Starting a Web Design Business

I frequently talk to people who are considering opening up their own web design business. The burning question most of them have is, "Will I actually be able to make this work?"

I try to pass along what I was taught when I was at that stage: it depends upon a number of factors. If you're at this juncture, I'd recommend asking yourself these questions:

1. Do you have at least some type of written business plan? I don't think that you necessarily need a formal, full-scale business plan, assuming you're not looking for investors. But I believe that a well-thought-out, written document expressing your plans and intentions for your business is extremely important. What steps will you take in starting it up? Marketing your services? Setting up accouting and other office procedures? What equipment will you need? How will you handle taxes? What are your projections for income and expenses?
2. Do you have a realistic plan for your own financial support (and that of your family, if you have one) while you're getting your business up to speed? It almost always takes some time - let's say at least six months to a year - before a new small business is generated reliable income.
   
3. Are you prepared to aggressively market your services? Business usually has to be drummed up through numerous efforts, certainly more than simply advertising. I remember when I had just opened my new business, and my father asked me how I was going to get clients. I told him the different tactics I knew about, including one of the main ones, networking face-to-face with other people. "But I don't think I'm very good at that," I worried. "Well, you'd better learn," was his answer. I didn't like it, but he was absolutely right, and I forced myself to learn to meet people, talk about my business, and make connections. I did a lot of things that were outside my normal comfort zone during that time.
4. Maybe most important of all: do you have the self-discipline to get up every morning, figure out what the most important work is for that day, and then actually do it - even with nobody breathing down your neck? This is a type of character that not everyone has; many people simply need to have their marching orders coming from someone else. I suggest thinking hard about this question: do you have that ability to self-motivate and self-direct, day after day, month after month, year after year?
   

A Nifty Flash Audio Player for MP3s

My client wanted to present an MP3 audio file on her blog, in a way that looked good, sounded good, and was easy for the user to figure out and click on. So far, the Flash audio player script I'm using has worked out really well. You can see and try it here on The Mojo Mom Blog.

We had to work out a few bugs. First, the code provided in the tutorial I followed (linked below) needed to be adjusted; it didn't work in some major browsers (my Flash genius friend Dan Smith re-wrote it for me). Second, we found out that MP3s which are going to be played by Flash need to have a standard bitrate and sampling rate. Last but not least, we had to overcome the Blogger application's ridiculous habit of inserting
tags into the middle of other tags such as the

Email doesn't cause stress and distraction, PEOPLE stress and distract THEMSELVES

It seems like the latest thing among computer-using professionals is the idea that email is somehow a major cause of a distracted, over-busy lifestyle.

I mentioned this a few months back when I had just read Connect!: A Guide to a New Way of Working from GigaOM's Web Worker Daily by Anne Truitt Zelenka. When I bought this book, I expected it to be very relevant to my "web worker" lifestyle, but didn't find it to be so. One of her main points seemed to be avoiding using email in favor of other means of communication such as instant messaging, social networking sites, blogs, and wikis.

An article from yesterday's New York Times seemed to be making the exact same point: I Freed Myself from E-mail's Grip by Luis Suarez.

I continue to be somewhat puzzled by this advice, simply because email has never become a problem to me. I have been using the Internet for about 12 years now, and I run two Internet businesses, and have the usual family and friends to communicate with - yet, somehow I've never gotten into the position I hear so many complaints about, in which email has become a terrible burden and taskmaster.

Even when I recently spent five weeks in a small town in Mexico, and even being the owner of a business which operates 100% over the Internet and depends upon email, I was able to keep up with my email correspondence without any stress at all.

So I don't seem to have the problem that apparently is more and more common these days, having email correspondence become something whose "grip" I need to be "freed from". I'm not sure where all of this stress comes from for so many people, but I suspect that it's much more the product of a corporate environment in which much too many pointless emails are sent, than the fault of the medium itself. I don't work for or with that size or type of organization, and maybe that's why I don't suffer with that particular ill.

I can tell you, though, that if I did suffer from an excess of email, the replacements suggested by both the Suarez article and the Zelenka book would not be my solution. Social networking sites - now why would logging into yet another web site to check digital messages - exactly like email - be easier? As for instant messaging, I've used it a lot, and have basically given it up as a poor excuse for a method of contact, because I find that it fosters careless, thoughtless, valueless communication.

I think email is being given a bad name by people who don't know how to manage their email or their time, and are looking to hit a nerve with other people who have the same problems.

Email isn't the problem. Used properly, is a brilliant method of communication. It shouldn't be used thoughtlessly, and it shouldn't take the place of more human methods of communicating (such as the phone) when a situation is touchy or complicated. But used intelligently, it has all of the advantages of other quick ways of talking to one another - it's easy and instantaneous - and all of the advantages of traditional written communication, because it leaves a permanent record. And best of us, it doesn't demand the recipient's attention until he's good and ready to read it - at least, if he is the boss of his email, and not the reverse.

An Update on Zoho CRM Support

I wanted to provide an update on Zoho CRM, and particularly on the customer support they offer. I had written in a post several days ago that I had had some unsatisfactory experiences thus far with Zoho CRM's support, which was true. But it's now looking like those problems were the exception rather than the rule. There may be a few wrinkles in their support system, but as of now, I think our support needs will be well taken care of.

A phone and web-meeting session was arranged for this morning with Gopal, who had described himself as being assigned to support my account. While we talked on the phone, I was able to watch him using the software on his own desktop. Gopal had actually worked on customizing the software to handle the processes that I had asked about, which in fact hadn't been available in the system: a double-opt-in email list signup function. He explained that he had tested out his customization on his own local system, but that within a few days it would be added to the actual Zoho CFM software so that it would be available to me and everybody else with the appropriate type of account.

This was a lot more than I had expected, and I'm really pleased. The fact that the software is under ongoing development, and that the programmers are so closely connected with the requests of users, seems like a major advantage.

Zoho CRM for Customer Relationship Management

I've been working with Zoho CRM for a couple of weeks now for a client, and I'm really impressed.

Zoho CRM is Customer Relationship Management software, designed to help a business keep track of its customers and sell them more stuff. It has so many features and functions that I don't think I've tried out 1/3 of them yet, but the ones I'm using are excellent.

I've been able to create a database of my client's contacts, and include information on them in custom fields that I create. Having done that, I'm now about to "select and sort" from the database. For instance, I can run a report of all contacts who took a workshop in March or April 2008, and print a report of them showing their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the names and ages of their children. From that list, I can send a bulk email, or print labels for a snail-mailing.

I'm still waiting to see if the technical support is going to be adequate. So far, it has been a lot less than what I need and hope for. My emails have waited several days for an answer, which is too long. The one phone call I tried was very disappointing; the person on the other end seemed in an enormous rush, and once he had directed me to the menu item which was the first 1% of my question, he made it clear that it was time to get off the phone. I'm hoping that these were anomalies, or that I just haven't yet found the best method of getting support.

Zoho has dozens of other online applications, and they are apparently still in the process of developing them, and integrating them with one another. So things will probably get better. It does seem very promising.

I don't like chaotic file structures!

Yesterday, I worked on an existing web site that was brand new to me. My client had a rush request for a very simple edit. Once I had the FTP connection information, everything should have been nice and easy - but nooo!

I've seen this before on badly-maintained servers, so should have been wary, but unfortunately it caught me. For some reason, the previous web person had two sets of site files. One set of files was in the root directory; but when I made the edit and uploaded the page, the change didn't appear live. After scratching my head for awhile, I figured out that the domain name was actually pointed to a subdirectory, where another set of almost identical site files resided. When I uploaded the edited page to that location, the change appeared live.

It's hard to guess why there would be a setup like that; to me, it's just asking for confusion and problems. If the root directory files are old files, they should be moved to an archive and the root directory left to hold only files that need to reside there.

Zoho: Online Word Processor, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Customer Relations Management, and more

As readers of this blog know, I'm an avid student of ways to work which allow me to be unattached from my own office, and even from my own computer. Online applications and services are a primary strategy in this quest. I use many of Google's online applications: GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, and probably others I'm forgetting. Just yesterday I found out about a somewhat similar suite of online applications/services: Zoho.

According to their FAQ, Zoho is "...a suite of online applications (services) that you sign up for and access from our Website. The applications are free for individuals and some have a subscription fee for organizations. Our vision is to provide our customers (individuals, students, educators, non-profits, small and medium sized businesses) with the most comprehensive set of applications available anywhere (breadth); and for those applications to have enough features (depth) to make your user experience worthwhile."

There's word processor, a spreadsheet program, a note-taking tool, a presentation application, a CRM (customer relationship management) application, a wiki program, a planner, an email application, project management, invoicing, web conferencing, database creation and reporting applications, a recruitment management tool, and even a few more. The scope of applications is quite impressive.

And who is behind all of this? Again quoting their FAQ, Zoho is "...a division of AdventNet Inc. A US-based company that has been creating and selling cutting edge software solutions since 1996. The company has tens of thousands of customers worldwide, is privately held and profitable."

They aren't all free, but many are. I've signed up for a free account but haven't tried any yet; I'll try and post again when I have more of a review. But from what I've seen, Zoho has a good possibility of becoming part of my steadily increasing set of important online business tools.

Using an online calendar system - you might want to consider it!

I am going to tell you about something which has helped hugely in organizing my business and my life in general. Before I do, I'll warn you: if you are concerned about using Google's free applications, you don't need to bother reading further. I understand those concerns, and I intend to do more research on them. But for now, personally, I'm not worried.

I knew of the existence of Google Calendar, but didn't feel the need for a new kind of calendar, especially a digital one. However, as I've mentioned here before, I'm on a mission to create an office which depends neither on paper nor on my hard drive, by using online applications wherever possible, so when Google Calendar was recommended in the interesting book Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani, I decided to check it out.

For years I've kept myself organized using various paper calendars, and I've never missed any important event for lack of keeping track of my obligations. I actually really like keeping track of stuff on paper, and until my recent push, have avoided digitizing things that could be kept on nice, old-fashioned, tactile, simple, paper.

So what's so great about an online calendar, and about Google Calendar in particular? Why have I switched completely and am now enthusiastically sharing my recommendation? I can probably best answer that with a list of reasons.

1. I use my calendar for a lot more than I used to. Because it's so convenient and efficient to use, I now keep track of a number of obligations and events on it that I used to keep track of in my head, or in numerous and various other places. I really have centralized all of my obligations that are tied to calendar dates. More about how this works below.
2. Google Calendar allows me to set up events so that they automatically repeat. This is perfect for things like (1) yearly large debits to my checking account that I don't want to be surprised by, such as web hosting payments; (2) monthly bills for companies that don't offer anything except for U.S. Mail billing, which I might miss when travelling; (3) weekly events like my Cuban Salsa dance classes; (4) birthdays of family and close friends, which now appear every year.
3. Google Calendar's system of reminders by email is extremely useful to me. Now, I'm aware that for many people, reminders sent by email are not desirable or effective, simply because their inboxes are a mess already, and the resulting information bottleneck doesn't allow for email to be used in this way. This is not the case with me. I have an excellent spam filter system, and I take care of my incoming email so that it is not at all a problem. So, receiving reminders at specific intervals for events on my calendar that I might forget is extremely useful. I only receive reminders I specifically request, and I delete all of these emails as soon as I'm sure I won't forget the event, so they are nothing but helpful.
4. My calendar is available anywhere where I have a computer and an Internet connection. This has not proved to a problem even when I spent 5 weeks in a small remote town in Mexico - there were Internet cafes on literally every block - and I don't plan on being further from civilization than that any time soon.

A good example literally just occurred. I just checked my email, and there's a message from the company who provides my fax service, saying that they need a new debit card number. I went to their site to provide that, and saw that they're going to charge my card again next February 19. Now, there is no way in the world I'm going to remember that date. So I took 60 seconds to access my Google Calendar, add a note on that data and set it to repeat yearly. I don't need a reminder of it, so I didn't set any reminders, but it will show on my calendar that week and I'll know what that funny charge is that my bank shows for a few days before the payee is displayed.

I'm very pleased with the way this is working for me. If you had told me a year ago that I would be using an online calendar on a daily basis, I would have been amazed, because my attitude was truly Hutterite on this question. But the truth is, the more I'm able to free myself from my notebooks and pads of paper and file cabinets, the more time I get to spend away from my office, say, on the beach in that remote town in Mexico. As a psychologist once told me, people can change, but we have to be very motivated!

Notes on One E-Commerce System

For the small web design shop, getting asked to produce an e-commerce site is often somewhat of a challenge. There are countless ways it can be done, and sometimes just choosing the right shopping cart software, payment gateway and merchant account can be a big job.

For very small shops, I definitely recommend considering PayPal's e-commerce solutions. Once the site owner has a PayPal Business Account, you can literally have an online shop up and running in a matter of hours.

For the larger projects, I have yet to settle on a single solution, but I've been reasonably pleased with a system that was chosen by one of my clients, Web Marketing Magic. I was initially turned off by the "internet hustle" feel to their web site, as well as by the poor design of the pages, but the software itself has always worked well for us. And in the couple of years that we've been using it, it has improved noticeably on both of those counts.

WMM is a hosted product which provides not just a shopping cart, but a range of marketing features, including an email database and autoresponder system. There are several packages providing different feature sets; we've been using the somewhat expensive Pro package because of our need to provide digital delivery of goods.

WMM has generally worked well for us. Because it was not my decision to use it, I have always been tempted to try and convince my client to try a set of other solutions instead: a PayPal shopping cart, Payloadz, and Constant Contact or MailChimp. But my client is convinced that the integration WMM offers between its shopping cart and autoresponder system is crucial to the sales process, and she may turn out to be right.

Is the customer always right?

Among the discussions on the web development business I've been part of, one very common one revolves around a statement like this: "My client wants such-and-such for his web site. I know it's a bad idea, but he's the client, so I have no choice."

In these discussions, some web designers/developers* insist on the old adage "The customer is always right" and believe that carrying out whatever orders the client might give is the highest form of good customer service. They consider themselves to be tools used by clients to create the client's own vision.

Others, myself included, think that an important part of our job is giving good advice about what constitutes an effective, good quality web site.

I don't simply comply with every request. I do consider that to be the default setting; the person writing the checks is, at least in one sense, the boss. But presumably I have been hired in order to take advantage of my knowledge of good web design as well as my simple ability to produce a web site. Ultimately, I consider my job to be to meet the client's actual goals, which typically are to have a web site which works well in the large sense; the site does what it's supposed to do: attracts business, provides information, contributes to the company's good reputation, etc.

So if the client has an idea for his web site which he thinks is really cool, but which I know won't work well for a lot of users, or will be disliked by most of them, I don't just shrug and go about implementing it. Instead, I initiate a conversation with my client in which I explain why I feel that their idea is not going to contribute to the success of their web site. I make sure he understands the potential problems and down-sides to his idea. We discuss it. And then, I let him make the decision.

Often, the client will take my advice, and get a better web site for himself. Sometimes he'll continue to insist on his idea. When it's the latter, it can be frustrating for me. Yes, I'm getting paid, but it's still a bummer to have to produce a web site which is less than good quality when I have the ability to do otherwise. It's just much more satisfying to produce a good site than a mediocre one. In some instances, I've even felt it necessary to remove my credit from the web site over issues like this.

It's not always easy to negotiate these issues, but I stand firm in my belief that a good web developer is not just a box of crayons for the client, but a box of crayons with years of knowledge and experience.

And by the way, "The customer is always right" is, of course, not a universal truth. It doesn't take much experience or imagination to come up with a situation in which a customer is most definitely not right. (How about "I want everything in your store for free"?) The expression has a purpose, but it isn't meant to be taken literally, but rather understood as, "A good business does everything possible to please the customer." Not as catchy, but a lot truer and more useful.

* Re. "Web designer" and "web developer": I continue to use these terms interchangeably to refer to a person whose job it is to plan, design, code, and produce web sites.

QuickBooks Online, get with it!

In the ongoing effort for a "virtual" and "hard-drive-less" web development business office, I've been using QuickBooks Online, as I mentioned in an early post. It's working well for me, and so a client and I looked into setting it up for her "virtual office".

We were 95% sold on using it from the start, and so were very disappointed to find out that they don't support it for any Macintosh browsers! My client is a Mac-only person these days, and though we're aware of the workarounds for installing Windows programs on a Mac, they're much too involved to undertake for only this reason.

So we need to go back to the drawing board and look for different software. What a huge mistake on the part of the makers of QuickBooks Online. From what I know of what it takes to build a web site which works well in all browsers, it wouldn't require much for them to make QuickBooks Online ready for Mac Safari or Firefox.

Have they not yet heard that the whole point of the Web is that it's platform-independent?

The Buena Vista Operating System Club

This week my new Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop arrived, and I've been busily setting it up all week. The laptop is beautiful and works great, but that's not what I wanted to discuss here. Rather, this is my first Windows Vista machine, and I wanted to describe my experience so far.

I was scared of going Vista, having heard plenty of negative stuff. The bad reviews all seemed to center around three complaints:

• "It's hard to get used to Vista because so many things are different from Windows XP."
• "Vista's User Account Control (UAC) is constantly nagging me to allow this or that."
• "None of my peripherals work and there aren't even drivers for them."

Now, I'm no big fan of Windows or anything, but I have to be honest here: I have none of those complaints. Addressing them one by one:

• Yes, things are in different places, but it has never taken me more than a few seconds to figure out where to find something.
  
• Yes, User Account Control does ask my permission to do certain things, but it's definitely not as frequent as the Apple TV commercials make it sound! I'm aware of the importance of the security features, and it just isn't that big a deal.
• Here's how difficult it was to hook my (6-year-old) printer up to my Vista machine: I leaned over and unplugged it from my old machine, plugged it into the Vista machine, Vista found and installed the drivers, and I was able to print. No problem with either of my external hard drives, either.

My most important programs (Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks) installed without a single problem.

It doesn't hurt that Vista is visually so much prettier than earlier Windows OSs either.

I'm just 3 days into this, but overall, everything works, most things are easier, and I'm enjoying it.

A "hard-drive-less" office

I've been making a focused effort to make my office not only "paperless", but also, "hard-drive-less". In other words, my goal is to have almost all of my systems and data reside on the Internet rather than on my hard drive. I say "almost all" because I don't think it's quite possible to do this 100%. For example, I have software which has to live on my hard drive; - Dreamweaver and Fireworks are the main culprits. But as long as I own the licenses and have the CDs and/or rights to the programs, I don't even have to depend completely on my hard drive for them. And I still have some paper files, although I've reduced them by about 2/3.

The following are some of the main programs and services which are allowing me to do this. Quite a few of them are Google-provided; whether or not I should be nervous about trusting so much to Google is a question I'm not going to delve into here, although I have to acknowledge that it's a fair question.

1. GMail - by far the smartest, most convenient, easiest, keeps-me-most-organized email program I've ever used. I've used quite a few, and email is important to me. Its nearly flawless spam-filtering system, "tags", and searchability are just a few of the things I love about it. And I was able to access my email on computers all over Mexico in less than 30 seconds.

2. Google Docs. I use it for information, not for documents that have to look perfect - but I have piles of information to keep track of, and the search function makes finding anything almost instantaneous.

3. Google Calendar. I didn't even really believe that I was going to be able to give up my paper calendar, but I actually have. And my paper calendar never emailed me reminders about upcoming appointments and events!

4. Online banking.

5. Highrise by 37 Signals, a wonderful contact manager where I know keep all of my personal and business contact information. Amazingly, for less than 250 contacts, it's free! Although I can see the wisdom of that business model, since after getting familiar with it I've already signed a client up with the paid version.

6. Backpack and Basecamp, also by 37 Signals. I'm still in the process of choosing between these two intranet-like applications for my own business and for a client's business. I really like both.

7. QuickBooks Online. Good old QuickBooks, but resides online and is accessible anywhere. It's not cheap, but bookkeeping is too important to skimp on, in my opinion.

The "nameplate page"

A couple of weeks ago, a client asked me to correspond with the graphic designer he had been working with. When the designer and I talked, he mentioned some information about me that he had obviously gotten by Googling my name. It wasn't anything that I minded him knowing, but it did remind me that anybody who does this will find out various things about me: that I wrote a book, that I have several web design-related web sites, and that I have made lots of posts on certain web design newsgroups, some of them not entirely serious.

So recently, when I read Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani, I paid attention to her section on creating what she calls a "nameplate page". The idea is that you can take charge, at least to some extent, of what Google presents to the world in connection with your name. In addition to being circumspect about what you post under your name online, you might want to post a brief web site at a domain associated specifically with your own name. The goal is to have that page come up first, or at least high, in Google searches for your own name, so that curious searchers will be more likely to be given information and links that you have chosen than to find random sites where your name is posted.

It seemed like a good idea, so I now have a little "digital business card" at www.pattyayers.com. I already owned the domain, so it didn't cost me anything, and only took a few minutes. Whether it helps to maintain my sterling reputation remains to be seen!

Customizing Firefox's Search Bar

Something else I discovered about Firefox: adding other searches to the Google search field in the toolbar. I had no idea there was anything but Google to choose from, or that you can add lots of other searches and sites. Just click the down-arrow next to the "G", which is to the left of the search box, to see a short list of other sites which can be searched quickly right from your toolbar. And, if you click "Manage Search Engines" at the bottom of the list, you can customize your list and add search engines and popular lookup sites from a list.

Knocking email as sensationalism

I've noticed an interesting trend. Several business-advice books I've read lately have made a point of suggesting, sometimes pretty strongly, that to improve productivity, we should all steer clear of using email so much. Don't ever check it first thing in the morning! says one book. Try to use "social networking sites" instead! says another. Other books have emphasized what a time-waster email can be.

Personally, I disagree. I should qualify this right away by saying that this may be because I'm unusual in that I've always been careful in how I handle email. I think I was aware since way back in the misty, distant days of my Internet use, about 12 years ago, that the Internet in general, and email in particular, are powerful and potentially dangerous, and I've always treated them with respect. I've always done everything possible to avoid spam, avoided mailing lists, and discouraged unnecessarily chatty email correspondence, to name a few examples. I've never made it my life, as some people seem to, but pretty much have always been the boss of it.

Also, I'm pretty conscious of how I use my time in general, and so not susceptible to being randomly distracted by the receipt of emails during my work time.

So email has never gotten the best of me. It's never wasted my time or distracted me from more important work, and I don't believe I've ever used it thoughtlessly in such a way as to detract from a business relationship.

And I question the email-avoidance advice that seems to be common these days, because it seems to me that the problem isn't the tool, but how it's used. Email still seems to me to be an excellent means for certain types of communcation, used with care.

Actually, I suspect that those authors gave that advice partly just for the shock value. What a radical thing to say! Can it be true? People read it, and then pass on the revolutionary concept to their friends, providing lots of buzz-marketing for the book.

Using Google Calendar's "Notifications"

I've recently started using Google Calendar. I've always been the old-fashioned paper-calendar type, but I decided to give this a try, in my ongoing effort to create a business with a truly portable office.

Although I kind of miss my paper calendar, which doesn't have to be logged into, can be scribbled on at will, etc., there's one aspect of Google Calendar which has begun to be very useful to me: "Notifications".

Using Notifications, I can set up the program to send me an email a few hours, or a day or a few days, before each "event" on my calendar, as a reminder. This is useful not just for appointments, but for the type of thing I ordinarily handle by using lots of sticky-notes taped up around my office - reminders of things that need to be attended or prepared for in the future. For example:

• hosting accounts which are going to automatically renew for the years (and hit my bank account with a sizable charge)
• transfers from my PayPal account to my bank account, which take 3-4 days, which I need to confirm
• my automatic computer backup, which I'd like to not have interrupt me in the middle of doing something on the computer

Of course, it's also handy for appointments, deadlines, and remembering to get to salsa dance class! But using it for less traditional reminders is even more useful, since it really is effective in clearing my life of the multiple small paper notes that I use for this type of thing.

As far as adding volume to my email in-box, this doesn't bother me at all, simply because (1) my in-box isn't out of control, (2) this is useful enough to warrant using email to get my attention, and (3) I just read and delete the reminders, so they aren't much of a burden.

A radical experiment: closing my email

I've just finished reading a couple of books about "productivity", and there's always a lot of talk about how we handle email. Since email is really not a problem for me, I didn't do anything with most of the advice offered.

The one recommendation that I did decide to try, though, I'm really pleased with. And it's ridiculously simple! I decided to try closing my email window (I use GMail, so for me this is a browser window tab, but for others this would apply to an email program) for periods of time while I'm working.

Although it felt weird at first to not be connected directly to my email at all times, I'm starting to really like those periods of time - they're very relaxing, and it's much easier to focus on work without interrupting myself every time an email comes in, which I seem to be compelled to do once I know it's there.

When I add to this a Pandora (www.pandora.com) radio station playing jazz, suddenly my work environment is much more peaceful and pleasant, and yes, more productive.

Setting up client domain registrations and hosting accounts

A friend who has just recently started in the web development business asked me what I do about client domain names and hosting accounts - who signs up for the them, and those name they are put in. I thought I'd repeat my answer here, in case it's helpful to someone else.

I've developed a system over the years which works well for me, so I'll explain it and the reasons for it.

I handle the two - domains and hosting - differently.

For domain names, first and foremost, I never register a client's domain under my name or business name. I don't think there's any reason to, and don't think it's in the best interests of the client, since he should always have control over his own domain name.

if the client already has his own domain names registered, I just ask for the login information for his account with the domain registrar, so that I can access the account to set the name servers. There is seldom any other reason for me to access that account. If the client needs a new domain name or names registered, and is comfortable doing it himself, I encourage that, but try to influence his choice of registrars, since I've found that some are much easier to deal with than others. I also ask him to be sure to make a note of his login information and give it to me.

If the client prefers that I do the registering, I'm glad to do it. I make sure I know what name, address, email address, etc., the client wants to use, as well as getting his credit card number, and put both the account and the domain name entirely in his name.

I handle hosting differently, for two reasons. (1) There is a more pressing reason to have the hosting account in my name: I will need to contact the host at times, and most hosts will not deal with a third party unless that party is authorized in some way by the person who owns the account. Of course, my client can inform the host that I am authorized to make decisions about the account, but when there's something urgent that needs to be done, that can be a real pain. (2) Legally/ethically, having the hosting account in my name is a lot different than having a domain name in my name; a business can depend entirely upon a domain name, whereas a particular hosting account isn't mission-critical. As long as the client has a backup copy of his own web site files, if the web developer were to be hit by a bus, he could carry on with his business without any serious problems.

A third reason for putting hosting accounts in my name is that at times, I have many client hosting accounts to look after, and it's much easier for me to have them all at one host under my name.

That's my system. By the way, the hosts I use for almost everything are HostMySite.com and CrystalTech.com, and the domain registrar I use is GoDaddy.com.

Why I sometimes turn down the opportunity to submit a proposal

I turned down the opportunity to prepare a proposal for two different clients yesterday, so I thought I'd write about that today.

This isn't unusual for me, and I definitely don't think it's a bad thing. But to some who are just starting out as small-business/independent web developers, it might sound strange. If I stated this on the online forums I frequent, I can almost promise that there would be a post or two from people eagerly asking that the clients be referred to them.

Some of my readers may be of a mind to turn down potential web development jobs as well; if you are, you already understand. But for those who don't, here's my explanation.

First and foremost is the fact that, after ten years in this business, I have found that I spend a lot of time talking to potential clients, gathering information, "selling" my services, preparing proposals and figuring estimates. I find this to be hard work, and it isn't my favorite type of work by any means.

Some of this work results in paying jobs, sometimes in good paying jobs. But the percentage that do result in good paying jobs is too low for my liking. Whether or not I could improve that percentage is a subject I'm not ready to tackle here, but I will say that I do the very best I can to get every single contract that I can, assuming that it's appropriate for my skills and strengths.

But, appropriate for my skills and strengths - that's crucial, at least to me. I don't enjoy being in the position of having "won" a contract, and finding myself faced with work that I need to subcontract out to others. I find that a lot of web developers seem to think that subcontracting is the answer to all potential problems with a web development project, and that there's no reason to shy away from any contract, since the talent to complete it is undoubtedly readily available for hire.

But I don't want to supervise web projects. I don't want to be the one whose job is to constantly interface between the client and the people who are having all the fun doing the design and coding. Again, in the immortal words of Sly Stone, different strokes for different folks, and that might be somebody else's idea of a fun job, but it isn't mine.

So, when it becomes obvious to me that I'm not likely to be able to handle all, or at least most. of the actual web development work myself, that's one time when I am likely to pass on submitting a proposal.

There are other reasons I sometimes pass on a project as well. Another is when a client, and/or his project, set off warning lights for me. This might be because the potential client sounds like he is not serious about hiring a web developer at reasonable rates, or it might be because I can tell that the web site production process will be "managed" by a committee, which I've found to be a formula for an unhappy project. Unfortunately, not-for-profit organizations frequently fall into one or both of the above categories.

There are other types of potential clients I've learned to pick out from a distance and avoid as well, for example, the get-rick-quick-on-the-Internet-wannabe. These are people who think that a web site plus a small amount of fiddling with search engine positioning will create for them a goose that will begin laying golden eggs into their bank account shortly after I launch their site.

The truth is, I've found that by sorting through potential clients carefully, I can put my energy into the potential projects which actually have potential for both the client and me, and avoid wasting time on those which don't.