Yesterday I attended the WebXpo event in Sofia, managed by Web & Events. There were plenty of different topics to be discussed on website development, design, usability and so on. I've written a review in Bulgarian in my other blog.

It was a great pleasure listening to the discussion of the website price. Three experts from leading web development/design companies in Bulgaria did a workshop on how prices are calculated, how do they manage different clients and complex tasks etc. All of them mentioned that the higher prices when you recall to company are based on the professionalism that they imply in their products. The whole cycle requires brief specifications, development and design, testing, some usability experience tests, support, SEO and others. Things that could not be accomplished entirely by a small team of non-qualified and experienced developers. This one is a bit tricky, of course, because the companies have higher rates as well and disciplined way of working when the client might need some flexibility at this point. Anyway.

Some of the hot quotes from the event:

"If you have a website for yachts, you don't need 10K visitors, but 1 buyer."

"When it comes to support and fixes, relatives suddenly disappear"

"A website could be developed by a company or 2 students in the Technical University, but the probability it would ever be deployed is way higher when working with the company"

"How do you manage changes to the specs?", "We call the client with the new proposal (changes to contract and price)"

"Content has to be provided by the client, not the company. Otherwise he has to hire copywriters as well."

"10% of the people use IE6. This would increase the final price with 600lv. You want this or not?"

I had a training on freelance tips and tricks in New Bulgarian University on Thursday. I uncovered some of the issues I've had during my first years of freelancing as well as some tricks how to avoid suspicious clients and projects.

My presentation included:

• what does freelance mean
• how to switch to freelancing
• where can we find projects and clients
• how to interact with them
• how to present ourselves the right way on/offline
• how to define our costs
• how to manage the time
• etc

Slides in Bulgarian are available in my Slideshare account.

I currently lead a course for Database programming with Java and Oracle. This is my third course with that subject, but there is a specific detail here - my trainees are not experienced developers. They are all adult who have experience in different areas - construction engineers, accountants, administrators, scientists. This makes it difficult to present the technology in a way for all of them to understand it correctly.

Except the variety of examples in all of the lectures, I have to decrease the technical level of explanations. I use to speak with less development terms and explain slowly and with an increased attention paid to the students that have less understanding on the subject. I try to combine the visual and audial techniques. I also left my email in order to provide further details on particular topics if there are blur aspects of the technology.

In the beginning of every lecture I summarize the content from the last training. I take notes of the hard parts from the lecture for every student and test his memory and acceptance with practical questions.

It seems to improve the course quality when working with juniors to med developers and have to keep up to a schedule for each subject.