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SitePoint Tribune |
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| Issue 446: May 14, 2009 News, Rants and Case Studies for Web Design Professionals | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Introduction
I'm confident you'll want to track your time after reading the article below. We'll then spotlight five online time tracking tools currently available. All of them have a free plan of sorts, so take time to investigate each of the options before making any investment of money or time. So, how do you tackle those small jobs that we all receive every week? We'll discuss reasons to adopt a "prepaid block hour" approach, and your profits will love you for it! Finally, we'll wrap up this edition by looking at Flickr as a design folio tool. Why only show your work off on your own web site, when you can proudly boast about it to others? I trust you'll enjoy this edition of the Tribune.
Miles Burke Easily Build & Deploy Web Sites: Introducing PageBuilder Developers build out the templates, put a wireframe in place and build the functionality in the form of widgets. Web designers can then drag and drop these widgets into the "dropzones" of a page, building user experiences and campaign pages as necessary. Content authors can focus on writing SEO-friendly copy in the WYSIWYG editor or the new in-context editor. Watch an INSTANT DEMO or download a FREE TRIAL now Summary
Editor's PerspectiveThe Best Kept SecretA common complaint when speaking to managers of web teams, is the often large disconnect between being busy, and the goal of all business, being profitable. I had the same dilemma years ago. We'd start on projects, feel like we're doing the hours expected and a few small jobs in between -- but we never seemed to make the money we'd calculated. Where was the profit going? The answer -- and one of the best kept secrets -- is time. Without an indication of how long it actually took to complete a job, you'll be unaware if you charged enough for the current job. And when a similar job comes long, you risk underquoting the work, if that's what has happened. The first golden rule here is track time on large projects. Secondly, we're all bombarded every week with those small "it should only take 15 minutes" jobs. Five of those, and we're talking about an hour and a quarter a week, perhaps more. How are you tracking those? Gut feel? Stop it! So you can see why I say that the second golden rule here is track time on the smaller tasks as well. Ideally, every member of your team (or you, if you're a freelancer) should clock every minute of the day into a system which allows you to quickly grab some useful details:
Once you've recorded weeks and months worth of this data, it allows you to accurately predict how similar tasks and projects will take in the future. You may now know that it takes four hours to build a widget. Instead of quoting that "gut feel" of two hours like you've done previously, you'll be able to quote the right amount and win back those losses. Say you charge $100 an hour, and build five of these widgets every month. That's 60 a year, and if you're short-changing yourself two hours every time, that's a whopping $12,000 a year in losses. Find other repetitive tasks that you've been under-quoting (and if you're only now starting to instigate time tracking, I guarantee you will!) -- you'll start kicking yourself you didn't do this before now. You can use any number of methods to record the time: paper time sheets, local computer-based software, or web-based tools. There's a plethora of different tools available to you, and I'll list a few of them below for your perusal. Best of luck, and enjoy the challenges of increasing your billable hours per week! Time Tracking ToolsAll ready to tackle time tracking and considering an online tool? Here are five of the offerings out there: 14Dayz embraces the "simple time tracking" methodology. Features include drag and drop categories, PDF and Excel exporting, and no user limit. They have six plans, from a free plan through to $99 per month; see their pricing page for details. 88Miles is another application touting as "simple time tracking." Features here include time budgeting, XML and CSV exporting, a mobile edition, and integration with online financial tool, Saasu. They have six levels, starting from free to $75 per month. See their pricing page. Harvest goes way beyond simple time tracking. Features include expense tracking, timesheet approvals, QuickBooks export, and more. Four plans available, from free to $90 per month -- more details here. Tick has a sexy interface and some great features, such as Basecamp integration, SSL, and desktop timers. See their various pricing plans (five plans, from free to $79 per month), or jump right in for a free trial. Toggl offers secure connections, ability to embed elsewhere, one-click tracking and a fully featured free account. Like most others, there are five plans with differing features depending on the plan. All the information for these are available on their pricing page. I hope the above suggestions help! Do You Have Five Minutes?You've started tracking your time, and are increasingly aware of the amount of five minute freebies you are currently giving away in support requests and tiny content fixes. What you need is a way to keep the administration of invoicing those small blocks of time to a minimum -- for you, and the person receiving the invoice at your client's end. A few years ago, we embraced the idea of prepaid block hours. These have been a savior for us, and we've managed to claw back many of the minutes and hours we previously wiped off. To make things even sweeter for our clients, we offer a discount rate to those who prepay their time, and then we charge those 10 minute fixes to these blocks. At the end of the prepaid block, we send a detailed time sheet for the work we did. We offer a small discount on our five-hour block, then increase it according to the size of the block; we also have 10-hour, 20-hour, and 50-hour plans. We've allowed clients to choose which plan they want and then pay for it up-front, saving everyone the pain of multiple invoices for tiny amounts. Now, when we're asked by a client to spend 15 minutes tweaking some content, we simply charge it to this block and then send a report at the end. Try it out; your clients and, importantly, your bank balance will appreciate the move! Flickr Your FolioIf you're a designer, here's something you may want to consider. Instead of loading all of your recent work just on your own web site, you could also upload screenshots of your work to photo-sharing service, Flickr, and describe the final web site there? Your portfolio benefits from the prospect of more people seeing your work (the Flickr community is huge!) and there may even be additional SEO benefits, if you link back to your web site within the image descriptions. Here are just ten of the Flickr users already embracing this idea:
Be careful, though. The Flickr Community Guidelines ask that you use Flickr for non-commercial purposes. I suggest that anything looking like spam would be bad, but showing the world your personal portfolio is acceptable -- there are millions of examples of photographers, illustrators, and designers using Flickr this way. Thanks so much for reading another issue of the SitePoint Tribune. I look forward to touching base in two weeks time.
Miles Burke |
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A recent conversation with a person who fails to
track their time efficiently has sparked me to write about our experiences
with time tracking, and why it's one of the best secrets to profitable
success.
Beginner web designers, especially those who come from a print
background, often neglect to consider certain aspects of the Web that are
unique to the medium. Matt spells out the stuff that every designer should
know before they build their first site.
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