Can Web design be done far away?
Monday March 19, 2007
Jim sent me the question
Can I do web design all over the nation or I am I limited to face to face local market type of work?Since I've built and managed Web pages and design teams all around the world from my home in Washington state, my short answer is "yes, you can". But there's usually more to it than that. Do you build Web sites for people far away or are all your clients local to you so you can meet them face-to-face?
Comments
I will take freelance work from anywhere when possible, but it’s always nice to meet your clients face-to-face so you can sit down with the ol’ pen and pad over lunch or dinner. It’s much easier to get a better understanding for drawing up the plans. Not only that, but sometimes you get a free meal out of it
I do my graphic design work from the Grand Canyon South Rim and I will do work for just about any company in any city / state / country / continent. In fact, my job at the Canyon gives me a lot of contacts for jobs and I can produce work fairly quickly.
What I generally do is sit down with the client in person or on a phone conference. For the most part I will try to see other sites that they are interested in emulating and then offering suggestions on how to make it their own. Once I have a general idea of what they want I will get to work on a rough and try to get it to them either that day or the next day. The rough is generally a photoshop document set into a GIF or JPG and I will upload it to my personal site so they can get a feel. Once they have that they will discuss with me again so that they are getting just the page they want.
After the layout is decided upon I will get to work on the template and show them a dummy page. If they approve it I go ahead and make all of the pages 100% and will deliver it as soon as the page is completed.
Generally this takes about five to ten days depending on my work schedule, but the work that comes out is generally top notch and I make sure everything is W3C compliant before anything is even shown to the clients.
I have done both, customers that live within a few miles, and customers I have never seen face-to-face.
One of the biggest challenges is to find a design, colors, approach, and contents that perform well for the customer. Whether the customer is local or remote, if I cannot get them to look at the work I do, and comment critically, I have a really tough time serving them well.
I do not see location of the designer as a problem at all, it’s the relationship you have with the client that counts.
Yes it is great to get together over a meal or coffee, but in reality, the phone and email are very usefull tools to being more productive.
The last site I put together was for a holiday property in France, for a client in the north of the country and I am in the south, only one face to face meeting in total!
Our web design team is in the Dallas Texas area and our corporate HQ is in California. We do 100% of our work with only a conference call and several emails. Our marketing group are the ones who site face to face with the customer and have the customer fill out a 6 page packet of information and then they send it to us. About 95% of our customers are in California with the design team in Texas. Its working great for us.
I see doing work for people in any location as an opportunity to expand. 97% of my work is internet based.
I will often set up a sample directory with a client name and allow them to view and comment on the progress of a project.
There are real benefits to sitting face-to-face however.
I have just returned from doing a year of web work in France and Italy. Finding hot spots, Internet cafes and actual storefront providers can be difficult. When you do find a situation, be prepared for no Sunday operation and the daily lunch period stretching from noon to 5:00 PM in some areas of Italy. Also, some storefront locations will not let you FTP or use AOL due to bandwidth issues. I also worked with a Vodafone 3G wireless card but due to their software compression, I was NOT able to look at my actual pages. Also, the IP addresses that SFR/Vodafone assigned to me were constantly being listed by “Spamhaus” and preventing me from sending Outlook email. At one point, I could GET Outlook email from the 3G card, but went to Internet location A to send email without spamhaus interfering, but had to go to location B to FTP. My biggest monthly bill for the Vodafone wireless card was $1,300 euros. Once you exceed 500MB transfer a month (a few day’s work for a webmaster), then you are hit with huge penalities.
I found out the hard way that you can’t just go and “work” anywhere. On many occassions, I encountered hours of hassle in order to generate just one billable hour, as my customers should not have to pay for my Internect connection issues.
My business, eye9 Design, has gone through phases where I focused on and benefited from both local and non-local clients. When I started my business, it was in a small town in Northern Indiana. So I focused almost entirely on nationwide and even global clients, specifically through eLance. Now that we have relocated to Denver, CO, we have grown a local client base. Furthermore, we designed a year long search engine optimization campaign around terms like
“affordable denver web design”. By focusing regionally it allowed us to have high google rankings which we never could have achieved without a geographical keyword focus. You will still never find us for terms like “web design,” but that’s okay. When people use geographical keywords they are already indicating a value for a local provider, and we can have a presence on the search engines both organically and through PPC. So your focus may shift with different strategies for growth!
I run my design co. from a home office in Phoenix, Az. I hire freelance coders from Los Angeles and San Diego, CA, when needed. I generally only hire people who I have met face to face or who I have worked with before. I currently have clients in California, Texas and Illinois, but have done work for people as far as Singapore and the UK. I only produce work with a contract. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A CONTRACT!!!
I work from home and from a small office and like to meet face to face with clients - though I do get most of my clients via the internet and because of geography only meet about 5%.
Although most of my clients are local to Austin, TX, I have done work for clients around the globe. Often, when I need extra hands, I use RentACoder.com, and have gotten fine work through them, too.
I don’t believe in depending on Google to bring business: I blog regularly and use multiple online classifieds to let clients find me.
Recently moved to Beijing, China from Vancouver, Canada and have done numerous website/web marketing projects without face to face contact.
How it’s done? Build up a solid online presence/portfolio and have a strong web marketing plan in place. Network with everyone and anyone…get yourself known. Join groups in your desired target markets. Make it very easy for the customer to find you and contact you. These days Skype, msn, email, wiki (project mgmt), etc are all essential and cheap. When you find customers prove to them that you have a solid project management system in place. But you will not find any work if you do not have the design sense, marketing mind or coding skills. Then there’s little tricks like offering to do a website for free in exchange for flights/hotels/food/etc. Contact people directly but do not spam them with mass emails. Personalization and customization to exact customer needs is essential. Know the customer and exceed their expectations.
I could go on forever…fun stuff working from home. The real fun stuff starts when you learn how to make money directly off the internet without having to work for anyone.
Have a nice day! Derek
There’s actually some advantages to looking beyond your local market:
1) It might be cheaper - you can easily look offshore to India or Romania (and if local designers realise you’re looking there they’ll realise they’re in for some stiff competition and might offer you a discount).
2) Greater talent pool - unless you live in Silicon Valley or Mumbai in India it’s probably worth looking beyond your local market
3) Possible time zone differences - you can review work during the day and then the designer can do the work overnight
It’s not hard to look to the global market. Our website, DesignBay, has a global web design marketplace where you can post a project and get offers from designers anywhere in the world. Almost all our clients end up using designers who are from a different markets.
Alec
Director
DesignBay