Merge

There seems to be a lot of discussion regarding time tracking--should a creative professional track their time? Truthfully, I think the real debate is should a creative bill by time (the hour) or should they bill for value? I would agree the latter is the better way, but for this post, I'm going to highlight why time tracking is essential to the success of the creative professional (and almost any other service professional).

When Merge was but one (myself), I didn't think I had to track my time because I could remember and manage billings in my head. Then I read an article in Inc. that discussed "shrinkage" (not the Seinfeld type, but the inventory type). Shrinkage is the loss of billing due to forgetting to bill for something.

I wondered how much shrinkage my company had. So I did an experiment and began to track my time. Almost immediately, I increased my billing by 20%. Whoa. All of those little "quick fixes" were suddenly being captured and therefore billed for. Before tracking my time, it was as if the service was never provided.

Another benefit to tracking time is that I soon discovered I was giving projects away. Before, I'd quote a project and as long as it took, is how long it took. Never mind profitability. But once I started tracking my time, I quickly learned I was woefully under-pricing my projects.

To remedy this, I nearly doubled my project price--or in other words, I was doing projects at about half the price I should have been doing them for.

Overall, tracking my time increased both my top line and bottom line. I helped me estimate much better, therefore, providing a fair price and a great project experience (nothing will make a project worse than on

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There are a lot of BAD web sites out there—we all know that. If I had a nickel for every time someone said, “You should call so and so. Their web site is awful.” If that is all it took to get new clients, Merge (and every other web firm) would be set with new clients for life.

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Designing a successful web site requi

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Because technology moves so fast, sometimes we have to rely on known conventions and best-practices to make decisions.

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Here's how web development usually happens: Go into a dark closest and don't come out until the entire project is flat-out done.

The problem? Web projects are a daunting, time-consuming task. 60% of projects that should be done never get started. 30% of projects that do get started never finish.

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