Freelance Materials, Documents and Notes for Drupalers

At the Drupal NYC Meetup on March 10th we discussed ways to ensure that life is more bearable for the designer/developer from the start of a project.

The documents being shared here are templates for contracts, proposals and so forth, and are very bare-boned (and a little ridiculous at times). My intention with these is not to provide an end-all solution, but to spark a discussion that will lead to the improvement of such documents, and even better yet (hopefully), replacements for some of the solutions that already exist. Frank Carey brought up the fact that he attaches a printed GPL license to his contracts, which I thought was genius, and is a great way to avoid ownership problems, considering we are working with open-source here.

One of the points that I emphasized at the meet-up repeatedly was to build a proper proposal before a contract is signed. I find that this is immensely important and starts of the project with a better understanding of what is expected and most importantly, in scope of said project. I will most probably keep bringing this up repeatedly until somebody shoots me, but so be it.

The idea is to avoid any problems that may arise during the life of a project such as feature requests that were not originally discussed, design changes that drastically increase the amount of time necessary to complete the project, and basically anything that may lead to a deterioration in the relationship between the client and the designer/developer.

With a CMS as versatile as Drupal, it becomes problematic when you find yourself spending your time removing features more than you are creating new ones. Sometimes it is also the case that you are spending way too much time coming up with solutions for certain use cases; you find yourself re-inventing the wheel when it may really be unnecessary.

There is also the fact that when you are working with a client that is more web-savvy, or simply has a good understanding of what they want and a concept that is really solid, you find yourself looking forward to the challenge, and this is the realm where amazing new tools, modules, methods, etc come out of fantastic ideas.

Rome wasn't built in a day, but they sure had really good planning from the get-go!

The other main point is to understand and come to terms with the fact that Drupal is an open-source, COMMUNITY DRIVEN project. What we do with this stuff that is available to the lot of us for free, is up to us, and that means we represent something that is larger than ourselves. So give it a good name!

Keep in mind that freelance is a lot less rigid in this line of work (teh intarwebz is a funny place), and it is only natural for a designer/developer to spend a little extra time on a project to keep the client satisfied. This is why you should charge with your time speaking to the client in mind, not just the time it will take to complete tasks and finalize details.

I build sites for the entertainment industry as well as legal and corporate entities. One thing I have learned from all of this is, if you can afford to, say NO to a project if you feel like it is going to be a headache. Personality conflicts & disagreements over aesthetics are the some of the worst things that can possibly happen during a project - learn to read people and see what you are compatible with!

Some of the documents I will be sharing are very colloquial, and the language may be offensive or somewhat non-professional. I apologize ahead of time for that, but also hope you take what I have to say with a grain of salt.

Thanks for being supportive at the meet-up, and I'm looking forward to any and all feedback on this topic. Please feel free to jump in and put in your 2 cents (or million bucks). Let's start establishing a healthy understanding of freelance in the Drupal community, so that n00bs don't have to go through some of the nightmares most of us did when starting out with this thing that is the stuff that is made of the goop that is the awesome sauce.

If there are enough requests for it I'll share my odd-ball presentation layout that I had at the meet-up as well.