Thursday 21 January 2010

Winning Web Design Proposals

Clients are becoming choosy in the recession about who they want to develop and maintain their digital media offerings. Maybe it’s time to review your company’s proposals because it is at the initial stages that you can win new business with new clients who won’t make your life hell. How’s that, you may well ask? You need to cover all the bases in the questions you ask upfront to ensure that the new business doesn’t hide any nasty dark corners that you haven’t costed in the quote. Equally, the clients need to have complete understanding of the processes you’ll employ and then you ought to have a relatively easy ride.

It’s the misunderstandings that cause the problems. So, if you clearly explain upfront how you will assess the needs, how you will develop, what you will develop, how you will communicate the process to the client, and what their role is, you will start on safer ground.

SpeckyBoy Design Magazine has put together a really good set of resources to help you with web site proposals. It came out on 18th Jan 2010 and has already had lots of positive comments posted. Worth a long hard look.

See: speckyboy.com

Thursday 14 January 2010

iMedia Project Management and time, cost and quality issues

Sorry about not posting something last week – we were without power for 2 days! Anyway Happy New Year etc.

The fundamentals of time, cost and quality project management in developing interactive media continue to feature in any interactive add-ons such as developing mobile apps. It seems that the mantra of the time, cost quality triangle applies to all projects, of course. But, people get fazed by thinking ‘this is an incidental add-on to our main project’ when clients want mobile apps, a viral campaign, micro-sites or other spin-off projects from their main web site. These extras need to be considered as separate projects and scoped and costed accordingly remembering that if anything affects either of the elements of time, cost or quality then there is an impact on the other two. (And you have educated your clients to know this, haven’t you!)

Yes, iPhone Apps are different because they are bespoke, subject to Apple inspection and have a leaning to the software/database skill set rather than web design. But Tim Ocock, VP at Symsource has strong advice on developing iPhone apps that reflect time, cost and quality issues at: technologyweekly.mad.co.uk

His costs were a bit startling until he explained the overheads of these micro projects. However, the article seemed to have a ring of truth about it. What do you think?