Photoshop Alternatives One simple example was providing a few alternatives to Photoshop for a client.  The client was under the impression that they needed Photoshop to resize and crop images to use in their CMS.  After pointing them along to Picnik, Aviary, and Gimp (if they wanted a stand-alone application), they were able to save a quick few hundred dollars.  This was not the first, nor the last, free service that we found to replace a powerful paid application.  Now a company like CWS could never replace Photoshop but for this particular client, these services could do everything they needed and more.

QR Code LibrariesAnother more recent example was clients looking to purchase a service that generates QR codes.  Again the clients did not realize that this was an unnecessary expense thanks to the libraries that are out there to generate these.  After a bit of Googling for the proper terms, I was able to find a few different libraries based the server technologies.  Sometimes we forget that Google is a powerful tool and, before throwing money at the problem, sometimes a good Googling can provide us with a myriad of solutions.

Spending on tech…

Before you go ahead and purchase that latest piece of hardware/software or decide on a web service, why not ask your web designer to see if they have any input.  

You could end up saving yourself a lot of time and money.  These are only a couple of examples but you can see the immediately savings.  Because of our thirst for knowledge we are constantly finding ways to save money, increase efficiency & productivity, and if we can’t find an answer, sometimes we even create our own  solutions  (see LeadSHIFT or ask about our ticketing system in development now).

I just want to take the opportunity to say thank you to all our clients, consultants (Lee & Jim), and supporters over the last 5 years.  Without you, CWS would not be here today.  I can’t say thanks enough for all the fun web projects, hard work,  feedback, criticism, guidance, advice, Facebook likes, ReTweets, and support you have given.

What I will do is briefly outline the steps from the initial meeting through a full launch from one of our previous projects that is simply a brochure site for a small business.  I will outline the hours as well to give you an idea of the man hours involved.

Initial Meetings & Communication (Proposals/Agreements)

The initial meeting can take place over the phone but is preferably done in person.  It is mainly a question and answer to understand the client’s needs and goals of the site.  We have a basic set of questions that help steer the discussion but this is mainly a time for listening and note-taking on our part.  This research and discovery phase is necessary to come up with an accurate project quote as well.  This formal quote is then prepared in a project agreement, eventually signed by both parties, that outlines the project scope, deliverables, timelines, etc. – 3.5 hours (including travel time and document preparation)

Creative

Once we have done the necessary research and discovery in the in initial meetings, we can move to the fun stuff.  The creative process can vary in terms of time and actual steps.  We have done everything from mood boards through to working prototypes and everything in between.  Check out a brief overview of our design process.  Each project calls for different steps.  This project required wireframes and mockups before it was ready for coding. – 3 hours

Ongoing Communication with the Client

This is the communication that is often forgotten.  Throughout each step of the creative process we try to keep the client involved and get feedback when necessary.  This usually involves a number of emails, phone calls, and even more meetings.  This particular project moved swiftly with 2-3 emails a week from each party as well as a call or two. – 2.5 hours

Team Communication

A project manager needs constant communication with team members.  We have to properly pass down all project information from the client to our designer and developer.  Each team member needs different pieces of information and questions are relayed back to the client before moving on with critical pieces at times.  This is also where the project manager can help guide the creative process in terms of wireframes and mockups as well in the case of the designer moving slightly away from the project requirements.  The project manager reviews every piece of the project that client, as well as any end-user, sees. – 5.5 hours

Development & Testing

This process is fairly self-explanatory.  For this project it was just a matter of coding the front-end with HTML, CSS, andJavascript without any need for a database.  We did have some simple integration with third-party services (Google Maps and Mailchimp) but both are very simple to integrate with.  We first built out the home page and tested in Firefox and Chrome.  We also did initial tests for Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9 at this point to make sure nothing was broken to the point of the site not being usable.  After the initial testing is done, the remaining pages are coded and then tested again in all the browsers to make sure everything still works as it should.   - 6 hours

Launch (including any quick post launch fixes)

Check out our launch process post to read exactly what we do on launch but this is usually the easiest part of the project.  It’s usually just a matter of moving files from the testing server over to the live server, which is exactly what happened in this case.  This doesn’t mean it’s always a cakewalk.  There have been times where the live servers were not configured properly where it took days to get a site up and running.  This is an odd case but we didn’t have the necessary server information until near launch. – 1.5 hours

Total Man Hours: 21.5 hours

So as you can see there are a few hours that go into the building of a fairly straight forward brochure website.  These were basically top-level views of each process as each one could have a post on itself, and maybe that’s what I’ll do in the future!  Now depending on the size of the agency (freelancer to large web agency) the hourly cost can vary and will sometimes be a fixed price.  Freelancers can afford to charge much less than a large agency since there is little to no overhead.  Large agencies have employees, benefits, and other office expenses.  That’s why the difference from a large agency can be up to 10x more expensive than a freelancer.  When billing hourly, I’ve seen beginning freelancers charge as little as $10-20/hour (here in the US), rockstar freelancers charge up to $100/hour (these guys are known in the industry and get pulled in as consultants on big contracts), and large agencies charge up to $150/hour (and sometimes more) depending on the type of work.

So based on our man hours above we have the following

Beginner Freelancer @ $20/hour – $430 
Rockstar Freelancer @ $100/hour – $2,150
Large Agency @ $150/hour – $3,225

Most agencies (and rockstar freelancers) will have fixed project costs and different steps but this is just one way to look at the breakdown of time and cost.  Keep in mind that these are only numbers that I’ve seen previously in my experience over the last 7 years or so…mileage may vary.

Hopefully this sheds some light on where all the time and money goes into a web project.  While this list might not be all-inclusive, it’s a great starting point in understanding a fairly straightforward web project.

After seeing an article on Freelance Switch, Prospect to Client Tracking Spreadsheet, I figured rather than using just a document, why not build a simple web app to solve the same problem?  The article/document was the sole inspiration for LeadSHIFT.

I loved the idea of tracking the time from initial contact to signing a contract.  I also wanted to track things like which types of contact (email, face-to-face, phone, etc) and which types of project types (web design, app dev, consulting, etc) had the highest conversion rates.  If you know that you convert 75% of leads on the phone vs 45% with email why would you not get the lead on the phone?

Another great piece of trackable information would be referrals.  I thought wouldn’t it be great to see which contact referrals generated the most revenue or had the highest conversion rates.  Then when the time comes to seek more referrals you could see which contacts have referred well in the past and start there.

This is a simple FREE app that is open to everyone.  This is not supposed supposed to replace a CRM but supplement one.  If I see that there are enough users in the future, I may build in SSL protection and start storing things like email addresses and phone numbers and build out the people system a bit to have more CRM features.

For the time being, LeadSHIFT is just a tool to help freelancers and small businesses optimize their sales process.

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Email

Gmail happens to be my personal email account of choice.  By using filters to automatically tag emails from certain people or to auto-star emails from clients, it provides a ton of flexibility if you are willing to learn its basics.  They provide more space than you would probably ever need and they don’t have a pesky attachment maximum size of a couple megabytes.  Savings = $60.00+

Calendar

Google Calendar is a great full featured FREE calendar that can sync to just about any phone wirelessly (so if you make an appointment on the road, it’s automatically in your calendar when you get home).  Not only do locations, times, and people sync but also reminders if you choose to set them.  Savings = $139.99 (Outlook at Staples, combine with email client below)

Email Client

It’s been my experience that everyone in the corporate world uses Outlook to handle email.  You might as well save yourself the $139.99 for Outlook and use Mozilla’s Thunderbird that offers all the functionality that I’ve needed.  Guess what?  You can also integrate your Google Calendar.  Savings = $139.99 (combine with calendar above)

Word processor, Spreadsheets, Presentations

Microsoft Office has been the industry standard for years but that was before alternatives such as OpenOffice and Google Docs hit the scene.  These alternatives have the same feature-set and can even open Office generated files.  If you don’t want your documents in Google’s cloud, go with OpenOffice which is piece of software that runs on your machine.  Savings = $279.99

Telephone

For those of you that don’t know our office line, 717-798-8448, is a Skype line.  Now we pay $60 to have a number attached to Skype and $3/mo to make UNLIMITED calls to and from the US.  This worked out perfectly when I was working in Costa Rica and I needed to reach clients or they needed to reach me.  Also Skype can make calls for FREE to other Skype users so you could have a completely free solution if you wanted one.  Savings = $383.00 (compared to Verizon phone)

Email Newsletters

Mailchimp happens to be my email service of choice (it sent out this email!).  Their FREE account allows for up to 500 subscribers and a limit of 5000 emails sent per month.  At the moment this is more than enough for our email list.  It allows for great stat tracking and easy signup form generators.  We can see who opens, forwards, clicks, deletes, etc.  And best of all, if someone decides to unsubscribe, the service will take care of this for us.  No need to go through the list one by one.  Savings = $180.00 (compared to Constant Contact 500 subs)

Brand Monitoring

A less well-known, but equally useful, tool by Google is Google Alerts. This allows you enter a phrase (your company name for instance) and it will email you results (you specify how often) when it is found in websites. This is a great way to monitor your brand on the web. You may find other blogs or newspapers mentioning you in their stories. It won’t find the phrase in older pages but from that point on, whenever the phrase is mentioned you will get it emailed to you.  You could also set up Twitter alerts using Twhirl or Tweetdeck to get real-time monitoring on Twitter. Savings = Time

Hopefully this saves you all some money (and some time)!

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I wanted to track a handful of things (some of which were in CRMs and some were not).

1. Leads (Open, Won, and Lost)
2. Referral Sources
3. Project Types (web design, app development, hosting, etc)
4. Contact Types (phone, contact form submission, email, etc)

By using these 4 types of information, I could figure out

• Conversion rate of new leads
• Average number of days to convert a lead to a client
• Best referral sources (based on # of leads converted)
• Highest income generating referral source
• Most common projects
• Which types of contact help convert most

This only scratches the surface but with 20+ new leads a year, this information can be extremely helpful.  From the data we can figure out which clients to reward for generating solid revenue for us, the average conversion time can help with cash flow planning, the contact types can prove to us why using the phone can be more successful than just emailing and why face-to-fact contact has the highest conversion rate.

If you are interested in a beta invite please contact us at info@connectedwebsolutions.com or a leave a comment below.

Educate the client
Be sure from the beginning of the project that the client understands what you can do to help them.  Before showing them anything (even a wireframe) make sure they know that any feedback and criticism should be identified as a problem.  By identifying the problem, you can then provide them solutions that will be in the best interest of the site.  If the client knows up-front that you are there to provide solutions to problems they identify, you will save yourself a ton of time.  No more  “Make that font bigger!”.  Instead you might hear, “This text doesn’t stand out enough from the rest of the copy.  What can we do to make it a little more obvious and noticeable?”, which still allows you to do your job as the designer.

Ask the client why
If the client still insists on making design solutions just calmly ask them why they want a certain change to be made.  This is the easy way to identify the problem using the client’s words.   There will be times where a client’s suggestion will be a good design solution but for the wrong problem.  Identify the problem first and then you can either confirm their idea or present new solutions that might be better suited for the problem.

Key Things to Remember
Remember in the long run, the client hires you or your agency.  Ultimately the decisions will be theirs to make for their own sites.  It’s our job as designers to present the best solutions to their problems and be able to explain why a certain solution will be the best fit.  Don’t immediately shoot down a  suggestion, make sure the problem is identified.  If their solution is a viable fix, fantastic!  If not, explain to them logically why not and some other alternatives.

Using the amazing project management platform, 5PM, I was able to pull all sorts of information necessary to create our project management status board pieces.  I love seeing when my people add a new progress note or if the “Other CWS Tasks” list gets cut in half.  I know stuff is being accomplished.

CWS Status Board Items

• Tasks assigned to me (via 5PM)
• Tasks assigned to others (via 5pm)
• Progress bars for tasks (via 5pm)
• Events in the next 7 days (via Google Calendar)
• Current time since we don’t have a clock (PHP)
• Current weather and tomorrow’s forecast (Yahoo Weather)
• RSS feeds for Digg, Lifehacker,  Smashing Mag, and Web Designer Depot (probably counter-productive)

Every container is automatically refreshed via AJAX so there is never a reason to manually refresh the page.  Every 30 minutes or so it will do an automatic full page refresh because Yahoo Weather doesn’t like the AJAX request for some reason but, again, no manual page refresh is required.

Why have a status board at all?

Think about how many windows or tabs you have open when you are working.  Think about the time it takes to navigate from 1 to the other and check what might be happening.  Imagine if you could always have a screenshot of the most important things going on regarding your company.  Rather than checking all your tabs, you just glance at your status board and see everyone all in 1 place.

Now if I can find a way to easily import Quickbooks data into this, this will be a super status board!  Any ideas on things to add?  How would you set up your status board?

Some time over the last week Connected Web Solutions officially turned three years old.  In these 3 years we’ve seen

• Countless (re)designs and apps developed
• Our first official product, alumLINK
• Clients have come and gone (I guess you can’t keep them all)
• The business has changed locations twice
• Worked in Costa Rica for a month (see www.mymovableoffice.com)
• A company car
• Annually increasing revenue, profits, and expenses (I guess the last is inevitable)
• A larger team
• And loads more but these are all that come to mind right now…

These 3 years have been a great learning experience not just in terms of web design and development but also in business and life.  I wanted to take the opportunity to thank all the clients and people that have worked with us in these three years.  Let’s hope the next 3 are just as exciting and successful!

“Learning never exhausts the mind.”

Leonardo da Vinci