Evie Milo is a self employed freelance web designer from her office at home in Kinghorn in Fife, Scotland. Trading under the name of Eskymo New Media Design, (Eskymo for short) Evie showcases her range of services, skills and work from her own little online igloo - namely www.my-igloo.net
We had a chat about how she got started, how she attracts new clients, how she finds inspiration for her design work as well as her favourite sites for getting involved in the web design community.
Could you provide a bit of information about yourself?
About 10 years ago I did a couple of 4 day courses in Dreamweaver and Flash and as I was unemployed at the time, managed to get onto a 6 month New Deal Programme which gave me access to training, a computer, the internet and also the opportunity to try and get a job placement at the end of it all. I worked my socks off learning everything I possibly could and made an animated flash portfolio which landed me a 3 month placement at a big design agency in Edinburgh and led to a full time position. I have since worked for other agencies part time, but eventually decided that I wanted to be my own boss and became a full time freelancer and I’ve not looked back since.
What type of work do you do?
Most of my clients are within the creative sector - artists, designers, photographers and I guess this has come about because of the fact that I have degrees in both photography and art and have always been surrounded by artists and creatives. Other work within my portfolio has come through word of mouth or chance meetings, or through companies finding me on Google - mostly individuals and small to medium businesses. I also do a lot of work for design agencies in Edinburgh and London who like to outsource either the design or the build part of a project and so I get to work on a lot of jobs for really high profile clients. So all in all I have a lot of variety in the work that I do.
The core of my work is web design / build and I work in Fireworks to create visuals and use Dreamweaver to hand code in XHTML, CSS and PHP. I also use Wordpress a lot now, as more and more clients are wanting blogs as well as websites. If a client requests a Content Management System, I get a programmer involved and have a couple of reliable folk I outsource to, but I am also expanding my own skill base on that front and so hope to be able to offer this service myself in the near future.
As well as web design, I also do flash animation and have recently been working with a Fife based illustrator who wanted to bring some of her painted characters to life. Other than exciting projects like that, animation usually takes the form of Christmas E-cards and in October / November I can often be heard to be humming or whistling Christmas carols and songs much to the annoyance of my partner. Christmas always comes early at Eskymo!
What are your most effective methods for attracting new clients?
I attract new clients through the work I’ve done and can honestly say that 95% of new clients come to me because I have been recommended to them. The only cold calling I have ever done is when I initially started out and the thought of it filled me with dread. So I devised a cunning plan and created a short animation entitled ‘Seeking Big Fish’ - you can view it on my website - I placed it in a password protected directory and sent out an illustrated postcard to the companies in Edinburgh I wanted to work with. After checking my website stats to see which of the companies had logged in - each had a different username - I phoned them up to talk business. They all liked my approach and some put my details on file and others became my first ever clients.
What key steps do you tend to follow from start to finish when approaching a new project ?
I have a ‘new client questionnaire’ that I get clients to fill out initially, which covers such things as:
- Whether they have a site already
- What they like / dislike about it
- Who they consider to be their competitors
- Have they got a domain / hosting sorted if they don’t already have a website
- What functionality they need
It gives me a good overview of what is required as well as informing me of their skills and abilities and the level of ‘hand holding’ and ‘jargon free speak’ required - some clients are more technically challenged than others and so you have to take the right approach from the start.
I then formulate from this questionnaire what I believe they need and create site maps, wireframes and ideas/visuals as well as putting together an estimate and suggested time scale for the project. I then have a meeting with the client where we go over every little detail and from that, I can then go back to the office and mock up the final layout for the project. Contracts are signed, design visuals approved, website build commences.
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