First Clients

Hollister11

Hi

I'm a 3rd year student studying CS and I want to dabble into freelancing. I have a enquiry and the chap seems pretty happy to go ahead with the job, it's a basic website with the following content: services provided, pricing, gallery, testimonials, contact form, basic info. I quoted €450 for this and he was happy.

My query is should I write the site myself or use WordPress. I have never used WordPress so I would have to study it first. Also if clients want content management systems should I use WordPress, write my own or merge WordPress and customer code?

Last question, what the best way to secure recurring revenue?

Thanks

14ned

Hollister11 wrote: »

My query is should I write the site myself or use WordPress. I have never used WordPress so I would have to study it first. Also if clients want content management systems should I use WordPress, write my own or merge WordPress and customer code?

Oh WordPress without a doubt. And hosted somewhere free where the hosting takes care of as much maintenance, bug patching etc as possible.

Hollister11 wrote: »

Last question, what the best way to secure recurring revenue?

That's very, very tough to achieve. Clients like to pay once off. They hate with a passion anything resembling a subscription. One route is to bundle in a year of maintenance with your fee, and once the year is up trying getting a maintenance fee for the next year. Unless they want more work done, 80% will refuse, but that's how websites get hacked, it's on them.

Niall

awec

Personally I'd run a mile from bundling maintenance, that's setting yourself up for a lot of work for no extra money.

If it were me I would make it clear that for €450 you will create the site and set it up. Recurring hosting costs are on him. Recurring maintenance costs are on him. Once he is happy with the work and signs off you are finished.

He can contact you again in future if he wants changes or further work at which point you can give him another quote.

daymobrew

awec wrote: »

Personally I'd run a mile from bundling maintenance, that's setting yourself up for a lot of work for no extra money.

How about defining "maintenance" as just keeping WordPress and plugins up to date? I use InfiniteWP (self hosted) to manage about 60 sites (I don't charge maintenance - I'm an idiot).

For backups you can use a plugin (eg BackWPup) to push backups to Amazon S3 (really cheap) and charge for that.

Buford T Justice

Have you a clear guideline as to what the end result will be? Client expectations vs reality can be vastly different and can cost you a lot in time, and ultimately money.

14ned

awec wrote: »

Personally I'd run a mile from bundling maintenance, that's setting yourself up for a lot of work for no extra money.

It brings in extra business though. Clients, correctly, observe that a year of bundled maintenance is effectively a year long warranty on the work done.

It also encourages you to use the absolute fewest Wordpress plugins possible, as that keeps maintenance down.

If the client will never update the site and you want absolutely zero maintenance costs - and thus you can offer that year free of cost to you - look into https://gohugo.io/. There is no database, no server components, nothing for anyone to hack, nothing to upgrade except Apache or nginx. I implemented my business website using Hugo, including its "technology blog": http://www.nedproductions.biz/#blog

How it works is very simple: a python script on cronjob yanks articles from my Google Plus feed, extracting only the ones with certain technology keywords into files on disk. The cronjob then runs Hugo to build the static website. The blog thus appears to be live, but it's not, it's a static HTML website, nothing else.

Zero, absolutely zero, maintenance costs. And very hard to hack or deface. Worth considering.

Niall

awec

14ned wrote: »

It brings in extra business though. Clients, correctly, observe that a year of bundled maintenance is effectively a year long warranty on the work done.

It also encourages you to use the absolute fewest Wordpress plugins possible, as that keeps maintenance down.

If the client will never update the site and you want absolutely zero maintenance costs - and thus you can offer that year free of cost to you - look into https://gohugo.io/. There is no database, no server components, nothing for anyone to hack, nothing to upgrade except Apache or nginx. I implemented my business website using Hugo, including its "technology blog": http://www.nedproductions.biz/#blog

How it works is very simple: a python script on cronjob yanks articles from my Google Plus feed, extracting only the ones with certain technology keywords into files on disk. The cronjob then runs Hugo to build the static website. The blog thus appears to be live, but it's not, it's a static HTML website, nothing else.

Zero, absolutely zero, maintenance costs. And very hard to hack or deface. Worth considering.

Niall

If I went down this road I'd be very explicit about what does and doesn't constitute "maintenance".

Are content updates maintenance? Are design updates maintenance? What if they decide in 6 months they want to add 10 new pages? If the client breaks the site will you fix it under maintenance? All work that should be billed that you'd be giving away for free, worth keeping in mind.

Just set expectations really, don't let the client think you're going to do whatever they ask for a year for nothing.

I'm not saying don't do it, just be clear about what you're promising to deliver and what you're signing yourself up for at the very start.

Graham

awec wrote: »

If I went down this road I'd be very explicit about what does and doesn't constitute "maintenance".

It's much harder for someone starting out to be so explicit.

That's no reflection on the OP, it's just one of those things most freelancers learn the hard way after they've been bitten on the ass a few times.

14ned

Graham wrote: »

It's much harder for someone starting out to be so explicit.

That's no reflection on the OP, it's just one of those things most freelancers learn the hard way after they've been bitten on the ass a few times.

Also, most clients paying small monies for a website are small business owners and they'll of course chance their arm at getting you to do little bits here and there for free. And I wouldn't necessarily be strict and say absolute no, business has a bit of give and take especially with small business owners, and if they think you fair but not a pushover, you'll get referrals which means more trade. So try to strike a balance, don't be obnoxiously difficult, and don't be a slave to them either. It's somewhere between.

It's still possible, especially if you live far away from anywhere expensive, to make a decent living implementing and maintaining websites for small business. There's a fair few small businesses here around Mallow which do, and out of the cities people tend to look after their own more. For example, there is a local business here in Mallow with a famously unpleasant owner providing a widely used service easily available for a quarter of the cost online, yet everybody here still uses him despite that he is one of the most unpleasant, rude and nasty people you'll ever meet charging so far above online it's daft. Yet, he has eight people working for him, and they're going flat out in there, he has a two to three week backlog and still people use him. But that's what makes rural living much easier than in cities, his unpleasantness makes him a local character, and people unavoidably think of him first when they need what he provides.

Niall

jmcc

Most of the compromised websites that I see in the web usage surveys are running on vulnerable versions of Wordpress and Joomla with vulnerable plugins. Maintenance should be a part of any package. Some cheapo customers don't want to pay for this and are typically the ones with sites that are permanently compromised. In most months, there are probably at least 1,700 Irish sites that have been compromised. The numbers vary across countries. There is always a spike when there's some unpatched vunerability in plugins or CMS software.

Some of the trickiest domain name recoveries that I've seen is where some student decides to get into the web development and domain name registration business for the Summer and then fecks off leaving the victim/customer without passwords to the domain name and without passwords to the site or its database. When the domain name renewal comes around, the student is nowhere to be found and the domain name drops and the site disappears.

Regards...jmcc