Best Practices

Oct 1st, 2008

Feel the Fear and Quote That Project Anyway

photo credit: Refracted Moments™
Short and simple tip this week: think long and hard before refusing to quote a project. It’s possible the work is something you truly don’t want to do, and in that case it’s okay to let it pass by. In most cases, though, you’ll be well served thinking about how much [...]

Sep 10th, 2008

Your Passion Projects Are Worth Pursuing

photo credit: pingnews.com
I love movies. I love going to the movies and spending far, far too much money on popcorn. I met my wife while we were both working at a movie theater. So I didn’t really need a solid business plan to create Single Sentence Movie Review. I knew I wanted to create [...]

Aug 27th, 2008

Feast or Famine: The Freelancer’s Sales Pipeline

photo credit: seeks2dream
Sometimes I feel like I’m riding on a pendulum that is swinging back and forth. At one end I have more websites in development than I can comfortably handle, and I’m working long hours just to meet my deadlines. In a relatively short period of time, though, things will shift to the other extreme where I find [...]

May 14th, 2008

What Makes You Excited for a Sales Pitch?

At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about thinking of your web design service as a product. In that case I was talking mostly about how this approach makes pricing your service easier. That’s all true, but I think I stumbled upon another benefit: it’s a lot easier to sell.

May 7th, 2008

What You Can Learn From Gregory House

For anyone who isn’t glued to the TV every Monday night, House is a TV show about an extremely obnoxious doctor who makes life difficult for everyone around him. He’s manipulative and vindictive. He has no faith in the concept of basic human goodness, and he goes out of his way to embarass and ridicule [...]

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 [...]

Mar 12th, 2008

Offer Email Templates as an Ancillary Service

As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling [...]

Mar 5th, 2008

Tracking Your Activities with a Free Online Tool

Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have [...]

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 [...]

Finding Work