As with Serverlove, Gavin created the designs handed them to me and I turned it into a fully functioning WordPress build.

The brief

The current website was running on a bespoke CMS and Melbourne wanted to start using WordPress for its ease of use. Thankfully, someone at Melbourne had already converted the existing site content into a WordPress install so that made my life a lot easier.

The design

Having worked with Gavin Burnett before on a few projects like Your Office Anywhere, I knew what to expect: a very clean, almost minimal design with graphical flourishes that would be relatively easy for me to build and that’s what Gavin delivered.

The development

As with most of my recent WordPress builds, I’ve tried to make use of custom post types and custom fields as much as possible in order to make it easy for the people managing the site to add/edit content.

Where possible CSS3 was utilised to ensure minimal HTML classes had to be used throughout the site. Properties like border-radius reduced the amount of HTML used on the old site significantly; this should have a impact on two levels:

1. Easier for the client to maintain – adding classes in WordPress’s WYSIWYG (visual) editor just isn’t fun
2. Better content to HTML ratio which may (and no guarantees here) improve search engines rankings

Timelines

The development of this WordPress build took 6.5 days from start to finish for the development with a total turnaround time of just under two months (the first meeting was 19th October and the launch was 7th December) which is pretty quick for a website of this size and shows how fast websites can be turned around when the client really pushes it through.

The deadline on this site was tight as Melbourne wanted the site up and running for their new office move. View pictures and a video of Melbourne’s incredible new office.

Summary

Having worked with Melbourne before, I jumped at the chance to again because they’re a great client. They’re open to good ideas, they pay their invoices on time and for this project in particular they assigned a Project Manager, Josh, who ensured that the project didn’t slip – plus as they’re a technically minded bunch it means I don’t have to spend as much time explaining how to do things to them as I do with other clients (not that I mind doing that). All these ingredients make for a successful project.

There were two more reasons for checking leads:

1. I seemed to be getting an unusual amount of leads last month and I wanted to qualify if that was true or not
2. I wanted to track where leads were coming from and what types of leads were most likely to turn into actual paying jobs

1 The number of leads

At some point last month, Google rejigged something and all of a sudden this website seemed to be ranking very highly for search terms like ‘Freelance WordPress Developer Manchester’, ‘Freelance Web Designer Manchester’ and some more too.

It felt like I was getting a lot more leads than usual, but as I’d never tracked leads before I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true. After speaking to my lodger, who is an Architect, about this he told me that one of the architectural practices he’d worked for had tracked their leads in particular to find out:

• where they came from
• the likelihood of them turning into jobs
• the likely value of the potential job

Each year the practice would look back over these leads to see if business was picking up, declining or the staying the same. Obviously that data would have to be correlated against profit/turnover.

2 The useful of leads

I also wanted to track which types of leads where useful and which weren’t. I suspected that a lot of the new leads coming from Google – which were consuming quite a large portion of my time – were pretty unlikely to turn into paying jobs. Rather they were people looking to get a quick price quote that they would never respond to.

Findings summary

In October 2011 I had 25 leads. 6 of which have turned into definite jobs (2 more are 90% certain to start next month).

Of those 6 definite jobs, all of them came from either referrals or existing clients requiring new work. None of the cold calls/emails that came through turned into jobs – not even close.

In November 2011, I had 23 leads which have so far developed into zero paying jobs – but with 3 or 4 on the horizon which may turn into proper gigs (guess where they came from: yes, you’re right – existing clients). Note: The zero figure in November is misleading because jobs can often take over a month from initial contact to a price/spec being agreed.

I’m not 100% sure what this tells me at the moment, probably that October/November were gigantic months in terms of leads and that I spend far too much time being nice and responding to enquiries from people who will never progress to becoming a paying client. I will continue to track leads and continue to report back on my findings on this blog – hopefully with some very interesting stats and graphs too.

The brief

The concept of the website was work in progress. Jobs would be posted to the portfolio whilst still in progress and to-do lists would be posted on these portfolio pieces detailing what had been done and what was outstanding. Comments would also be encouraged on portfolio pieces – something which other agencies often shy away from.

Barraclough had a tight deadline – they wanted their new site up and running as quickly as possible in order to demonstrate their skills to potential new clients. Fortunately after having completed a few similar sites for other agencies recently I was able to accommodate a quick turnaround.

The design

Barraclough supplied a very modular design and were very particular with regards to how it was implemented. They were an interesting client to work with as they were very concerned in gaining a perfect representation of their designs in the HTML/CSS templates – something which can be hard to achieve but very satisfying when it does happen.

The development

I was able to make extensive use of WordPress’ custom post types and custom fields for the website’s: portfolio pieces, to do lists and staff members.

I wanted to make the website as easy to use as possible and I think I achieved this with custom fields – one of which can be seen in the pictures in this case study.

Timelines

The website was built within two weeks of the client first contacting me; with the client taking a further week or two to perfect the copy and images on the new site after the code was complete.

However, when I became the boss, it became really hard to justify the expense of a new machine to myself. But after recently moving into a new office and saying to myself for the past 6 months that my current machine wasn’t quick enough, I actually bit the bullet and bought myself a new 27 inch iMac – not quite the top spec model but pretty close.

My desktop - complete with new iMac

The difference

Now, I can open a gigantic Photoshop file and not have my machine crawl. I can also boot up Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion to test in Internet Explorer and still be able to run other programs. Denying myself the best tools to do the best job was a mistake – okay it was a mistake and had I been the employee I’d have been very annoyed at my boss for making me work a out-of-date machine for so long.

The business case for a desktop machine

One of the reasons I held off getting the new machine was because I wasn’t sure if getting a desktop based machine was the right move. After all, my work used to be primarily on site hence the need for a laptop but gradually over the last 12 months I have done less and less onsite work and when I thought about it, it seemed silly to be using a less powerful machine (i.e. the macbook) for my day to day work just in case I got an onsite job one day in the future.

WordPress

I made use of WordPress’s custom post types to make sure adding new case studies was as simple as possible for the guys at Marble Media. It’s the part of the site that has the most prominence so I wanted it to be really easy to manage.

JavaScript

I used the Slides plugin for jQuery to achieve the case study slide shows on the site. Having used lots of plugins in the past (and written my own code too) to perform tasks like this I can safely say that this plugin is the best I’ve used so far.

Timelines

As this was converting an existing website into WordPress is was quite a straightforward job. I did however rewrite some the HTML/CSS and JavaScript as I felt it was not as semantic nor as reusable as it could have been.

There was around 3.5 work days that went into this project.

No-one ever really talks to you about cashflow before you go freelance and whenever I’ve worked onsite at agencies, the attitude from some inhouse developers is that freelancers are coining it in and whilst it is true that you can make more more by freelancing the fact that your cashflow is so up and down means that if can rarely feel that way.

In fact, I’ve met lots of people on the cusp of going freelance who haven’t saved up at all and haven’t realised that they’re first freelance payment may be month’s away.

My revenue and expenses for the past 3 tax years

Cashflow for 2011-2012 (so far)

Cashflow for 2010-2011

Cashflow for 2009-2010

See those big green spikes. They’re the good times. They represent the fruition of month’s of hard work; times when I went for celebratory meals at (slightly) expensive restaurants with people I loved. However, those green troughs represent some of the worst moment’s of my life; times when I was working really hard but knowing I would not receive a penny for months to come; times when I was buying smartprice beans in ASDA and wondering if I’d be able to pay the mortgage that month.

Payment terms

Most companies have payment terms of 30 days. That means, that 30 days after you complete the job you get paid. If the job takes one month then this means you get paid a full two months after starting the job. Some businesses have payment terms of 45 days, 60 days or more and honestly, if you can avoid working for these guys then do.

However, if you can negotiate them down to 30 days or lower than that’s great and, yes, it can be done because I have done it with some of Manchester’s most notorious agencies.

In reality 30 day terms means, that after 30 days their accounts dept will tell you:

• they never received the invoice or they lost it so you need to resend it
• you just missed the payment run but there’s another one in 30 days
• the guy who pays the invoices is on holiday this week and will be back in next week

It’s important to remind accounts people at least a week before your invoice is due so those excuses don’t get trotted out on the day the invoice is due.

Improving cashflow

One of the ways that I’ve attempted to try and sort out my cashflow is to start taking upfront payments of (usually) 50% for larger scale jobs – that is to say jobs that will take a month or longer. In fact, when working with direct clients I try to do this for all jobs regardless of size/duration.

Also, I try to request payment terms of 15 days maximum. A lot of the time, I have no say over this as clients often dictate the payment terms and don’t allow me to shorten them but, sometimes, as mentioned previously, they do so it’s always worth trying.

If I work with digital agencies for day-rate priced projects spanning months then I often ask to invoice at the end of every month. When I first started out I’d wait until the end of a 3 month project then invoice – which was stupid.

The other way to manage cashflow is to maintain a sizeable cash reserve in my business bank account. Personally, I try to keep 3 month’s minimal pay in there at all times so I can survive for 3 months if the worst (or let’s face it the usual) happens. Of course, doing this means I’m constantly squirrelling away money as opposed to spending it on anything. My bank manger probably loves me.

Good clients

There are some direct clients and digital agencies who are fantastic payers. These people pay on time without have to be strong-armed or sweet-talked into doing so. In return, they get first refusal on my time, they get preferential treatment and they get respect. It’s important to find yourself clients like this – they do exist.

Paying yourself

Another mistake I made when starting freelancing was to pay myself as and when I got paid by clients. Now however, I try to treat myself as an employee and pay myself the same amount at the same time each month. This is really difficult to do but very important to maintain a level of stability and realism in my life.

Summary

3 years in and I still struggle with cashflow from time to time. It does get easier but I think it always will be an issue as a small business owner.

Are your a freelancer or business owner? Do you have any tips for managing your cashflow that you’d like to share in the comments?

The new office is at 23 New Mount Street

The reason for the move was that the old office based in Ardwick, Manchester (near the Apollo) was just a little bit too far away from the Manchester city centre and personally I felt I was missing out on the buzz of the city by not being that close to it. With this new office I am only a 5 minute walk from the centre and 5 minutes from the Northern Quarter where a lot of digital agencies (my clients) are based. The old office was 10 minute walk to Piccadily train station but that walk heavily featured the unsavoury sights of Manchester’s red light district and was not very pleasant at all.

It’s almost exactly a year since I decided to get office space and I’m very happy with the results and while this new office is a little smaller than the previous one and missing some of its luxuries (like a kitchen and a water cooler) – the location more than makes up for it.

Background

I originally worked on the HTML/CSS and WordPress build for the first SQUAD website a few years ago with another agency so a solid structure was already in place.

Process

Step 1: I created a design in Photoshop for the homepage and presented it to the client. Once we had agreed upon an established style I then created the other pages by ‘designing in the browser‘ to speed up the process.

SQUAD had strong branding in place and an idea of how they wanted the website to look so this the design was a fairly straightforward process.

Step 2: I updated the WordPress theme and custom plug-in code to make use of the new features that have been created since the website was first created.

Step 3: The site then sat on a staging server while the client went through, got to grips with WordPress and perfected the copy. Once they were happy with the new site, I put it live.

Timelines

As a lot of the work was already in place for this job the timelines were relatively short with around 4 work days going into this project.

Fortunately, because I was involved in an aspect of the project (designing the web UI), Mediaburst invited me along and I managed to get myself up on stage for the 2nd year running.

Team Mediaburst receiving the Best Public Sector project award at the 2011 Big Chips

This is the third year I’ve attended the Big Chip Awards and, as I mentioned above, this was my 2nd time on stage. It’s a great feeling to go to an awards ceremony and be part of a team that wins so I’m very grateful to Mediaburst for inviting me along and, more importantly, for choosing me to work on such a great project in the first place.

Further reading

My case study on Florence

Full list of winners for 2011 Big Chip Awards

YOA had already approached a designer, Gavin Burnett to create the look and feel and were looking to me to create a search engine friendly website from Gavin’s designs.

Fortunately, the client had been using WordPress to experiment with microsites to see if they could gain some SEO results. Therefore, they were very keen that the new website should use WordPress – which suited me too.

Features

Once again, I made use of some new features of CSS3/HTML5 including:

• using @fontface for the headline fonts
• using @media queries to create mobile friendly version

Extending WordPress

It’s always a good idea to ensure a Content Management System makes it as easy as possible for the client to add/edit copy on their website and I used custom WordPress plug-in functionality to make sure updating content such as the main ‘masthead’ copy on the site was simple.

Project duration

The build took around 5 days and then once all the other services like training, basic SEO had been factored in the entire process took around 2 weeks; the whole project took just over 2 months from receiving the designs to putting the site live.

Sidenote: Admittedly, this is longer than expected to build and launch a website of this size. Timings *should* be around 3-4 weeks maximum but it’s important to realise that clients can have other commitments (i.e. running their business for one) and other development projects may be running concurrently making project durations longer than originally planned.

Summary

This was an interesting project to work on because the client invested heavily in a complete rebrand of their existing style.

I think the designer came up with a brilliant concept and having worked with Gavin’s designs before on the Serverlove project I knew what to expect design-wise: a nice clean design that was pretty simple to convert into HTML/CSS templates.

Visit the new Your Office Anywhere website.