My job would obviously be designing the sites that get sold onto the clients.  When the initial enquiry came in we had a chat over the telephone and I asked how much he was currently paying per site, he said “£400″, to which I said that I would be considerably more and would he still like the meeting, he said ‘yes’ so I went and had a face to face chat with him.

Without going into too much detail, as I truly do not believe this is the clients fault, I’m just seeing an increase in this across the board, the client in question was thankfully a web savvy client who knew the difference between a table based and div based website, albeit all of his websites contained tables used in the wrong context but that’s by the by for the moment, he was very easy to chat with regarding the best solution for his site(s). I certainly came up with an excellent solution to his problem that would provide him with an superb selling point to his customers and also considerate of him making a nice profit on each site too, solutions which no other web designer had suggested to him.

Back to the office, write the proposal, send it. Wait.

Wait some more. Phone rings. It was the client calling to let me know I was too expensive and that if I could negotiate down on price..

Somewhere in the region of £400, like we’re currently paying…

He would be able to use me. I should point out here, I have the utmost respect for clients who have the common courtesy to call/email to say “Thank you but we won’t be using you for x,y,z reasons” – as normally, as we all know, a proposal gets sent with out so much as a “Thank you” to be had, let alone a response if you haven’t quoted what they thought you should.

The price point however, is of course an issue. After posting to Twitter I realised there’s a small minority of people “making websites” who just don’t understand pricing on the web, this small group don’t realise how much harm they are causing our industry.

I had quite a few messages sent to me on Twitter, including:

forward this to @**** he would knock out a website for that price.. plus hes good.

and

pass that site to me … i will look on it ..

And I sent back the same response to both, saying they are not understanding my point. If I wanted to I could “knock out” a website for £400, I could “knock out” a website for £10, unless I’m needing to licence something, my only outgoing cost is my time, therefore anyone could do a website for any cost, but there’s a reason we don’t and this is the big black hole many people are just not grasping. What we do isn’t easy folks, we take it for granted because we know it inside out and this is our professions but for many people, turning on a computer is about as far as they go, let alone all the many things we have to do to produce a site – just like any other service industry (solicitors, physiotherapists etc. etc) , we have specialist knowledge of our sector but a small minority are completely undervaluing that knowledge.

It’s all about integrity, integrity for what you do, integrity to the web community. By “knocking out” websites the care and attention to detail ultimately must suffer and in turn, give web designers a bad name as inevitably, the client is going to come into problems later down the line and turn to someone for help, and then expect that person to be super cheap too.

It’s about value for the client, how much is that website worth to them? Not a lot if someone down the road will produce it for £400.

Apple are a great example of brand and price point awareness, the products are high end, they do their jobs spectacularly and the price points are the same across the board, you won’t find Apple stores with differentiating prices and they never have a sale. They have a product they know consumers want so they have no need to drop the pricing substantially – people will still buy.

As web designers, we are holding the largest marketing portal in the palm of our hands and yet people still don’t understand it’s value.

It’s up to the designer/coder if they want to accept £400 for that job.Some people don’t have the luxury of turning down work – a response to my tweet

and

i got your point …i am saying that send that project to me … send that client mail to me …

No one has the luxury of turning down work – even web designers who are busy and booked up obviously still need a stream of enquiries to enable us to carry on into the future.

Put it this way, if the Yellow Pages, (the traditional printed book) 10 years ago said to everyone “You can have a full page colour advert for £10 per year” can you imagine how big the book would be? They didn’t, because this would devalue their product. This is a very basic way of me trying to get across what some web designers are doing to our industry, only it’s worse because it’s starting to filter through to clients who we then have to work with.

Let me go back to a quote from above regarding Apple:

They have a product they know consumers want so they have no need to drop the pricing substantially – people will still buy.

We have a product consumers want, we have the ability to pretty much set the pricing based on the value to the client however, it needs to be done by every single web designer. If the price point was, for arguments sake £1000 + to build a basic site, clients would get to know this and everyone would gradually see budgets increase to make allowances for this, yes including you Mister “I will produce a site for £400″.

There’s so much more to this argument than I can even get into now however, let me just check, you want me to plan, project manage, design, develop, jQuery, cross browser test, validate, seo and respond to the countless emails you are bound to send me, all minutes within you sending them, for £400?

Sorry, but I’d pay £400 to keep my integrity.

We first installed Snow Leopard on my other half’s Black Macbook (2GB), it took about an hour in total and upon returning to the laptop, it had restarted itself and was sitting on the home screen with the new Snow Leopard wallpaper. Great until we tried clicking on something, anything. The whole lot jammed up, we had the spinning beach ball of death and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get into any applications, no menus, nothing. Reading the few resources available to people who have run into trouble with Snow Leopard, it seemed everyone else could at least get into Disk Utility, Verify the disk and then everything was working hunky-dory. Not with us – sods law.

So, after forcing a restart I held down “C” while the Macbook was restarting forcing it to boot from the disc instead, we went through another hour of Snow Leopard installation and kept an eye on it throughout, not that a slightly moving blue bar was anything to keep an eye on but it made us feel a whole lot better!

Installation complete, restart – same problem. Spinning wheel of death.

Simply because I’d run out of ideas and the lack of anyone else having the same problem on the Apple Forums, we left the beach ball spinning, for about 25 minutes, when eventually it popped up saying there was a font conflict problem, would we like to delete or replace (some conflict involving Helvetica Neue) and once these had been deleted, the whole system was great, working snappier and with 10GB of free hard drive space.

Installation on my iMac – (3GB, 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo) went smoothly without any hiccups at all. I’ve tested a lot of my apps, Photoshop CS3 and CS4 are working without any problems at all, all my additional Plugins seem to be working as they should in Photoshop CS3. I haven’t used it enough in my day to day running of You Know Who yet to know 100% if there are no problems, but on the surface, it seems fine. The only apps I’ve had to resolve straight away are 1Password, which automatically prompted me to switch to their 3.0 beta and Dropbox needed an upgrade too – (http://bit.ly/12IQgy).

We purchased the family pack, so for £19.50 per computer, I’m really pleased with the results and it has made a noticeable difference to the speed of both the iMac and the Macbook.

Let’s get one thing straight, we might be creative, artistic, any other word that fits your persona but we are in a service industry. However we dress it up, we are a service industry. I feel like we, as designers must be doing a bad job of branding ourselves as our clients don’t seem to agree.

I’ll put my rant into context, our freezer broke down a couple of months back, we called a specialist who came round to our house, pulled out our freezer and took a look at the back and promptly told us it was unrepairable, charged us £45 call out fee and promptly went on his way 5 minutes later. This is how I expected this to work, I was calling this guy out from doing other paid jobs, to come and look at my freezer and use his skills, that I don’t have, to tell me whether I need to buy a new one or not.

I have had two incidents crop up in the past month, both have been from clients who think they can just not pay their invoice. Can I have a refund on the time I spent on your project please, then you can have a refund.

The first has just decided it’s “ok” to ask for a deposit refund because “they” don’t want the website anymore. The second, a logo design where the client said they had a “great idea” of what they wanted, that turned out when they saw it in the flesh, they didn’t like. I had banked on completing it in the allotted time but then couldn’t allocate anymore time to them due to the other clients that week,  so they went elsewhere, but decided that because I didn’t complete the final design, it means I shouldn’t be paid for the time I did spend on their project.

Why is this? How has this crept into our industry and why, when it’s accepted in other service industries, is it so hard for our clients to accept our time is just as valuable? In-fact, we aren’t as bad as solicitors, who I’ve been in regular contact with about one of the above projects this week (I will post about this at a later date), who charge not only by the hour for their time, but also per email/letter read and for time spent on the telephone.

How can we hammer this point home? It’s our time, and time spent working on projects that they ask us to do, is time that we can’t spend on another project and our invoices should always reflect this. It’s that simple, but what are we doing wrong as an industry that means our clients are thinking differently?

Let’s, please, change this.

I get the worksheet back and they do have a great idea of what they are looking for, a site identical in functionality to a well known CBBC website. They have thought about colours, brand awareness, the actual users of the website, everything. It was one of the most detailed design briefs I had seen in a long time. I skip to the part where I always ask about budget, curious as to how much they have put aside considering all other aspects of the site have been well thought through, only to see…

Ballpark around £500

My reaction is always split down the middle when I see ridiculous web budgets. I normally start off annoyed and then come round to the fact that it’s just down to the client being misguided by someone or something or having no knowledge of the web industry whatsoever. This is normally when I respond with a very diplomatic email and this one was no different, here’s an outline of what I said.

Thank you for the prompt reply with the Website Worksheet. I have had a good read through and I totally understand what you are looking to achieve.

However, the budget you have set for the site is unfortunately not enough to build a site of this calibre. I do understand it’s hard when you are not in the field to know how to gauge a budget correctly, it’s my job to try and give a little insight into budgets and why, in this particular case, you will struggle.

The xxxxxxx website you are comparing your new site to, is large. I know you will be starting off small and building up to a large website, but the infrastructure still needs to be in place to enable you to add news items and video every day and gradually build up the content.

I then went on to explain the process of web design in brief, how we start off on paper or wire framing, then turn our hand to design then eventually the development side. How we have to inevitably go back and forth on the design until sign off and then deal with stumbling blocks with cross browser compatibility and so on.

I estimated the site would take 4 weeks solid work with 2 people working on the site. I then explained the following:

£500 over 4 weeks divided by 2 people works out at £1.56 per hour – I’m not showing you those sums to be patronising at all, please don’t think that, but I’m just merely trying to point out why it would have to be increased considerably before we could look to producing the site for you.

I don’t need to go any further into details, the client can work out for themselves that £1.56 an hour is below minimum wage and that our profession is highly skilled, therefore it would take a lot more than £1.56 to even get us to our desks.

I then signed off the email with the following:

I know you said £500 as a ballpark, I’m just trying to give you an idea of what a professional web design firm would charge you to get the standard that I know you want to achieve.

Inevitably, I never hear from the clients again, or if I do, it’s for them to say they “don’t have the budget” to use me. I still feel like it’s my job to try and explain why I wouldn’t be able to help them rather than just sounding cocky or not responding at all. I feel like the only way we can stop this from happening is to break down exactly why their budget is insufficient rather than leaving them in the dark about it – for the sake of the client and the next designer they approach.

NB. I have just received a very appreciative email from the client in question thanking me for my helpful breakdown and that explaining to them in basic terms was exactly what they needed. They have been able to increase the budget to a reasonable amount, possibly still not enough however it’s a good step in the right direction.

A brief history, I was hired to create a website back in October, the project bounced back and forth between me, the agency (they’re not a digital agency in the sense we all refer to it, but for arguments sake we’ll call them an agency) and the client, largely due to the fact the client withheld information for weeks on end or simply didn’t provide it at all, even re-designed their own website in publisher at one stage only to revert to a hybrid of our design and theirs at a later date. Say no more.

So fast forward to launch day, a Friday at the end of March (I had completed a further 4 e-commerce sites in the time it took to complete this one!) , the site is completed, against all odds, they had had the final invoice and they were aware of my terms and conditions;

“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred”

My clients pay 25% of the total project at the start and the remainder 75% is paid upon completion prior to launch. I have done this for the past 3 years due to an incident a couple of years before when a client locked me out of the server, changed the passwords and ran off with a brand new website. I have never had a client complain or question this clause before – possibly because it’s common sense, you wouldn’t walk out of a car showroom with a brand new car without paying for it, why is this any different? Milestone payments are not a new thing, in fact I will probably change them to smaller percentages more often to defer that risk even more but, enforcing them before site launch is less common and something I want to campaign to be the “norm” in web design.

Again, without going into too much detail, on launch day I had the agency demanding the site to be put live. I referred back to the T&C’s and explained that I had made people aware of this prior to launch day and that under no circumstances would I put the site live prior to the balance of the site getting paid, that it was nothing personal and something I do with all my clients. To this I received a very icy response from the agency and I asked that they send me an email with how they want to proceed. I go out for the evening, come back and grow suspicious that I had heard no more communication, I check the site in question only to find it live. Not only live but they had already changed the FTP passwords for the site. so that I was locked out.

N.B. We had been dev’ing on the agency server towards the end to test all the SSL encryption and the payment gateways properly, this is where some people would argue the files had already been transferred and as such, payment should have been due the minute we placed the files on the clients server, the way I was thinking – there was still a holding page up so, until the final tweaks were done and the index file uploaded, it wasn’t live or completed. In actual fact looking back now and considering what happened, I think you would be right that the minute the files were on the clients server would have been the right time to at least collect a milestone payment. Live and learn…

The agency putting the site live really got to me, a lot, however I was not about to let it slide and nor was I about to do anything in anger. I calmly thought about what my choices were and decided the only thing I could do would be to remove the MySQL database that was feeding the site. So that’s what I did, in turn I found out what the new password to the FTP was and placed the holding page back up so that it didn’t look unprofessional to any visitors and shut down for the evening..well by this time it was 3am.

The following morning, Saturday, I awake to a couple of strongly worded emails from the agency.  I re-explained that these were my terms and conditions, that my contract was with the agency and that I expected my terms and conditions to be adhered to. They were aware of the circumstances but thought for whatever reason intentionally or unintentionally,  they didn’t apply to them. Here is the explanation I sent to the agency to explain exactly why I use this clause in my contract:

This is how I see it, and why my T&C’s are laid out this way:
“The remainder of the balance is paid upon completion of the project prior to any files being transferred.”

The reason for this is so that;

a) the developers/designers are paid for the work done on the project prior to any files being transferred because it’s too easy for clients to do what (agency) did last night and lock people out of the server once they’ve got the files then disappear, OR define their own payment terms, as they have no incentive to pay on time once they are in possession of a live site.

b) You tend to have a transition period where if the client has 2 weeks to pay or a month they think any further significant changes are included in the website price, I’ve seen it happen years back and you loose hundreds of pounds just trying to keep them happy to ensure you get your money.

This is the reason the industry turned to milestone payments, ie. where the bulk of the money or all of the money is transferred before the site goes live. This protects the designer/developer and it’s also fair, you get paid, the client gets their site.

I just don’t see what the problem is with paying for the project, and the fact there has been so much uproar about it makes me suspicious. That’s been in my terms and conditions for 3 years and this is the first time I’ve ever had a problem with it?

I can’t help but feel the time spent going behind my back and putting the site live would have been better spent doing a BACS or Paypal Transfer of the balance so it could be put live through the correct channels?

Once I am paid what I am owed, the site will be restored.

Further emails followed, and I’m sure you can guess the tone. I have never felt bad for asking clients for payment prior to the site going live, the way I see it is business has to be a two way transaction, the client is getting a brand new site, you are getting paid for the work you have done. It really does seem simple.

My reason for highlighting what happened to me is that the agency’s defense was that other web designers they had worked with did not have these types of terms and conditions, to me, other peoples terms and conditions are irrelevant and this is the way I’ve done business for 3 years without any problem whatsoever.

I would like us, as a web design community, to make something that is common sense – concrete in our workflow. I do not think any website should be put live without prior payment of some kind, and I know I’m not alone or the only one working like this. Whether you choose to do milestone payments whereby a percentage is paid upon launch (ensuring it’s a majority percentage) with say 5% balance left over as a fixing fee for any bugs or errors they might find. Or whether you take the stance that if a website is live, the client is happy with it, therefore it is signed off and the full balance is due. You might choose to take a different point of view if the site is being hosted on your own server, but on external servers it really is too easy to have a fight on your hands – and a fight that takes up yet more valuable working time and becomes ridiculously unproductive, trust me.

If you do not already take some form of payment prior to launching a site, no matter how difficult you think it might be, I urge you to re-think as I have never lost business due to it. While you are in posession of your hard work and while the client wants posession of their new website, the ball is in your court.

I strongly believe that credit terms should not apply to completed websites unless it’s exceptional circumstances and would be interested to hear your views or how you currently deal with these issues.

Note: As of Monday, I have now been paid for the site and the site is live.

But what can we take away as adults from our school life that we’ve forgotten about? Plenty.

1. 1. We prepared the night before. Whether it was as simple as putting our pencil case in our bag or making sure we had the books we needed for the next day. We negated that tiny element of stress that can now creep up on us as adults when we find we’ve lost our favourite pen or iPhone headphones as we are walking out the door to work.
2. 2. We arrived to work at a clean and tidy desk each morning. I am really bad at this, and I bet I’m not the only one. At school we were forced to clear down everyday, remove everything off our desk and start a fresh the next day. I get to my home office desk in the morning to find at least a coffee cup and random pens, paper and bank cards strewn across my desk, which I envariably end up tidying up each morning, why didn’t I just do that when I finished yesterday?
3. 3. We took regular breaks. Ding ding -end of morning session, nip outside for some fresh air and come back in again 20 minutes later (after a packet of crisps) feeling refreshed and ready to start your next lesson. Remember that feeling after morning break? As adults, especially adults that work infront of screens all day, remember to take a break, and get some “Skips” or “Wotsits” in just to be nostalgic.
4. 4. We had a schedule we had to stick to. Double French. Possibly many peoples nightmare, my personal favourite oh oui- by the by…we had an hour and 15 minutes for double lessons, and looking back now, it’s amazing how much we got done by just focusing on one task. Section your day into smaller tasks if you’re the type of person who gets easily distracted working on one large one.
5. 5. We took an hour for lunch. Working from home, I rarely take an hour for lunch, I tend to grab a sandwich and work straight through sitting at my desk. I need to go back to taking an hour for lunch, walking the dog and coming back in ready to start work for the afternoon, and so do you if you don’t already!
6. 6. We read books. Remember in English Literature when you had a whole hour to read a book? Ok so it might have been “Animal Farm” and possibly not your choice of reading material nowadays, but how often can you say you took an hour out just to read? I know I don’t do it enough.
7. 7. We were able to explore ideas without feeling stupid. Remember doing a brainstorming session at school? Envariably all sorts of weird and wacky ideas would come out, often genius ideas, because no one was afraid of looking stupid. We were young, therefore didn’t know any of the answers we now think we know and threw caution to the wind.
8. 8. We looked forward to 3.30pm. How quickly 3.30 can now come around in the adult working world, I feel somedays I can wake up, blink and it’s that time. Whenever you get to 3.30pm remember just how much you would have done in one day had you been at school, and then take a look at what you’ve achieved that day, somedays it can be a real eye opener and a boot up the bum to get going again.
9. 9. We never wanted to do homework at weekends – and quite right too, I always thought weekends were sacred, our time to relax from the school week however, too scared to have not done my homework I always ended up doing it on a Sunday night while my parents watched “Heartbeat”.  As an adult, I now try to limit my working at the weekend, for the same reason. If you have to work at the weekend, make sure you schedule something nice to do that gets you away from the screen to balance it up a bit.
10. 10. You hated Monday mornings. Well…..I guess some things never change.

I think a lot of it is to do with mindset for the client. I’m going to use a really girly example here, forgive me but I hope you’ll see where I’m heading. When I book to have my nails done once a month (£25.00) I think of the service and end product I am getting – which are gel nails that last and look beautiful all month, I bet loads of you men notice females in meetings with chewed nails, chipped polish etc., which is more than worth £25 (in my opinion, anyway!). I don’t think of the beauticians time to complete that service, if I thought of it like that I might start being cynical that £20.00 per hour (£5 for materials) is a lot for an hourly rate for that service.

I think in 2009 we are going to be much better placing our services as products as much as possible,  sell the end product to the client rather than telling them how many hours it’s going to take to complete and what that will cost them in your hourly rate. A more techie example, if you say to a client “Hey, I can install that CMS system, fully rebrand it, it’s going to enable you to update your website as much as you want without the need for additional charges from us for maintenance, it’s going to cost £450.00 to complete” – you’ve sold them an idea, a solution and a money saver all in one. Against saying to them, “Installation will take me 10 hours at £45.00 per hour” for example. This suddenly becomes a questionable idea, I’m sure amongst other things, they will question whether it will really take you that amount of time to complete the project, suddenly you’ve put doubt in the clients head and the project has gone, or at least been put on the backburner.

Clients are of course a great breed who want to add to their projects as they go along, so I can hear you saying as you read this “but if we fix our prices and then the client wants extras, we’re screwed”. Wrong. If you have a plumber round to fix your tap and he’s quoted you for these works, then you decide you want your shower mended, you expect to pay more. Clients should be no different and we should treat our industry no differently. I think as long as we are upfront, honest and polite, of course you can ask for more money when they are asking you to complete more work. It seems such a simple solution but one that fills many people with fear for some reason.

The other fear with fixed pricing is if something takes you longer than anticipated. I’d suggest sitting down at the proposal point and thinking of the maximum time it’s going to take you to complete the project, place a limited amount of revision sets that come part and parcel with the project and then specify a price for extra revision sets should they need them. With no hourly rates to be seen. By all means use your hourly rate as a guide for pricing though but I would refrain from writing it on the proposal itself. The following example would be for a logo design project for a client, and this is how I always lay out my proposals – you tend to find you can cater for everyones budget a little better then.

A list of what I’m going to do:
1. Corporate Identity Development

Optional Extras
2. Stationery Design
3. Extra Revision Sets

1. Corporate Identity Development. Use this paragraph to explain exactly what you are going to do and how it benefits the client, followed by how many revisions you are including in this price.
PRICE

Optional Extras:

Stationery Design. Another paragraph to explain what’s included in this package price.
PRICE

Extra Revision Sets. Another paragraph to explain what consitutes one of your revision sets.
PRICE

Place tick boxes next to the optional extras and let the client work out how much their budget can stretch to. By doing your proposals this way you will find your pricing becomes a lot more accessible to clients. They can see the benefit of what you are proposing and can clearly see the cost involved.

Daily rates would also be a great way forward, I personally would prefer this method, however there are times when you are going to need a solution for smaller projects, and that’s where I’d suggest, for 2009, we’re all going to be much better off placing our services as products as much as possible.

I have read a few articles online about how high street retailers are being hit badly however, online sales are up in comparison to last year. Does this mean for web designers the credit crunch is going to gently pass us by? I fear not.

From my experience with my clients over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen some interesting patterns emerge, aside from them changing banks and their cheques being written on mostly one banks chequebooks.

They are definitely taking longer to pay, without a doubt. A nightmare when trying to keep hold of cash flow on a business. There is also a hesitancy around new projects, not that they’re all holding back but it is taking them longer to get their wheels in motion. When they do decide they want to go ahead, they are looking for cost cutting measures, especially with e-commerce, and opting for a lot of Paypal driven sites with the option to upgrade to Worldpay and the like at a later date.

One client asked for their FTP details so they could get their little sisters friend to make them a website – a terrible shame after nailing their new branding last year it is now a great advert for Comic Sans. No matter what I said to this client or however much I tried to educate her, cost was the driving issue. I’m lucky in that the main bulk of my clients are very loyal and are staying put but others just starting out might find this a cause for concern.

So what do we do? We always know there’s someone who will be cheaper than us out there, that’s not a new problem but should we loose a client to someone, we can’t afford to just let that client go, they need to be replaced. Dropping your rates to ridiculously low, and filling your days with double the amount of clients than normal, not only makes you stressed for less or the same money, undoubtedly the standard of your work will drop.

How do we go about replacing clients or gaining new ones at a time when people are at their most cautious? Does being a studio with premises give you an advantage over someone who works from home? Being a freelancer at this point could give you an advantage over a studio as you have fewer overheads, but studios have the physical presence which acts as a 24/7 billboard advert to draw in new clients. Who knows, only our clients can make those decisions. In my area, traditional local newspaper advertising has rock bottomed and you can now pick up a quarter page advert for about £30 per addition – I’m guessing others must be the same, which means this could be an affordable option for some people.

How are you finding the credit crunch? Some people are reporting being busier than ever while others are finding things slowing down a little. Do you have any plans in place or are you taking each day as it comes? I’d love to hear your thoughts to try and gain a bigger picture of how the web world is feeling right now…

I’m always interested to hear other web designers work flow processes and the tools that help them along the way. I had the pleasure of meeting a few of my Twitter friends at FOWA last week and it’s sometimes inspiring to hear alternative methods or ways of approaching work that you may not have thought of before. For instance, Andy Clarke who likes to ring me up for random chats sometimes, has told me that he uses Keynote for wire framing websites. A use perhaps unthought of by the masses.

So I thought I’d run you through my work flow process and what tools I use along the way. I’d certainly be interested to hear other peoples too.

At the very start of a project when an enquiry comes in I always gather all the information I can about the new project, whether this be by email (Apple Mail App) or by telephone, I want to get the most specific information I can and jot it down. I always provide a ballpark figure on the project first, before any formal proposals are drawn up, just a simple email stating roughly how much the project, based on the brief so far, will cost and what is included in that cost (such as hosting, cms integration, the cms itself). This is something I’ve only been doing the past couple of years but ultimately can save you many wasted hours on long formal proposals just to be told at the end of it “Right, well my budget was around £200 for the whole site” – which can be quite common.

Once I’ve sussed out that the ballpark figure is ok – I then draw up a proposal template that I have saved in Adobe Indesign. This has pre-written paragraphs for every eventuality that a client could need, I simply swap the parts relevant to the client to their details and any specific needs for their project can be added onto any of the pre-written paragraphs. Although this took a good day to get right and is constantly being tweaked, it’s well worth it to save hours in the future. At the end of each section I put a total cost for that section so that they can see exactly how their budget is being spent. I also ensure I split the web design concept cost from the web development cost so that should they have not provided enough design brief, and come back to you after you’ve gone away and designed the site only to say “Well, I was thinking it would be more along the lines of insert very specific design brief here that makes you scratch your head and think, why didn’t you bloody provide me with this in the first place” - you can simply point out the website concept cost and explain that will need to be charged again. It’s much easier than having the whole thing bundled in one and then trying to backtrack and explain exactly how much of their budget is going on the initial concept designs.

Page 2 of my proposal I put my terms and conditions, Page 3 I detail very clearly exactly what I need to get started on their project, I always take a deposit of 25% of the total cost + any software costs such as Expression Engine, outright – that way, I’m never likely to be out of pocket should they jet off into the sunset.

I then bundle all this up as a nice PDF document and pop it over to the client. They always look awesome when they go out and give you and the client a great reference point for the future.

As far as design and development goes, I’m probably about to get my knuckles wrapped for what I’m about to say, I’m a big fan of Adobe Creative Suite. When I start wire framing a website,  which I’ve only started doing recently – and to be honest, I’m not sure whether it actually helps the client or me more – that’s perhaps another topic. I use Fireworks. Once this has been approved I move onto Photoshop and use a hybrid process of straight to xhtml/css or pure jpg flat concepts (nb. Andy Clarke has written a great article on presenting static visuals to clients) depending on the site/client.

For web development I use Dreamweaver – but, for nothing more than a text editor really, it’s what I’ve used since 1998 to build websites, although granted back then, I let the tables do all the work and it more than likely outputted very messy code, but hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere – it’s just what I’m used to. I’ve tried Coda, I just can’t get up to speed with it, I’ve tried Coda with Transmit and found that even more cumbersome so always end up back in Dreamweaver.

Other bits and bobs I couldn’t do without are Adium, for instant messaging, Twitterific, Things and good ol’Skype. I use iCal to keep track of meetings and events, personal and work, and MobileMe to sync some work up with the studio. I also use Skitch, Typeset and an app I couldn’t do without that comes with every mac, Digital Color Meter. For printed brochures/materials I use indesign and Illustrator.

I’m still looking for a better mac address book. For some reason I’m not a fan at all of the present one.

If anyone else has some great apps you think I’m missing or if you want to know more about my work process, I’d love to hear from you.