When dealing with clients we constantly find our heads spinning with a barrage of different things - from “I hope they don’t say one of these” to identifying and dealing with task at hand, whether it be design, code, or both. We’ve always said that communication is essential for a good client-designer relationship, but what are you supposed to do when that essential line of communication is so hard to maintain due to language restrictions?

The Importance of Client Communication

Ever since I joined the freelance world, I always made sure the client communication lines were always open, especially since, hell, it would be their money I’d be taking a few weeks later. I generally try to update my clients as much as possible. And most importantly, I always try to be honest. Whether that means telling a client I’m too busy to take on their project at the moment or letting them know when uncontrollable situations arise that cause me to have to pull out of a project early. In most cases, this would probably piss clients off immensely, but if the line of communication had been there the whole time, they’ll appreciate honesty and truthfulness.

That line of communication can sometimes be very “hard to maintain”. Hard to maintain can come into play on multiple occasions. Sometimes you end up with a client who just isn’t willing to play nice, and has more of a “Take the Project and Run” type strategy and will attempt to do anything but pay you. Other times, we’re put into situations where a client really wants us to work on their project - only there’s one major problem - You don’t speak the same language.

Where’s my Translator at?

This becomes a time when the line of communication requires you to pull out your favorite edition of the world’s Multilingual dictionary. We’ve all been faced with it before. A client asks you do to something, but it takes you as long as it would to get their project done just to decipher what the hell they’re asking in their message.

You can’t fault everyone. Some people try extremely hard to get their message across in your own language, but not everyone is perfect at it. For example, here’s a recent excerpt from one of my emails from a client who wanted me to take on the duties of redesigning their online magazine.

“Uh, it sounds too good for me, especially the price, i mean, for us in Latvia it is big summ, thats why i want to use WP or Pligg or something instead of codding. But maybe it is cuz needs ir for internet magazine, more in newspaper or magazine style, not like regular style, right?”

Laying out the options

If it’s your first time attempting to deal with an international client, chances are you’ll be under a lot of pressure. You want to take the project, but you’re unsure if you can handle it. You end up having a short list of options for working through or around the international request.

• If the client does speak my language well [enough] that we can easily get on the same page, I can move along with the project and nail out specifics.
• The client has somewhat of a grasp on my language, but leaves out essential details that they can’t describe well enough for me take the project. Should I be in or out?
• It’s extremely hard for me to understand the clients request(s), but I do need the money…

Is it Possible to take International Clients who don’t speak your language? (And Should You?)

For most of us - no way. Unless you have a lot of experience in multiple languages, it’s never a good idea to try and connect with clients that you can’t understand. While money talks, so do clients. And there’s no way you’re going to find yourself with a payday if you can’t understand what the persons asking for to begin with. That’s not to say you have to say no to every international request you’re ever going to get.

Some International Clients could have a better hold on your native language than you do. In that case, brush up on some of your own vocabulary and jump right into the project without any concerns. Just make sure you and your client are on the same page before you begin and get too deep into the project.

And the message to clients before hiring non-native speakers

As designers, developers, freelancers, and industry leaders - we all want to be able to do our job for you without the extra hassle of trying to nail down what you mean. If you really want someone to design for you but you don’t speak the language at all or well enough that they could understand what you’re trying to get across, than don’t bother! Or, find someone who could translate your native language to the potential designer / developers’ language so they can have a better grasp as to what you’re looking for. In the end it will speed up the entire process, and safe both parties countless headaches and visits to Babelfish.

Welcome to another addition of my column, which has yet to be named. I must apologize before I go into this column. For those who remember, I released a previous column a few months back, and like various other columnists appeared to drop off the planet. Unfortunately, a few issues in life came at me un-expectantly and I had to deal with them, while working on my freelance projects. You need to take life as it comes, and deal with it the best way possible and sometimes certain things are set on the back burner, while more pressing issues are attended to. Now that these issues have been resolved, I am hoping to get back to something I enjoy.

Now that I have apologized, I would like to get into more pressing matters: The creation of a portfolio. For those of you who are experienced, successful web developers and designer this will be old and repetitive I am sure. However, I thought I would pass long what I have learned so far.

Portfolio 1: Under the Sea

This was my first attempt at a portfolio. It was a required piece for school and at the same time was acceptable, considering what I knew. Of course, things have changed, and I look now and there are about a dozen things I did wrong. One of the most obvious is the photo I selected to represent myself. It was a year old, still had a time stamp, my fiancée is in it, it’s at a dance, and I’m drunk. As you were to continue to explore this portfolio, you would learn I used a star wars light saber affect on the rollover of portfolio items, simply because it sounded cool at the time. The pieces that I provided were not easily accessible, and believe it or not, I didn’t even link to my websites shown. In the “About Me”, I was more focused on announcing my official status with my fiancée (although in fairness, I had just gotten engaged at the time). However potential clients and hires, didn’t want to know and didn’t care that I wanted to own my own business, support my family, and live comfortably. They wanted to know my knowledge, employment history, my past experiences, and my education. None of the three I mentioned. The closest I came was saying I was growing fond of flash. Although I did alright on the project, I must say I am glad I never took a point to show that to future employers.

Portfolio 2: Plain, Simple, Effective

Although I probably designed half a dozen portfolios after the last one I showed, this was the one I decided to go with in the end. I’ll admit it certainly did the trick for me. About four months had passed since creating underwater themed portfolio and I decided to take a new approach. Implementing a far more simple design, I decided to focus on what I had to offer at the time. This worked out well for me, getting me my diploma, as I sailed through the Portfolio review, as well as landing me three jobs, including my current one. Of course, this layout, being a year old, has it’s own flaws I can see now. The home page was almost too bland. As I looked at it now, it really doesn’t give too much impression as to what I can do. I provided to sentences, and then my name. It doesn’t exactly force a user to get interested. Also, the contact information followed the same trend. It actually provided less information and accessibility then the former portfolio. I didn’t even provide a mailto link. Then again, it was only minor as the “About Me” was much better this time, not focusing on my personal life, and instead my current web goals and aspirations. Although I touched on previous unrelated jobs, it was done in a manner to show my determination and my ability to showcase hard work. The Portfolio section itself was done far better then my previous site, allowing better user interaction, as well as the ability to actually view my sites! To this date, this is still, in my opinion, one of the better portfolios I’ve done. I’ve thought of only updating this version to show case newer work, however I feel like I have grown past what I have here, and wanted to push myself both design-wise and code-wise.

Portfolio 3: Current…. Disappointment

This is my current site, which I can’t say I am too proud of. As it stands right now, I currently don’t even have a portfolio properly listed. As with most designers, when we run out of time, and have various projects on the go; we ignore our stuff first. This site is a result of that. Due to the rush of things, I don’t even show it to potential clients. I’ve made a list, and went with that instead. Embarrassing? The content is solid, I had three people, two English majors, review it and make sure it all checked out. The coding was solid, as I’ve been told on a few occasions it’s even blackberry accessible. It’s the little things that I don’t like. I feel like the text looks out of place on the home page. I should have used an sans-serif based font. The resume should be up to date, and a pdf instead of a cut together jpg of two print screens. My portfolio should have been finished. I should have taken more time on the articles section. I should have made the Quote Form work properly, instead of basic text. There’s a lot I wish I’d done, and didn’t. That’s why, even with my busy schedule, I am forcing myself create a new portfolio. (That and career advancements).

Portfolio 4: In the Works

I won’t go into details regarding these two layouts today, as I plan to save this as another column in the future. I will, give you a quick idea of what was going through my mind. My past projects, I found to be a little “bland” and I wanted to jazz it up, pushing myself to think of a new creative way to represent myself. I made sure all my portfolio items were present right away, while following a theme that made sense to have them there. As I said, this project will be another column.

Final Thoughts:

I know, I more so, just reviewed what I’d done. However, I am hoping you did pick something up.

• One of the first things I ever learned was that content was important. Your portfolio needs to show you in a serious, professional manner, and not just someone who loves what you do. I know that sounds harsh, but people want to know what you have to offer, and what you’ve done in the past. They don’t care about how much you love it.
• Simple is the safest route. I know, a lot of the time, you hear about needing to push the envelope. However, in my opinion, you need to pick when and why. This is your career, it might look cool to some, but if it’s too busy or complicated, you risk losing more clients and work.
• FINISH WHAT YOU START!!! As designers, we set our stuff aside most of the time. When it comes to your portfolio, you need to find time. Right now, I have six freelance projects on the go. I kept putting my portfolio off, and now I am risking potential full time work and more freelance work as a result.
• Be creative. I know, I also said keep it simple, but you need to find a way to mix the two. Without it, you can be bland, and boring. Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who keep it too simple, and their sites lack a professional feel, and don’t allow them to show off their other talents. If you don’t have the “design ability”, I would recommend hiring someone, because odds are your programming abilities would make most jealous.

I hope this helps at least one person in the future. Good luck with the portfolios!

If you stop by Devlounge today, you may notice that the articles index has been revamped, making it much easier to find things and giving you more ways to find what you’re looking for. Previously, the articles index was rather confined. It showcased the last three posts from each category, which not only slowed down the loading time because there were so many Wordpress loops running at once, but it also may have turned people away from digging deeper into the archives. Some people who looked quick may have been under the impression that all we had was those three articles from each category, and wouldn’t even notice that we actually have a whole slew of content available for your reading pleasure.

The new index is broken down into three sections:

• Browse by Category
• Browse by Popularity
• Browse by Year

The popular section is running off of a newly installed plugin, so it has started calculating the most popular posts as of right now. Because of this, watching the page is like watching Digg spy, because old posts are making it onto the popular list even though they might not be the most popular of our posts. Give this section some time and it will be able to spotlight our best and most read content. If you have any other suggestions for improvements we could make to the Articles index, please feel free to let me know in the replies.

This will in fact be a whole week of updates, a “pre-spring” cleaning of sorts. Other areas I hope to tackle this week include; refresh the interviews page, style the contact form (we had to update it with an anti-spam question to eliminate a recent surge of trash), as well as other improvements and tweaks here and there.

Welcome to the first “team” edition of Friday Focus, in which Ronald and I will each be contributing our own favorites of the week, adding more variety and more spice to your Fridays.

Sites of the Week

AJ’s Picks:

First up from my choices this week is Contraband. Utterly simple, this design makes the cut thanks to the illustration work in the header.

Next is RadioCinema. This dark design also makes the list because of it’s use of header imagery, in this case, with flash effects.

And finally for my picks of this week there is Silverpoint. Silverpoint designs sites mainly for schools, and they do a good job at it. This clean company site is sleek and efficient, with a good combination of colors.

Ronalfy’s Picks:

This next design is from a web design portfolio/blog called Blue Anvil. The design is highly professional and makes good use of the top-level navigation and sidebar. The footer design is superb as well. While you’re checking out the design, make sure you check out some of the well-written content.

Although I’m not too fond of animals (I do own a cat), this next design captured my attention for its out-of-the-box design. The designer makes excellent use of background images for the layout, and link hover effects for the navigation. The site is for a local store in Minnesota, but it’s definitely worth looking at if for the inspiration alone.

Digg Weekly

AJ:
Design - 83 Wordpress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
A large list with thumbnails of 83 Wordpress theme that are free (excluding Soxnest). Includes some of ours, and a great resource if you’re looking for the perfect pre-made Wordpress theme.

Programming - Add Opensearch to your site is 5 minutes
A quick and easy method for adding Opensearch to any site (IE7 and FF2 compatible) with little work.

Ronalfy:
I didn’t get a chance to get my feet wet with Digg this week, but I did find these links this week:
Design
- 8 bits of Colour Inspirations
A wonderful list of color resources/inspirations for the color-challenged people such as myself.
- Why You Should Create a Wireframe First
The engineer inside of me loves diagrams and charts. This article talks about setting up a wireframe to assist in creating a holistic view of a site’s design. The article also has an Adobe Illustrator wireframe template for you to download. The article assumes the reader has Illustrator available, but you could create a wireframe using any diagramming (or vector) tool.
- Famous Logos Converted to Web 2.0
Also from Inspiration Bit is this hilarious post about popular logos being converted over to Web 2.0. Awesome stuff.

Important Reminder

Remember, we need your questions for our upcoming interview with Digg! Right now we don’t even have enough submissions to formulate the interview. We’d really like to have enough that we can’t take them all, so please submit away and tell your friends to contribute their questions!

Bes Zain — a former Gravatar moderator — helped contribute to this article.

As reported earlier, the Gravatar Public Beta is live. Within this review, you’ll find screenshots and my opinions of Gravatar’s new features. Please note that Gravatar is a paid service ($10) if you want more than two gravatars and/or more than one e-mail address.

Registration

Since I was already registered for Gravatar, I didn’t need to re-register which was nice. And my old Gravatar was there as well. The main screen — dubbed My Gravatars — shows which gravatars you have and allows you to add additional gravatars and/or e-mail addresses.

Adding a Gravatar - Image Uploading

Since I didn’t particularly like my old gravatar, I decided to add in another one. Gravatar allows you to upload a picture from your computer (the file I used was 1.55 MB) and crop it from there.

One thing I’d like to see here is a status indicator for the image upload and also a limit on the file size uploaded.

Cropping the Gravatar

Now that I had my spiffy picture uploaded, I wanted to crop it. Gravatar conveniently has a cropping tool that allows you to easily do this. One thing I did notice is that the cropping tool gives you much more control when the picture is at a higher resolution.

Rating the Gravatar

Once my gravatar was all cropped and ready, I got to rate it. As tempted as I was to rate my gravatar “X”, I decided to give my gravatar the Disney friendly “G” rating.

There is a potential for abuse here, but I’m glad Gravatar decided to allow users to rate their own gravatars. However, I foresee a problem with the reporting mechanism for abuse. What if it takes too long for an offending gravatar to be taken down? What if the admin is on vacation or something?

When reporting an “under-rated” gravatar, all you can enter in is the offending URL and an explanation. What I think should happen here is that the user can enter in the gravatar’s URL and give the gravatar a suggested rating. If enough users change the rating (say from G to X), then the offending gravatar is automatically changed to a neutral image until the owner of the gravatar changes it and/or the rating.

The owner of the offending gravatar would get a message telling him/her that the gravatar has been labeled as offensive. The owner can then appeal the offensive rating or change the gravatar and/or rating, which will then go into an admin queue. This takes the admin mostly out of the loop and makes the users the moderators.

Select Which Gravatar to Use

After uploading, cropping, and rating my gravatar, I had way too many choices to chose from. However, if I want to add one more gravatar, I would have to pay $10 a year. Rather than do that, I selected the gravatar I just uploaded.

Removing a Gravatar

Removing a gravatar is simple as well. Just hover over the gravatar you wish to delete and click the bright and shiny red “X”.

The Future of Gravatar?

It sounds like from this WordPress Podcast that Tom Werner is planning on turning Gravatar into a pseudo-MyBlogLog.

I’m not incredibly convinced Gravatar will be able to pull it off, especially since Gravatar has had such a shaky start. MyBlogLog can almost be a full competitor since it offers a full profile, community, and avatars for comments as well. Gravatar will be playing catch-up for a while if anything.

However, MyBlogLog is bloated and Gravatar (right now) is extremely easy to use, especially for those who don’t own blogs. If Gravatar starts turning into MyBlogLog and still has the admin/server difficulties, there will be nothing to stop people from flocking to MyBlogLog for good, especially since MyBlogLog offers a great amount of services for free.

I also don’t personally see Gravatar surviving very long unless the service secures some serious funding, and right now ten dollars is a little much to pay for more e-mail addresses and gravatars.

Conclusion

I suggest giving Gravatar a second chance and checking out the beta. The service is much improved over what it was before and very easy to use. I foresee a significant problem with Gravatar as far as abuse goes, however.

My skepticism is high as far as the survivability of what I think is a valuable (but not ten dollars worth) service. MyBlogLog is a viable competitor, but it carries a lot of baggage that Gravatar doesn’t have at the moment.

Right now the service is still in beta and is having its ups and downs. If Gravatar cannot reliably stay online and functioning past the beta, I predict that the Gravatar launch will not be a success, especially since the service has already left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

Gravatar is having a public beta right now. The site was down earlier, but appears to be up right now. I truly hope this is the beginning of the new Gravatar and not the end. I’ll try to write a review (no promises) this weekend after I’ve been able to adequately test out Gravatar’s new capabilities.

I just wanted to make this clear, that not every theme on the Astereo testing ground is available for download. Many of you are probably aware of Smashingmagazine recent list of 83 Wordpress theme you probably hadn’t heard of. They kindly included two of ours right at the beginning: Iceburgg and Soxnest. The problem is soxnest is not a public theme. It was client work that was than sold off, so it will not be released and there are no plans for a release in the future. I’ve been getting a lot of requests asking “where can I download it” and “is it available?”. While we thank SM for the link, the theme is not a free theme, so I’m sorry for any trouble that might have cost you if you’ve spent the last few days looking for it. We do have plenty of other Wordpress themes and other goodies, so head over to our list of extras if you’ve never seen them before. I’m sure you can find something good.

We will be hosting an upcoming interview with the crew behind Digg, and we need your input! This will be a user-generated interview, where will take the best 6-8 questions and send them in to Digg for response. Multiple digg staffers will be contributing, so nows the time to ask away! Please leave your questions in the replies. Later this week or early next week we’ll be sending in the best ones, and the interview will go up shortly after that (it may take a few weeks as the digg crew is busy, but we’ve already got the ok, so this is a definite interview!).

Working from home as a full-time freelance web developer I’ve encountered some absolutely stunning lines from clients and so have friends of mine. This is a small collection of those lines to watch out for if you choose to go into the field yourself.

1. If you do this one for free…

This has to be one of the most popular. People always want something for as little as possible, the notion of ‘you get what you pay for’ normally doesn’t register until at least eighteen years old, but the notion can be ignored at ages high above this.

2. This will be great exposure…

This usually comes before number 1, ‘If you do this one for free you’ll get great exposure’. The problem is great exposure isn’t a link in the footer and it isn’t a mention in the launch post. Great exposure is guaranteed jobs afterwards, and lots of traffic for your own personal site - that and possibly free advertising in a prominent placement.

3. Deposit?

Some clients want you to effectively work for free. No deposit and lots of free work = one starving freelancer. To be free to accept work that doesn’t involve deposits be sure to have some money stored away to eat away at until the client pays in the end. Make sure they are trustable and will pay in the end. Be sure to do your research.

4. Can I put this on my GeoCities?

It takes the breath out of you, working on something for a long time and then a client asking you if they can put it on an incompatible hosting platform that won’t support it. It makes for some difficult explaining but makes one great entry on a ‘ten things you hope the client never says’ article.

5. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want it anymore

This is always an annoyance, and is sometimes a requirement in order to progress onto other projects. But it’s always something that will affect you on a personal level.

6. Ok can you just add this, and this

“You want money for the additions? You said you’d do everything for a set price!’. This one starts a lot of arguments and can affect your relationship with the client dramatically depending on how you react. To prevent this one blowing up on you always outline a clear feature set before starting work and outline exactly what you’ll deliver. Also outline what additional costs will be monetarily to the client. Will they be by the hour? Or a fixed fee? Discussed on arrangement? Whatever it is - it’s always best to plan these things out beforehand.

7. I just need you to look the other way whilst we break this law..

Whether it be tax law (it usually is) or some kind of pass the parcel - breaking the law is bad, um kay? Be sure to brush up on your tax laws that apply to you - make sure that if your hired to do a job for a company as an employee that they are handling your taxes, and if you are a contractor that you sort out your own. It always helps to know a small amount of law, and to consult an accountant when you aren’t sure of something.

8. My mum says that she won’t let me use her credit card so I can’t pay you

Funny, but a huge cringe worthy moment. It happens to all of us once in a blue moon, and it makes a fun entry.

9. Yahoo! will buy us

This is normally followed by number 1 and/or 2. People get bought all the time - but it’s simply not the case that millions are involved with every purchase of another site. Yahoo! may buy anywhere between one and tens of sites a year, but that’s between one and tens of several million websites out there.

10. Nothing at all

The client disappears, drops off the face of the earth. It’s your worst nightmare, they get you started on a project and leave, they give you a brief about a project tell you the deposit is coming and then you never hear from them. To avoid this make sure you always have a backup plan and if you can get a secondary contact for your client - that’s even better.

I’d like to thank Ronalfy for giving me the idea for this article. If you have any other things you’d like to see me write feel free to leave a comment or use my contact form to send it directly.

I would also like to mention that this article is also available on my blog JHuskisson.com where my articles will always appear first. To keep up to date with my blog be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.

I finally updated the comment form today to break up trackbacks and comments to prevent trackbacks from breaking up responses. It appears (at least to me) that the comment area is now taking longer to load. This could be because of cache issues, or the comments code may need to be optimized and cleaned up. Please let me know if the comment areas are loading slow(er) for you than the rest of the site. I’ll try to get it sorted out tomorrow.