I’m pleased to present the first interview here on the blog, something I hope to do more of in the future. Bear with me as I clearly lack experience on camera and hosting an interview. But it’s a learning experience and I had a great time chatting it up with a fellow web worker.
The interview is with Dave Yankowiak of Lift Development. Dave is a fellow freelancer, WordPress expert and entrepreneur who recently took the initiative to launch a new co-working space in his home town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. I caught up with Dave to learn about how he did it. We also talked at length about running businesses around WordPress, marketing our services, and more. Enjoy…
The first part of the interview is all about Common Space, a co-working space for freelancers and remote workers in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. More info at CommonSpaceGR.com.
For the handful of you who may be watching this space, here’s a quick post about this weekend’s reboot of the blog (again).
Yes, I did just re-launch the CasJam blog a few weeks ago. Basically the goal there was to expand the blog, bring on guest writers, and transform it into more of an industry design blog than my personal posting place. Well, with today’s reboot, I’m reversing that decision and going back to basics.
What Went Wrong?
In a nutshell, I quickly realized that the expanded blog route wasn’t for me. As I’ve been known to do in the past, I bit off a bit more than I could chew. Managing an expanded blog with multiple authors and a strict posting schedule was way more work than I had anticipated. But I could have made it work if it wasn’t for this more important reason:
I lost interest in my own blog.
I wasn’t happy with the content being produced both by myself and the writers I hired and edited articles for. I felt the content didn’t add the right value to the larger conversation than what I had hoped. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m able to add more value when I keep things loose as I had done before the expansion. Which brings me to…
Where We Go From Here…
As I said, it’s back to basics. I believe the key to a successful blog is to write when inspiration hits. Let your ideas and passion dictate where you take your content. So that’s what I plan to do moving forward. I’ll go back to posting whatever I find useful, thought-provoking, inspirational, and educational. Whether that takes the form of personal posts reflecting on my journey, callouts to my publications elsewhere, my interviews with fellow web workers, or links and things I come across, it will all pack in value.
I constantly set higher and higher standards for myself and my creative work, and can’t help but do the same with this here blog.
On The Redesign
Aside from the content itself, I view this site as my personal sandbox for building up my skills as a designer. This time around, my focus was on simplifying and stripping things down to the core. The idea was to keep it as open-ended as possible, allowing for the freedom to take this blog, the content, and focus in any direction at any time.
It’s also a stomping ground for me to try out some of the latest technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and mobile web design. I’m still in the process of implementing a few ideas on these fronts, so stay tuned…
Being a freelance web designer certainly has its perks. You get to make your own hours, set your own rates, and control your own professional destiny. I’d add that designing for the web, like any freelance field, is a craft that most of us are truly passionate about. There’s something about the merging of beautiful design and cutting edge technology that keeps our creative juices flowing and keeps us endlessly engaged in our work.
But as any freelancer or small business owner knows, sketching diagrams, arranging pixels and constructing code make up only a small part of this profession. At the beginning and the end of the day, it’s still a business, which brings it’s own inherent challenges. At the top of the list is something we all must deal with every day: managing client expectations.
In this article, I intend to cover several aspects of working with clients as a freelance web designer (but these tips apply to any freelance profession, really). These are all based on my own experiences and lessons learned the hard way.
Whether you’re a solo freelancer or the head of a huge web design agency (or somewhere in between), your website often serves as the first point of contact with a potential new client. Displaying an impressive portfolio of work along with a few client testimonials is a great start. But the final piece is key: Your contact form, or as many call it, the “Request a Quote” form, also known as Request for Quotation (RFQ) form or Request for Proposal (RFP) form.
Converting new visitors to sales leads (and ultimately to paying clients) is how we sustain ourselves in this business of web design. With a carefully designed “Request a Quote” form, we can get this process off on the right foot.
In this article, I will discuss some of the factors to consider when designing this key feature of your website. Along the way, we will look at the “Request a Quote” form of different web design shops to get some ideas brewing.
The findings for the 2009 A List Apart Survey For People Who Make Websites have just been released. It’s always interested to view the trends and patterns for our fellow web workers in this far-reaching industry.
Most of the results come as not much of a surprise, though there are a few things that caught my eye:
Way more males than females. Clearly there are more males in our industry, but I didn’t expect there to be this large of a gender gap.
Developers 30% vs. Designers 9%. Really?
Employed 54% vs. Freelance 28%. I would have expected to see a higher percentage of freelancers / contractors. Though they still make up a large chunk of the industry.
9% are in a 3000+ person organization. Who is this 9%? Probably all from Google or Microsoft or something. 9% seems high when you think about all of the small web shops / freelancers out there.
I was recently contacted by the guys behind the WordPress Manual Plugin about spreading the word about this new and unique product. I have to say, it’s very impressive and I can see how this can really come in handy for web designers and developers who frequently build WordPress-powered sites for clients.
In this post, I give my video review of the WordPress Manual Plugin in action, plus we’re holding a contest to give away a free lifetime license (normally priced at $24/month)! Read on for details…
