One on One

 When you get one on one with a new potential client, or a new potential employer, how do you sell yourself?

Personally my experience is….. You don’t!

Selling more often than not will backfire on you (unless your really good at it). So what do you do instead?

My approach is to educate (not lecture, not condescend), and learn (in other words listen).

Educate: For a client, listen to what they want. Try to understand all their requirements and wishes. Then educate them on things like process (how the design process works), how a website works, or various technological aspects of it. Educate them about choices they may not have thought about. There’s always something that you can find that they will appreciate.

All these things can be true of an employer as well. Research them first, listen to what they say, ask them intelligent questions and understand their answers. Then don’t just respond but educate them in your replies. Don’t just describe something actually walk them through it.

Learn:  This starts with researching the client or employer before you meet. Preparing yourself by studying any material/info they may already have given you.

When you finally meet don’t assume you know, listen and learn, then when you speak stay on task and address the concerns that have been expressed. The more you do this, the more they will perceive you as being on their side, and that you have something to offer, as opposed to something to sell.

To Parallax or not?

I’m going to start by summing this up first: Let me say that I will at some point design a small parallax site for my portfolio cause I do think it’s somewhat cool. I can’t say how much beyond that I will go, so I would like to get some feedback from the design masses as to:

• ·      What do you think about Parallax?
• ·      What type of client would it be good for?
• ·      Have you ever, or how many and what types of client have you done it for?

Here’s Why:

So at this point in my design education I am at the door of entering my 4^th and final term. In our 1^st term we were presented with the concept of Parallax Scrolling Websites.

It was very interesting and different from a design point of view, and a couple of my classmates embraced it and actually did a project in it. But I had some difficulties getting my head around the “what I will call value proposition”. Essentially I couldn’t define what sort of client I might design with it for.

Fast forward to term 3, and in our web interactivity development class we got to try our hand at creating the basic parallax scrolling effect. But I still had the same difficulty, so I asked my teacher what sort of client was it suited for, and had his company developed any parallax sites for anyone.

His response was it was probably best geared towards design/arts based type clients and clients wanting a small site (limited pages), and no they had not as yet done one for a paying client.

I have done a degree of researching on the Internet to try and answer/understand my issue, and I have seen many examples of parallax sites, some good some bad, but very little information as to why the choice was made. I have found a couple of sites that actively promote that they do parallax, but they don’t offer their criteria for when it is appropriate to use.

There is an aspect of a scrolling parallax site that puzzles me. We have been taught that generally when designing webpages, you don’t want them to be to big, because scrolling through to much information will cause a viewer to lose interest. It seems to me that a parallax website flies in the face of this. Yes they are very graphical, but I know that now having viewed quite a lot of them, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. So why do I see this as being promoted as the next best thing on the Internet?