Get Ready for getting project

As an IT freelancer I have lots of opportunities where I need to sent a proposal to my client for his o her project and if they like it they call me for an interview.

Interview which I do with my client is usually online through Skype video chat or any of the collaboration tools.

This is my first and last chance to convince client about my understanding of the project and prove my capability that I am fully 100% fit to do his or her job and its not only safe but will provide value for the money which he is going to invest in me.

So the journey of winning client starts from moment I see a job post on oDesk,elance, or in email or any direct client.

I am hereby trying to put steps which I keep in mind while approaching any opportunity.

(Note: I will cover steps which I normally follow once I am going for the interview with client)

Client Question: Tell me something about your self?

Preparation Plan: Go through your resume or CV thoroughly make main points of your experience which reflects your capability. This gives a first impression. Be confident in your reply.

Go through the post details thoroughly. For eg client wants a POS system.

1. Go through job post thoroughly and go through any sample application if you haven't worked on any that kind of application and understand its features thoroughly.

2. Never give any estimate on call no matter how small it is. Just ask client "I will review the requirement and discussion will come back to you with the effort estimation."

3. Discuss about UI. No matter if client is not particular about UI do provide him UI in next 2-3 days event client says default theme.

4. Make internal activities or ToDos list.

5. Send status reports to clients daily. Don't try to fool client as one day truth prevails so be better to be sure to be open in communication in day one.

6. Provide feedback and value to the client suggest him new ways or methods through which you can add value to the customer business process.

7. If you are going to create a public facing site always make sure to ask client which is his or her site to which he wants to compete with or wants to look like.


These few steps can improve your confidence a lot.

Happy Reading......





 

Special characters in action parameters : MVC handling

Special Characters in URL:

We have one scenario in which our complete sign up URL was containing encrypted key. Encrypted key was base64 encoded string which was generated by a crypto algorithm. This encrypted key was having special character like %,#,<,>,/,!,@&* any of them in one or more combinations.

So our sign up URL was forming something like this:

http://mysite/completesignup/ADSD$%@#$sdfdf?sdfsdf&^sdf++==/dfdfdfdf?/

And this link was sent to potential users in their email. So if user wants to complete its sign up operation.

But due to default request filter settings of IIS request pipeline user was getting error 404.1 Bad Request.

to fix this first step was to specify following in application web.config.


 <security>
            <requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="True" />
</security>

This fixed issue when ever we have double escaping

Another point to understand here is instead of passing special characters in action parameters we should pass it as query string.