Clue Chicks

Andrew might like the title, but it really has very little to do with the content other than the word "clue" and that I wish some people could form them about really simple things like time spent.

Recently I had to justify to a potential client why the estimate of hours doubled. I budgeted about 20% of the time for meetings.

I spent 2 hours of my own personal time being berated about the carneekinet site via IM. I was being insulted, and I was allowing this pro-bono. At this point I realised I had spent more time discussing my own site than I had spent designing elements that day for it, and that I should increase my estimate accordingly. I also offered a pro-rata option where I am paid in smaller installments.

To people in the professional services industry it might seem obvious that meetings often are billable hours. Tradespeople have callout fees, solicitors bill hourly for consultations, so why should a webdeveloper have to spend half of their time unpaid, or even worse, fall behind deadlines, because the developer did not forsee how he'd have to justify hundreds, possibly thousands of tiny little details.

Gold offered two ideas, my favoured was to charge my normal hourly rate as "Development" and meetings are twice the hourly rate and billed as "Consultation". It sounds very tempting as consultation hours would hopefully decrease.

If you were the person I was speaking to, please realise you are asking for me to spend unreasonable numbers of hours of my day to discuss your site without payment whilst shortening my deadline each time you contact me.