Every business I’ve dealt with wants somebody internal to their company who can design and/or develop their website. They don’t want us.
In all the circumstances I’ve come across clients who think they are designers to clients who convince themselves in knowing HTML. They don’t want somebody professional or a professional company to deal with their web solutions, they want somebody internal in their company, and who’ever seems to step up to the mark always get the task, irrespective of whether they have they know how to.
This somehow leaves me at a daze, what should I do? Should I develop their Ms Word website? Should I compliment them on their cough cough brilliant design skills, all to reward them for their ingenious plan in saving them a quick buck. Believe it or not internal competition is our worse competitions, clients hate signing contracts, and they hate dealing with external companies.
Hmm… I’ve never had a client who hated signing a contract. It’s not just for our safety but for theirs, too.
What you do with the clients of the kin you described above, I’d say that’s up to you. But it doesn’t sound all that fun. Do the clients have you design their site, then have it maintained by some untrained staff in-house and get back to you for help when things go wrong? If so, I have a line in my contract stating that I do not give unpaid support for my code that’s been modified by a third-party as I can’t be held responsible if they mess it up.
I must state, however, that I’ve never dealt with clients that you’ve described. My clients are either programmers or firms who have capable in-house developers. Or they are small startups or private persons who I guide through the process of maintaining the site and updating content (properly) themselves. I usually guide them for a period of three months.
One client asked me to design their site how they wanted it. Having design changes that did not compliment their design. They had an in-house designer who was not a designer, like a sub-job, and it clearly showed in their work.
Another client sent me a series of designs that looked something out of a Windows '95 application. They all seam to devalue my work too, which is pretty awful. I am now focussing much of my energy on internal work. I don’t mind client work, but when it goes like this it’s pretty bad.
2 clients I’ve had refused to sign contracts, and another wanted to hold money back in order to get support. I haven’t really had an easy ride. I think maybe it’s something I am doing. I am new to this so maybe this is the problem.
One thing you could do to get into the field is design something for free and then look for a popular web design magazine to distribute it. The advantage is, you could show off what you can do and you’d get advertisement, and hopefully better clients than the ones you’ve had so far. That’s just one way, but if you’re lucky it can work well. It’s the method I used and it’s worked very well for me.
Another means would be to become a writer on some of those magazines. That can be good exposure as well.
Finally, you could create graphic elements or some such. For that it’s of advantage to get yourself onto design platforms such as dribbble. Dribbble is one heck of a good place for getting new clients. If your work gets seen, you could get a few dozen client requests a week and choose who you want to work with.
These are just a few methods of getting your name out there online.
Starting out can be difficult, so don’t let that get you demotivated. Opportunities will come.
I am working on an internal blog, this is going to be big, very big I am hoping. It’s modeled around something already done but I am hoping to redo it and do it well with an online advertising mission, I won’t really give up because it’s what I love and I don’t see it fit to have to go through this. At times I think that client work is not that way to go. How can we learn as much as we need to learn when a client’s budget is way below anything it should be. We have to learn, but we have to make a living. Starting out is hard and I am a witness to this.
I’ve seen Dribble, but I feel in order to get noticed you need a strong portfolio, something which I’m lacking at the moment. I’ve seen your site and it’s pretty amazing. I don’t mind getting demotivated, it’s not going to stop me
Certainly, client work is not for everybody. Currently I feel it’s not for me. I’ve noticed the best websites on the internet seam to be done internally created, from Facebook to Amazon. Client work is always within a budget, and clients (in my experience), try to get more than what they paid for and it’s very hard to expand our experiences and knowledge when we’re working on budgets, particularly tight budgets. Another clear argument to this is that with client work you’re building relationship’s with people and with personal projects you’re building yourself up and gaining money from ads (little as it maybe) as well as the knowledge. Money from client work is one-off, money form online ads is constant, rain or snow (as us Greeks says) you’ll have your money. Can you see where I am coming from? Client work seams to restrict me in the quest for being better and learning more as I have to deal with things I rather not deal with. Understandably you’d have to be a pretty big website to be able to live on your online ads.
PS: I just got off a 2 hour web conference just to give quotation, even so, it’s not FUN! Hardly!
