One of Netstudio’s income generating avenues is coding projects for designers. Through the years we’ve built up an array of profitable relationships and worked on some amazing projects. Some adjustments are needed when working with designers and in this article we wish to point them out to prepare coders wishing to do the same.
The good, the Bad and the Ugly – Identify your customer.
Starting out we answered every request, providing detailed time frames, descriptions and costing analysis to find out that our requests are being used to cost projects without the intention of ever using us. Realizing that we played into the hands of “the bad and the ugly”we set out to find a system of classifying the design requests and things started to take shape. There is no hard and fast rules on weeding out the bad requests. Talk once and listen twice. Think before you promise. Ask a fair price and stand by the price you made.
There are thousands of designers out there that have the need for a good coder. Once you nurtured a few strong working relationships you will be set with a steady stream of project requests that comes in regularly.
It’s still a business — Yours.
Getting into a working relationship with a designer can easily bring a false sense of security to to your business. There are three pitfalls that we needed to overcome:
You are still the one responsible for your own income.
Coding is much nicer than selling! Our first few requests from designers that turned into nicely paying projects got us into a false feeling of “we’ve got it made”. a Few fat months turned into a few lean months and we were nicely freshened up to the realities of life. The most important desicion we needed to make was to keep talking business with everyone that came along, and not to rest on our laurels.
Protect your interests, even if you think it is not necessary!
Having a “let’s do it” frame of mind can bring you far in life, no risk – no return right? , there is however a stage where you have to think abut your own interests. The most typical request that we receive is one promising a great stream of work and a increased fee if only we can do this one project at a huge discount. Up to today we still want to see the large stream of work and the increased fee. We have however typed away large parts of our lives, whilst others have made a profited from our ingenuity. Think before you leap!
Mr. Nobody gets credit, the others pay cash.
Donald Trump preaches that if you want to learn how to make a million, go and ask a millionaire. So here’s advise about not giving credit from coders who have given credit and got burned!
We are in dire need of our standard deposit and prompt payment of the full amount for the following reasons:
- With our own clients we have complete control over the design, coding and content process, and can “push” them to get outstanding content, photo’s and other elements. When working with designers, we are part of a process that we cannot control. If we work on 3 or 4 projects that gets paused waiting for elements or decisions, it will have serious implications on our own cash flow.
- We strongly believe in a proper business process when dealing with clients. It assists us in not getting hurt halfway through a project. If the designer that you work with do not have the same principles, you are taking the risk with them and will get hurt along the way.
Know your stuff
Most designers have a basic understanding of css, html and even some php. You can be assured that you will be called in to assist with some heavy lifting. It is therefore necessary to have a good knowledge of the medium that you work in, being it php, CMS’s or E-Commerce.
Don’t make promises for work that you know you have no knowledge in. This is not a time to wing it. Promises are being made on the strength of your acceptance of a project and when you let customers down, word will get around.
Study hard and make sure that you have a knowledge of all the latest techniques and are in a position to easily find the answers that you do not have questions to. A good relationship with other coders that you can call unto for assistance is always a benefit, even if it might eat into your profit.
Advise properly
One of the adjustments we needed to make is to “live and let live”. Like every coder we have a firm belief on coding practice and what we see as a good usability. Suddenly we get orders for coding that makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up.
We found the best practice to be to give advice politely stating the reasons why we believe differently and then let go. There’s no point in winning the battle and losing the war! We generally see that the things we say stick and see them corrected in follow up projects.
Give proper feedback, update regularly and don’t forget after sales service.
One of the most important aspects when assisting a design team is setting up proper avenues of feedback. After experimenting with many ways in which to achieve this, we came up with a solution that worked for us, being the setup of a development server that gets updated throughout the project.
The extra work in copying files are easily offset by the time we save in telephone and Skype calls, IM’s and so forth. It also allow the designer to see changes needed in time and act accordingly.
Regular contact after your project delivery will ensure all small niggles are being sorted and will assist in you in getting feedback on the usability of the features you added.
