Sk-etchbook

Right I need to pull my finger out and get back on with the paperwork and research for establishing myself. Well I haven't exactly been slacking recently but have been more focused on learning Actionscript, philosophy, psychology and some theories relating to design/advertising/perception and other areas. Predominantly I'm focusing on these areas because I'm basing my Critical Studies essay around the subjects of human perception/misperception but I also find some of the subjects incredibly interesting and beneficial on a personal (and professional in terms of strategy) development level. I've also picked up a good few tricks on the design front, have started on some PHP, and tried to start on learning more about Joomala and Wordpress but not got far yet.

Anyway back to the point. As I may have previously mentioned I'm trying to amalgamate everything into superbriefs. Here we have the Major Project, merged with Enterprise and Innovation. It's also kinda merged with PPD2 (a poor excuse for a brief if ever I saw one), which I'm not convinced is not just a good way of getting the students to build a database for the college to use for shameless self promotion. Slave labor or what!



So far I have downloaded Wordpress to document the set up but I'm not sure where to put it! The Primitive Ink domain is not going to be used for web design any more so no point putting it there. I'm not yet ready to register my final domain and it wouldn't look very professional either having a blog about setting the company up attached to the main website. It can probably be attached to my Shaunio domain as this is going to host personal and experimental shit whenever I get round to sorting through it all.



Leading nicely on to my next subjects, the hosting of domains and my domain name. I have been researching reseller hosting for a while. The choice out there is phenomenal and the variations in facilities, allowances and prices is huge. I started referencing reputable magazines, reading forums and also using Whois requests to see who hosts some sites designed by companies of interest. At the present time I'm still swayed towards Media Temple as they are extremely reputable, offer excellent functionality and are very competitively priced. The cons however are they are based in the US. In this day and age this has an unnoticeable effect on the download speeds and is more cost effective then UK hosting however it can negatively impact on search listings. The SEO war is paramount to any company marketing itself online and localization is detected using both the domain and the IP of the host. Not so big an issue if you want a .co.uk but a .com would be trouble.

So I'm still undecided. I have however decided to use an alternate domain name for myself as I want to get "web design" into the URL. The downside is this is making the URL quite long so I'm looking to use an abbreviated version for printed documents and email addresses. I'm just struggling to find a short and relevant abbreviation that hasn't been bought by one of them awful bulk buying companies! Needless to say there isn't much point printing off any new business cards until this issue is sorted.

Onward then to planning and documentation. I need primarily to finish my Business Plan and write a Brief or myself. Sounds easy. No, it isn't.

To produce something of use the Business Plan needs to incorporate financial predictions of annual turnover and a breakdown of expenses etc. The documentation from Business Link used in conjunction with docs from E&I along with several online resources are useful in doing this in as far as calculating outgoing expenses goes. The same sources are somewhat useful in predicting also how much you need to earn. The problem for me and where the real leg work is involved then comes from working out everything I actually do when working on a project. Finding how much time is spent at each step of the project then working out what extras a client may ask for and how to charge for these accordingly. This is however only one approach. You also need to check out the competitions pricing, see what similar end-results are priced at then see if your prices are competitive. Then you are left with a rough idea of what you can charge. What you need to survive on up to what you think you can get away with based on skill, experience, your portfolio etc. Then it's decide on which pricing strategy to go for and how to synchronize this with how you plan to market yourself. By this point I had most definitely lost interest. This is an example of what was needs to be covered when costing for an average project. For each of these I worked out an average hourly rate for myself then estimated how long needs to be allowed based on past experience. I have no idea how anyone could do this if they don't have existing experience?

Marketing & Promotion
Pitching
Inception
Consultation & Concept
Market research (outsourced)
Semantic Content Creation
Graphics Design Site (3 options)
Logo creation (3 options)
Photography & Product shots
Stock Photography
Studio/Location Photography (outsourced)?
Video Content Production (outsourced)
Copy Writing
Coding
Programming
Graphics Design Flyers (3 options)
Graphics Design Business cards (3 options)
Search Engine Optimisation
Testing
Image Galleries (how many images?)
Product Galleries
Updateable galleries
Updateable shop
Updateable text content
Updateable image content
Databases
Forms
Message Boards
Blogs
Further Consultations
Updates