CategoryClients

November 5, 2009 — Your invoice should be prim and proper, so that you can get paid by your clients efficiently. While invoicing is not a fun task, it’s a necessary one: by keeping clients informed of your expectations, you will get paid punctually and reinforce your professionalism. After going over some best practices for creating invoices, we’ll review some great (and not so great) online invoicing tools, so that you can spend less time creating invoices and more time doing the things you love! Read more…

October 15, 2009 — In business, being able to read people and quickly get a sense of who you’re dealing with is an invaluable skill. It turns your encounter with a client into an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the upcoming project and how it will need to be handled. It is one of the building blocks of a professional relationship. Read more…

October 11, 2009 — Whether you are getting a client to sign off on a website’s design or persuade a user to complete a call to action, we all need to know how to be convincing. Read more…

October 1, 2009 — Winston Churchill once said: “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” Regardless of where you work or who you work for, being able to take criticism is part of the job description. Read more…

August 24, 2009 — Freelancers have it hard. I mean, really hard. In theory, the idea of working for yourself, of being able to choose who you work with and what you work on, sounds like the perfect job. In practice though, it’s a lot more than just working on amazing projects for amazing clients from the comfort of your own home. Read more…

April 4, 2009 — FTP’ing is a fact of life for Web designers and developers. Some Web design programs have built-in FTP utilities, but they may not always quite meet your needs. Sometimes you just want to upload a file, image or something else that doesn’t require any coding. Opening your usual coding application seems like a big waste of time in that case. Read more…

October 9, 2008 — Let’s face it. Some days, you want to just fire your clients. You go through one too many comps, iterations or edits and you’ve had enough. It has happened to everyone at least once and I’d be lying if I said it won’t happen again; you get to the end of a project and realize that you would have made more per hour flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Read more…

July 22, 2008 — You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such cirlces unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You’ll hear ideas being thrown around like “design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1” or “we are not worried about the design, we’ll outsource it or use a free Wordpress theme, let us focus more on the product”. Read more…