Hello and welcome back to Thesis Thursday! They say if you haven’t posted on a blog for a while to not bring it up, but it’s definitely been a while!
Since the last time I visited Thesis in an article, tons of things have changed with not only Thesis itself — but the community of Thesis owners and developers has seen a big change as well. More and more people are looking to have the best Thesis powered blog around.
For the longest of time, the Thesis theme has claimed to be an easy to use and customizable theme. While it has certainly proven to be a very usable theme, many people who have basic knowledge of a WordPress theme have found it difficult to customize it.
Sure, some pros like Kristarella, Greg Rickaby and many others have found their way through the hooks system like it was nothing. But, for the majority of Thesis users, who aren’t all web developers have been seeking a guide to help them customize their theme.
Lucky for all of us, Thesis 1.6 is close to its full launch and will make editing your theme much, much easier. Take it from me, I have used Thesis 1.6 and I have done a lot of customizing without even touching a single line of code.
But, even these new options won’t help many achieve their dream design. So that leads me to the main point of this post — being a freelancer in the Thesis community. The market for this theme is huge, and all it takes are a few good designs to get you started and on your way to becoming a freelancer.
My Short Story as a Thesis Freelancer
I have been creating designs on Thesis since April 2008. When I announced my return to freelancing, I started taking everything more seriously and really getting my act into gear and learning Thesis to the best of my abilities.
Ever since that post, I have been getting emails at all times of the day, from different people around the world in a vast variety of blog niche’s for me to work on their Thesis blog. I have been getting more requests than I can handle, and I do have to say “no” at times.
Basically, this post I am going to cover the three things you have to know if you want to become a freelancer for Thesis. The three topics I am going to talk about in this post are:
- Learning Thesis and resources for learning how to use it
- Pricing your services
- Marketing yourself
1. Need-to-know-info for any Thesis Freelancer
If you want to freelance for Thesis, it’s probably a great idea to have a clue as to what you are doing when opening up the Thesis options panel and creating your own hooks. Here are some resources I have found to help you get started:
Thesis Basics
- Customizing Thesis with
custom.css - How to customize like a pro with Thesis hooks
- Thesis Hook Reference List [I keep this in my bookmarks bar for quickest access]
- Thesis Hooks for Dummies
Customizing Thesis and Beyond
- Creating new widget areas in Thesis
- Using content filters for easier customization
- Thesis Footers 101
- Thesis OpenHook
- Creating custom Thesis categories
- Customizing the 404 page
- Creating Multiple Custom templates
Thesis pros on Twitter
- Creating new widget areas in Thesis
- Using content filters for easier customization
- Thesis Footers 101
- Thesis OpenHook
- Creating custom Thesis categories
- Customizing the 404 page
- Creating Multiple Custom templates
Thesis pros on Twitter
[see: 10 Thesis pros on Twitter you need to follow]
2. Pricing Yourself
I think being a regular freelancer and a Thesis freelancer is a lot different. At the moment, Thesis may have a less competitive market then a regular WordPress freelancer, but the way you price yourself should be looked at differently.
At first, I had trouble determining how I wanted to charge my clients. Should I do it on an hourly basis, or set a fixed price for themes? At first, I went with the fixed price because that was the type of pricing I was most familiar with. But, I felt like I was earning less than I should have which made me switch to an hourly rate.
Each side has its own benefits and disadvantages to them, and if you haven’t already decided how you want to be paid, check out an amazing post from FreelanceSwitch; Hourly vs. Fixed Pricing.
Evaluating yourself
You need to be brutally honest about the quality of your work. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How much background knowledge of Thesis do I have? (ex: who created it, licensing options, etc)
- How well do I know HTML and CSS in general?
- Do I fully understand how to create a function?
- Do I fully understand the options in Thesis and how to use them?
- Can I keep up with the Thesis community, trends, and multiple clients at a time?
- Is freelancing even for me?
It can be tough to determine your price. But ask yourself those questions — no one else but you knows the answers and no one is listening so be as honest as you can with yourself. To get a good idea what kind of numbers are being thrown around as to what to charge, check out this extremely informative thread on the Thesis forums “What would you charge?” (Thesis owners only).
Other useful information to know
- The Thesis market is huge and only getting bigger. Take it from me, if you do good design work then you will get more work then you can handle. So don’t under price yourself even by $1.
- Don’t over price yourself either. It’s a general rule of thumb, don’t charge too less and don’t charge too much. Evaluate yourself the best you can and charge what you are comfortable charging.
- Take into account that most of your clients will already own Thesis and that means they have spent nearly $100 or more to get it. That may limit their budget, so if you are throwing a ridiculous $150 an hour at them, there’s not a chance in hell you’re getting the job.
- Spend the extra money to upgrade to the Developers option. If not, don’t even try and freelance for Thesis.
- There will be people who don’t own Thesis already, so you need that Developers option to be able to buy the Cient Site Option which will allow you to buy a license for $40 and let the client use Thesis. Always make sure to tag that as an expense in the final bill.
3. Marketing Yourself
Marketing is such an important thing for your business. If you blog, then you know exactly how a good advertising campaign or good sales pitch is for your blog to be successful.
Here are some ways I came up with to marketing your Thesis services:
- Create a portfolio of your works
- ALWAYS recommend Thesis to clients who contact you for non-Thesis work
- DIYthemes is the key
I do not have a portfolio set up 100% yet, but you should really start working on building one for yourself immediately. Let your work speak for itself, and do your best to get a few clients done and added to your portfolio. A few good pieces of work is all you need!
And please make sure you build your portfolio on Thesis and make it your best work. It just defeats the purpose of targeting a market and not even using the product you are working on for yourself.
On the occasion I get people who want a theme done, but they don’t own Thesis. If you ever run into that situation, try and get your client on Thesis immediately. Your client will thank you, and they may even want to go back to you for more work later since you put them on the best theme in the world.
DIYthemes, the site that created Thesis is the key to marketing yourself. The company has a forum with thousands and thousands of Thesis owners go to discuss Thesis, get help for it and more. Use those forums and get involved with the community and assert yourself as a Thesis guru. Use the Classified sections to promote your services and answer other Thesis ads.
DIYthemes is also very active on Twitter. The Thesis community has its own little spot on Twitter. Just use the #thesiswp hashtag whenever you tweet something Thesis related, and you will be bound to get some retweets. Tweet about your latest designs, and you are sure to make a huge impact in the community on Twitter by just using the simple #thesiswp hashtag.
Be on your way
Freelancing is the best job in the world. I am 16 and am freelancing to the point where I can turn it into a career for myself. Just be aware that it can be a hard job to get used to, and there is just so much information I did not write about general freelancing. This post is just about getting you into the feel of being a freelancer on Thesis.
If you guys have any questions about Thesis, my business, or questions about the article — don’t be afraid to ask in the comments section! I hope you enjoyed the longest article on Asnio yet. Take care now.
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a great article Alex.
The part about being honest with yourself is essential. And if the answer to knowing about HTML and CSS in general is “only a bit”, the response should be to get to know it any way you can. You can’t come up with creative solutions to problems if you don’t have the know-how. You might have enough know-how to do a more straight forward job though, and that would probably be a good thing because we all get more emails than we can handle. Also, then be honest with your clients, if you don’t know how to do something, they should probably know about it. You don’t have to talk yourself down, but I, for example, tell clients that video integration is not my strength when they start talking about video and video galleries etc.
I like what you said about always recommending Thesis to people. It’s a good idea to mention to them that though Thesis costs money, it will probably save time and money in the design stages because it does widths and typography automatically.
Thanks for dropping by!
I have the same thoughts about honesty and when there is something I can’t do – rather than wasting both of our time, I simply tell them that I can’t do it. That’s important for any client you get really, but I always do try and improve my skillset with each new client.
I usually tell people when recommending it to them that they will save time and money in the end since a lot of the things I need to make a great WordPress theme are already coded into it. Not to mention, it will help their blog along so much.
.-= Alex´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog =-.
Thank you for those links, I have been going crazy trying to figure out a problem that one of your links had the solution…. I feel a lot better now!
.-= KalibreOnline -Games, Life and Ent´s last blog ..prologue04 =-.
Glad I could help! What where you having trouble with?
.-= Alex´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog =-.
It was a menu thing, after reading about it made me feel very silly. I found a plug in for the recent posts w/ thumbnails. It is not as fancy as your boxes but it helps for those of us that get lost in the CSS/Thesis world
.-= KalibreOnline -Games, Life and Ent´s last blog ..priest10 =-.
You pulled in another rocking post mate. Spot on for all those aspiring Thesis Freelancers out there. I started with Thesis 2 months back. I am primarily a web application developer and not a designer. But I found Thesis a breeze to sail with. Made some custom designs, wrote some posts and now with some prospects of Thesis freelancing work!
Great article again! Let me know if we can collaborate on Thesis work. I would love to…
.-= Ashwin´s last blog ..Create Newsletter from your Blog RSS Feed using MailChimp =-.
Thanks for stopping by Ashwin. See, you and I both have some web development experience, so it was easy for us to get into Thesis. But there are people out there with zero experience, and that’s why Thesis is harder for them to understand.
But I’m glad your Thesis freelancing is working out! It has been such an easy market for me to get into.
.-= Alex´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog =-.
I started about a month ago to market myself and the work I’m doing. Have had a few clients and the changes they wanted are very easy to do and does not take much time.
I have a partner that handles all the requests and negotiates a price with the client so I’m just left with the changes to do. Makes my life easier as I can concentrate on the work at hand.
I must say that with playing around with Thesis, my knowledge of PHP and CSS has increased and still continues to increase on a weekly basis.
.-= George Serradinho´s last blog ..Produce Fake Google Adsense Earnings =-.
A partner to handle requests. Ah, that is cool. I would love that. They would have to know you and your abilities very well to handle all requests, but even someone to filter through emails would be worthwhile.
.-= kristarella´s last blog ..Bridge at night =-.
Could you write about how you got yourself known around the “web”?
It would be an interesting read to know about how you manage to get the traffic you do now and such. If you already posted something like that, let me know so I can read it ASAP.
.-= KalibreOnline -Games, Life and Ent´s last blog ..screenshot98-screenshot_viewer_medium =-.
Nice post, Alex! It’s always useful to see a collection of Thesis resources – even I sometimes forget the nice tidbits that are out there.
I find it’s not necessarily the case that my clients already own Thesis – I buy a lot of Client Site Licenses myself – and even if they do, it is my opinion that $87 is such a tiny fraction of the price of a high-quality custom Thesis design that should be irrelevant in making pricing decisions.
For more guidance on pricing, I would refer readers to Chris Pearson’s own classic post from a few years back – How much should a web design cost?
.-= Cynthia LaLuna´s last blog ..It’s official: Google ignores keywords meta tag =-.
Hey Alex! This is a great post!
I know charging by the hour is a lot easier to manage and there is much less risk, but charging by the project is the way to go. In my opinion, you should be charging no less than $50 per hour. That’s equivalent to a full-time $100k salary. It sounds like a lot, but considering the work you are doing, it’s not. And when you start to increase your rate towards $100 per hour, it’s going to seem outrageous to potential clients. $1,000 for a project that you know takes 10-15 hours sounds much more reasonable.
Just my 2 cents! Take it for what it’s worth…
.-= Nick Tart | JuniorBiz´s last blog ..Don’t Buy a Book Without Finding Where It’s Cheapest =-.
I agree that charging for whole projects can be worthwhile. If you’re going to do that you need to be quite strict in what you agree to do and need to come up with some kind of agreement or contract to make sure both parties know what’s agreed upon. Charging by the hour, projects can sometimes be a bit more freeform and it’s not a big deal if the client throws a couple more ideas in. This works well with some clients, with others it can be a nightmare.
That’s a great point, Kristarella! It definitely helps of the client knows exactly what they want. And most people have no idea…
I imagine it’s also tricky with design. Alex could whip up an incredible design, but if the customer doesn’t like it, then he’s stuck doing twice the amount of work, if not more.
You guys know better than I! Thanks for the response.
.-= Nick Tart | JuniorBiz´s last blog ..Don’t Buy a Book Without Finding Where It’s Cheapest =-.
I still prefer Wordpress I have to say.
.-= PSP Go´s last blog ..Buy Sony PSP Go – Quick Buying Q&A =-.
Awesome post. I am just getting used to Thesis and have the developer licence that I am using for my sites.
Looking to start using it for clients on web design.
Subscribed to your rss feed, looks like you are going places!
Great post Alex–just what I needed to hear. Let me tell you: I’ve been working with Thesis for about 2 years now, and have built a total of three sites with it (I’m not quite ready to provide the links.) Anyways, I love working with Thesis and have really come a long way in my knowledge of html, css, and php as they are used in Thesis. I have a strong print design background, using programs like photoshop and pagemaker (now defunct, I know). I’m currently learning Flash.
I guess what I’m asking is: Do you think that someone with that set of skills could earn $20-$30/hr. becoming a thesis freelancer? I am so intrigued by both you and Kristarella saying that the emails never stop…sounds nice!
I love Thesis. I am not going to say that I have mastered it, but I definitely have a good understanding of it. There is a lot to learn, and if you are new, it is definitely a lot to take in. I am looking forward to seeing what they are going to do to make it better/easier.
We’ll see…
Great post Alex. At the age of 16 you are really doing great job. Congrats !
I am on the way to learn Thesis properly. It’s great, you have posted lots of thesis tutorials. Thanks a lot.
Cheers
.-= Chandan´s last blog ..Earn Money From Home – Let’s Get Real With It =-.
This is a great article.. inspired me alot.. I ll try to play with my thesis right away..
.-= Rajesh Kanuri @ TechCats´s last blog ..Firefox 3.6 & Thunderbird 3.0 RC Released =-.
It still amazes me just how much work is out there for those who know what they are doing and are willing to get out and do it. I find it hard to say no to projects but sometimes I just have to.
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