Okay, freelance designers. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: you’re working on a project for a client, and all of a sudden there’s a discrepancy with your payment. Perhaps it’s because of scope creep, or maybe the client just went over budget for some reason.
Either way, you’ve been informed that you will not be getting the full amount agreed upon in your contract, and the client is asking you to be “flexible” on the exact amount they initially agreed to. You’re already several dozen hours into the project – to back out now would cost you more than it would to simply accept the lesser amount being offered.
What do you do? Do you simply agree to take what you are offered? Do you keep this client as a repeat client in hopes that things will improve with the next project?
Why do clients think they can rack up charges with designers and attempt to weasel their way out of paying the full amount? More importantly, why do designers let them? Even more importantly, how do you, as a designer, identify trends common to this type of client behavior, so that you can avoid them completely in the future?
The key to avoiding situations where you might be called upon to be “flexible” with your fees is educating your clients about the true value of your services as a designer.
If your client falls asleep in a taxi and the taxi driver drives past their house and up the street for five more miles, he’s going to charge your client for those five miles, despite the fact that he or she didn’t “mean” to fall asleep. And your client would expect to pay it, as well.
Design is a service, just like being shuttled about in a taxi cab is a service. I’m always surprised – not at the number of clients who don’t understand this, but at the number of designers who also fail to make this connection.
You aren’t creating some esoteric work of art that is completely subjective in value and which your clients should feel apprehensive about paying you for. You are providing a service that will help them improve the functionality of their brand, whether that’s through a website, an identity system, a brochure, poster, CD cover, flyer, or anything else you design.
Yes, it’s creative work, but ‘creative’ doesn’t equal ‘exempt from standard pay agreements.’ The only way clients will get this thought out of their heads is if designers get it out of their heads first.
This is going to come off sounding a bit like a rant, but the frequency with which clients avoid paying designers the fees they initially agreed upon is very unsettling to me. Some people simply “go with the flow,” accepting that some clients are going to be unreasonable about things and that there’s nothing you, as a designer, can do about it.
But why is that? Why should designers simply be expected to be ‘flexible’ when it comes to payment? I’m just going to come out and say it: there’s something really wrong with the nature of this industry that people can get away with thinking this kind of thing is normal. It’s not normal; in any other industry, it would be called theft, and making a fuss about it could be construed as attempted extortion, if you mess with the wrong kind of litigious service provider. You get a service, you pay your money.
If a client is unhappy with the service you’ve provided, that’s another issue. Designers should always be willing to work with a client if something isn’t right and do their best to make the client happy. But clients trying to get out of paying altogether, or trying to sweep hours, days, weeks, months of work under the rug with some absurd plea about ‘flexibility’ is just wrong, and it has got to stop.
The only way freelance designers are ever going to earn any kind of respect for themselves in the industry at large is if they collectively start educating clients about the true value of their services.
So, after saying all this, you might be wondering whether I’m to going answer my own question. Should you, in fact, stand your ground when re-negotiating the terms of your prior agreement with a client?
It’s easy to stand back from a distance and proclaim “of course you should! It’s only right, after all.” But the reality of the situation is not always so simple. Perhaps it’s a huge client who’s causing you trouble – the biggest client of your career so far. Is it worth it to argue and possibly get yourself blacklisted by other clients in the same industry?
Ideally, you’d be armed with an iron-clad contract and a lawyer at all times, but we all know that sometimes things are less than ideal. Sometimes your client will force you to reword your contract before they agree to work with you, and you have no choice but to comply if you wish to get paid at all. And well, lawyers can get expensive.
So what do you do? I won’t pretend that I know the answer to this very old, very persistent problem. What I will say is that it’s entirely possible to drastically reduce your likelihood of finding yourself in these types of situations in the future, by positioning yourself in a more high-level position within your niche industry.
Knowing what makes your clients tick, and how best to serve the markets they serve will make you a much more highly valued service provider, which in turn will drastically reduce your chances of being taken advantage of.
There’s something very strange that happens when people are confronted with a designer who can seemingly read their minds – they show you a level of respect and trust that you would have thought they’d have shown only to their spouses, friends, or cat. It’s a very fascinating thing to watch.
Designers aren’t too keen on most clients assuming that they’re mind-readers, but if you make it part of your job to study the habits of your client base, as well as your clients’ customers, users, audience, or other markets, you can arm yourself with this near-psychic ability relatively easily.
The post Educating Clients About the True Value of Your Services as a Designer appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
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Recently I received a question; if I could explain these four lines:
/**
* @test
*/
public function it_works_with_a_standard_use_case_for_command_objects(): void
The author of the email had some great points.
public function testItWorksWithAStandardUseCaseForCommandObjects(): voidPHPStorm IDE from the last version gives for you ability to generate a TestCode and they do not use an underscore too:
I opened a popular frameworks (Symfony, Laravel, YII2, CodeIgniter4) test folders in Github and then I opened a popular PHP library and also do not find underscore usage in test and @test annotation.
This made me realize that, yes, what I'm doing here is a convention, and maybe it's not the most popular one. Well, I've seen tests that use an even less conventional approach to method naming by using some kind of character that isn't a space but still looks like one:
/**
* @test
*/
public function it works with a standard use case for command objects(): void
This is too much for me, but who knows, in a couple of years maybe...
I'll first respond to the objections now:
it and it will complete this with /** @test */ public function etc. We'll talk about it later.Philosophically speaking, I don't think a test method is a regular object method.
Yes, of course, it is technically a method. PHPUnit instantiates your TestCase and will call its methods.
But that is just the way PHPUnit does it.
You might as well write something like this:
it('works with a standard use case for command objects');
In fact, there are test frameworks that let you write tests like this.
You will never find any normal code (a.k.a. production code) call these test methods. I do think that would look rather weird.
Instead of regular methods, I think we should consider test methods to be documentation or more specific: specification.
This makes other aspects than code style conventions more important: it needs to be readable and precise.
And in my experience testItWorksWithAStandardUseCaseForCommandObjects is really hard to read.
Then again, maybe I just have to practice.
But what if your code style fixer automatically turns "snake_case" method names into camelCase ones? Just configure the tool to ignore your tests.
try/catch blocks and coming up with inventive ways of dealing with exceptions.
Not because we have to, but because the IDE developers thought it would be a good idea.
End of rant.
Conclusion: don't let the IDE determine how you write your code (unless you have thought about it and agree with it of course).
When it comes to generating a test class and "generating test methods": totally ignore what PhpStorm hTruncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4445 bytes)
When the Gutenberg block editor was released as part of WordPress 5.0, a number of web designers were worried about the effect it would have on existing websites. Some vowed to keep using the Classic Editor for the foreseeable future.
But the newfangled block editor has settled in nicely. Its features and usability seem to improve with every new release. And the development community has contributed a number of handy custom blocks.
For new projects, going with Gutenberg seems like a great option. But what about existing websites? What does the conversion process look like? And, most importantly, what are the risks?
While every website has its own unique quirks, there are some general things to keep in mind. Today, we’ll cover the basics of converting your website to use blocks. Let’s get started!
If you have the Classic Editor plugin installed, making the switch to Gutenberg and the wonderful world of blocks is easy. However, it’s not recommended to do this without proper testing.
That means setting up a staging environment or local installation of your website. This will allow you to see how things work without risk of breaking a live site.
In addition to staging, it’s also worth looking at your active theme and plugins. You’ll want to do some research to ensure that they are compatible with the block editor. At the very least, it’s about making sure no major conflicts will arise from the change.
Thankfully, just about every theme or plugin that is regularly maintained by its author should be fine. However, if you have any legacy software that hasn’t seen an update in quite a while, you might have a problem on your hands. Only testing will let you know for sure.
So, what does a WordPress page or post created in the Classic Editor look like when you switch to Gutenberg? This was an understandable concern for a lot of us. In reality, it’s not too shabby:
WordPress puts the existing content into what is called a “Classic” block, which is exactly like it sounds. This block recreates the experience of the Classic Editor, which will keep your content in tact unless and until you decide to covert it over to a series of blocks.
Converting is a straightforward process. Click the options button for the Classic block (it consists of three vertical dots) and choose “Convert to Blocks”. From there, Gutenberg will break your content up into individual blocks for headings, paragraphs, images and more.
The conversion is fast, and works great on simple pages. But what about something more complex?
In this example, we embedded both a YouTube video and added some custom CSS to part of the content. What does Gutenberg do with it?
The YouTube video was a piece of cake. Gutenberg converted it to a YouTube embed block, and it can easily be edited and moved around.
The transition for our custom CSS wasn’t quite as smooth, at least not visually. In instances where there is custom code, the block editor will convert it over to an HTML block. It may not be pretty at first glance, but it’s actually a positive step. This saves any customizations from being lost in translation.
At worst, keeping the HTML block will allow you to maintain custom code. The alternative is reworking the element as either a CSS class or maybe even a custom block.
The decision to go with the block editor is one that should be considered carefully – especially on an existing website. And, depending on how your website was built, there are a few potential sticking points to look out for:
It should be noted that page builder plugins and Gutenberg are completely different animals. Thus, there’s no built-in way to convert content from Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc. to the block editor.
That could mean a lot of manual labor. In addition, you might have to accept the fact that Gutenberg can’t do everything a page builder can. Some of the fancier features of your favorite page builder will likely require a custom block – or abandoning the look/functionality altogether – when converting over.
Custom fields have been a popular tool for customizing page templates and content types. Plugins like Advanced Custom Fields have been widely adopted because they make the process easier.
While custom fields generated through ACF still work with the block editor, their positioning within the edit screen has changed. They’re now at the bottom of the screen. That would be fine, except that ACF long allowed developers to position fields above the editor, or remove the editor entirely. That’s no longer the case.
The result is a more cluttered UI. One way around that would be to convert these custom field sets to blocks. Doing so lets you position fields within the content of a page and makes for a more seamless experience. That will take a bit more work, however.
Plenty of users have made the transition from the Classic Editor and lived to tell about it. But if you’re converting a website that your clients will update themselves, be prepared to provide some education and support.
While Gutenberg’s usability has grown by leaps and bounds, it’s still a different experience. Therefore, it’s going to take some time for your clients to adjust. This is something that needs to be discussed before making any decisions.
The fear of switching to blocks was and is understandable. There’s always a risk when making a major change to your website.
However, switching from the Classic Editor to Gutenberg is a pretty straightforward line for most websites. And, it’s perfectly fine to convert only the content you want to revamp. Everything else can safely stay in a Classic block and will work just as it always has.
Of course, the use of page builders and other complex tools can muddy up the process a bit. That’s why it’s a good idea to test on a staging environment first. It’s one of the key steps in your website’s transition.
Beyond that, it’s about considering what you stand to gain by using blocks. Things like custom layouts, easier content embeds and more flexibility come to mind.
If those seem like exciting benefits, then maybe it’s time to start building with blocks.
The post Tips for Converting an Existing WordPress Website to Use the Gutenberg Block Editor appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
During the past few summers, I’ve started a little tradition. Since I tend to have the house all to myself in the early morning, I sneak into my office and take some online courses. The daily sessions last about 30 minutes, before I start work for the day.
It’s been very beneficial, as I’ve brushed up on PHP and JavaScript, among other subjects. Not to mention that, unlike my school days, I’ve actually had fun learning new things.
I was looking forward to taking up the tradition again this year. But then the world went and changed. Suddenly, a pandemic meant that bit of extra time for learning just wouldn’t be there in the mornings.
To be blunt, the disruption of my precious routine is nothing compared to what others are experiencing and have lost. But it got me thinking that a lot of web designers have had to put their own goals on hold.
The question is, how do we manage these disruptions and avoid falling behind?
While COVID-19-related quarantines are the biggest disruption web professionals have faced, they’re not the first. Everyday life also has a way to pulling us away from learning and other personal projects. Just the obligations of running a freelance business or working on various client projects can do it – let alone events outside of work.
In this way, the challenge has always been there. You want to level up your skills, but it seems like there’s never enough time in the day.
Meanwhile, the web continues to move at warp speed. Those at the top of the food chain are building incredible UIs with React, while the rest of us try to figure out why our 3-line jQuery script stopped working.
Leveling up sounds great – but just try to get a quiet moment to work on it. Instead, making it through another day is seen a small victory.
So many of us, regardless of what niche we work in, put off our professional learning goals. Usually for good reason. They can range from raising children, being a caregiver to family or simply trying to make ends meet.
But the longer the delay, the harder it is to get back into the habit of learning. Plus, it could mean falling further behind on the skills we need to serve clients and compete in the marketplace.
Web design and development are fields that really do require a commitment to keep up with the times. The ability to stay with industry trends is of great importance. None of us want to be stuck using antiquated tools and techniques.
Then there is the personal aspect of learning. When you’re behind, you know it. You’re reminded of it in every tutorial for some fancy new tool, framework or CSS technique.
It’s easy to feel like you’re missing out – and that affects confidence. In turn, that impacts your ability to book new clients and build out your portfolio. It becomes a bit of a vicious cycle.
Each of us has our own style of learning. Not only does it include the methods we prefer to use (video, step-by-step tutorials, etc.), it also encompasses the environment around us.
For example, I really feel at my best in the morning. My head isn’t spinning from all the tasks I’ve had to handle nor the inevitable challenges that pop up. Having that uninterrupted quiet time to learn just works for me.
As difficult as it can be to accept, that idyllic situation just doesn’t exist right now. So, the choice is either to forgo learning or make the effort for self-improvement – even in imperfect conditions.
That may mean brushing up on skills at less-desirable times and when others are buzzing about the house. It may also require an uneven schedule. Maybe it’s a matter of fitting in 30 minutes on Monday night, then 45 minutes on Thursday afternoon.
Disjointed as that is, at least it’s progress. And maybe that’s the bigger point. If we wait for the “perfect” time to level up, we may be waiting for a very long time. Perhaps it’s better to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, even if they don’t fit our narrow definition of ideal.
In the end, the act of having learned something new is all that matters. The rest are just details.
The post Making Time for Your Professional Learning Goals appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
