In today’s installment of my redesign project, we’ll discuss the second bullet point of content the site needs to contain: “What I can do.”

I can do a lot of things. I can sing bass. I can write fiction. I can do voice acting. But even people looking for a “generalist” really aren’t looking for a laundry list of all the things I am capable of doing well enough to get paid to do.

What potential clients are looking for is a short and succinct list of the skills I can bring to bear to solve their problems. The list of what I can do is long, but the attention span of the average reader is very very short. It’s critical that I focus mainly on the things I do best and/or those things that are going to give me the highest return (from greater demand or from being most efficient uses of time or most effective solutions). As in the target audience discussion, that doesn’t mean I would necessarily turn away a request for something not in my advertised list, only that I’m not focusing on selling it.

So let’s start with some brainstorming of all the things that might go on that list, and then we’ll prioritize and pare it down.

• Web design, from initial concept through production.
• Search engine optimization and marketing
• Web development – this is differentiated from “design” as being more in-depth programming. Ecommerce or a community forum site would fall under “development”
• User interface design – specifically on-screen interfaces
• Seminars – specifically on web and user interface design
• Copywriting – ad, web, script, or otherwise
• Print design – newspaper and magazine ads, business cards, posters, etc
• Page layout – newspaper, magazine, book layout
• Identity work – including logo design and collateral.
• Advertising design – banner ads, both static and animated
• Fixing bugs in, and making changes to, existing websites
• Digital image enhancement (for editorial) and manipulation (for illustration), either with print or screen as end-product
• Editing – any sort of writing, technical, non-fiction or fiction. Prefer developmental editing.
• Documentation and creation of teaching resources
• 2d animation
• Voice-overs and voice acting
• Illustration, either hand-inked or digitally painted. I specialize in hand-inked knotwork.

Some of these things can be dropped immediately. I enjoy voice acting, but any of that I do will be through an agent. I may include some samples in my portfolio, but I won’t be selling my voice directly through the site. So that’s out of the Services page.

I actually have a degree in digital animation, but I have very few professional examples of my 2d animation — nearly all of it is in the form of banner ads, which has its own entry on the list. I will be pursuing animation opportunities, but until I have more professional examples of my animation to include in a reel, it’s unlikely that I will be able to convince random viewers that I’m the animator for them. Therefore, including it now detracts from the professional quality of my offerings. Look for it to make an appearance in the future.

My husband is involved with creating stock 3d models and we’ve been discussing joining forces to sell stock photography, 3d models and textures, illustrations, etc. with an eye toward taking commissions for custom illustration/models as well. I’m going to pare illustration and digital photo enhancement/manipulation out of this list in favor of promoting them through our joint venture. We’ll have enough competition as it is. No need to compete with myself.

Those are the obvious things that can be removed. That leaves a list that is still far too long to catch viewers. I need to group similar items and combine items where possible.

Four categories immediately suggest themselves to me: Online, Offline, Words, and Teaching.

After dividing items into those four categories, I need to start combining them to make the list more succinct. Even though the actual process of fixing bugs or making changes to existing code is often very different from the processes of design or development, it’s unlikely that anyone who is not involved with web production will know the difference, so I’m going to roll all three of those into one item: Web Design and Development. I debated including UI Design in that item, but the principles of on-screen UI Design stretch across all applications, not just websites.

Online:

• Web Design and Development
• User Interface Design
• Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
• Banner Ads, both static and animated

Offline:

• Graphic Design
• Page Layout
• Identity Work and Logos

Words

• Copywriting
• Editing

Teaching

• Seminars
• Documentation and Training Materials

That’s much better. A shorter list, easy to glance through. In essence I’m creating a menu here, like a restaurant’s menu. You’ve seen cluttered menus that you picked from at random because it took too long to read everything. Shorter, sweeter, is better, and infinitely easier to follow.

Better, but not perfect. Taking into account explanations of each item, the list still feels too long to me. Of these four items, “Teaching” is the least like the other sections. To demonstrate my ability at teaching, I’m going to need to create some video tutorials and supply documentation that I’ve written, but all documentation I’ve written to date is proprietary information belonging to the companies I wrote it for. I need to create a personal project that I can document. That’s going to take some time, so it is perhaps best left for Phase 2 of the redesign. I don’t want to include anything I can’t immediately demonstrate.

I’m also not sold on these category names but they work for the moment and we will revisit them when we get to Search Engine Optimization. I’m also going to leave writing the descriptions until the search optimization stage, as this page promises to be keyword heavy.

Pricing

People like to have some idea what kind of cost they’re looking at before deciding whether or not to consider what’s being offered. Typical user behavior is to look at as many alternatives as possible and quickly prune out as many vendors as possible. Cost is a major factor in the initial pruning and if you don’t supply at least a vague notion of cost, you’re unlikely to survive the pruning process.

I intend to survive the pruning process. Therefore, I need to include pricing information. Big problem: All design, development and writing projects are unique. There really is no such thing as the “average” website design time. Each project requires an individual quote. Creating a five page website might take me five hours or it might take me 500. It all depends on the client’s needs.

There are as many opinions on pricing your design services as there are design blogs on the internet. I don’t intend here to debate my prices, but I do need to delineate them on the services page. There’s such a wide gap of costs — from the college kid charging minimum wage under the table to design agencies that can cost thousands of dollars an hour all told — that the best thing to do is simply figure out what you need to be making and divide by the number of hours of work you expect to work. That’s your minimum, base price. Considering I have to cover my own insurances, taxes, etc etc even before I get to the part where I’m paying my rent and keeping food on the table, I’ve come to a current base of $100/hr.

Some people will look at that and be shocked by how high it is, others by how low (that’s how I know I’ve hit a good middle price!). Every geographical area is different; every type of client has different expectations of cost. Also, that’s on the higher side for editing and writing, and the low side for good quality design, but well within the usual rates for both. By giving them the same rate, I’m simplifying my billing considerably, both in calculating final costs and in making it understandable for clients.

You begin to see, perhaps, why it’s so crucial to provide a fee structure up front in spite of the difficulty caused by the individuality of every project. If a viewer’s entire budget for design is $100, it’s unlikely that I’ll be among their choices for anything but the smallest of projects … and that’s ok. It’s best for both them and for me if we don’t waste each other’s time (and money — time IS money in business). Since I didn’t waste their time making them search for a price, they are more likely to come back to me in the future when their cut-rate designer’s work needs to be fixed.

I don’t want to emphasize the cost, but I do want to make it available. I think a good way to accomplish both is to give it a heading and a single-paragraph blurb that states the hourly rate but makes clear the need for an individualized quote. I’ll need to provide a few average examples, such as “average 1,000 words (4 ms pages)/hr” and “basic site design ~= 10hrs for an initial design and ~= 10 hrs to turn it to html.”

Summary:

Page will include:

Online:

• Web Design and Development
• User Interface Design
• Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
• Banner Ads, both static and animated

Offline:

• Graphic Design
• Page Layout
• Identity Work and Logos

Words

• Copywriting
• Editing

Pricing

• Rate $100/hr
• Blurb that gives average examples but makes clear the need for an individualized quote

In the next article we’ll look at “What I Have Done,” aka “How to Build a Resume.”