thisdesignstudio is currently being born. We have several very very large projects lined up and a couple of clients in our queue who could be, with the proper massaging, very lucrative for the long term. Plus umpteen smaller gigs that add up to a pretty solid chunk of cash.
But Dave can't do it all himself. More to the point - Dave doesn't really have the necessary skills to make everything happen like it should happen. Dave needs a partner.
Ideally, you are a designer or programmer yourself, but you understand that your REAL skills lay on the managerial side of things. We like to wear multiple hats around these parts and the more hats you can wear, the better. But primarily, Dave needs a skillset that complements his own. Dave wants to be able to focus on creative and problem solving tricky situations as they arise and not on spending his days writing proposals and dealing with all the logistics.
Among the hats that it would be GREAT if you could wear:
1) tds is taking on bigger and bigger web projects that require multiple programmers and lots of management. We could continue and expand on this if You have experience with budgets, scheduling, project management, wireframes/IA, and client hand-holding.
2) tds has a great book, but it's scattered over 200 CD/DVD backups and four old sites. We could really make our skills known to the world if You have a little bit of Photoshop experience and the time to collate all our stuff.
3) tds hosts many of its clients on a VPS. Web hosting is a business unto itself and we're doing a bad job at it right now. We could certainly do better if You could manage our hosting server through it's simple control panel and deal with the occasional support requests.
4) More than anything, tds needs another brain. One that's a little more linear in its thinking than Dave's, but meshes in just the right way. A brain that can learn (Dave's a good teacher). A brain that can riff on Dave's directives, expand on them, and help make them happen.
Here are my thoughts on the pay for this gig:
For the short term, you work freelance and tds pays you what we can afford up to 20% of all incoming fees - as long as your help ensures a 10-15% increase in overall business or even just productivity (meaning we get paid faster because we work faster). If you actually do some of the design or programming, that percentage would be higher.
For the long term, we form a proper partnership, incorporate, build the hottest agency in NYC and pay ourselves sick salaries.
We're aware that this ain't the best deal under the sun. There are absolutely no guarantees that you'll make enough money to survive ("Welcome to MY life," Dave says). We could fail horribly. But we doubt it. In fact, we think that with the right partner in place, tds could easily go big-time. And we'd love to have you along for the ride.
Send us your best reply. No resumes. No Word files. Links are fine. No cut-and-paste standard responses. We want to know that you WANT this gig.
You should well-versed in modern XHTML structure and CSS layout, can pick your way around integrating CMS tags from open-source packages (we like Textpattern a lot), and who can implement clever public-domain javascripts (like so-called "lightboxes", for example). No original coding needed, you will simply need to be able to work with our "starter" code and make it sing based on our Photoshop comps and notes.
We're not really looking for someone who is still learning in the still-look-stuff-up-in-books sense. We need a pro who is constantly learning in the how-did-they-do-that-I'll-check-the-source kind of way. We understand that many of you out there who are qualified for this will be qualified to do MUCH more and probably ARE doing much more in their day-to-day work.
As such, we would like to simply add you to our call list when we need work and you need some extra cash! In fact, we hope to find several of you out there who can take our projects and knock them out in a day or two (maybe three). A qualified person will find that the work we pass on to you "ain't rocket science." But we are hoping that top-notch folks (like you?) are into the idea of making an extra $25-$50 an hour (based on experience) between the big gigs.
Send us your best reply. No resumes. No Word files. Links are fine. No cut-and-paste standard responses. We want to know that you WANT this gig.