Musings and miscellaneous ramblings into the web development business, graphic design, technology, and things that interest me.
I am a bit late to the game here, but I wanted to say that Remember the Milk is a fantastic way to track your tasks. It’s a web based task management system and has a decent iPhone app. They do hook you with the app as it requires a Pro account to use after 15 days.
I was recently in a presentation to show our “solution” for a companies RFP (request for proposal). I was not involved in the planning, but was there for technical support. During the presentation I couldn’t help but think that the very first thing the presenter said was extremely accurate, and the reason we lost the bid. “How can we develop a solution and plan for your project unless we understand your business, yourselves, and your projects goals.” I might not have started with that, but he was right. This would require a working relationship while we learn and understand, and are able to formulate a plan that meets all the clients needs within their budget. Without that, we end up aiming for the stars with the absolute lowest budget possible, and that would just not make any sort of sense. Because, in the end, the RFP process is usually all about the lowest bidder.
Afterwards, at home, I was browsing the internet and stumbled across this fantastic article from Andy Rutledge, “The Trouble With RFPs”.
In this article I’m going to touch on the inappropriate nature of using an RFP to attract a design agency. If you are someone responsible for engaging with design professionals, I hope you take this article to heart. As for your finding it useful, I don’t have to hope; it’s a certainty that this information will save you time, trouble, and probably thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
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Professional design service is not a commodity. Oh, design does exist as a commodity, at the proverbial bottom of the barrel. It is not my purpose here to disparage any agency, but the commodity design agencies are pretty much the only ones in the habit of answering RFPs. You’ll often find their campy ads in magazines, touting “business solutions.” These agencies are a dime a dozen …true commodities.
Read the entire article - http://www.andyrutledge.com/rfp-idiocy.php
So much of my work is visual, and the work section of this website is designed for that. It is challenging to showcase my custom programming projects. I have yet to find a good way to do it, that makes sense with the design work. I have dozens of projects that I would like to present here but so far have not been able to. How would you do it?
I have considered having a second portfolio, with the programming projects, but am not sure if that is the best solution. I am probably making this more difficult than it needs to be. One thing I want to avoid is coming off like there are two different websites and focuses. I do both, graphic design, and programming. It’s rare enough I suppose, but I have yet to see a good example of a website showcasing both.
At my previous employer we did not have a very good record of existing clients, domains, and their hosting packages. We also did not really have a solid hosting platform, no disaster recovery, or solid backups. We were very new and very fresh and very, very reactive. Then a terrible thing happened with our hosting, and with no legit recovery system we were forced to migrate dozens of websites by hand. Seeing an opportunity to not only improve our backup/recovery process, but to develop a very solid database of clients, domains, and hosting packages, we quickly threw together a MySQL database and interface to store the information. This system became the backbone of the company, evolving into a domain expiration reporting tool, automatic web reports generation tool, client management with call/email/issue logging, several misc handy utilities, daily email reports, all neatly tied into the companies Exchange server for user authentication. Needless to say, the code was a mess, but it did it’s job.