All the elements are on a transparent background so you should be able to drag and drop them straight onto your own designs.

You can download my web design elements psd right here.

The simple answer is work out how many hours you think the project will take and multiply by your hourly rate, but how accurate can you be when estimating the total number of hours a project will take?

You may estimate that a project will take 80 hours to complete but as everyone knows in this industry, things don’t always run as smooth as you’d like. What if your initial design gets rejected after spending 14 hours on it? What happens when you hit a stumbling block when accessing a clients server that throws you a couple of days behind?

There are freelancers out there that won’t give fixed price quotes for that very reason, they’re not comfortable with it. This approach will actually end up costing them money, as more likely than not the client has a budget in mind and they want to know the project can be completed within that budget. An hourly rate doesn’t give the client confidence the project won’t overrun and end up costing them more than they can afford.

The reality is, there is no simple method to providing a fixed price quote, the more experience you have with web project, the more likely you are to be able to give an accurate quote. The method I use is to work out the hours I think the project will take and then factoring in a certain amount of time (depending on the size and complexity of the project and also equally as importantly the relationship with the client) to allow for any potential issues. In most cases it works, but it doesn’t always go to plan.

I’m a big advocate of the brilliant online accounting software FreeAgent (review and discount code here) to manage all the financial aspects of my business and I’ve recently started using their time tracking facility on fixed price projects to work out project profitability. Over time this will help me to make my quotes as accurate as possible and highlight any areas where I may or may not be over running with time. As with all things digital, it’s a constantly evolving process.

Use a generic email

I appreciate that clients will look around to get the best deal, but I also appreciate it when emails contain at least some personalisation, even if it’s just the inclusion of a name.

CC everyone into the same email

Ok this one doesn’t happen all that often but when it does it’s shocking. You receive an email and see 20+ other designers cc’d in. I like gambling, but not that much.

Make lots of spelling mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes when they type and I can forgive a few errors, but when the majority of the words you write are spelled wrong I lose confidence in you.

Explain your idea badly

The less information I get the more dubious I am. If you really want an amazing website creating, talk about your project with the enthusiasm and detail that it deserves.

Ask for prices without any project information

I really hate this one, an email with no introduction, no project details but requesting prices. It immediately makes me think you’re just a competitor doing a bit of price research.

Tell me that you haven’t got much money to spend

Quite simply, if you’re not prepared to invest the money then I’m not prepared to invest the time.

Have you got any particular irks when receiving new business emails? I’d love to hear them!

Should you want to pick up a copy of CS5 Master Collection in the UK then you can expect to pay £2,706.02GBP. Now I know that the pound isn’t particularly strong against the dollar at the moment but I have to say that is completely ridiculous. A quick conversion (using Google’s current exchange rate) of the US price to pounds comes out at £1767.32, which means that UK customers are paying almost £1,000 more than customers in the US. Am I the only one that finds this a little bit unfair?

After a few days of testing it quickly became apparent that FreeAgent was a great fit for my business. I’m not going to have an in depth look at every feature that FreeAgent offers, the trial can do a better job of that than I ever will, but what I will try and do is explain why I rate it so highly.

First and foremost, FreeAgent is a UK based business. The software understands UK business and tax better than any of it’s competitors, it’s all very straightforward and intuitive. Right from the off it really feels like it’s tailored to your business, you’re prompted to choose your business type: Sole Trader, Partnership or Limited Company after which the interface changes to meet your requirements.

FreeAgent’s dashboard provides you a great overview of all that’s happening with your business – open/overdue invoices, projects with unbilled time, profit and loss for the year so far, recent timeslips, and open/recently approved estimates. If that doesn’t float your boat, you can customise the overview page to meet your needs.

Another great feature is the ability to import your electronic bank statements and explain transactions as money in or money out. As you begin to use this feature you really notice it’s worth as FreeAgent learns from your explanations and starts to save you the time, while at the same time building a picture of the money coming in and going out of your account.

Finally, FreeAgent offers all the usual features that you would expect from an online accounting service – estimates, expenses, invoices, reminders, time tracking and contact management. And it does them all very well.

Pricing & Discount Code

Take a look at FreeAgent, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed – FreeAgent starts at £15/month with a free 30 day trial and you can get a 10% discount by clicking this link or by entering this code into your FreeAgent trial account – 362gj3oe.

So finally, along comes Adobe Browserlab and I love it! It’s fast, gives you multiple browsers to choose from (all the major players), allows you to compare screenshots from different browsers side by side or even use a very slick onion skin method to overlay them.

So far so good!

Over the past few months I’ve been having all kinds of trouble with my one time sweetheart, my 17″ Macbook Pro. It all started 4-5 weeks ago when my mac was fast approaching it’s 2nd birthday – after a long day at work I put my mac to sleep, tucked it into it’s second skin and made my way home. Now I’m a bit of a workaholic and truth be told, my mac never gets much of a rest. But when I went to wake it up – nothing. I scoured the net, tried every trick I’ve ever learned, but nothing worked. So I took it to an authorised Apple service centre. As I was passing the Mac to them, I heard something loose rattling around inside. Not good.

After a day of keeping my fingers crossed, the call came in – the logic board was broken and there were some loose ‘clips’ inside. It cost me a cool £750 to get my baby back up and running again. United again, I figured we could soon make that money back. Wrong.

A few days after getting my mac back, I noticed another loose item inside – another clip had worked it’s way loose (what the hell are these clips?) and had to be removed. A few weeks go by and everything is fine, until one day, the track pad stops working and I had no idea why. That was until I felt the underneath of my mac and noticed that the battery had swelled up and bent out of shape causing the trackpad to stop working properly.

So at present I’m without a battery, I have a laptop that can be on my lap, just as long as I’m sitting somewhere near a socket. Apple have very kindly agreed to replace the offending battery, however I can’t help but think that my 2 year old computer is falling apart at the seams and hasn’t fully justified it’s whopping price tag (£2000). And I haven’t even mentioned the electric shocks it likes to give me when I’m working (I didn’t even have to pay for that extra!).

Did I consider switching to PC?

Yes I did.

For about 4 seconds.

Twitter and the freelancer seems like a perfect fit. As a freelancer you either move around quite a lot or you end up working at home on your own with little outside contact. This is where Twitter steps up – you can build a network of colleagues to communicate with and these colleagues can be anyone, from anywhere – heroes, idols, friends, peers, former colleagues, celebrities – whatever you want. Need some feedback on your latest design? struggling with some code? – consult your new found community!

As you build and refine your network, you’ll also notice that news breaks quickly on Twitter, which is very handy indeed when you work in a fast moving industry and staying on top of developments and trends is vital. Where did I first hear about Google Wave, Adobe BrowserLab and Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80m transfer to Real Madrid? You’ve guessed it!

So what initially seemed to me like little more than an extension to one of my most hated facebook features (status updates) is now growing on me rapidly, and is fast becoming a tool that I consider a necessity.

Just lately, as I approach probably the busiest I’ve ever been in my career I’ve learned to embrace the deadline and it’s become one of my biggest allies.

Deadlines set targets, they unite the project team (client included) and get them all focusing on a single goal and that is a good thing. Everyone needs to be singing from the same sheet if you want to deliver a knock-out project on time.

So what happens when you don’t have a deadline? Expectations differ, decisions become less urgent and prominence gets taken way from the project. This leads to a very unordered work-flow and ultimately makes the project much more difficult to manage.

On any given project, I tend to set numerous internal deadlines as well as numerous deadlines with the client. Why? I do this because it is much easier to manage a project in small chunks. It allows you to constantly assess how far you are from your goal and is a really good way of helping you to plan should you start to run behind or even in front.

Don’t fear the deadline!