Orangedrop Design was born in Caerphilly 2009. We're a Website design, branding & design studio now based in Newport South Wales. We make a positive impact in helping others achieve through utilising a clean and consistent design approach. We believe that all businesses, freelancers and services deserve a look that represents them and what they stand for. We have a strong passion for all things creative and continuously strive to produce quality rich and engaging results.
For me, it’s the opportunity to be creative that I love. I’ve been creative ever since I was young. I have experience acting, singing, dancing, and playing guitar. I always had a creative side but felt I was borderline autistic. Code and programming appealed to me and I started coding when I was around 7 years old. I was on TV for quite some time and on a Welsch channel and worked for a company called HTV. I was a child actor until I was 18 when I decided to change career paths. I got into nursing for a short period. Throughout my career, computers dominated my life. It was a natural progression that I eventually fell into this line of work. I worked as a Word Press developer for a large PR and media agency in the UK and then about 6 years ago I opened up OrangeDrop to start putting my own name on my work.
I like meeting and helping clients more than anything else. The best satisfaction is when you take someone that doesn’t have a strong identity and you turn it around and deliver something they are really proud of. When the client is happy and sees a good return on investment, that’s the greatest satisfaction I can get.
The biggest challenge when I started my business was around financial management. There is a tendency in graphic design and development work to undervalue what you do. The biggest challenge I faced was managing and assigning a value to what I could do for people. I found it difficult in that I had to apply a value to what I love doing. What started out as a hobby became a career and you have to get paid for what you do.
I used Sage for many years and the biggest problem was that I work across multiple devices so I needed all my work in the cloud. Sync was the biggest gap that there was in terms of any other apps I was using. Having the ability to sync everything no matter what device I picked up was important. If I lose all 5 of my Macs, I need to be able to pick up my work from my laptop. I was doing some research on a site that recommends apps for freelancers called AppStorm and saw Billings Pro.
I really like the fact that Billings Pro syncs across all devices. It makes it easier for managing projects. Billings Pro is customizable so building invoices is no longer a headache or time consuming. With Billings Pro I can customize my invoices quickly and produce something professional. A lot of apps come with standard templates but you’re limited in what you can do to customize. With Billings Pro I can generate something professional in relatively little time.
I had a problem when I upgraded to Yosemite. I contacted Marketcircle support and they were absolute outstanding. They got back to me within minutes of creating the support ticket. I didn’t have to wait around and I was really happy with the support they gave.
I most definitely recommend Billings Pro to freelancers and agencies. Its user interface is really slick and makes it easy to manage your client payments. Billings Pro has reoccurring bills so I can see when hosting for clients is due. I like that Billings Pro offers approvals, reports, and makes it easy to attach slips for projects so I can track my work.
