AS / Autism and Web Design

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Hi Ebi,

yeah, i am very bad at the hard sell and pretty bad at charging people in general. my prices are low to begin with, and I usually end up doing tons of extra work at no charge. i do have a breaking point where i will start charging extra, but i know i should just charge for the all or most of the work i do in the first place.

I have been looking for a business partner, but haven't been able to find a good match yet. it's hard when i really don't have any kind of guaranteed offer for anyone. i do work with one person now, but it's hard because she is very busy, lives out of state, and is looking for a full time job. still, she has found a few leads. Our deal is a 50/50 split of the $. Luckily word of mouth from folks I've done sites for gets me some jobs.

Have you ever worked with a partner? How did you deal w/the business stuff when you were freelancing?

Sounds very much like the way I did work back then...



When I was freelancing, I got about 3-4 big, large-scale jobs, but mostly because of networking and previous reccomendations (usually, brought over by former workmates who in turn knew a friend who had a friend who worked at some company... and I'm not a networking whiz by any means). Therefore, the "hard sell" part in those cases was already done for me in most part. Negotiating a price is always the hardest part, since you can't shoot too far up (they'd just go with somewhere else who's cheaper) or too low (not enough profit to compensate expenses). You can't always win all the time.

It usually takes a couple of meetings with the client before production: One, to find out what he wants of the site, projections, required features, etc, and a second one now with cost/approach proposals based on an analysis of the client's needs and your experience. The more times you go through this, the more easy and familiar the whole process becomes.

I just found a link that should guide you to figure out that elusive price you should charge for your work, while keeping your sanity and your finances heathy:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/web-work-should-charge

Most of my freelancing work I did it alone (sites' demands were less complex back then) and I partnered with a fellow workmate to help me if I needed it so, with whom I split earn percentages according to a previous deal. Then again (and this is a good disclaimer) I already had a day job so I did freelancing in order to earn a little extra cash, and because I had far more spare time than I do now, so I can't comment on how it is to freelance in a full-time basis.

Thanks for the link Ebi. It was an interesting article, especially the links to find out what the "real world" pays people. Too bad about the price fixing thing making it illegal to actually talk about real numbers. Sometimes i look around other websites to see what people charge, but the range is so large, it's hard to know what to think. there are a few folks who charge even less than i do, and tons who charge outrageous amounts that I could never dream of charging someone!

Do you work now? How did you keep track of your hours when you freelanced? I try to keep a timesheet, but am extremely bad at remembering to fill it in! I also wonder how to estimate the amount of time a project will take to give someone an estimate. Each project seems to take a different amount of time depending on many factors, even if the initial project descriptions were almost identical.