1. Buy an electric heater

It might not work having the whole house’s heating on, but it doesn’t stop you buying a little portable, plug-in heater. These heaters generally work best in a smaller room, perhaps under your desk, to allow the heat to rise around you and your body. Typical running costs are reasonably low, but if you were to purchase 2 or 3 and run them at once could stack up. A 2KW heater, running at $0.15 per hour would work out at around $1.2 per day. Not too expensive and they very well at keeping a small, localized area, toasty and warm.

2. Get Some Warm Slippers and Socks

Speaking from experience my feet and hands get the coldest. I don’t know if it’s bad circulation or what, but after 15 minutes, they start to chill. The worse thing is that getting cold feet so to speak actually effects my performance. The cold spreads around your body and becomes quite distracting. So, purchase yourself some good slippers and socks. Hey, if you work alone who cares what you wear? By far my favorite socks are from the Heat Holders line. These are extremely thick socks, with a heavy, fur-like lining. Think of them as slippers and socks rolled into one. These are the big guns in terms of keeping warm, I have them on now and can feel my feet slowly coming back to normal heat. Heat Holders cost less than $10 a pair.

3. Batten down the hatches

Keep your windows and doors closed where possible. This will trap heat inside, reducing the need to put on the heating. You may even chose to improve the sealing on your current windows, cutting down on chilling drafts that creep across your keyboard and cool your hands down. This can be done with a bit of window-caulk or draft excluders. You should also do the same to doors. Where possible try work in a smaller area (find yourself a winter office) as these are faster and cheaper to heat up than a larger space. Closing doors will help stop air from circulating, which often results in warm air been carried away and replaced with colder air.4. Move aroundIt doesn’t hurt to get up and move around for a bit. Sitting at a PC will likely mean very little movement (other than your fingers on the keyboard and to occasionally reboot it when it breaks). However, getting up and moving about (going for a walk, going to make a coffee, doing star jumps) will help get the blood moving around your body and generate heat from within. This is a great technique that’s very effective, even if you look quite silly. Plus, it costs nothing (well, apart from the food we require to tick-over).

4. Get a rug!

Adding an additional layer between you and a freezing, hard wood floor will insulate your feet and help keep the warmth in. Rugs are great value for money and can offer a lot more than simply looking nice. Though that helps a lot. For bonus points, get a sheep skin rug, because these are super warm and look very cool.

5. Drink

Keep yourself warm by drinking hot drinks.

6. Work at Starbucks

And speaking of drinking, if all else fails, get on over to Starbucks, who’ll offer a warm working environment for the cost of one, gorgeous coffee.

Using these 4 ‘secrets’, I have only one client on my books that has commissioned only one project – but they are incredibly pleased with my work and service and will be forwarding more projects in the future. The majority of my design work is from repeat clients, some I’ve worked with for many, many years. This is proof that working hard and following these tips works. Always remember, finding new clients is 4 times harder than getting work from an existing one.

Communication

There is a fine art to communicating with clients, newbie freelancers will need to learn quickly. First, you need to establish the level at which your client is at in terms of their understanding of jargon. Kerning, PHP, Twitter and Gigabytes are everyday terms for many of us. But what a non-computer literate client hears is “Kermit? PEEP? Twits? Giglybytes?”. You should determine where your client is initially with their comprehension of things, if they can take jargon, i.e. because they knew their beans from their mange-to us then use it. But some clients have been told they ‘must’ get on the net, or they really need to promote their site with Social Media. These are buzzwords thrown around by helpful friends. This moves them to search you out, but they know very little. It’s your job to help them understand what’s what and the benefits of Choice A over Choice B. This is very much a hand-holding process and some clients will appreciate your approach, moving them to feel satisfied with what you’ve done, because now they now why you’ve done it. This will result in more word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients.

Customer Service

Customer service can be very much tied into communication. It’s an absolute must. If you went to Walmart and nobody served you, likely you’d leave the store and tell everyone you knew about the poor quality of support you received from them. It;s the same with freelancers. You likely work on your own, so offering good customer service takes more effort, but taking 2 minutes to help a client by phone will help them see your interested in them, even if you’ve received your cheque and moved on to other projects. This might interrupt what you were working on, but will leave past, current and potential clients impressed. Customer service doesn’t have to be difficult though. If you receive a quote request and you’re just too busy, always reply to inform the client. Perhaps pass them onto a contact or just tell them you’re busy right now and you’ll be free in a few weeks. This is just basic manners, but because a lot of companies don’t care any more, you’ll stand out from the crowd. Likewise, if you can’t make the agreed deadline, hold up your hands and tell your client. Do it at the earliest opportunity, tell them exactly why it’s happened and tell them how you are going to proceed. Show them you care and are doing everything you can to make their project a success. Clients will always understand this, especially when it wasn’t through any fault of your own. This will result in more-word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients.

Honesty

Honesty is the best policy. Don’t ever lie, it’s a terrible practice in any walk of life. But if you tell a client you failed to complete their design on time because your mother in law was will, you’re just setting yourself up to have to do more lying. Clients can see through this tripe everyday of the week. It just doesn’t wash. If you’ve made a mistake, own up to it. If something’s happened, tell them! If you are unable to finish the project, tell them! Don’t lie, by telling them you can’t finish the project because your closing down or going on a year long journey around the world. Clients will appreciate your honesty. It shows you’re trustworthy. Once you have that reputation, clients feel more comfortable around you and know you’ll never try to overprice a project or just rip them off. This will result in more-word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients.

The ‘Extra’ Mile

I’m sure all of us have at least once experienced someone who went the extra mile for us. It might have been a car salesmen who threw in some free goodies, or an employee who become’s your point of contact within a company you deal with. Go the extra mile for a client, by working through the night on an emergency project or offering free advice on promoting a website through social media. This will result in more-word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients.

Final Say

I hope you get the picture. If you do the above, This will result in more-word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients. That means more income, more profit. You don’t need to spend thousands on marketing. Just pick up one or two clients, do a good job and take it from there. If you lose a client, spend a little finding out why – it helps highlight a gap in your service. You should constantly be seeking to improve. This will result in more-word-of-mouth referrals, from happy clients.

Here’s the design we’ll be creating:

Here’s a few elements we think are absolute musts for a personal homepage:

Who you are

What you do

A little bit about you

Ways to contact you

Your name

That’s the bear minimum. It also depends on the focus and aim of your page. Are you creating a single page portfolio? A teaser page? Or literally just a way for your social contacts to find out more about you.

Step 1: Color Pallette & General Layout

It’s always a good idea to wireframe, sketch or just briefly plan out  the design. Designing as you go, or on the fly can result in some really creative work – but it’s also very time consuming and can lead you to eventually waste time. Here’s our initial idea – obviously it’s very simple, and some of the layout may alter. It took about 15 minutes to get here – so don’t be afraid to have a little play about with the design.

Step 2: Design Time

In painting, you always start with the background, so why should web design be any different?

Here’s how we made our background using 2 rectangle shapes, to achieve a complex gradient. It’s quicker and easier to do this with one gradient – but a little harder to show – so here’s our settings:

Background, made of 2 layers

Layer 1: Opacity 100%, color:#27d4da

Layer 2: Fill: 0%, color: #27d4da

Here’s the Gradient Overlay settings.

Next, we’re taking the picture we’ll be using. This was shot in Photo Booth, we removed the background in Photoshop, then applied a Mosaic Filter to the layer, making it look all ‘pixelly’. This can be found under Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic. We’ve also added our name across the top, faded in the background.

Next, we’ve added our ‘tagline’. This has a Drop Shadow (in white), a simple gradient and a black stroke. This gives the line a ‘letterpress’ effect. The font used is Gotham (Medium) but the ampersand is from Palatino – a system font.

Now for our introductory paragraph and some social icons – taken from iconfinder.com. Iconfinder is an excellent resource of all things icon, do check them out!

Now for a post it note, which will become our about section. This was made with a pale yellow rectangle, which has a white to transparent gradient. The left edge was made with another, darker box. Finally, we created a drop shadow and use the following technique to separate it as a new layer.

This layer can then be warped, and given an arc shape – thus creating one of those trendy lifted shadows.

Next, our text is added, using a mixture of Helvetica and Gotham. Line-heights are tweaked to boost legibility. Our Polaroid image was created in a similar manner as the post-it-note, only this time we made the shadow convex.

Re-using the Profile picture surround for our work samples.

Finally, a line is added below our large Profile pic layer, which will pull in our Twitter comments real time.

Close up of detail.

More detailing.

We’ve included the source file, so you can learn from and edit the file in anyway you like:

http://www.mediafire.com/?kxko8zk238fizmp

There are a long list of Web Design ‘gurus’, i.e the designers that make great speeches at design conferences, write piles of books and amass huge amounts of followers on twitter. However, as John found out, the most successful web design companies are completely unknown, despite many of these companies earning multi-million pound profits a year. What we need to ask ourselves is: The people we look to for advice and help, are they offering something that they themselves haven’t got? Yes, they do the conferences, they evangelize about why CSS3 is going to change our lives and how the mobile web is (or isn’t) the next biggest thing. But are they earning the same amount as the biggest earning web design companies? Not likely. John points out that these companies don’t need to go to conferences, write books or generally big themselves up – because they focus on actually getting clients.

Different Focus

It seems that many of the design gods now focus on earning their wages by targeting the web design community, in essence, an entirely different business plan to that say of your average web designer. They promise to divulge the secrets to getting bigger and more higher paying clients, but in reality they themselves have a client list of 20 ‘internal’ projects and one for a local coffee shop. We’re not saying their not good at what they do, they just have a different business plan and a different focus.

So you want to be famous?

Ironically, many new web designers idolize and dream of becoming one of the elite. They wrongly believe that if they want to make their design business a success, they should promote themselves amongst fellow web workers. But why? Surely, you’d be better spending time seeking clients and building a profile within an industry-niche. Do you want to know the biggest secret to getting lot’s of clients, huge profits and return custom?

Be a super hero to your client.

That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Your client doesn’t care that your site designs are 100% accessible and user-friendly (which of course they should be). They want your work to make them more money. It’s that simple. So you should go out on a limb for every client, hit deadlines, always provide your best work and be around when they need help. This simple dedication has made me a good wage for the last 4 years working as a designer. No, I’m not making millions, but I only design part-time and always have more work than I can possibly do. If I wanted, I could spend plenty of time finding more clients, but really, I don’t need to.

Earn a living or make millions?

At the end of the day, it all comes back round to your goals for your business. Are you looking to just make a comfortable income to support you and your family? Or, are you looking to set-up a design business and use it to fund future, multi-million pound companies? Only you can decide that. But don’t make the mistake of trying to follow suit if your targeting business owner clients, particularly local ones. Spending time focusing on fellow designers will likely yield little work, bar the odd overflow project. You may however pick up a few contacts for your own overflow work, or find a brilliant developer.

Use them, then drop them

That said, whilst perhaps you might not want to go down the same path as the humble web evangelist, they are useful. Many of their products, articles and blogs are written for designers and they do know what they’re on about. So, take their advice, if not just on technical matters, because they were designing when you were still playing war-hammer at school. Use them to get better at what you do and move on.

I’m not on about any old stock – because often some stuff just looks stock, it has that “overly professional” feel, like the presenter with the whitest teeth ever! I’ve started using a series of site’s under the Envato Marketplaces, as a source for quickly building designs up and I must say, it’s saved me hours of hard work and thus made me more profit. In particular, the GraphicRiver marketplace keeps working it’s way into my work-flow.

Benefits of using quality stock

• Save time not needing to re-invent the wheel
• Make more money, by having time to work on other projects (it all adds-up)
• Help beat creative block, by giving you a solid start to a design

Example

Let’s look at an example of one of my latest sites, built using stock. I’m not ashamed to say it – using pre-made elements in this design saved me hours of pretty pointless work and gave the design a very clear, defined theme.

MacMount

MacMount is a little project of mine, that I’ve been working on for months. The site design was going nowhere, because as always I’ve hit the problem of the whole “designing for yourself”. The problem usually stems from you feeling the pressure of trying to make the design the absolute best piece of work you’ve ever done. Sometimes creativity doesn’t work quite like that. The harder you try, the more strained it feels. You tend to really, really over think things – this probably comes from the having 100% creative freedom. You have no idea where to start, question every concept you make, create several alternate designs and just end-up moving in circles in general. We’ve all experienced it, I’m quite sure of that.

So, before starting this project, I knew something needed to be different from the start. Firstly, I treat it as though it was a client project. I drew up a proper brief, designed several logo concepts, garnered feedback on those and took it from there. Once the branding was in place, it was time to design the site. The logo used is pretty generic, so the look and feel of the site could literally have taken any route.

I based the site design on two files really, I liked the very clean, Apple like style. This made sense knowing the intended user base for the site. The two files were:

3D Download Buttons

http://graphicriver.net/item/3d-download-buttons/114920

This file was a steal at only $3 for several concepts. I ended up using the top download buttons, as these looked unique and very cool. Creating something like this may have taken only 10 minutes in Photoshop, but to get it absolutely pixel perfect and to create the concept in the first place could have taken hours. Just for a button. We designers are pedantic about these things – so to simply buy and download a psd file that is ready to drop in is genius! This formed part of the styling influences for the site – most particularly the colors and theme.

Slightly modified to suit the big typography, with price added and the text was amended on the red cross over banner.

Re-sized for add to cart and various smaller buttons. A real bargain as it forms the basis for the most of the Mac Mount styling. It doesn’t in anyway look stock either, so you’d have never known if I hadn’t told you

Blendy Navigation Menu Bar

http://graphicriver.net/item/blendy-navigation-menu-bar/114924

A little bit of tweaking and this menu suits our needs perfectly.

Adding our own twist to the menu, with some drastically altered typography to give the menu a cleaner look and adding 3 icons we needed.

As you can see, we probably saved ourselves 2 or 3 hours overall design time (if you account for sketching, iterations e.t.c). For that privilege we paid just $6. That makes a lot of sense to us, because that was 2 or 3 hours we freed up for marketing, promotion, development e.t.c. You should seriously consider using stock in your non-critical or internal projects.

http://55eleven.com/

http://mattdempsey.com/

http://www.13creative.com/

http://www.thecroquis.com/

http://www.miguelbuckenmeyer.com/

http://www.foundationsix.com/

http://wingcheng.com/

http://squaredeye.com/

http://arbutusphotography.com/

http://www.spaceshipcollaborative.com/

http://wildbit.com/

http://www.morphix.si/

http://analog.coop/