Can I see your work? Um…..
May 17th, 2007 | Posted in Freelancing | 2 Comments
When planning the structure of this site one of the features that was automatically included was a portfolio which needed to showcase my body of work. I began with making a list of all sites I had worked on along with brief notes on my involvement.
Eventually, the portfolio section was completed along with the rest of the site and was published live on the internet. Fine, job done. What’s next I thought.
A short while later I had an enquiry for work, prior to parting with project details they wanted to go through my portfolio. I promptly sent a link to my portfolio page. Some days later they called to discuss the work and my previous projects came up during the discussion. They went through the bits that they liked and asked how I went about developing the slick flash interface, but I didn’t? They then asked about the really nice looking designs and animation and asked again about my involvement, again, I wasn’t involved. The conversation fell silent.
Caller: “So what did you do then?”
Me: “All the server side scripting and database development”
Caller: “Can I see any of what you did?”
Me: “Um…”
Therein lies the problem, as a server side developer discussing my portfolio with potential clients, it is difficult getting across what part I played in the construction of the site. As developers, we do all the work which happens behind the flash movie, or the posh slick design. This isn’t to say we cannot develop in Flash, or design but for these projects our role was that of a server side developer. Trying to get this point across is a constant issue and one I expect will never go away.
How do you showcase your work? List technical details? That would just blind them with science and scare prospective clients away. A friend suggested screenshots. Of what? A web form and its subsequent thank your for submitting your details page? Quite often, our work sits behind a login screen, so demoing is not an option. You could create a demo on your site, again, what will it show?
Hopefully, as clients become more aware of what’s involved, which to be fair is happening, we can all expect to face this again and again.
I’ve had a similar issue in the past with more than one potential client for a business I worked for, and it can be a real pain to get people to understand that there’s much more to a website that what they see on the surface. It’s got to the point now where if I work on a site, I keep the static design (that someone else has created) aside, and when people ask what I did I can simply say “I took this static design and turned it into a functional website.”
That’s one way. I have often thought to put together a short screencast type video of the application with notes at certain times explaining the system. Only issue is that if the system is a password protected one then the client may be reluctant to have a video made of it.