbook, a 5th Generation 80Gb iPod and an old Sony Ericsson W850i. This puts the cost of the stolen items at around £2200 give or take.

The good news

Thankfully the thieves had no interest in my Time Machine powered external hard drive so thankfully when I purchased a replacement iMac I was able to backup all my data to the new machine – the only things I lost were 3-4 days worth of MySQL data (not much) and the serial number for a piece of software.

I did however have to take time off from my schedule to meet Loss Adjustors, phone insurance companies, tear my hair out and curse the world. All in all,� I lost around five days of production spread over two projects. Luckily none of my contracts included lateness penalty clauses and both my clients were very understanding of the situation.

The thieves also seemed to miss a lot of items including: credit cards, cash, jewellery and that was a massive relief. Quite frankly, these guys must have been wearing clappers – in and out in in less than a minute, had they took time to look around we could have been looking at losing everything we owned. Take away the Apple goods and most of our electrical items are pretty old and/or second-hand. They left our old school CRT television I suspect because it was a: too big/heavy and b: has no market value whatsoever. They even perused our stereo and decided it wasn’t worth the bother to steal it.

The bad news

Then came the bad news, my home contents insurers, or more accurately the third party loss adjustors, were turning the screws and were attempting to get out of the insurance for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a technicality on the policy triggered a massive £1,500 excess then the final blow came:� it turns out if you have a home office, you need separate business insurance – regardless of whether your computers are used for personal usage as well as business usage – there’s a chance they’re not covered. The combination of the huge excess and the computers being removed from the claim took the value of the claim down to zero.

Currently we’re disputing the ruling. Who knows perhaps we’ll win and get some money back but at this stage who knows how it will go.

Damage limitation

Thankfully, this wasn’t as disastrous as it could have been. It sounds ridiculous but I was quite grateful that the burglars left the house in a relatively undisturbed state – they took the computers and left practically no mess (except the broken window). I’ve also been fastidiously saving a portion of my earnings since going freelance in case of such a rainy day therefore, buying a replacement iMac has set me back, left me out of pocket but fortunately, not destitute.

I’ve had my iMac fail before and not had Time Machine setup properly which resulted in me losing months of important data so I’d learnt my lessons with backups and upon seeing that the thieves left the backup drive made me weep with joy. Had I lost that data I would have been up shit creek – make no mistake.

Summary

Hopefully, this post doesn’t come across as a plea for sympathy; I got burgled: I should have put better security on my home; I should have realised that business insurance was needed for anything I use to work with regardless of its personal use; I should have hidden all expensive items away when I left my home unattended for the night; and I should have read and re-read my insurance policy and policy booklet from cover to cover and eliminated any potential for the insurers to wriggle out of paying up.

Much as I love to learn from my mistakes, this was a truly expensive one I could have done without but hopefully, someone reading this today will go and reread their insurance policy or investigate buisness insurance for their home office and I’ll have saved someone from the trouble I’ve been through.

1: Keeping out of date records

If you sit in amongst a group of web developers, in a web agency for a day, you’ll undoubtedly bear witness to at least one phone call from a recruitment consultant. The majority of the time the consultant will have got their name/details from a CV several years old. I get calls/emails like this at least once a fortnight and often the person calling me has a CV that is from my graduate days – e.g. three to four years old and horrifically out of date.

So what’s the problem? Their data’s a little out of date; so what? The problem is that these people are contacting me because they have a job and are panicking and they can’t find a suitable candidate. In reality, they should be contacting prospective candidates every three to six months to check up on them regardless of whether there is a job just to get their latest CV, skills, wants/needs etc.

2: Selling candidates the world then never getting back in touch

The amount of times, I’ve been told I’m perfect for a role by the recruitment consultant only to never hear anything back. Honestly, I’m convinced these guys edit my CV and put buzzwords in there to make it sound better and in doing so remove the bits that appeal to employers. They must either butcher my CV or never send it off in the first place. That sounds very arrogant, like ‘how could someone not offer me an interview if they’ve seen my CV‘ sort of attitude but as long as the job is targeted at my skills, that is often the case.

Having spoken to recruitment consultants a lot in the past three and half years, you’d think I might have scored at least an interview via one of them? I’ve come close only once when a recruitment consultant passed my name on to a client after I’d already taken a job. They must’ve mistakenly sent on my CV without editing it first.

3: Trying to get candidates to interviews at too short notice

When I was working full-time, and looking for a change, I needed at least a couple of days notice before an interview. It isn’t always easy lying to your boss (and getting away with it) to get time off for interviews, so if I’m told I have to be there tomorrow morning then I often can’t make that and if there’s no leeway then that’s probably not the right job for me.

4: Offering unrelated jobs

The other issue, is a clear lack of understanding of what is involved in web development. My CV does not mention .NET, C++ or anything other than PHP so I don’t want to be bombarded with emails and phonecalls for jobs outside of my skillset and/or on the other side of the country. A quick read of this blog will show you what my skills are and what kind of work I’m looking for. How hard would it be to read this blog (and others) and click on the names of some of the commenters. If they did that they’d find some very good people.

5: Asking me to do your job for you

I will happily pass on details of friends or colleagues if I can’t do a job, but not to a recruitment consultant because I know I won’t be getting any of their commission if I do. When I get emails through from these guys there always seems to be ‘let us know if any of your friends are interested’ but there’s never a statement that says we’ll pay £xxx for each recommendation. Therefore, there is no incentive whatsoever for me to refer people. To be honest, I can probably guess who the company is via the job profile and apply directly anyway.

Summary

There are undoubtedly good people out there working as IT headhunters who are good at their job. Perhaps they’re all in London, New York or California and not working in Manchester. I’ve definitely heard of recruiters getting involved in events like PHPNW conference in an unobstrusive way thus building up contacts and making friends. That’s definitely the way forward.

Even in this financial climate, there are still jobs going and people looking for work and we need go-betweens because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do your job and find a new one at the same time. Recruitment consultants need to step up their game and get involved with the community, otherwise job boards will completely replace them and no-one will mourn the loss.