Welcome to our blog!
The Internet is full of freelance developers and designers. There are a lot of blogs that discuss developing and designing, but very few that delve into the actual process of working with such freelancers.
We are going to give you an honest look into how we work and the projects that we take up. If you wish to hire us on a project, this will also give you an idea of our process from start to finish.
We hope you enjoy it!
We believe in a long term relationship with our clients. We will explain to you how we work and the process of taking up a project. We will not try to oversell ourselves or make false promises to get your project.
If we are not able to solve your problem, we will let you know. We will try our best to refer the right people who can help you.
I’m going to talk about a particular way of doing things that I think is good. If you’re a freelance developer, maybe it will help you decide how to work. If you’re not, maybe it will help you understand what developers do.
There are two sides to this: the process and the product. The process is how we get from problem to solution; the product is the solution itself. For example, if I were writing an essay, a possible process would be: brainstorming ideas, finding references online, researching in books, making an outline, writing a first draft, and revising. A possible product of this process would be this essay.
I am specifically interested in processes that take exactly one week. This means there is a natural break point after every week: either you have something that works or not. Of course sometimes projects take more than one week; I’ll say more about this later.
The ideal outcome of any process is that everything goes according to plan and at the end of the week you have something working. In practice this rarely happens for big projects with multiple moving parts (like apps or websites), so it’s important to decompose them into smaller projects where each one can be done in one week. Projects that can’t be
We use a variety of tools to communicate and work with clients. You can find our preferences below:
Communication:
Slack for chat, Zoom for video calls and Google Hangouts for screen sharing.
Time Tracking:
Due Time is an app that we use to track time so that you are always up to date on how many hours have been spent on your project. We generate a report at the end of each month.
Project Management:
We use Trello as our main project management tool where we manage tasks and you can see the status of your current project at any time. If you prefer another tool, we can also use it.*
We don’t do things the traditional way. We are not a traditional agency. We are a group of freelancers working together to provide a better solution for our clients.
We have been working in this industry for over 10 years and we have seen alot of change. In the past few years it has become apparent that the traditional model for web development is outdated and needs to be improved upon.
In Australia, most of the work is being done by small agencies with 5-10 people in them. They work on a project basis and charge by the hour or by a fixed price contract. This is their business model and they need to make money from it, so they will try to milk every dollar out of you as much as possible.
The problem with this system is that there is an incentive for the agency to make more money out of you, which means there is no incentive for them to keep things simple or build something well enough that it will last longer than one or two updates. The system also encourages scope creep because there is no incentive for them to limit what you want them to do and they will keep adding on new features until you run out of money.
What we offer is a different approach, where we work on a smaller scale with fewer people (
I work on a project basis. That means I charge by the project, not by the hour. I work this way for two reasons. First, it’s more fair to you: if I worked by the hour, I could pad my hours however I liked. Second, it makes me focus on getting your site done as nicely and quickly as possible – so everything works right and you’re happy with it. If a project takes longer than expected, that’s my problem – not yours.
I always give you a fixed-price quote before we start any work together. That way you know exactly how much your site will cost before we start working on it.
I recommend against hourly billing because if you don’t know how much something is going to cost, how can you decide whether it’s worth doing? If someone’s willing to build something for $1 million or $100, that doesn’t tell you which price is better; it just tells you they’re flexible in their pricing. To make a good decision about what to spend money on, you have to have an idea of what things cost.
The Code of Ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists states:
Seek truth and report it
Minimize harm
Act independently
Be accountable and transparent
When in doubt, you should err on the side of transparency. The gray areas are where you can get into trouble. Publishing a video without context or explanation can be harmful. But publishing a video with a long description that includes all the context and explanation is not harmful. It might even be helpful! That’s why I prefer to err on the side of transparency.
Sometimes journalists will tell me “if we explained everything, it would have been too long.” Well, if your explanation is so long that people don’t want to read it, then maybe it should have been two articles instead of one. Or ten articles instead of one. Or a whole book, instead of one article.
A journalist’s job is to explain things to people who don’t know anything about them. If they can’t explain something in a way that makes sense to the general public, then they haven’t done their jobs right.