Category: General

Hiring decisions can spell the difference between the success and failure of a project. That’s why it’s important that you get the best candidate for the job. Take as much time as you need. Don’t hire right away. Wait until you hire the right one.

Keep this mind, whether you’re on the lookout for a dedicated designer or a freelancer. Don’t quite know when to pick a freelance graphic designer over a dedicated one and vice versa? Here are some tips to point you in the right direction.

Deliverables schedule

In an article on LinkedIn about freelance writers, the author says that finding out “how often you’ll need new content may be the deciding factor in hiring a freelancer.” The same logic applies if you’re considering the services of a freelance web designer. Do you need new visual content supplied to you on a regular basis? When you say regular, do you really mean once a month or on a weekly basis?

If you just need new content occasionally, then keeping a dedicated person or team on the payroll, just to handle the work, is a tad wasteful. If this is all you need, hiring a freelancer is your best option. Sites like Designhill make this easy and convenient for you.

Advantages of hiring freelancers

Going for the services of a freelance graphic designer at Designhill means you won’t have to pay for benefits, insurance and taxes to get the design you need. There are no sick leaves or vacation leaves to worry about either. This is especially true if you only need a couple of one-offs, like a logo design, perhaps, or a remake on your existing site design. After that, the deal’s done and you both go your separate ways.

In the article “Should I Hire a Freelancer or Employee?” posted on the Coworks site, one section mentions another advantage to hiring a freelancer, over a dedicated one. You can get freelance graphic web designers based on the skill set or specialty you need. With this, you won’t have to find and hire the multi-disciplinary—the jack of all trades—designer. Designers with technical know-how in as many fields or types of design work as possible sound like a godsend. But they rarely fall at your feet in batches. At best, you’ll end up with one who’s good at four out of six or two out of four. Getting a designer who specializes in logo design or front-end applications is the next best thing because it does away with all that.

Also, the really best ones command a hefty fee. This isn’t ideal if you’re working on a budget.

Perks of a dedicated designer

However, if you need visual content pretty regularly—that covers daily to weekly deliverables—you might want to take on the idea of hiring a dedicated designer for that. In this case, you’re definitely going to need a bigger budget. But you can count on a couple of handy perks to offset the expense. Since hiring dedicated designers mean you share the same office space with them every day, they also get to have a hand in the office culture and team you’re building. Built on trust and honesty, professional relationships like this can last for years and even help both of you succeed in your careers.

The third option

Thanks to the internet, hiring anywhere in the world isn’t a problem anymore. With sites like Designhill offering you a network of designers—from web designers and logo designers to illustrators and graphic artists—you’ve now got access to a huge talent pool out there. The bigger it is, the better your chances are at finding the right person for the job. When you find the best ones, then count yourself lucky. Keep these freelancers on your roster of go-to experts for when you need something new. You get the quality you need but at a much lower cost than keeping a dedicated designer on your payroll.

Hongkiat’s article, “Hiring Freelance Contractors: 8 Things You Need to Know,” gives helpful insight into how you can find the right freelancer for your project.

1. Check the portfolio. This is one of the first things you’ll have to look at. Evaluate the style and quality of the work. Does it match what you want and need?
2. Set the ground rules. Make sure the designer knows everything you need him/her to know. This includes project details, deadlines and pay rate.
3. Don’t go for cheap. While hiring freelancers are more affordable, automatically going for designers that offer the lowest rates out there can be more trouble than help.
4. Be fair. Respect the work that designers do. Pay designers at fair rates. You’re already saving up on medical insurance coverage, leaves and taxes.
5. Don’t forget about references. If you want to be extra sure, then ask after references. Call them up. If you’re satisfied with the feedback you get, then set a meet up and start the ball rolling.

Thrilled that you’re finally starting your own online shop? Here are a few tips that could prove useful to you as you begin to build your business from the ground up:

1. Let go of the assumption that sales would just automatically start to pouring in the minute you put up your site.

Having an online site ensures that you have online visibility. This adds to the credibility of your business. Any business that can’t have its own site might even be perceived as shady. That’s why many shoppers are wary to trust businesses that don’t have online presences. With web-based solutions and platforms that offer easy-to-use systems, owning a site is now the norm.

However, having a site doesn’t guarantee sales and conversions, especially not if you don’t know anything about what you’re doing on the site. Is the content optimized for mobile? Do you offer online credit card payment options for your customers? Do you have a long list of product pages that need to be trimmed? Or maybe your checkout process is too long? You’ve got a lot to learn to improve your site’s performance. It would be great if you already know a few things before you got started.

If you don’t and you think your time is better spent elsewhere, particularly in planning marketing campaigns, then why not hire someone to take care of these things for you? Just make sure to check the output every step of the way so you know they’re getting the vibe, the tone, the character you want for your brand.

2. Don’t expect to earn money right away.

You’re not going to get rich, not right away, maybe not even after a few weeks. So don’t expect your money to return to you twofold or triple-fold. That’s not the way this works. However, if you’re patient and you’ve got passion for the business, then there’s a bigger chance that you’ll find yourself succeeding one day. It’s a long road to success though so you’ve got to be able to last that long.

Make sure you have plenty of money, not just for capital, but to take care of your living expenses along with your emergencies, while you try to get the business off the ground.

3. Don’t do everything.

You can be the boss, the mentor, the occasional comedian providing your team with much-needed comic relief. But you can’t be the editor, the writer, the designer, and the strategist at the same time. You can’t be everyone and you can’t do everybody’s job. You shouldn’t even try.

Do what you’re best at. If that means you have to spend a good amount of your time every day developing campaigns or thinking about how to come up with creative ways to use Scrapebox, then do it. That’s your core competency. Don’t lose that by trying to be everything that your team needs. Learn to delegate. Learn to trust your team, if you have one. If you don’t, then hire somebody, even just one person to help you out.

4. Don’t quit—at least not yet.

Starting your own eCommerce site is tough work. There are plenty of growing pains to overcome. There are days that you’ll be too busy to even look in the mirror, and days when all you’ll want to do is sleep. But you wanted this, you said yes, you committed to this project. So even when you feel you’re at the lowest point of being an entrepreneur, when you think the business isn’t going to go anywhere, that’s when you’ll have to remind yourself not to give up, not to quit. Give the business a chance. Don’t pull up stakes until you’re absolutely sure. And even then, you should still try and talk yourself out of it.

There is, however, a difference between having a bad day and not being fit for the work at all. If you know it’s just a bad day, then distract yourself until it goes away.

5. Don’t work for more than 12 hours every day.

If you have to do 12 hours of work or more just for the business to survive, then you’ve got to know that the set-up you have isn’t going to be feasible in the long run. If you can, hire a person or two to take over some of your work or better yet use a reputed software like Shopify, if delegation is the problem. If it isn’t, find a way to develop a process that allows you to shave as much time off that 12-hour time frame as possible. While the idea of working hard is commendable, working smart is a better option. If you can revise your process so that a lot of the work can be automated, or if you could use templates, that would create a more efficient and happier you in the end.

Guilty of doing a few items on the list? No worries, you’ve got plenty of time to get these bad habits out of your system and make a change for the better.