One of the toughest things for me is coming up with a quote or hourly rate to charge clients. I want the job so I don’t want to charge too much but offering a price too low is just cheating myself and devaluing my work. Early on I took some really low paying jobs but thought I was making a pretty good hourly rate. I applied for other freelance jobs at the same rate and often times didn’t get the job. Slowly I’ve raised my hourly rate and been more careful when picking projects. My portfolio hasn’t changed (I’ll update it sooner or later) and yet I get more work at the higher rates then I did at the lower rates.
Clients may want a low price but they also know that they get what they pay for. If you pay …
James is another one of the “web guys” I met through Refresh Phoenix and he’s also one of the guys who helped get Refresh Phoenix started. James is the founder and CEO of Forty Media, a local web design company, and CJO of Jitsu.com.
How did you get started as a web designer?
In ‘94, I was sitting in a college computer lab, and one of the lab managers handed me a photocopied tri-fold brochure called “Introduction to HTML,” with a recommendation that I do something better with my time than trying to find free video games. I signed up for a GeoCities account that very day.
How long have you been working as a web designer?
I’ve been doing web design/development non-stop for the past 12 years. Most of the jobs I’ve held since that date have involved …
In the interviews that I post in the next few days and weeks you’ll notice that I use the term web designer a lot. Many of the people I interview are web developers, project managers, etc and not web designers but they all work on the web and build websites.
The interviews are really just a series of questions that I asked everyone. This first interview is an interview with Sean Tierney of Grid7 and JumpBox. He’s a local web developer that I met at Refresh Phoenix and you can check out his blog at http://scrollinondubs.com.
How did you get started as a web designer?
By summer of my Junior year in college the web was starting to get interesting. I had taken a psychology course where the professor made us publish our experiment via the web and in …
So I was talking with David Krug on AIM today about Blingo, the search engine that gives out prizes at random to users. Then only an hour or 2 after we had been talking about Blingo I won another $10 iTunes Gift Certificate.
Last time I won it was because someone who had signed up through my referal link won a prize so I won too. This time I won the prize so the person I signed up through should be pretty happy. I’ve been really busy lately but that made my day a lot better.
Blingo has recently partnered up with Publishers Clearing House and the prizes are much bigger and better. Instead of an Ipod Nano being the best prize you can win, now you could win a Ford Mustang, $5000 in cash, …
I started playing around with websites when I was 12. My dad built a website for his company using an old version of Microsoft FrontPage. I didn’t understand how it all worked and so he showed me how to use FrontPage. I was hooked.
I don’t use FrontPage anymore but I love building websites. I used to search the web for sites that I thought were cool. I would sit at my computer recreating the site I found from scratch using their images but never looking at their code. It was a lot of fun for me and I did it a lot.
I launched my first site selling web templates when I was 14. That failed quickly and when I turned 16 I got my first freelance job with a local web design company who I still occasionally do work for. …