identifying limitations
On Speak Up (a relatively new addition to my feed reader) this evening, a question was posed. Here’s a portion of it:
Yes, I have quite a few things I’m not as good at. 
I have definite talents in coding (HTML, CSS, Movable Type, and PHP) and designing (pulling it all together, picking fonts and coordinating colors for a design, painting, drawing), but I’m lacking the "figuring out what a client wants from vague descriptions" and giving them a clear contract without doing the project and going through multiple revisions. I need it to be a bit more clear cut than just "make something I’d like."
I’m bad at picking clipart/images to use with a design - I’d rather draw a quick image myself than look through image galleries if a photo/clip art isn’t provided.
Cross-browser testing isn’t always my forte, although I know how to identify the problems a bit better in the last year or so. Especially when people wait until the project is done to say "this doesn’t work in my browser." "What browser are you using?" "IE 5 at less than 800x600." Doh! People should be able to see by my first examples if this is the case!
Also, my email skills are a bit low. I seem to always have at least one quote request that I have a hard time knowing how to reply to, so I mark it as unread and sometimes don’t get back to it as speedily as I should. 
I truly do bad on the phone, and so I’m not as flexible to different types of ways to communicate. I need a secretary ;)
This article wasn’t the only thing that got me thinking about this... the BlogBarter! project has me really wanting to be able to provide a service and have an agent do the middle man work to get the details before I produce the products. Maybe I’ll have to do some looking into what I could offer to the project. It might give me a new aspect of how I want to deal with clients. Working for wishlist items or mix CDs or another bartered item are just about as nice as money to me
Anyhow, this question is probably a good exercise to go through periodically, and make me focus on what I enjoy doing. And it makes me want to add my newest stuff to my portfolio.
Comments
Someday, when I find more time, or when I don’t have to work in the corporate world anymore - I want to be an "agent" for people just like you. Although, based on past sales experience, clients don’t often know what they want at the beginning of a project - and they always have revisions along the way. I learned to plan & account for them in my pricing - even accurately pegging the people that would be a big pain and change a lot of things.
Being a freelance agent for freelance designers and programmers would be a dream come true - I just need the guarantee of a roof over my head and food on the table.
Posted by: Christine | July 16, 2003 11:59 AM