Consultant Rant
One thing that annoys me about this industry is the flagrant misuse of the term "Consultant". A consultant is generally somebody who provides professional advice to a client for a fee. So as an accessibility and user experience consultancy, clients will come to us for our advice on improving the accessibility and user experience of their products, and we'll respond with some form of report or documentation, often backed up with a formal presentation.
One of the benefits of hiring a consultant is that their advice is independent of the internal and external political factors surrounding a project, so is generally seen as more reliable. It's sad, but clients will often take more notice of an external consultant than their own internal team, who may have been recommending exactly the same solutions for some time. In fact, one of the benefits of employing an independent consultant to back up what your in-house team has been saying all along.
We are often brought in at the start of a project to give companies an overview of the problems and issues they face. We can also be bought in during a project to give unbiased feedback on the performance of other agencies. More often than not we start by providing consultancy services and then get asked to implement our recommendations. The key defining factor is the provision of professional advice, hence the use of the term consultancy.
Unfortunately I see a lot of companies using the term consultancy because it sounds impressive, rather than because they offer a true consultation service. This is even more true of the freelance market where the term "consultant" has simply come to mean "short-term" or "temporary" contract work. It may sound cooler than freelance web designer, but unless you're offering professional advice rather than design and implementation, I'd avoid calling yourself a "Web Design Consultant".
It is sort of like calling yourself "President and CEO" of a one man company. It may sound good on paper, but looks less impressive to clients when they find out that you're also the secretary and office cleaner.