Best Practices

Jan 30th, 2008

Accepting Online Payments

Why does anybody offer online payments? After all, there is a mark-up that takes money out of your pocket on every transaction. Unless it’s the only way you accept payments (which is true for some businesses), you’re complicating your accounting and business processes by adding another special case for how a payment is received.

Jan 2nd, 2008

Price Your Service Like a Product

Up until a few months ago, I always started from square one when I needed to create a quote for a client. I’d go through the requirements for the project and estimate how long each item would take. I’d estimate how much time I expected to spend communicating with the client based on what I [...]

Nov 21st, 2007

Suck It Up, Freelancer

Sure, you’ve got a lot to complain about. Let’s start with the ups and downs of work coming in. One week you spend so much time on client projects, you barely have time to eat. The next week you twiddle your thumbs and set a new high score on minesweeper… on all three difficulty levels.
That’s [...]

Oct 24th, 2007

Priority Home Office Expenses

I was recently pointed to a blog post (via Freelance Switch) that proposes some of the most important things you can spring for in your home office. The logic on all of these is that you are spending a lot of time here and need to be able to work comfortably and efficiently.

Sep 26th, 2007

Counterpoint On Hosting the Sites You Design

Early in the life of this blog (and my freelance business) I made a post advocating the idea of reselling hosting to your design clients. I came across this post old again as I was scanning the archives. The truth is I don’t host the vast majority of the sites that I’ve designed, even when [...]

Sep 5th, 2007

6 Reasons to Turn Freelance Work Down

If you’re just starting out in the world of freelance web design, it may be hard to imagine that you would ever want to turn down a paying client. I’ll admit it is certainly easier to do when the coffers are full, but there are some times when you should at least consider turning down [...]

Aug 15th, 2007

Look Back on First Year of Freelancing

This week marks the 12-month anniversary of the day I left my safe cubicle in corporate America for the more adventurous world of freelance web design. I’ve already posted some of the things I’ve learned at the 2 month and 8 month marks. Here’s a look back at what I’ve learned with the wise and [...]

Jun 6th, 2007

Moving Out of the Home Office

This past week I left the comfort of my home for a one-room office 5 minutes from my house. I didn’t enter into this decision lightly, but I did enter into it fairly quickly. I sat down and thought about all the pros and cons for working in a home office versus a more traditional [...]

May 2nd, 2007

Include Support Costs in Your Quote

Projects have a natural ending point. You and the client are both satisfied with the work. Checks are cashed, and to-do list items are checked off. A few months later, the client calls you concerned because some particular feature isn’t what they expected. They had signed off on the completed work months ago, but this [...]

Apr 11th, 2007

Lessons Learned in the First 8 Months of Freelancing

One of the blogs I read regularly is that of AJAX designer Jesse Skinner. I’ve never had an extended conversation with the man, but he stands out in my memory in part because we started full-time freelancing at almost the exact same time. Naturally when he made a post about his first 2 months of [...]

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