Agency Byte

This post is going to deviate a bit from the technical realm but I just read a report in the latest HOW Design magazine that was based on a recent survey of designers’ rates. One of the questions in the survey asked whether designers disclose their hourly rates to their clients.

The question, as written, seemed odd to me until I realized what they were getting at. This is how they should have asked the question: Do you bill your clients by the hour or do you provide a fixed-fee estimate?

I was disappointed to read that the majority of survey respondents bill hourly for their work.

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When I began freelancing I thought it was important to make my fledgling business appear bigger and more established than it really was. My website used phrases like “our designers” and “our programmers” in an effort to make a one-man show look like a full team of professionals. No matter what a potential client wanted I felt the need to make them believe I had all of the resources to do it.

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At Agency Fusion we’re fortunate to have some really great clients. For us, a great client is one who appreciates our experience and recognizes our expertise. We’ve been doing web development for years and years now (some of us since 1994) so we’ve definitely been around the block a few times. We recognize, however, that some would-be clients haven’t yet done enough web projects to be in a position to fully understand how web development works.

This is an attempt to draw a helpful analogy for the benefit of those who’d like to better understand how websites are (or should be) built.

Additionally, this is for the benefit of those of us who build websites so that perhaps we can better explain to our clients what it is that we do and why it pays to follow a thorough process!

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