Reasons To Become An Agile Web Designer. #5 Fewer Risks

April 22, 2022

Reduced risk is perhaps the key reason for agile project management going mainstream in IT and development. It’s taken many years and annual losses running into billions to force top-down, budget focussed organisations like governments to change, but for small web agencies it should be much easier. We don’t have centuries of culture overturn and…

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Reasons To Become An Agile Web Designer. #4 Stable income

April 7, 2022

Agile focuses on continuous delivery where the traditional model works to deadlines. The feast and famine problem known to most web designers is a product of the traditional approach. Two common tactics have emerged to overcome this problem. Value pricing – getting high ticket jobs to cover the designer for longer periods. Recurring incomes –…

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Reasons To Become An Agile Web Designer. #3 Less time wasting

March 30, 2022

Web designing was my escape from the tedium of being a manager in the civil service. I loved working with staff to achieve our shared goals, but the processes and documentation requested by my office became soul destroying. I felt it prevented me from getting on with my job. Mostly, I was creating an unread…

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Reasons to become an agile web designer. # 2 More enjoyable work

March 28, 2022

In the last video I argued that selling websites as commodities was outdated because: The “build it and they will come” approach is rarely considered an effective online marketing strategy. Most web designers are using platforms (like WordPress) that need to evolve. Here, I am looking at how traditional project management can also make work…

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Reasons to become an agile web designer. # 1 Better work

March 23, 2022

This is the first of 5 posts on how web designers could benefit from adopting an agile mindset. This one, on better work quality and opportunities, will be a little bit longer as I need to offer some historical context. Traditional Vs Agile approaches Most will be familiar with Traditional web projects. They start with…

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When do web design contracts do more harm than good?

February 28, 2022

There’s a general consensus that web design contracts with clients are a good thing. Unlike many other services, web designers depend on their customers’ input to complete their work. Traditionally, web designers have submitted a contract along with a proposal of work. It sets out the end deliverable and the responsibilities on either side. The…

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How Agile has helped me price web projects

January 7, 2022

One of the benefits of moving to an Agile approach, for me, has been the confidence it’s given me with pricing projects. That might sound paradoxical as Agile is about letting the process determine the cost, rather than fixing them upfront. But, that does not mean we have to be suspiciously vague or evasive when…

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Are we “leaking” web design clients?

December 28, 2021

For this first post on getting clients I’m revisiting one of my favourite books. It’s a long time bestseller, we based a series around, on the WP Builds podcast. It’s called Watertight Marketing. Amazingly, you can now grab it for free thanks to the outstanding generosity of its author Bryony Thomas. Here, I will be…

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Are you a Traditional or an Agile web designer?

December 17, 2021

Recently, on the WP Builds Podcast, we put out a discussion called “Realistically defining our business model”. It was the first in our Business Bootcamp series where we’re relearning everything we know about building sites and running a design business. For contrast Nathan (the host) agreed to take the role of representing a traditional approach…

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Using Scrum to make our businesses Agile

December 7, 2021

In the last video I talked about agile and how it is a mindset and a reaction to the problems of traditional project management. Here, we are looking at Scrum, which is a lightweight framework for implementing agile. It was created by two of the authors of the Agile manifesto (Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber)…

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