Dootch

Lately I’ve been focusing a lot on vec3t projects and on the ecommerce stores. Since freelancing still makes up the lion’s share of my income, and since I want more money, I’ve decided I’ve got to lift my freelancing game. I am not optimal in a number of ways at the moment. I don’t bill [...]

I’ve written before about how turning down clients is necessary to grow as a freelancer, but today I want to focus on signals that alert you that this job might be a good one to turn down. 1. The client is quote shopping. Government departments are great at this. They send you an email with [...]

I’m a pretty easy going guy. When I started freelancing, you would’ve been hard pressed to insult me. Now, I’m much more professional and do a much better job, but some things can really tick me off. Sometimes being easy going means that you just don’t care enough. “We’re a non profit… Can you do [...]

Without a doubt, the #1 key to happy freelancing is… perfect customers. What makes a perfect customer? The perfect customer is successful. People that are winning are generally good at what they do. It’s far easier getting content and feedback and input from someone who is organised and on top of things than someone bogged [...]

I’m sure at some point it’s happened to most freelancers. You spend hours on a design, working on getting all the last little details right. The design is pixel perfect, everything has plenty of room to breathe, it looks great and it feels like you’re going to hit a home run. Then you show it [...]

I was recently contacted by a videographer, let’s call him Frank. Frank makes testimonial type videos, videos with the owners in them, tv commercial type stuff. Videos that make a great addition to a website. He invited me out to coffee so I was like ‘yeah cool’. So I went there, and he was a [...]

As freelancers, it’s our job to improve our clients condition. One thing I’ve realized a lot lately as I’ve been outsourcing more and more, is that good planning saves lots of time. Yesterday I was working on upgrading a site for a client that I made when I first started freelancing in 2007. The css [...]

I had a prospect from about a year ago call me up with a renewed interest in building a website. The only problem is, in that time, my minimum price has tripled. At first I thought I would just tell him that I can’t do his job, because I thought there’d be no way he’d [...]

People say that one of the joys of being a freelancer is the freedom. That you don’t have to work for ‘the man’. That’s true in some senses, but in reality, it’s the same stuff with a different man. Especially as you work for bigger clients and make more money. There are still deadlines and [...]

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with different tasks that come at us freelancers during the day. The phone might ring, some urgent work comes in, meetings pop up, IM messages come in, emails coming through, not to mention all the social media and information we have at our finger tips. And it’s getting worse. If [...]