Apologies if this is against any forum rules. Rob, I won’t be offended if you remove =).
As some of you already know, my company, QWeb, is primarily a web agency but we’re looking to move more towards the games industry. We’re starting to receive more enquiries for small game projects and despite being fairly established in web and ranking well for a number of search terms, I’m noticing a general decline in enquiries for website projects. Seems it’s time to look at switching our skill-set properly.
We incorporated in February 2013 so have been around for a while now, and previously I worked as lead developer for another web agency so over the years have built a reasonably sized portfolio of contacts who now freelance for us. I prefer to work with freelancers rather than in-house staff, so there are only 2 of us in-house at the moment, but the people we currently work with are very much web folk. Only one of my designers has any real experience in game, and my developers are almost entirely LAMP stack, or front-end HTML/JS guys.
So this is a bit of a shout out post. If any of you are open to working freelance for us, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact through our website so that we can collate the responses more easily: https://www.qweb.co.uk/contact
What we’d need to know most of all is your skill set and the types of projects you’d be comfortable taking on. Please only include the things you’re genuinely competent and comfortable in - if you’ve dabbled a little in a language, framework, or piece of software, that’s not really enough for us I’m afraid. You’re absolutely welcome to contact us as either a web or game creative, or indeed both, but we absolutely only want to hear about your true skills - the ones you can confidently sell yourself on. The last thing I’d want to do is accept a project for a client only to find the people I’ve put together for it aren’t actually as competent in the required skills as I thought.
We prefer UK based freelancers, particularly in or around Leeds as that’s where our office is located and where most of our clients are based. We rank well for geolocation based search terms so our clients tend to be people who want to come in and meet us. It’s also just much easier to work with people who are within the same timezone. That said, I’m not against working with creatives who are further away if they’re impressive enough. Strictly no agencies though - we have absolutely no interest at all in working with offshore teams, and already receive far too many calls from eastern companies looking for work. We’re very much only looking for freelancers.
It goes without saying really, but please include links to examples of your work. We can’t work with people who haven’t already proven themselves on quality, and if you’re coming to us as a web developer especially, we also need to be sure you’re practising good security principles - we do a lot of ecommerce so competency in writing code that meets PCI-DSS requirements and won’t fail a pen test is pretty important. Knowledge of W3 and WCAG guidelines would be advantageous too, if you’re web.
In terms of actual projects - if we want to work with you on something, I’ll be in touch with a quote request when the time comes, for that project specifically. Please don’t expect a sudden flood of work landing in your inbox or for this to be a reliable revenue stream - we’re just not that big of a company.
Much appreciated.
