This morning I checked my email for the first time since mid day yesterday. Sitting there was an email from a name that I know, but I don’t recall ever exchanging via email. Turns out that he had seen some of my design work and wanted some assistance in that area.
I couldn’t really believe my eyes. Someone had taken the time to track down my contact (not overly hard) & was requesting a design service. A service that I don’t actually advertise doing. (Ok it turns out I do have a single page on my “main” website, which I put up in hopes of getting accepted by a printing press for an account. Not sure if it was required or not, but I got the account after another company turned me away. But the site itself definitely doesn’t scream “hire me to design things, like this amazing website” – given sarcasm can be hard to detect at the best of times, it’ll be best for me to clarify, my website is pretty rubbish, I threw it together in a weekend about 4 years ago & haven’t touched it since. Luckily my skills that improved over this time).
The next challenge….answering the question “how much would you charge?”. I have no idea, I generally get contracted to do a large site, and the web design is a side component, this was the other way round, “here’s a design project, plus a landing page for web”.
It has taken me all day to think of a reply for the email. There’s always an inner battle for me around quoting. I want to quote for the best possible outcome for both parties. Ideally you want to quote the clients budget, plus $10. But sometimes you have no idea what their budget is. (Chase Jarvis and Gary V talk about it in an interview). There is nothing worse than to quote too low, and then get stuck doing 100 revisions. In my mind I fell it’s like a taxi meter in reverse. The quote gets accepted and that’s like adding credit to the taxi meter and then as work is done the meter winds down, and the first revision it starts to go into the negative space, and by the 20th email of changes the meter is half of the quote. Sometimes you can go back to the client (particularly if there is some paper work) and say “hey this is getting ridiculous” other times I just wear it. Unfortunately what I find can start to happen is that bitterness creeps in around the project and the client. Which then can start to have a negative effect on the work. It’s a vicious cycle.
But at last I bite the bullet, sent off a figure with some options. Let’s see what they say when they come back. At the end of the day, it goes back to this weeks theme of pointing your toes in the direction you want to go.