Archive: June, 2006

Hosting the Websites You Design

If you work as a freelance web designer for any length of time, you’ll quickly notice that your income can fluctuate wildly from month to month. One month you have almost more work than you can handle and the checks start rolling in. The next month all the projects you had finish up and you hope there’s enough in the bank to cover your expenses because you don’t have any thing coming in.

You may be one of the few who are paid a retainer by some of your more affluent clients to be available just in case anything comes up. Personally, that seems a lot like being an employee, but it works for some people. The most likely scenario, though, is that you are paid in full after you complete any project. I haven’t met many freelancers in any industry who can easily translate their personal service into a revenue stream that pays them money each month.

Does that mean you give up and resign yourself to enduring the financial roller coaster of wild swings in sales from month to month? No, or at least you shouldn’t feel like that’s the only option.

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Pricing Your Web Design Service

A challenge for web designers (and really anyone in a service industry) is determining what to charge for their time. What are customers willing to pay? What’s your competition charging? How much do you need to make to cover your expenses and earn a profit? People smarter than me have already covered the topic of determining what to charge for your service, so I’m not going to rehash it here. What I am going to talk about is what to do next with that information.

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CSS vs. Nested Tables

Cascading style sheets weren’t always an option for designing your web site. When the Internet first began to transition from the world of academia into a commercially viable tool, not much thought had been put into how information would be displayed. Creative designers recognized, though, they could make use of the limited markup options available to dramatically effect how the information on a web page was displayed.

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