Web Development Business

Links for Designers, Programmers, Developers, people whose business is the web.

"Hire" the right clients (Signal vs. Noise) (#)

Jason Fried turns the client capturing on its head by asking Should I hire this client or not? rather then the other way around. He goes on to state Saying Yes or No to a client is a business decision just like any other business decision you have to make.

This advice may seem obvious at first, but newer businesses may not have the luxury of choosing their clients, so it is important to keep in mind while your business grows, as it can be very easy to get burnt out if one works with too many difficult clients.

Be sure to read through the comments as well for some good discussion.

Bring me problems, not solutions (#)

An excellent post by Jeff Croft that outlines one of the things that we, as consultants to our clients with respect to our expertise, need to be careful of: letting them provide solutions rather then supplying us with the problems.

To take an example from the article, We really like the look of whatever.com, make our site look like that when what they want to say is We want a look and feel for our site that is suited to our company’s mission and brand image is not always obvious to people.

It is our job to provide solutions to our clients needs, so make sure that you are getting the needs from your clients, and not the solutions.

Check out the Resource categories for older content

The latest from my personal website,
Mike Papageorge.com

SiteUptime Web Site Monitoring Service

Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:

The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.

The Art & Science Of JavaScript

The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.

The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..