Accessibility Links

Search Blink-Design

Worrying trend on job sites

As a freelancer it’s good to keep snooping for new gigs even if you have work on but lately I’ve been seeing some concerning reoccurences on many job sites.

You must know everything for £12 an hour

One problem with many job adverts are the people the post them. As far as I can see either they aren’t technical and don’t understand or maybe they are, but they’re just insane. I’ve seen too many adverts that follow this kind of pattern.

“Web developer required!

We are looking for a competent developer/designer with excellent skills in the following languages:

HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Flash, Photoshop”

Hang on a second! That’s three totally different disciplines at least, maybe even four!

So many people want one person to be experts in everything and then work for peanuts as well. Let’s be honest here, if I knew all the above languages I certainly wouldn’t be looking for work and if I was it wouldn’t be with some tiny business for £50 a day.

If you’re gonna go to the trouble of posting an advert at least put some effort in and research what you actually require first.

I’ll do it all for you, but don’t check my website just call me

The first time I saw a web designer/developer advertising their services and NOT having a portfolio I thought it was a mistake. But on my searches I’ve now found a crazy amount of people who blabber on for 10 sentences about quality code and amazing designs and then all that is left at the bottom is a phone number? Seriously, the very minimum you need in this trade is a website and then after that comes actually having a good one.

Knowing my luck they’ve probably got 200 clients!

Website ‘packages’, 5 pages or less for £200

The final thing that ticks me off are freelancers who offer websites as if they’re a bargain pack of crisps. To start with just because a website has a lot of pages doesn’t necessarily make it better than a well designed site with two pages, in fact it can often be worse.

The worst thing you can do is base a freelancers quality on the amount of pages they offer.

Secondly when did websites fit neatly into packages of £199 as if they’re second hand cars? No website is the same in the way it is built, content gathered, pages designed etc so it’s madness to quote a price before you start. Each client should be treated individually and the project should be priced based on how much work they require.

I can only hope smart clients aren’t drawn in by tricks like these as nine times out of ten they’ll only end up with something they didn’t want.

Posted on Thursday, May 7th 2009 and there are 4 comments

Categories: Rants

4 Comments

Contribute

Fields marked with * are required. Your email will not be shown.

  • Please enter the word you see in the image below:

Site Navigation