Best Practices

Feb 10th, 2009

Best Practices Rewind: Change Requests

photo credit: Extra Ketchup
Until just recently, I had gotten into the bad habit of using my inbox as the storage location for customer change requests. Until I completed all the items mentioned in an email from a client, I just left it in my inbox. (It’s especially tempting when the email has [...]

Oct 29th, 2008

Best Practices Rewind: Growing Customers

photo credit: Extra Ketchup
My emphasis has shifted to more of a product-based business model since July of 2006, but there is still some very good points in this post. The idea of growing large customers is really based on the model of being a service-oriented web developer.
The advantage is that you get to develop [...]

Sep 17th, 2008

Communicate Hosting Requirements at the Outset

photo credit: fill3r
With most of my clients, I develop their site on my web server. We’ll go back and forth through all the iterations of changes there. When it’s complete, then I move it over to their production server. 95% of the time, this works fine. I recently came across [...]

Aug 6th, 2008

Fork in the Road

photo credit: tonystl
In the past year and a half, I’ve done a fair amount of web work for a local marketing company, Silver Square. For a variety of reasons (foremost the quality of the people there) the organization is growing at a healthly clip. So much so that they are looking to [...]

Apr 9th, 2008

Give Your Expertise Away

You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. [...]

Mar 26th, 2008

We vs. I

When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a [...]

Jan 17th, 2008

Leveraging Fresh, Original Content

One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start [...]

Nov 7th, 2007

Is It Easy To Do Business With You?

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running low on business cards. When I first started my business, I threw together a simple card design and went with the cheapest printer I could find on the Internet. (VistaPrint is what I found, if you’re curious.) My business has grown quite a bit since [...]

Sep 21st, 2007

Gracefully Outgrow Your Customers

If you stay in business for very long, there’s going to come a time when you outgrow some of your previous customers. As your business develops, you will begin to notice that certain types of work and certain clients are more profitable, rewarding, or in some other way more desirable. When your days begin filling [...]

Sep 12th, 2007

All I Want For Christmas Is To Reach My Customers

I came across a post in my RSS feeds today that talked about saving money on Christmas cards for your clients by doing a custom design. That got me thinking. I wouldn’t normally use an e-card as communication with a customer. Because they require so little effort and are somewhat generic, they don’t convey that [...]

Dealing With Clients