Consulting and Business

Hello.

I run a small Drupal shop a little ways out of Ottawa, ON. To date, I haven't had any local clients; all the projects I've picked up have been through the Drupal forums, and word of mouth.

However, I want to begin expanding into the local market. I live in a small city with a few web development shops. I really think I can offer better value for the money than any of the local competitors.

In my opinion, there are some fairly clear benefits to having a local clientelle:

Hi,

This week sees the release of iteration 10 in the Drupal redesign prototype.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration10

We're currently working with the Drupal Association to further define an advertising strategy for the redesigned d.o. Therefore, we've included a few more ads, but it probably isn't indicative of the final strategy.

Hi people,

I'm an experienced freelance programmer / 'sql expert' / 'business consultant' in need of a career shift.
I think Drupal as an environment (the things you can work on, the community) would make me happy.
However my programming experience with PHP/Drupal is very small. I'd have to 'get into it' (very probably unpaid) for a couple of months.

That's fine - but because of that, I'm somewhat afraid of diving in there without feedback. Is there enough work if you're good?

One observation I've had from lurking in the Knight Drupal Initiative meetings is something that's haunted me before. If only I was good at writing a solid grant proposal and subsequent review and revisions, some of my pie-in the sky ideas might actually turn into something valuable for the community (and provide a self-sustainable way for me to contribute).

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

Pretty neat, I have nifty excel sheets for portions of this, so it's cool to see an easy web app for people to know about and use to know if they're charging right or not.

I would like to open up a discussion on retainers for drupal web developers. I started the conversation on drupal.org here: http://drupal.org/node/286539 and I would like to continue that here.

As a drupal consultant or as a client hiring drupal developers/designers/etc, what are your thoughts on retainers?

Recently we were tasked with building an e-commerce solution for a client that has an old homegrown solution. We have been researching the e-commerce and ubercart modules - with still no clear decision.

A few key points that our clients expect:

• Easy inventory manager
• Ability for a customer to search every field in the product description (something we're unsure either of these modules allow - outside of drupal core search)
• Ability to "Express order" - for repeat customers that know what item # they are looking for, they can enter it in at a prompt and it adds to the cart.