Michael Boyink - Quoting and Planning ExpressionEngine Projects
- Categories:
- Business, ExpressionEngine, Freelancing
- Tags:
- business, expressionengine, planning, projects, quote
- Published:
- 11:24am on Monday 26th October, 2009
Michael Boyink is a consultant and trainer who has been working with ExpressionEngine since 2002. He discussed his process for planning and quoting on EE projects.
Watch Mike’s presentation over on Vimeo.
Pitching and quoting EE
- I pitch EE as a commercial product that has people working on it for a living, paid tech support staff, security, and great community
- You don’t need to know the size of a site to quote for it any more. Now we need to know how many weblogs/channels it will have. All other aspects - fields, groups, templates - all depend on the number of channels
- There are always other pieces is of content that don’t fit
- Look through the site and identify unique content types
- Other things that add complexity: complex content types, IA complexity, frontend complexity, people, the server environment
- Also: don’t forget project management, other things that need to be done in the project (e.g. content importing)
- Come up with a range of project hours, then give it a gut check - does it feel right? Come up with a final cost. Billing by hours is bad - the better you are, the less you can charge
- I usually give a ballpark figure so the client can decide whether they want the full quote/proposal
Office walls
- Everything goes up on a project wall - the quote, a site map, content and designs. With everything in front of you it is easy to spot issues (e.g. the
- design doesn’t accommodate the content, or IA issues)
- Post new versions over the top of old ones; kind of paper-based version control. Never take anything off the wall
- Build deep content first so the client can start entering their data earlier
- The project board is a good way to jump back into a project after time away
Q&A
Do you charge ongoing costs?
Don’t do it, in fact I sell against it in proposals, and don’t charge for doing upgrades.
How do you do training?
Offer a visit, screencast, or documentation. Clients usually prefer on-site visit.
How do you charge for licenses?
The client buys the license, so they own it.
Who should populate the content?
We can do it, but it’s better - and good training - for the client to do it.
Do you ever customise the Control Panel?
No, never needed to; sites either don’t need it done, or there isn’t the budget for it.
What add-ons do you use or recommend?
Don’t really use them - I’m very careful to keep EE as clean as possible to be ready for 2.0.
I'd love to hear what you think - please use the form below to leave your comments. Anything I consider too offensive, off-topic, or spammy will be deleted at my discretion. Some HTML is permitted, or you can use Textile.
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.Boyink at 6:33pm on 27th October, 2009 #
Adam Khan at 8:34am on 30th October, 2009 #
Matthew Pennell at 9:31am on 30th October, 2009 #