For the last few years I’ve been driven to do a lot of things. I had almost unlimited supplies of motivation which I used to build a business, and another one, to become a public speaker, to contribute to open source projects, to build a name for myself. It seems surreal now to think back to that mindset. Don’t get me wrong, I got a lot done – which was definitely a good thing – but the very idea of time-off or a “holiday” seemed like a total waste of time to me. Even when I had a day off, I was always working on something. Looking back, I never slowed down for long enough to appreciate what I had. I was always just reaching for the next “thing”. The next idea. The next purchase. The next project.

Eight months later, my outlook has changed quite a lot. I’ve slowed down. I still have big ambitions, but they’re fueled by different motivations. I’ve written before about how not owning anything makes you question everything, and as you might have deduced from my post yesterday – I’ve been trying to justify my own goals.

I’ve started working on fewer things. At the moment I’m working on Travelllll.com – 1 client project – and nothing else. Sure, I still have lots of ideas for things I’d like to do. Last week in fact I had an idea for a very simple iPhone app that I really want to see happen (drop me a line if you’re an iOS dev looking for a side project), but there’s no rush. I actually have time to relax, unwind, and recuperate. I’m slowly discovering how to do that.

The interesting part, for me at least, is that the more I slow down – the more productive I become. When I spend the morning kiteboarding, I come off the water energised, invigorated, and focused on my tasks for the day. When I spend an evening relaxing with friends, I usually get up at 4:30 the next morning to start work – completely rested.

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to decide on a new talk to give. I’m speaking at a large travel event in Colorado in 2 months called TBEX – and the more I’ve searched for something interesting, inspiring and relevant to talk about… the more the answer has eluded me. This morning I decided to take an extra hour in bed – not to sleep – just to relax and mull a few things over in my head. Within 20 minutes, without actually trying, I’d come up with the perfect idea for my new talk.

It feels unnatural to me *not* to work. Society (and genetics) have programmed me to feel guilty if I’m not doing what I’m “supposed to”.

Well here’s my new motto: fuck doing what I’m supposed to. I’m going to do what gets the job done. And if what it takes to do that is a lot more fun than what everyone else is doing, then so be it.

No related posts.

What do you do now?

You’ve bought the Ferrari. You have a private jet. You’ve built your dream house, and you second dream house. You’ve got all the Macs and cameras and gadgets a person can physically own.

What do you do now?

You’ve travelled the world. You’ve been to every place you have any desire to go to, and even some places you didn’t. You’ve volunteered in Africa, you’ve climbed the Eiffel Tower, you’ve seen the Amazon rainforest.

What do you do now?

You’ve given to charity. You’ve started non-profits. You’ve paid off all of your friends mortgages. You’ve become an internationally renowned public figure and swept up every award that can be won in your line of work.

What do you do now?

You’ve learned to cook, play an instrument, build a shed, fly a plane, read palms. You’ve gotten fit, found a healthy diet, and improved yourself to your maximum potential.

What do you do now?

All of this has only taken 5 years. Your ambitions have been fulfilled. Your bank account is flush. Society deems you to be successful. You still have about another 60 years to fill before your time here is over.

It’s Saturday morning, it’s sunny outside, and the day is yours… close your eyes.

What do you do now?

Grab a piece of paper, write it down, and answer me this: Why are we devoting our entire lives to trying to win “the lottery” for 5 years of crap, when we’re just going to end up wanting to do what’s on that piece of paper anyway? Why don’t we just start doing what’s on that piece of paper right now?

No related posts.

Today was an interesting day.

I’m in New South Wales, Australia at the moment – I’m here on a month long road trip with Destination New South Wales and MTV on a tourism campaign. The #unmapped trip has just reached the halfway point, and it’s been absolutely incredible so far.

I’ve been fortunate enough to go on quite a few of these trips over the last few years, but this one is the most extravagant and the best organised of them all. Basically there are 5 of us from all over the world, on a bus, and where we go is decided entirely by the New South Wales Facebook page. We ask people where to go and what to do… and then we go and do whatever they tell us to.

So far this has involved Mardi Gras, Skydiving, Abseiling, Rock Climbing, Mountain Biking, Surfing, and Guinnea Pig racing (yes, seriously). Today was a day that topped them all, however.

Right now, the bus has stopped in the Hunter Valley (Australia’s most prestigious wine region), and late last night we got confirmation that one of us would be allowed to take a 1 hour flying lesson in a plane at the local airfield. I wanted to do this really badly, but after a fearsome round of Rock/Paper/Scissors it was Kelly who came out on top.

I was gutted, but having come to terms with defeat – Kelly offered me a chance to buy the flying lesson back from her… if I would submit to some sort of humiliating challenge. We put a call out to the Facebook page for suggestions, and someone came up with an idea that proved to be a winner.

Becoming a Pilot

This morning I turned up at Hunter Valley Aviation, at Cessnock Airport, for my 1 hour introductory pilot course. I wasn’t nervous (something to do with jumping/falling out of similar sized planes rather recently – see here), but I was extremely excited. I met my instructor, Maddy – who showed me the aircraft control system in our Cessna, as well as how to correctly fasten the seat belt (vaguely important, apparently).

After a quick taxi to the runway and a few more brief explanations of plane functions, I pushed in the throttle and took off, solo, for my first ever flight.

I won’t bore you too much with dramatic tales of the view, although those were certainly present. It was actually a very relaxing experience, and honestly very similar to flying a plane in a video game. I got to circle the area at 3,000 feet for just under an hour before heading back in to land the plane (didn’t realise I was going to have to do that part) successfully on the runway.

The whole thing was surreal and amazing. I would absolutely jump at the chance to do it again. If you ever get the chance to do it, don’t hesitate. The Hunter Valley is a pretty incredible place for it, too.

Oh – the whole “no phones on planes” thing is crap apparently – there was no problem with me using my iPhone to take photos and tweet while flying. WIN. It’s like tweeting while driving, but in 3 dimensions.

(The plane was a Cessna, I spelt it wrong in the image)

Paying The Price

The challenge was set… though my road trip partners decided it would be best to keep me in the dark until mere hours beforehand as to what it would actually be. Eventually, I was informed we would be going to a place called “The Chili Factory” which was close by.

Now, I assumed that this would simply be some sort of speciality chilli shop. With lots of different sorts of chillies… and maybe I’d have a few vaguely hot ones. Nothing worse than a Vindaloo curry…

I was wrong.

As we stepped out of the #unmapped bus, we met Alex – one of the owners of The Chili Factory – who asked introduced himself and then said,

No but seriously, are you sure you want to do this? It’s no joke… we got banned from the last convention we went to because we took up too much of the ambulance crew’s time…

Gulp.

It turns out that The Chili Factory is famous for one thing. They are in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the producer of the hottest chilli in the world. It’s called “The Scorpion Chili” – and it’s fairly spicy. Let me explain just how spicy: The humble Jalepeño Pepper, widely regarded as “pretty hot” – is usually around 2,500 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). For the average person, this is enough for some serious tongue tingling.

The Scorpion Chilli weighs in at 1.5million SHU.

I was nervous, though I don’t think I was anywhere near nervous enough for a sane person. What happened next was a pretty extreme experience all around. The thing about The Scorpion is that for the first 1-2 minutes you don’t feel anything. It’s just like eating a Jalepeño. After that, the heat starts to build up in your mouth like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. By around the 5 minute mark, every part of your respiratory and digestive system is on fire.

It’s really hard to describe what it was like, because I can’t compare it to anything else I’ve ever done before. I felt like I wanted to throw up, pass out, fall over, cry, scream and gag – all at the same time. The worst of it passed within about 2 minutes, but they were a very long 2 minutes. After that it was just a constant unbearable heat for another 10 minutes. The milk didn’t help much, if at all.

Anyway, here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve got to say – I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun. It was absolutely *awesome* – and an accomplishment that I will doubtless be boring people with tales of for many years to come.

I’ll be writing more about the road trip over the coming weeks (including the documentary filming with MTV – preview), and doing a bit of a general recap of my travels recently. Stay tuned, and eat some chillis. They’re good for you.

Oh, and if you want to see me do more ridiculous things – please please head over to the New South Wales Facebook page and hit the “Like” button, then comment on the wall and tell them where they should take us and what we should do.

(I can still feel The Scorpion literally burning its way through my digestive system. Alex warned me that The Scorpion’s exit from the body tomorrow will be just as fiery as its entrance. Not looking forward to that part if I’m honest.)

No related posts.

Here we go again. There’s nothing that can be said about this lifestyle if not that it’s exciting.

I suffer from frequent boredom in life, and now – just as Sydney was beginning to become comfortable and easy – I’m thrown unceremoniously back onto the road and out into the unknown.

I like it.

I started travelling because I like being mentally stimulated, I like new experiences, I like exploring the unknown. Nothing has ever motivated me more to discover things for myself than the people who couldn’t teach me telling me that I’d never learn.

So I’ve departed Australia. After nearly 3 months I’ve arrived at sunnier shores and bluer waters (if that’s even possible). Now I find myself in my new place of residence; a beach hut on an island called Boracay, in the country where much I’ve already spent a great deal of time; in The Philippines. It’s quite a change in pace, culturally as well as socially.

For the first time now, I’m travelling completely alone. Up until now I’ve been going to places either with people who I know, or to see people who I know. As of right now, those safety wheels are gone. Time to get real.

Australia wasn’t just an easy start in terms of staying with friends who I’ve known for a long time… it’s also really not that different from the UK. In fact being in the center of Sydney isn’t all that different from being in the center of Manchester… London… or any other large city in a first world country.

Now I’m in a place I know, because I pretty much grew up here. When I was about 10 my family moved over to The Philippines and I went to an international school for a little under 7 years just outside Manila. But despite knowing the country, it remains vastly different to the aforementioned first world cities – and I find myself much more stimulated and excited being here.

After 18 hours of flying I arrived at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, which is rumoured to be the worst airport in the world. I’d been waiting to pass veridict on the former, after an 8 year gap in visits, but frankly – I don’t know what sort of crack everyone is smoking. It wasn’t that bad when I was last here in 2004 and it’s actually a lot better now. It isn’t a nice airport, sure, but Christ – it’s really nothing bad enough to write home about.

If you want to see a shit airport, forget about NAIA Terminal 1 – take a look at the old Manila Domestic Airport which I travelled to next to catch my flight down to Boracay:

Now, it’s a little hard to tell from this photo why the airport is shit – so allow me to elaborate a little: This photo is of the entire airport. It’s a 1 story building with a corrugated iron roof, and at the end of this room is a little glass door that leads to the planes sitting on tarmac outside. It’s hot, dirty, and cramped. It’s much worse than terminal 1 of NAIA, but really – it’s still not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

I waited in this airport for a good 3 hours, being generally shattered from the previous 3 planes, until we finally boarded the little island hopper to me the remainder of the way to my final destination. Disappointingly, the planes have improved in both size and quality since I was last here:

Last time I went on a plane about half this size, and it was a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. It was great! I was sitting in a seat just behind the pilot. This time the flight was disappointingly mundane, and the cockpit was closed. Boo.

But, after 45 minutes Boracay came into view.

Boracay is a very small island a couple of hundred kilometers south of Manila. It’s one of most popular tourist destinations in the country with what is widely regarded as the 2nd best beach in the world. To say that it’s changed a bit since I was last here would be a bit of an understatement. In 2004 this little island was comprised largely of a few expatriate tourists living in The Philippines, and local shops in the form of.. well… shacks. Now it’s like a little Miami beach, the streets are paved and the shops have glass windows. There’s even a Starbucks.

I arrived just in time for the most beautiful sunset I’ve seen in a long time, and then put myself straight to bed in my modest but comfortable accommodation at Casa Camilla – which is the first time I’ve booked a place to stay via AirBnB. It worked out to be about £14 per night – not bad. Rest was dearly needed because I’d pre-booked something a little strenuous for the very next morning.

I made a few changes to my “equipment” line up (if you can call it that) just before leaving Australia. Up until now I’ve been traveling with one carry-on sized bag weighing in at roughly 13kg. After a few months living with the contents, I wanted to fine-tune. First, I got rid of quite a few of the very-functional-but-surprisingly-ugly travel clothes which I’d picked up (at great expense) prior to departure. There’s a point at which form really does take precedent over function, and with clothing that line is a fairly important one. To summarise – I looked like crocodile dundee uncomfortably often.

Secondly, I made the fairly large decision to drop my most prized posession from the travel itinerary… my D700 and lenses. Up until now I’d justified the whopping 7kg of camera gear because there just wasn’t any other way for me to get the image quality I needed. Then I discovered the Fujifilm X100 (review), and I became an overnight convert. Literally. All the images you see on this post were taken with the X100, and weighing in at around 300 grams, it’s made my bag nearly empty and light as a feather. Buying it in Australia was a good thing, too. I got a great price as well as a tax rebate at Sydney airport upon departure.

I also got rid of a few things which I’d picked up due to being overly cautious. A big laptop case which was overkill. An external harddrive which I wasn’t using for anything that wasn’t already on Dropbox. Some document holder things which were taking up more space than added organisational value. A few padlocks.

My bag now weighs just 6kg. And I actually like my clothes.

The biggest change, however, was the addition of a 2nd bag. A big one. I could fit inside it quite easily, and it weighs about 18kg. Just when you thought I was getting smart and efficient, I went the other way. Bazinga.

When I last lived in The Philippines, I used to do a lot of wakeboarding – and I loved it pretty much more than anything else. When we eventually moved back to the UK I never had the time or the inclination to keep it up… there was nowhere to do it easily, or without freezing to death – also, boats are expensive. Just before I left The Philippines, though, I came to Boracay. In 2004 I witnessed a sport called kiteboarding for the first time and was immediately fascinated. I desperately wanted to try it right then and there, but the lessons were expensive and it was a short trip. So it never happened.

In December I had to decide where to go next after Australia. I decided to come back to Boracay and make up for the missed opportunity 8 years ago and take some kiteboarding lessons… and pick up a set of a equipment on the way. Oops.

It took me 4.5 hours to complete the course. Normally it takes people 12-15 hours, but I’ve been flying trainer kites for a few years ever since that first sighting in 2004. My wakeboarding, sailing, and windsurfing experience all helped, too.

So here’s what my average day looks like at the moment:

I get up, usually around 5:30am, check the wind forecast and take a long walk along White Beach to grab breakfast at a local place just as the sun comes up for the day. A full cooked breakfast sets me back just short of £2, so obviously I have to be very careful with my budgeting for the rest of the day… ahem. I’ve never been a morning person, ever, but waking up really isn’t much of a struggle here.

Then I walk on to the other side of the island to Bulabog Beach (which is where the wind is!). I spend about an hour on the water – which is incredible – before retiring to my office in a little bar/restaurant right on the beach looking out over all the kiteboarders on the water. Boracay is the number 1 kiteboarding destination in Asia, I counted 86 kites out on the water at one point on Sunday. It’s very cool to watch.

It’s a pretty comfy office, with decent wifi and coffee. (The photo above was taken on my iPhone rather than the X100)

I work here from about 9am to 4pm, doing a mixture of client work and managing Travelllll.com as well as scheming on other business and travel ideas while watching friends and strangers out on the water. I’ve met so many great people through kiteboarding already that I’ve pretty much decided to use it as a travel guide of sorts for a while.

I’ve never been interested in tourist destinations really. I like exploring different cultures and places… but the traditional guides of “things to see in ____” don’t do anything for me. So, stupid as it sounds, I struggle to decide where to travel to next. Going from kite-spot to kite-spot seems like a nice solution to that problem. And it should be a little different to the standard destinations travel writers go to – which is definitely a good thing. No one in the world wants to read another blog post about backpacking around Thailand.

Back to my average day: Once I’ve finished working, I might head back on the water for another hour – or just go and get some dinner with some of the other people at one of the local kite centres. Eventually, I make may way home around sunset. As you can see above, it’s a pretty stressful lifestyle that people lead around here.

Then I settle in at a restaurant on the beach just in front of my resort (which is where I am now) and do a little more work. Occasionally I indulge in a beer or two at a cost of about 50p each during happy hour, which is actually happy-4-hours from 4pm to 8pm.

Then I get up and do it all over again the next day.

To say that I’m enjoying it, at this point, wouldn’t be doing any part of it justice. I can’t remember the last time I was so thoroughly pleased with pretty much everything. I was worried about a lack of human contact after leaving Australia – I don’t really like striking up conversations with strangers – I’m no good at it. What I’ve learned though, is that when you’re out and about by yourself you suddenly become much more approachable to other people. So I’ve managed to meet absolutely loads of people just from them coming over and saying hello. Very easy really.

So far, this lifestyle is turning out to be greater than I even imagined it could be.

I’ve got another week left in Boracay, then it’s on to the much more remote island of Sibuyan. Stay tuned.

No related posts.

I’m not depressed – far from it. Being on the road for almost three months now, a lot of things have changed.

I expected a lot of things when I started traveling, and most of them ended up being accurate. One thing which I didn’t expect, or plan for in any capacity, was just how drastically my general outlook on the world would change following the removal of material possessions. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, really, cause it’s something that’s written about frequently. Prior to departure I’d absorbed countless articles discussing the sense of freedom from giving up all one owns. But I’ve never really been that attached to “stuff” – and I had no reservations about giving up mine – so I didn’t really see it as a big deal.

The shift in perspective doesn’t really have much to do with the things you own owning you, as such. It’s a state of mind. Whilst living a “normal” life, even as a relatively non-materialistic person, I was always thinking about the next “thing” to buy, or pay for, or do. I had absolutely no appreciation for how much time my mind spent locked into this rut of: earn money, buy something, do cool things with it, earn a bit more money, buy another thing.

Now that’s all gone. Not only do I have no “stuff” – but I can’t buy any new stuff at all unless I’m both able and willing to carry it on my back inside my hand-luggage-sized backpack around the world. Which is an extended way of saying: there’s nothing I want or need to buy, and even if I did – I couldn’t.

There’s a frustratingly large gap in my head where a bunch of things which I used to care about once resided.

Introspection

Right now I’m in Sydney, Australia – staying with some friends over here after speaking at WordCamp Gold Coast last month (which was excellent). As soon as I got here, everything settled down. Between October and November I travelled something like an average of 5,000 miles a day with an average of 2 days in each place. From Lincoln to Seoul, to Amsterdam, to Dublin, to Bristol, to Bournemouth, to London, to The Gold Coast… and finally Sydney. I hadn’t had time to even think up until I got here.

Then I started noticing this shift in outlook, and I started trying to fill this large (and growing) gap in my head. I don’t know if this is the same for everyone, but I found that I started questioning my goals in life… my dreams… my ambitions. What is really the point of anything I’m doing? Will I look back on what I’m doing *right now* in 10 years time and say, “those were good years – you really accomplished something.”

When you have nothing else to think about, nothing else to even occupy your idle mind with, those types of questions run riot through your mind.

That’s also the reason that, despite my best intentions, I haven’t been posting on this blog much. Because the question of “who gives a fuck about what I’m writing as I travel around the world?” is haunting me. I’m not sure what the purpose of this blog is yet, and it needs one. I’ve always posted journal-type-entries on my personal blog… and I’ll continue to do so. But it needs to be more than that if I’m going to invest a lot of time into it. I’m still trying to work out what the best angle for that is.

So I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions, I’ve been looking for a lot of answers, and I’ve been diligently continuing work as normal – but taking a step back from the social side of things for some reflection.

Realisation

A few days ago I was talking to Rob, and he mentioned how many industry fights I’d missed over the last couple of weeks. Then I turned on Twitter today to find another stream of personal insults aimed at me from one particularly agressive American web developer who likes to ram his neo-liberal political views down everyone’s throat and then attack them if they don’t agree with him. These, both things which I usually would pay lots of attention to and get involved in, suddenly seem desperately pathetic.

That latter argument I don’t even have the energy for anymore. The former argument is so well rehearsed that I needn’t even have looked at it to know what it was about. One web developer points out that another (more famous) web developer is talking shit. A day of destroyed producitivity for hundreds of people ensues as everyone takes sides. Again.

As always, it is far easier to criticise something than to build something. As always, those who’ve built something take the criticism personally. Nobody wins.

I guess I’ve realised that really I don’t care. To survive in the web design bubble (or any online community bubble), you either have to embrace it and conquer it – or you have to get the fuck out, because you’ve realised that this has become a far too accurate depiction of your life:

I’m choosing the latter.

Realignment

I’ve made huge changes to my life in 2011, so I guess now it’s time to make some changes to my work – too. I’m going to start transitioning my skills and my experience to apply my knowledge and expertise to my own ideas and my own projects. I started a website called Travelllll.com a few months ago. It’s doing rather well. Over the coming months I’m moving into a much more active role on the site, to build a business and a product which I can have some fun with.

I also have a couple of other ideas that I’m working on – ideas which came from my month of introspective questioning – ideas which I think matter. I’d like to explore those, too.

I’m still doing client work, but I turn down about 75% of the enquiries that I get at the moment. If you’re a great WordPress theme developer – leave me a comment – I’m running out of people to refer clients to.

What I’m really realigning, is my activity in the web design community. Technology has so many exciting applications to industries which are drastically lacking behind. There are far too many talented people squandering their time arguing over whether or not an <a> tag should always be inside a <p> tag, rather than using their powers to instigate positive change in both the web… and the world.

For me, it’s time to get outside my comfort zone and try new things. Again.

No related posts.

The Korean DMZ now claims the title as the most heavily guarded border in the world, but it also has other more obscure accolades. The DMZ is recognised as one of the best preserved areas of temperate climate in the world, and has become an inadvertent nature reserve. While  the 4km wide strip of land – which is so green that it can be identified from outer space – has been notably hostile to human life, it has created a thriving population of birds, black bears, and even leopards – all of which are thought to be extinct in all other corners of the earth but this one. The DMZ was also host to the two tallest flagpoles in the world, a true display of phallic competition between the North and South, until a few months ago when they were finally trumped by the Dushanbe Flagpole in Tajikistan.

While often perceived as quiet or inactive; the incursions across the DMZ are regular, and recent. Not even a year has passed since the last shots were fired by both sides across the DMZ.

Reading up on the history of the area on our way to meet our guide… I’m decidedly intrigued, if not slightly nervous, about the whole thing.

No Time for Nerves

Our journey to the DMZ begins on a large, empty bus with a very enthusiastic tour guide. None of us are really sure what to expect. It’s a short journey out of Seoul to reach the border, a stark reminder of just how close the capital is to the North – the significance of which only becomes clear a little later. The closer we get, the more barbed wire fences appear and the more guard huts we see.

Upon arrival to the tourist centre, we’re made to wait for 10 minutes and examine the wall where South Korean families who were divided from their Northern relatives during the war have left messages of support and prayers that they will one day be reunited. While we’re looking at the wall, our tour guide is submitting our names and passport details to the Korean military to allow us entrance into the demilitarised zone itself.

When we reach the military checkpoint which serves as the entrance to the DMZ, it’s guarded by armed and uniformed officers. Our tour guide explains that all South Korean men are required to serve in the Korean army. When drafted, they go through a physical to determine which regiment they’ll end up in – then they must serve at least 14 months. The soldier who comes onto our bus to inspect all of our passports and issue the bus driver with an access pass doesn’t look more than 18 years old. The single stripe on his helmet means that he’s a new recruit.

Inside the DMZ, having driven carefully around various blockades, our first stop is place called The Third Tunnel.

After the Armistice Treaty was signed in 1953, North Korea tried – repeatedly – to launch a stealth attack on the South. The first tunnel was discovered in 1974 when some South Korean soldiers noticed steam rising up from the ground. The second, was discovered in 1975, and the third was discovered in 1978 when one of the tunnel’s engineers defected from the North and told the South of its location. There are an estimated 20 tunnels running under the DMZ; all designed to launch a surprise attack on Seoul, all designed to move around 1,000 troops across the border some 100 meters underground every hour. When questioned, North Korea has always denied any knowledge of a surprise attack – claiming that the tunnels were for coal mining.

No coal has ever been discovered in any of the tunnels – but there are traces of black paint where someone has tried to make it look like there might be coal. Not the most foolproof of ruses, really.

Going Underground

The entrance to the third tunnel is housed in an unremarkable concrete visitors centre. As we enter, we’re told to use provided lockers to secure all cameras, phones, camera-phones, things which look like cameras or phones, and things which may once have been related to a camera and/or phone. No cameras in the tunnel, we’re told. No exceptions. Then down the steep incline we go into the tunnel itself, picking up a hard-hat on the way. The route down to the tunnel is a pretty well engineered one. Once the South Koreans discovered the tunnel they sealed it off underground with three thick concrete barricades, then created their own tunnel leading down to meet it.

Once we reach the bottom of the ramp, the harsh rock walls become more damp and a plumbing and ventilation system becomes evident. These exist both for the supply of air to the visitors and for diverting the constant stream of ground water which seeps down through the rock. The actual tunnel, created by the North Koreans, is tiny. The reason for the hard hats immediately becomes evident as we take it in turns to crack our heads (hard) on outcrops of rock in the ceiling of the tunnel. It’s a dark, dank place – no more than 5 feet high and 4 feet wide in most places. We make our way along, backs hunched uncomfortably, for about 10 minutes in a single-file queue of people heading deep into the shaft and another returning on the other side. There isn’t much in the way of personal space.

At the end of the tunnel we reach the third blockade. It’s really not that impressive. It’s a concrete wall with a small window in it allowing you to see the (artificially lit) second blockade. Each blockade is about 15 meters apart, and about 15 meters beyond the final blockade is North Korea. To think, I came within 45 meters of a North Korea Gowalla pin. Dammit.

Sidenote: If you want to keep up with where I am in the world and what I’m doing, you should totally follow me on Gowalla. Go on. It’ll be awesome.

Having completed the tunnel tour and delivered a few choice-words to the woman at the top selling overpriced drinks to tourists who are, without exception, close to cardiac arrest following the steep climb back up to the concrete eyesore of an entrance… we’re guided into a separate visitor centre just next door where we’re shown an extremely surreal video presentation. The video talks about the DMZ with narration in the style of cinema trailers talking about upcoming blockbusters. You know the sort – “This summer. One man, against the world, has – a gun.” – [Cue explosions].

The video talks about the DMZ, pretty much like it’s Disney World. They’re marketing it as a nature reserve, a tourist attraction, an essential Korean landmark, and an important step in the great unification of North and South Korea.

Now, I may be a little bit out of touch, but I wasn’t quite aware of an impending unification of the North and South. I remember the two nations making a simultaneous hand-holding appearance at the Olympic Opening Ceremony a few years ago… but further to that I’m not sure what progress has or is being made. Just two weeks ago North Korea threatened to launch “direct fire” on the South over reports of the distribution of leaflets in Seoul defaming the North Korean capital. “The scattering of leaflets is not a simple provocation, but an undisguised war action,” said the North. They followed up by saying they were “ready to take direct fire to destroy the citadels of the psychological warfare.”

These types of reports make it hard to imagine a box of cupcakes being sent from the North to the South with a note saying “Hey guys, letz unify.”

A View of North Korea

Back to the tour, we’re taken to an observation point high up on a mountain inside the DMZ from which one can, on a clear day, see right across to North Korea. As we pull up to the place where we can experience the exciting feat of looking at nothing in particular, our tour guide explains the rules:

Listen very carefully. Behind the yellow line taking a photo is ok. But if you take a photo in front of the yellow line, the Korean soldier will shoot you…  only kidding, they’ll just delete everything on your memory card.

The DMZ, as you will remember, is a tourist attraction. Totally safe, not a threat, no big deal. Disney World.

Indeed, having extracted ourselves from the bus we watch as several people – too stupid or too brazen to listen – are harshly shouted at and have their memory cards deleted. The view itself doesn’t offer much in the way of top secret information. It’s actually pretty hard to tell where one territory ends and the next begins – it’s just a big, open landscape. Our tour guide explains that the easiest way to tell where North Korea starts is where all the trees stop. They’ve all been cut down for fuel.

Having been suitably unimpressed by the coveted view from the observation point, I get chatting to one of the guards who, as it turns out, speaks perfect English. Sam* – I quickly establish – is from the USA. As a Korean national living abroad, he’s been called back to serve in the military. He has to do it, he tells me, or he’ll lose his Korean citizenship. The past 7 months have been the longest of his life. He spent the first 2 months being worried about being killed by a sniper rifle from across the DMZ, but now he says he’s settled in. I ask him what he’s going to do when his 14 months is up, “Go back and finish my undergraduate degree.” he says. It’s a very surreal conversation, because there’s so very little that separates the two of us, and yet here he is – in full uniform – drafted in the Korean military with little-to-no personal freedom, guarding a country he can’t wait to leave.

Half way through our conversation Sam’s head snaps around and he barks aggressively in Korean at a man who has just tentatively raised a camera to his face – a reminder that while he’s very friendly, he still takes his job seriously. He quickly apologises to me and says “I don’t really understand the point – you can find photos of this place all over Google images anyway… but what can I do? I have to follow orders.”

For a the tourist attraction that it’s being marketed as, the whole situation feels serious and uncomfortable. And to think, this is the “friendly” side of the border.

Dorasan Station

Our final stop inside the DMZ is Dorasan Station. The train line running between the North and South Korea opened in 2007 and was the first method of transport across the DMZ. It carried freight between the two countries once a week for just a year before the North shut the whole thing down and accused the South of  a confrontational policy (I’m not sure what that means) after a change of government following the 2008 elections in South Korea.

A brand new station intended for passenger travel now stands in Dorasan, and it’s covered in advertising about the unification of Korea. It’s a bizarre building. Modern to a fault, with plenty of state-of-the-art facilities which you would expect to find in the richer parts of Seoul, but it’s completely abandoned. It has no purpose. The security scanners and baggage halls sit empty, the ticket office sells tickets to go and look at the platforms, not get on a train. The entire thing – it would seem – is nothing more than a symbolic gesture.

As we leave the DMZ and are checked again, rigorously, by armed and uniformed military (both Korean and American, this time) our tour guide imparts on us a few choice closing words:

I envy all your your countries. Bigger than Korea and not divided into two. Someday I hope that we can be unified once more.

It’s hard to tell how much of this unification message which is being pushed on us is sincere, let alone realistic. I get the feeling it might be a marketing message which conveys what the South Koreans want the rest of the world to see – rather than what’s actually there.

The tour itself was absolutely fascinating, and highly recommended if you ever find yourself in Seoul. The sociopolitical history of Korea is both convoluted and decidedly unfinished. A small glimpse into a world that we in the West haven’t known the likes of since November 9th, 1989.

No related posts.

Errrdsflkgj… come in?

Are you ready to go?

Wait… what? [groan] Is it time to go?

And so it begins.

This week is the start of my new life. I’ve sold pretty much everything I own and reduced my life to one carry-on sized bag. For at least the next year (but I have no defined time-period) I’ve decided to take my office on the road and travel the world whilst still continuing to work as normal. Having departed from Lincoln in the UK and saying goodbye to the amazing friends who’ve done so much for me for the year that I lived there, I spent a couple of days in Northampton with my friend (and ExplicitWeb co-host) Hannah and her husband David.

The first leg of my journey started, as most of my journeys do, with a degree of disaster. I’m not a morning person, to put it mildly. Not at all. So when Hannah found me sprawled lifeless in bed about 5 minutes after we were supposed to have left the house to catch a train to London, there was a frustration in her voice.

(Apparently “is it time to go?” when phrased as an answer to the question “are you ready to go?” isn’t deemed to be a satisfactory response.)

[Frantic packing]

Avoiding near misses with toddlers en route to the station, we did just about get there on time. Hannah shakes her head at me and seems to have a degree of scepticism with regards to how I’m going to cope with travelling alone. She’s not the only one. My best friend, Rick, has a pool running in Lincoln on how many days it’ll take before he has to come and bail me out of a prison in Thailand, and my favourite so far has got to be Phil – who said “I don’t understand how the shittest person in the world at public transport wants to make a living out of using public transport.”

Ok, so I might have a bit of reputation for missing trains. Let’s not get hung up on that. It’ll be fine. Right? Right.

Departure

A few hours later I’m sitting on a KLM flight to Korea with my travel companions for the week, Chris Richardson and Paul Dow. We’re headed to Seoul on a trip co-organised by Travelllll.com (one of my own ventures) and Expedia to visit both Seoul city itself as well as the Korean Formula One Grand Prix. These guys are seasoned travellers, so, that’s probably a good thing – for my safety.

Korea is the only divided nation in the world, with 49million people in the South and about half that in the North which, of course, is famous for its communist regime, fragile relations with pretty-much-everyone, and (worryingly) a nuclear weapons program. South Korea, where we’re headed, is known more for its high-tech and rapidly growing economy. With a GDP of £1.4trillion in 2010, it’s the 13th largest economy in the world. Most of that revenue comes from brands which we all know, like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai.

South Korea is the world’s 11th largest producer and consumer of electricity, and the 5th largest importer of oil – totalling about 3million barrels of oil every single day. It is also the number 1 country in the world in terms of internet connectivity and speed. In the next six months, most South Koreans will have broadband that runs at over 1,000 megabytes per second at a cost of less than $30 per month. More on that later.

Korea is somewhere that I’ve wanted to visit for a very long time. When I was at school in The Philippines we used to compete in the Asia Pacific Athletic Conference each year. Essentially, all the international schools in South East Asia take turns to host various sporting events and compete with each other. It was always a big deal whenever we got to host APAC Varsity Volleyball or Basketball because it would pretty much take over the entire school for a couple of weeks and teachers could be bribed into scrapping their lesson plans and letting us go and watch the various matches instead. Branded as a “class trip” you understand. It was for educational purposes.

The boys from Seoul International School (SIS) were always of particular interest, because while we were restricted to a rigorously enforced uniform and general dress code which included rules about hair – these guys would rock up with various beards, goatees, mustaches, braided-warrior-hair and the occasional set of dreadlocks. You know when Bugs Bunny plays basketball with the massive-muscled-aliens in Space Jam? It was a bit like that, except they were bigger. We didn’t win much.

APAC swimming (years and years ago) took me around Singapore, Hong Kong and The Philippines – but I never had the opportunity to visit SIS for those meets. I’d hear stories from the returning basketball teams though. They’d talk about girls (good) with FaceTime on their phones in 2002 (very good), and magic heated toilet seats (!!). This seemed to me like the sort of place I might enjoy.

Arrival

Some 18 hours after leaving London Heathrow, we touch down in Ilcheon Airport after a surprisingly painless flight where the flight attendant only crashed the food trolley at full-tilt into my knee once (far below average) and the couple across the isle provided mild entertainment as they, not particularly subtly, disappeared in the middle of the night to join the mile-high club for an hour or so and then returned looking very-fucking-pleased-with-themselves.

There’s something quite exciting about arriving in a place where you can’t understand a single word of the language and, as an added bonus, you can’t read or pronounce a word of it either. I was very pleased to be offered 50% off something on the metro from the airport, for example, I’m just not entirely sure what it was. Possibly a special sort of tea which you feed to your cat.

As a language, our Taxi driver later reliably informs me, Korean is very easy to learn. It is made up of just 26 characters and takes on average 2 hours to learn in its entirety. I think he may have been a little optimistic on the latter count – given that it’s taken Paul, Chris and myself 3 days to master the words for “beer” (beyh-ah) – as in “can I have a beer?” and “thank you” (kamze-nida) – as in “thank you for the beer”.

Having mastered two cash machines and a metro ticket machine (not as simple as you might think), we wander aimlessly around Bucheon for several hours. The map to our hotel says we need to be on one side of the city, little do we know, the hotel itself is on the exact other side of the city. On the plus side, after the walk we are familiarised with the apparent multitude of seedy “girl bars” everywhere. We went back to one later, for research purposes, and I can tell you that a neon pink sign saying “She Bar” with a flight of stairs inside the front door, yielded nothing more than a completely empty bar with very expensive drinks and no evidence of a “She” ever having occupied the premises. We did get a free bowl of hula hoops with our beer though, so that made up for it a bit.

We stopped for dinner at a place with appetising photos in the window. Naturally the staff didn’t speak a word of English, and at this point we hadn’t even learned the word for beer. What the menu lacked for in pictorial content it made up for in squiggly symbols, so our ordering process consisted of pointing at pictures of beer on the wall, and then arbitrarily selecting the first thing on the menu. Which turned out to be very tasty indeed.

One issue which did come up, though, was when our waitress presented us (unprompted) with several bowls of seaweed in water. This lead to a good 25 minute discussion about whether we should drink it or dip our hands in it. Also, what would be more embarrassing/insulting – drinking something you’re supposed to dip your hands in, or dipping your hands in something you’re supposed to drink? Eventually we decided that there was only one thing we were sure of, which was that you weren’t supposed to eat the seaweed out of the soup with chopsticks – which we discovered by eating the seaweed out of the soup with chopsticks. Stifled giggles from other tables were the main giveaway. Our entire meal including drinks came to a grand total of £3.80 each, very pleasing!

A short walk back to the hotel and jetlag started to set in quickly. While not being able to understand a word of the language we’d successfully been helped with directions, food, accommodation and transport. Korea so far – not bad at all.

Next up: off to the most heavily guarded border in the world – the Korean Demilitarised Zone that divides the North from the South.

No related posts.

Thinking back to that first day when I decided to throw in the towel on my job and take the plunge into freelancing, it seems like a lifetime ago. I remember the feelings of fear, apprehension and excitement – all at the same time. It was a big decision and a huge step to give up the stability of a monthly pay cheque and rely completely on myself to make a living. Today those feelings are all back again, as I take my next big leap of faith.

Working for yourself has one huge advantage that often goes overlooked: It doesn’t really matter where you are. As long as you have a decent internet connection and some electricity… you could be working from home, or a cafe, or… anywhere else really.

The Past

At the end of 2009 I landed a new contract with Virgin Atlantic Airways to design and build a new travel blog for vtravelled, their social-travel web application. The next summer, vtravelled were invited to attend a travel-blogger press trip to Valencia, Spain which would include attendance to the 2010 Formula 1 European Grand Prix. Having an understandably busy schedule, no one from vtravelled had time to go on the trip but, knowing my love for Formula 1, they asked me if I’d like to go on the trip on their behalf. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity without hesitation.

What followed was one of the most amazing weeks of my life, I couldn’t help but write about how much I’d learned from the experience.

As some of you already know, I have some experience with travel. I was born in Scotland to Irish and English parents, I grew up in The Netherlands (learning to read and write Dutch well before English), before spending six years in The Philippines. I only came to live in the UK for the first time (that I can remember, anyway) in 2005. When people ask me where I’m “from” … I genuinely don’t know what to tell them.

Growing up all over the world had its advantages. I was exposed to more cultural diversity and given more opportunities than many have in a lifetime and I was unbelievably lucky to do so much in so little time. But the grass is always greener, and while people who have grown up in one small town long to travel and see the world. I longed for somewhere to call home, for friends who I’d known my whole life, for a place which felt like I belonged there.

To this day there are only about 3 people who I’m still in contact with who I’ve known for longer than 2 years. My Facebook profile is filled with 338 acquaintances. People who I once had something in common with.

So initially my interest in the trip to Valencia was purely based on Formula 1 – I wasn’t that concerned about “travel”. But then again, I didn’t expect to meet such an amazing group of people. I definitely didn’t expect for the trip to change my outlook on work, life and everything in between. But it did.

Me, jumping out of a plane on a trip to Costa Brava.

I got on well with the organisers for that trip. Before long I was being invited back on other travel-blogger press trips to Spain not on behalf of Virgin Atlantic, but just as myself. I also started speaking at travel conferences and events, often talking about WordPress – but directed at users, not developers. Quite a difference.

The Future

The more I travel now, the more I realise how much I enjoy it. The more I travel now, the more I feel like I’m doing something with my life.

The more trips I went on, the more I met people who live a location-independent lifestyle. They travel non-stop, moving from country to country living and working as they go along. About 6 months ago a realisation finally set in: I’ve been location-independent for two and a half years… I just haven’t been doing anything with my independence.

I can work from anywhere and, at the end of this year, I plan to make ‘anywhere’ my new home.

In November I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Gold Coast, in Australia – and I’m not coming back. I’ll be staying in Australia for two months with friends in Sydney, before starting my new life in early January by revisiting the Philippines and then going on to China, Japan, Korea and Thailand. After that, I don’t really know where. I’ll figure it out when I get there.

My office will be a Macbook Air, my living-room will be an iPad, my bedroom will change depending on wherever I am, and my entire life will fit into a single carry-on-luggage-sized bag. I’ve already sold half of my possessions in preparation.

I’m petrified. And I can’t wait.

I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for over a month. Not only have I been waiting for final plans to be confirmed, but I’ve also been pretty scared of publishing it. This post is my own, self-imposed, point of no return. If you’re reading this… then I’ve successfully located the ‘publish’ button. There’s no going back now.

More to follow.

No related posts.

As of the 22nd of July 2011, it’s taken me about 8 hours to finally do it, and it was an extremely painful process that involved a lot of research and trial/error. I hope that this post can spare you some of that pain.

Why Your eBook is Stuck in Adobe Editions

So, a little bit of back story to help you understand why this is so convoluted: eBooks which are sold nowadays often come encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is a way for publishers to restrict the way in which you use your downloaded content – primarily with the goal of preventing piracy.

The downside, however, is that it makes it incredibly hard to do what you want with your files – for example – putting them on your iPad or Kindle.

When you buy PDF eBooks from certain online retailers (in my case, whsmith.co.uk) they are advertised as “PDF” – but they aren’t really. You get a download of an ACSM file, which you have to open through Adobe Digital Editions to download your eBook. Once it’s downloaded, it’s locked into Digital Editions, and there is no compatibility with iPad or Kindle.

The only way to get the file onto your iPad or Kindle is to get it out of Adobe Digital Editions, so it functions as a normal PDF or EPUB file.

Digital Editions saves a PDF file to your hard drive (/Documents/Digital Editions/Your_eBook.pdf) but if you try to open this file with any application other than Digital Editions, it will throw up errors or say that the file is corrupted. Usually something like:

“The file [xxx] could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize.”

This is because the PDF file is encrypted with Adobe Adept DRM, which is surprisingly difficult to get around. We need to remove the DRM from the file in order to transfer it to a Kindle, or import it into iTunes. Unfortunately, most DRM removal software will not be able to handle this type of file. Trust me, I tried a lot of them.

It’s worth noting, at this point, that it is completely legal to remove DRM from a file which you have purchased. You aren’t doing anything wrong unless you’re removing DRM from a file which you don’t own. So let’s get started.

How To Remove Adobe DRM from Your Ebook

First: You’re going to need a PC. Mac users (I’m one of you), there is no way to do this that I’ve found on a Mac, so you’re going to need to find/borrow/steal a PC, or set up a virtual machine with something like VMware Fusion. Here’s the step-by-step:

Step 1: Install Adobe Digital Editions on Your PC

If you’re already on a PC, you’ve probably already done this. Mac users, get set up in a PC environment. You need to download Adobe Editions, activate your computer with an Adobe ID, then download your ACSM file, and get the eBook into Digital Editions.

You MUST have Adobe Editions installed and activated on a PC before proceeding to the next step. The DRM removal app used later will not work if you copy your PDF file from your Mac to PC and try to decrypt it.

Step 2: Install ePubee

The little application that does all the magic is called ePubee. Get it here. The trial version of ePubee is free, and will let you remove DRM for 3 eBooks before you need to upgrade to the paid version. No watermarks or limited features, which is nice.

Step 3: Remove DRM

Click on the “input” button and navigate to where Adobe Editions has stored your encrypted PDF file, and select it. On Windows this is in My Documents > My Digital Editions > Your_eBook.pdf

Click on the “output” button and select where you want to save the new (DRM free) PDF file which you can put onto an iPad/Kindle. I just select My Documents for this.

Click on “Remove DRM”

You should get a success message, and a shiny new PDF file titled Decrypted_Your_eBook.pdf located in My Documents.

Step 4: Back to The Mac

If you’re a Mac user, that’s all you needed the PC for. You can now upload the file to Dropbox or email it to yourself, and go back to working on your Mac. PC users, skip this.

Step 5: Optional File Conversion

Both iPad and Kindle will read your new PDF file, now that it’s DRM free, however both will sometimes render the file better if you convert it to their preferred format. For iPad this is .epub – for Kindle this is .mobi.

Normally I write about interactive design and other cool shit.
Follow me on Twitter.
This, thankfully, is rather easy. Head over to Zamzar, upload your file, select the format you’d like, and put in your email address. In a few moments (usually under 3 minutes) Zamzar will email you your converted file. There are other tools, such as Calibre (for Mac) which will do this straight on your computer rather than through the web.

I have found that conversions (to .mobi in particular) don’t work well for books which are graphics heavy. It does the text no problem, but any special coloured info-boxes (typically found in non-fiction books) or images just come out as a blur.

That’s All

I really hope this worked for you, and more than anything I hope I saved you the hours of screwing around with Python scripts through command line interfaces that I went through. DRM is no fun for people who just want to use the files they’ve paid good money for. Adobe, unfortunately, always love to make everyone’s lives more difficult at every possible opportunity.

Here’s to their eventual demise.

No related posts.

On Travel Blogging & Bubbles

Travel blogging is a very young industry. They still think social media is awesome magic and haven’t come to a conclusion on how everyone should be making money out of their blogs. Should you get paid by the companies providing the trips? Should you get paid for writing content with links in it? Should you get paid for banner advertising? Affiliate marketing? These questions and more are up for constant discussion, but no consensus.

It’s so easy to get sucked into the details of the industry that you care so much about and forget about the bigger picture. I spent most of this weekend telling people to take a step back, look outside the travel sector at what other companies and individuals are doing. Blogging has been around for a long time and other industries have already paved the way. Travel bloggers: your only job for the rest of today should be to make sure that you watch Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote at the Blog World Expo – it covers so many of the things that were being talked about at TBU, and yes, it really was 3 years ago that he was talking about this stuff. The audio quality is terrible, but the content is really really worthwhile. If you enjoy the talk – you should definitely pick up a copy of his book on Amazon for a mere £6.69 too.

A couple of people asked me this weekend if I’d learned anything – I said “no”. I’m pretty savvy on blogging, branding, freelancing and all the main topics being discussed. And yet, having told everyone to take a step outside of the “travel bubble” and explore the bigger world of the web, I realise (once more) that I too am in a very secluded little bubble. I’m no better. We web designers could sometimes do with spending less time on every minute detail of how the web works, and more time on actually doing something with it.

When I spend time at travel events I suddenly realise how nice it is to get away, even for just a moment, from the nuances of web standards, validation, browser support and whether or not an anchor tag always be wrapped with a block level element or whether it can sometimes be treated as one based on context and still remain semantic.

To any travel bloggers reading this: you won’t have understood that last sentence. To any web designers reading this: I put it to you that you probably shouldn’t care.

On PR & Opportunity Cost

There were lots of things on the table at TBU, but these were probably the the two at the top of the list. I thought the discussion about PR agencies was interesting (and generally positive), but I’ve seen a couple of followup tweets and blog posts implying that the entire conference was all about how travel bloggers and PR agencies should be working together. Please don’t let this be your only takeaway from TBU. There’s plenty of great things to be said about PR agencies, but let’s not get carried away here: they are one piece of a larger puzzle, and not always an essential one. Work with PR agencies if it’s beneficial to you, but please don’t feel like it’s the only thing you can or should be doing. Social media is not PR. Again: watch Gary Vaynerchuck’s keynote above.

As for “opportunity cost” – let’s clarify something briefly: A few bloggers throw this term around a great deal in regard to blog trips. They say that bloggers who go on (unpaid) trips are providing valuable exposure to companies in return for no financial compensation, so the opportunity cost is that the time spent on blog trips could have otherwise been spent on paying work. But opportunity cost, dear friends, works both ways: The opportunity cost of going on a blog trip is paying work. The opportunity cost of not going on a blog trip is all the content, networking and relationships that come with it.

So you choose: a week of paid work, probably sitting at home – or a week of unpaid work where you spend time traveling, getting to write about it, meeting people who may give you paying work in the future, and building your reputation. One is not superior to the other. Decide what suits you best and then move on.

After all, the opportunity cost of wasting time discussing opportunity cost is also time that could otherwise be spent on paying work.

On My Talk

My session was all about WordPress (surprise!). I didn’t plan on writing an entirely new talk for TBU, I was going to cobble together bits from my numerous other WordPress sessions and workshops, but on Thursday night I decided that the audience was going to be so different from my standard range of geeks (love you) to take the easy option. Around 91 new slides and 0 hours of sleep later, I’d put together a session targeted entirely at travel bloggers using WordPress. It was the first time I’d delivered the same talk back-to-back, 3 times in a row, but I think it went ok!

The slides, if you’d like a copy, are embedded below.

Finally – to everyone at TBU: Thank you for a fantastic weekend. It was an absolute pleasure meeting all of you. If there’s anything I can help with, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line :)

Oh, and a special mention goes to the Caliberi crew. It was great meeting all of you ;)

No related posts.

What is it?

UI Labs is a free plugin for WordPress that comes with progressive enhancements and experimental user interface features for the WordPress administration area.

In a sense, this is for UI touches that aren’t appropriate or currently feasible for core implementation – mixed with totally new ideas that I hope might indeed get picked up by core some day. Essentially, if you’re interested in a constantly evolving WordPress UI with some clever (and useful) touches, you should check out the plugin. It’s like GMail Labs, but WordPress, got it?

Experiment #1

The first UI experiment inside the plugin is colour-coded post statuses. Its purpose is quite simple:

Sometimes you have lots of posts with different statuses mixed together, it’s hard to tell what’s what because they all look the same.

The UI Labs plugin will take that list of posts and transform it into something which is a little easier to scan:

It’s a simple as that really. Give it a try – you might be surprised what a difference it makes to your workflow. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Please Note

At present this is not an official WordPress plugin of any kind and has absolutely no influence over future WordPress UI decisions. Will it ever go that way? Maybe. I would love it if the core team wanted to adopt the plugin – but for now, this is just a little project for me (and perhaps other people) to get creative with the WordPress UI and test new things.

Related posts:

1. Joining The WordPress UI Team
2. Designing WordPress: Keeping 30,000,000 Users Happy

Customer Service Priority Levels

Customer service exists, for the most part, to help customers when things fail. On that basis, the best customer service in the world would be no customer service at all. If I never needed customer support again, then that would quite simply mean that everything was working as it should. So the very first step in customer service should be to figure out how to do less of it.

Stop trying to serve people in the best way and getting overly caught up in how to do it. Make your product better, make it so good that people don’t need your help at all. Use every bit of customer service that you do as a guideline for how to make your product better and eliminate customer service in the future. Make your product or service just work.

In the mean time, while you’re doing that, recognise that some problems are more important than others – and treat them as such. Not all problems are equal. Some things need immediate attention, while others can wait a little while to be dealt with. Too often customer support is all lumped together when the priority of support requests should be something like this:

1.) The Whole Thing is Failing

Whatever your product or service is, its core feature is dead. If you offer hosting, your servers are down. If you sell software, it has a bug that prevents the program from running. If you sell boats, they are sinking. The crux of this point is that customers have given you their money with a core expectation, which isn’t being delivered on.

These customers need to be helped right-fucking-now. Not in 5 minutes, not tomorrow. They’ve given you money in exchange for services, and you’re giving them no services. If YOUR service is failing then don’t send them to support forums, don’t ask them to open tickets, get a phone number and help them personally. You messed up, now you fix it.

Treat these customers like royalty, because they trusted you and you are letting them down.

2.) Money Money Money

Remember why businesses exist? To make money. If someone needs customer support for the process of giving you money, you should probably help them out pretty quickly if you want to stay in business. Money is a difficult thing because it comes with stigma. People are very conscious about their money and their financial data. Someone thinking that they may have been charged twice after completing an online order is a much bigger problem than someone finding a software bug. Problems relating to money cause panic.

Again, these customers need to be helped very quickly indeed. All of the confidence which the customer has in your company rests on how you deal with this level of customer support. Completing a payment takes trust and commitment from the customer, any problems to do with payments or money will seriously hinder your reputation in the eyes of that customer.

3.) There’s a Real Problem

Nothing is perfect, which means that you’re always going to have to deal with some customer support. Maybe one feature of your product isn’t working right, but everything else is fine. The crux of it is that most of what you’ve sold is right, but there’s a small problem that the customer wants help with. Your phone works fine, except when you hold it a certain way. Your new accounting app works fine, except when you assign 2 contacts to the same invoice. Your new car works fine, but the hand-break is loose.

These customers need help, but they don’t need it right now. They have a real problem and it needs to be addressed, but nothing awful is going to happen between now and then. The core part of the product works, and they haven’t had any problems relating to money. Acknowledge the problem, offer an interim solution if applicable, fix the problem. If you can’t fix the problem, give the customer something back to acknowledge that they paid for 100% of a product and you only delivered 90%.

4.) There’s a Fake Problem

Sometimes your thing works just fine, but the customer has a problem using it. At a base level, this is your fault. 2yr olds have no trouble using iPhones, so your customers should have no trouble with whatever you’ve built. For now though, you just need to help them out. If they bought a theme, they can’t figure out how to install it. If they bought a flat-pack set of shelves, they’re putting it together backwards. If they have a camera, they’re shooting with the lens-cap on. The crux of it is user error.

These customers don’t need help quickly. They just need help.  There’s a small caveat here though: The actual importance of the customer support issue is sometimes vastly different from the perceived importance. For example, the customer shooting with the lens-cap on thinks that the camera doesn’t work at all. They think that their support query is level-1 importance – aka “help me out right-the-fuck-now” – which is exactly what you should do.

For everyone else, help them out when you can. If they need a lot of help – then explain that their issues are outside the scope of customer service, but you’re going to help them out as much as you can anyway.

5.) Feedback and Suggestions

Often times, customers have feedback and suggestions for your products. They see how it works, and they’ve thought of a better way of doing it. Other times, they’ll just have things they want to ask you that aren’t a problem – like “Do you want to sponsor my conference?” or “Have you considered making/selling [relatedproduct]?”

These guys are very low stress, low maintenance customers. They’re getting in touch, but most of the time they probably don’t even expect a response. They just want to get in touch and tell you or ask you something fairly inconsequential. You should always respond to them, but if you have thousands of customer support queries to deal with then these guys go to the bottom of the list.

Customer Service Channels

Once customers have been grouped by importance, the next question is what channel is going to be most appropriate to dealing with their problem. Different channels for different problems and different types of customer. Pick one based on whether or not it’s suitable:

1.) Text Based Services – Email, Twitter, Forums

People try to distinguish between these, but the distinctions are largely irrelevant. The key is that the customer is trying to get in touch with you through the medium of a keyboard. The keyboard (assuming it’s attached to a computer) has a profound effect on people, and apparently changes personalities. The keyboard is a method of communication which uses 0 of the human senses. You read the words someone has written, but you don’t see how they feel. You read what they’ve written and then you interpret it (usually wrongly) to try and figure out what it all means.

Benefits:

• Quick to produce, quick to consume.
• Very easy.
• Can reply to lots of people with the same message.
• Historical data of conversations if preserved.
• Free.

Drawbacks:

• People can (and WILL) interpret text wrongly, so will you.
• Can take longer to resolve complex problems.
• Public conversations for all to see.

Conclusion:

The perfect medium for 90% of customer support, but you need to exercise extreme caution in how you express yourself to ensure that customers interpret you correctly. I add a :) to the end of a huge number of my replies to other people on Twitter not because I’m a 14 year old girl, but because I want to make sure I’m interpreted with the correct tone. There’s a big difference between. “Don’t be such a dick!” and “Don’t be such a dick! :)” – People will often read text and interpret it based on their own assumptions of whether or not you’re being friendly. Most significantly, if text based communication starts going down hill, it’s a slippery slope. Once friction has been created, it becomes very EASY for both parties to send snarky replies to each other.

The biggest advantage of this medium is that it’s “quick and easy” – so if it stops being those things then you’re using it for the wrong reasons. If something isn’t getting resolved with a keyboard, switch to voice.

2.) Voice Based Services – Phone, VOIP, ScreenSharing

Voice communication has been around for ages, whether by telephone, over skype, or even through some sort of remote screen-sharing support utility. Voice communication is handy because you can get a lot of back and forth done very quickly. An hour of emails flying back and forth about an issue can almost always be resolved with a 10 minute phone conversation. The downside of course, is that everyone has to be around at the same time

Voice is a great next step after text because it introduces tone. We actually get to make use of one of our senses to interpret the way in which something is being said rather than just guessing. It’s easier to understand the problems and the emotions of the customer, and at the same time it’s easier for them to understand you. You become a real person to them, and not just some faceless text on their computer screen.

Benefits:

• Tone and emotion are conveyed.
• Much easier to resolve complex problems.
• Private conversations.
• Easier to calm down angry customers.

Drawbacks:

• Generally slow for most communication.
• Often difficult to schedule.
• Non-reproducible. No FAQ’s on the phone.
• No way to go back and look up what was said by who.
• Can be very expensive if used a lot.

Conclusion:

The biggest problem with phone-calls is the perceived time that it will take. We know that one email will take 2 minutes and one phone conversion will take 10 minutes. What we often fail to remember is that to accomplish something complex: twenty emails will take 40 minutes and one phone conversation will still only take 10 minutes. As a rule of thumb, if you can predict that a problem will take more than 5 emails or tweets to resolve… then pick up the phone.

3.) Face Based Services – Retail Outlets, Meetings

Not very relevant to most tech based businesses, but still relevant to agencies and other people who conduct some form of customer service through meetings. The age-old face-to-face situation is what we used before introducing all these newfangled layers of technology to help us out. Speaking to a customer in person is great because it uses at least two of the senses, if not more. The more senses that we have in action, the easier we find it to empathise with our customers, and vice-versa.

Benefits:

• Tone and emotion are easily conveyed
• Easy to resolve complex problems
• Private conversations
• Cheap

Drawbacks:

• Painfully slow
• Generally painfully hard to schedule
• Macho men
• Non-reproducible
• No historical data

Conclusion:

Face-to-face customer interaction isn’t much better than voice communication all round and is really only used for convenience, or for when two individuals really need to get to know each other prior to engaging in a large business agreement. It’s easy to communicate and help people in a face-to-face environment, but there is also the added drawback that men often feel the need to be macho and to assert their authority in real life (You know, to prove that they’re real men), so sometimes logic/sense is replaced with testosterone.

4.) Physical Services – Post, Fax

If you force your customers to communicate with you like this then Jesus hates you and kittens die every single time you do it. With a few miniscule exceptions, there is absolutely no reason that your customers should be the subjected to the torturous bullshit of “writing a letter” that will only serve to aggravate them further.

Benefits:

• Nothing

Drawbacks:

• Everything

Conclusion:

Don’t fucking do it.

Customer Service Methods

Once you’ve prioritised your customer service requests, chosen which one to deal with and what channel to use: you actually need to do something with them. They’ve gotten in touch with you (generally) because they have a problem of some sort. It’s time to solve that problem. Here’s how:

1.) Say you’re sorry

This should (but doesn’t) go without saying. As already established, if a customer is contacting customer service, then it’s because they’re having a problem which is probably your fault. Apologise and mean it. Actually give a damn. Don’t just apologise because I wrote it here or because other people tell you that you should, apologise because you care so much about your product that you’re genuinely embarrassed that it isn’t functioning correctly. Be sincere.

As humans, we all have huge egos. We all like to think we’re a lot more important than we are, and we definitely all like to be treated as though we’re a lot more important than we really are. “The customer is always right” is a misleading statement which many people enjoy disputing, the sentiment which the statement really conveys is “The customer is always most important”. The customer isn’t always right, in fact they’re wrong a great deal of the time, but they never stop being most important. Showing a customer humility and making them feel important is the absolute key to making customers happy. If you are defensive, condescending, or anything else that implies that they don’t really matter to you – then you lose.

User error is your fault. Build it better, document it better, and apologise when customers make mistakes because you didn’t make your product’s functions clear enough.

2.) Resolve the issue

Fix it. If someone is getting in touch with you then it’s because they need something to happen. Your first goal (after apologising) should be to find a way to solve their issue. If there’s a bug in your software, patch it. If they aren’t happy with their makeup, change it. If they say the food is cold, exchange it for them. For the most part, customers care more about you trying to fix an issue than whether or not you actually fix it. People want to know that you care about them and that you recognise the problem and want to fix it – the rest is often secondary.

In January 2011 I moved to a city called Lincoln in the UK. After moving into my new house, I discovered Virgin media (my broadband company) were suffering from a big network fault which meant I got 50kbps speeds instead of 50mbps speeds. Ouch. The company literally couldn’t fix it. They needed to assign a budget and a team to the area, get planning permission, and then carry out the work to upgrade the infrastructure. It’s going to take 4 months to upgrade, but I’m still with them because I got such amazing customer service and people *trying* to help me and find interim solutions.

If you can’t completely fix the problem, try to at least partially fix it. If one part of the product is broken, suggest another way in which they could accomplish the same task. For example if one part of your WordPress plugin was broken, you could suggest another plugin to the customer which they could use in the mean time to complete that one specific task while you fix the original product.

3.) Give them a refund/discount

If you can’t fix the issue or the customer has been majorly inconvenienced by the issue, give them discount or a refund. Do not be shy. Yes the point of being in business is to make money, but a happy customer is worth much more to your business in the long run than an angry customer. If you give an angry customer their money back (you *always* let them keep whatever they bought too) then they will probably become a happy customer and use you again + recommend you. If a customer feels like you’ve cheated them out of their money then not only will they never be a customer again, but they’ll tell all their friends to avoid you too.

While companies should do this all the time, they often don’t. So this method has the added bonus that it may be unexpected and pleasing to the customer. Being given a refund/discount when you feel that you deserve one is good. Being given a refund/discount when it hadn’t even crossed your mind is really good.

4.) Give them a freebie

If nothing so far has worked and the customer is still unhappy, or the issue was so large that you feel it warrants it. Give the customer a freebie. Even if you’ve already given them a full refund. This is really just an extension of the last step. Essentially what you’re trying to do is not just refund the customer for the problems they had (making you ‘even’) but to go the extra mile and compensate them for the inconvenience which you caused them (making them ‘happy’).

Consider whether or not the customer is worth to you whatever the wholesale cost of your product is. Happy people spend money. So make them happy.

5.) Ask for their advice, and then do what they say

With all customer service, but particularly those customer who have had a particularly tough time, ask them for their feedback and then do what they say. Once again this comes down to humility. Customers like hearing that you consider their opinion to be worthwhile, they like being made to feel important, and they like it when you go out of your way to improve your company based on a problem which they experienced.

Keep in mind that this method is largely pointless (and potentially even damaging) if you make a whole load of empty promises or simply ignore the customer’s suggestions. Your most vocal critics can quickly become your most vocal evangelists if you make them feel like they matter and that you really care.

In Closing

This post is dedicated to @VodafoneUK – who really suck at customer service. If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more stuff like this, I’ve just written a book on the subject. More details coming very soon – subscribe to my blog or Twitter or Facebook in the mean time!

No related posts.

BioThemes is a premium WordPress themes company with a twist. We  aren’t making blog templates like lots of other theme companies already do, instead we’re building mini web applications on top of WordPress. Our first release is a theme called ShowOff, it’s a theme built for creatives: illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, people who want to get their portfolio online quickly and easily. It isn’t just a portfolio theme, it customises and builds on WordPress functionality to turn your site into a dedicated portfolio platform. Think of it a bit like CarbonMade running on WordPress – but with more advanced functionality.

We’ve launched both the theme and the site itself in beta – so there’s still a long way to go, but I’m really excited about where we’re going.

“We” – for the record – is myself and Gilbert Pellegrom, who is my partner in crime and one of the most talented and dedicated developers who I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. You might have seen some of his work before if you’ve ever used the (world famous!) Nivo Slider.

If you want to know more – check out the BioThemes release post on the company blog, and watch this space for a lot more exciting things coming soon. Oh, and if you want to be one of our first customers (highly recommended) then here’s a discount code to make the decision an easy one: ONOBIO

I’m seriously excited about BioThemes, I’ve been working on it for such a long time and we’ve changed direction countless times. It feels good to have something out there in the open. Roll on the rest of 2011.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below!

No related posts.

The Talk

As you might know, I work as a member of the Core WordPress UI Team – but what exactly does that mean? I for one, had no idea what I was letting myself in for and my mind was completely blown by all the intricacies involved. I put together this talk to try to explain some of those intricacies and show just what goes on behind the scenes of the world’s favourite Open Source content management system.

The Slides

You can also download the full copy of these slides from the awesome @noteandpoint website here.

Related posts:

1. Joining The WordPress UI Team
2. Designing User Experience: Business Edition

Happy new year! Sort of… I did mean to write this particular article around the beginning of 2011, but one thing lead to another and quite frankly I got bored of reading everyone else’s new year posts. So here I am, a little bit late, but ever-so-enthusiastic.

The people who read this blog, and I appreciate that there are a lot less of you since my posting frequency significantly diminished, have always told me that the posts they enjoy most are the ones where I take a look back and review where I’ve come from, what my goals were, whether I achieved them or not, and where I’m going now.

A couple of weeks ago (oops) was the 2 year anniversary of when I first ditched my job and started down the path of self employment. It feels like it was just yesterday, and at the same time an eternity ago.

Year 2

The second year was interesting, if for no other reason than that it was extremely fulfilling, mostly in ways that I didn’t expect. If you’d asked me where I thought I’d be in 2 years, 24 months ago, here’s what I probably would’ve said:

“In two years time I’ll be running a small web design agency called Lyrical Media based in West Sussex with about four employees. The company will be profitable, mostly from a plethora of local clients, and I will be paying myself an extremely tasty director’s salary, driving a brand new car and generally living a pretty decent quality of life working 3-4 hours a day.”

Ha. And here’s what actually happened:

“Today I’m working as a freelance interactive designer for major corporate brands all over the world. I speak regularly at both national and international conferences, I’ve just written my first book, and I’m a core member of the WordPress UI Team. I have no car at all, I make no more money than I did two years ago, and I work 18 hours a day on average.”

Swings and roundabouts. It fascinates me just how different these two paragraphs are. Life just doesn’t always work out the way you think it will. In fact it rarely works out anything like you intend it to.

I think what I’ll remember most about 2010 is all the new people who I met. I didn’t really appreciate what an amazing group of people I share this industry with until I started attending conferences last year. All of my best memories in 2010 consist of the rare moments spent with a beer to hand rather than a keyboard and a lively debate over something-or-other inconsequential. It’s amazing how a debate on t’internet which would lead to flame wars and animosity can instead lead to laughter and alcoholism in real life. Less animosity and more alcoholism I say.

If you’ve never been to a conference, here’s the skinny: They are over-priced, frequently uninspiring, and you will probably never learn anything that you couldn’t find out by yourself online… but they bring people together like nothing else. A conference ticket to me is justified by its list of attendees, not its list of speakers. Take note, conference organisers. If you’re looking to get out and about in 2011, try and find events which will be attended by people who you know (and like). The worst conference I’ve been to was one where I knew nobody, and the best conference I’ve been to was one where I was meeting up with over 30 “old friends” – it’s no coincidence. Find one that has reasonably priced tickets (less than £200) and, if you can, talk your way in. Exploit any connections you have with Z-List celebrities and/or web design blogs in return for free entry. If you don’t have any, start a web design blog/magazine/podcast/something and convince the organiser that coverage on your [whatever] will be worth their while.

What About Goals?

I set myself a whole load of goals 12 months ago, but… nothing really happened with them – I accomplished a couple of items on the list but for the most part they didn’t get done. I think that the primary reason is that my goals changed so much throughout the year, and I never really updated that list. I got a tremendous amount done and I’m really happy with everything that I accomplished, it’s just that most of it wasn’t on the original list.

I set some goals for myself at the start of 2011 – and managed to accomplish almost all of them inside these first 2 months. This year I really want to focus my attention, so I’m just going to set myself two goals for the rest of 2011:

• Get BioThemes to 1,000 customers (more info on BioThemes in a post tomorrow)
• Launch Phosr and get 4,000 users

Everything that I do is going to (hopefully) be working towards one of these two things.

Credits

I think it would be wrong not to mention all of the people who helped and/or influenced me in some way during 2010. They’re awesome, so you should probably follow all of them on Twitter.

• @RickNunn – For being my actual best friend. Actually more like a brother, or something.
• @RobHawkes / @ErisDS – For being the amazing two people who I have the great pleasure of hosting the ExplicitWeb podcast with. I think I’ve learned more from arguing with both of them than anyone else, and there’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for either of them.
• @Nacin – For introducing me to the world of WordPress Core and being my Open Source mentor. Also for putting up with my rage/complaining/bad jokes on a regular basis.
• @JaneForShort – For introducing me to and mentoring me through UI design for WordPress, which was by far the single most rewarding thing I learned in 2010.
• @Adii - For being an amazing mentor, friend, and co-author. Helped me more than anyone else in 2010.
• @W3Edge – For giving me invaluable business advice advice when I needed it most. Several times.
• @Moopus – For introducing me to the (AMAZING) world of travel blogging/bloggers, and for winning the prize of best-client (by a country mile) for the year.
• @VelvetEscape – For getting me into the Lotus F1 garage at the Valencia Grand Prix. An absolute highlight of the year. Not something I’m going to forget any time soon.
• More – There are too many people to mention, I appreciate absolutely all of them :)

Closing Thoughts

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after 2 years it’s that this whole game is a lot harder than I ever expected. I’ve made more mistakes than I can count (I’m actually convinced that I’ve made ALL the mistakes that it’s possible for one to make). I think what I’m getting at is that you have to really want this. This lifestyle isn’t what most people would consider fun and it’s certainly not what anyone would consider easy. You have to REALLY want it.

I wish that I was someone who could hold down a decent job and just be satisfied, but I can’t. I have to have change and challenges, I have to make my own mistakes, I have to try things for myself, I have to learn things for myself, I have to speak up when I have an opinion and I have to do everything my own way. I don’t make things particularly easy for myself sometimes, but it’s that same part of my personality that gives me the (unstoppable) drive to succeed.

Year 3 begins now. Here goes nothing.

Related posts:

1. Starting a Business: A Year in Review
2. Starting A Business – 6th Month Review
3. Starting A Business – 1st Month Review
4. Starting A Business – 3rd Month Review
5. Starting A Business – 4th Month Review

Over time, however, Dribbble transformed from what it was in those early days to what it is now: A glorified sandpit for icon designers where all the cool kids sit in one corner stroking each other’s genitals while simultaneously throwing sand at everyone else.

Every week is the same:

Part 1: [insert-cool-designer-name] creates some “brand new” social media icons, 700 people tell him how awesome he is, 50 people rebound his shot with their own version of the exact same icons, and later [other-cool-designer] posts a followup icon set which receives comparatively similar treatment.

Part 2: Someone dares to do something different or have an opinion, and the Dribbble Nazis go crazy.  They all gang up on the poor unsuspecting designer and beat him to a pulp for not conforming to their self-imposed standards.

This is not a fucking “community”, it’s a gang.

I hereby retire from Dribbble roster. I’m bored of the drama from the Dribbble Elite, I’m bored of the copying, I’m bored of the inbreeding, I’m bored of the cliques.

If you need me, you can find me here, or on Twitter. I’ll be busy, doing design work because I enjoy it and I get paid for it. Not cause I want lots of people to click the little heart button and leave me a comment.

The real design community, to me, consists of the amazing people who I’ve met at conferences all over the world, who I’ve sat in a bar and had a drink with, who I’ve talked to for hours on Skype about everything but design, who I’ve come to know and respect for their humility and incredible talent.

Not the bunch of inflated egos who run around on Dribbble patting each other on the back and expressing their design opinions to everyone else as though God himself anointed them to speak on behalf of our industry.

No related posts.

Snow Days

When you’re at school or work, snow days are fun. They’re more than fun, they’re one of the most hotly anticipated events of the year. For most people it means an unexpected day of tomfoolery, whilst still being paid as if you were at the office. The joy which you feel when taking in the view of the gentle white blanket outside your bedroom window for the first time in the morning is unsurpassed.

As an employer or someone who is self-employed, it isn’t quite the same. If working from a home office then you have no reason not to go to work and your deadlines aren’t going anywhere either. Better than that, if you have staff on your payroll then you’re losing money hand over fist while nothing is getting done. Better still, if you work from home and your internet goes offline during a snow day then the tech support staff aren’t at work. So you’re really screwed. That’s what happened to me today.

Now, instead of the joy and elation that comes with the prospect of a day off whilst still being paid, I’m filled with fear and anxiety as a result of all the projects I’m responsible for that just got screwed.

Maybe once you’re better established in business and have a large contingency to fall back on these worries diminish somewhat and some of the fun comes back. I’ll have to let you know when that happens.

I think the mindset that comes with self-employment is something that I hadn’t fully considered or appreciated before I made the jump. When you’re at school, your only real responsibility is homework. Then you leave school and maybe you go to university, where you get a new set of responsibilities – things which are expected of you and things which you have to do. When you leave university and get a job, possibly living in a non-shared house for the first time, you get a new set of responsibilities yet again – lots of bills, lots of work, lots of schedules to manage. Self employment is yet another new set, but it’s the biggest jump of all. Suddenly you don’t just have your own bills, schedules and finances to worry about. You have all those things to worry about for the business too. Then you have clients who are depending on you, HMRC breathing down your neck for taxes (constantly), and all of it is completely and utterly down to you.

Trust me when I say there aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s no wonder I feel like an 80 year old in a 23 year old’s body.

In The Mean Time

It’s not all doom and gloom. I’m working on more exciting projects at the moment than ever before – and that makes me happy. Today (and possibly tomorrow and the next day) I’m just going to have to do as much of that offline as I can. Over at @radiiate we’ve just launched http://onepercentproject.org – an extremely worthy charity which we created to fund computers in classrooms for children in South Africa. I’d absolutely love it if you’d take a couple of minutes to check out the site and consider making a small donation.

Of course @adii and I are also writing our book, which I’m pleased (and slightly nervous?) to say is almost finished. We successfully met our 75% manuscript submission deadline last week, and the 100% mark is coming up in exactly two weeks time. After that it goes through a (seriously scary) number of editors and then it comes back to us for review. We have a month to make final changes and then in mid-January we submit the final draft to the publisher. A few final checks take place, then it finally goes to print.

For anyone interested, co-authoring a non-fiction book is a fairly surreal experience. At first it feels like you’re just writing a whole bunch of really long blog posts… Only in the last few days have Adii and I realised the the bulk of the chapters are complete now and they’re already flowing together very nicely. We’ve been doing a few behind the scenes author diary videos along the way covering this sort of stuff in more detail which we’ll put online at some point. Oh, and luckily for you, despite not being online I’ve memorised the Amazon pre-order link to the book! http://amzn.to/DesigningEmotion (yeah ok, wasn’t that hard to remember).

Don’t forget that if you pre-order now, you don’t pay anything until it’s delivered in May next year – and it massively helps us out too.

And so I bid you farewell, enjoy your snow day. To my fellow freelancers and business owners who share my troubles: I feel your pain.

No related posts.

lolwut?

Yep! You heard that correctly! I’ve talked a fair amount recently about how my goals, ambitions and workflow have changed since becoming self-employed. This is a continuation of that.

I’ve gotten to the point where I want to focus on products not services, and I’m doing that by building up a couple of little startup side projects. The problem is that its very hard to find any “free time” to dedicate to them when all your time and effort is going into figuring out where your next client is going to come from to make sure you’re safe from a financial point of view.

Working for Radiiate not only makes me a little more stable, but it also gives me more time.

Why Radiiate?

In 2007 I was working for a company I hated and following the blog of an ambitious young entrepreneur called Adii Pienaar. He’d just left his job at the time and started up a new little agency called Radiiate..I remember seeing photos of his first office and being incredibly jealous.

A few months later @Adii founded @WooThemes and went on to build a multimillion dollar empire. Radiiate, understandably, got put on the back burner.

When Adii asked me if I’d be interested in coming on board at Radiiate to relaunch the company a few months ago, there was no way I was going to turn down working with someone who’s business success I’ve followed and admired for so long.

So What’s New?

Well, Radiiate isn’t a web design agency any more, it’s a creative agency. As well as handling custom design and development work for digital applications, we also cover printed materials, product manufacturing, non-profit / charitable causes, and capital investment for startups through the range of Radiiate sub-brands.

We’ve already been doing a lot of exciting work for huge artists in the music industry and well known names on the tech scene. You can be sure that were going to be doing a lot more.

Yesterday we relaunched the Radiiate a completely rebranded site (more on the rebranding side of things another time), which is pretty much a collaboration between everyone in the company. It took a while to get it off the ground but we’re very proud of this new first version of the site.

Win Some Swag

To celebrate the launch of the brand new site we’re giving away some limited edition sets of posters with some beautiful Radiiate artwork. If you want to win then all you have to do is Follow Radiiate on Twitter or Like Radiiate on Facebook – you can even do both if you’d like a better odds of winning!

Each lucky winner will receive one full set of these limited edition posters, shipped free to anywhere in the world! Hot stuff.

No related posts.

I often wonder how we must all look from the perspective of an outsider, looking in. We have a fairly crazy community of people all fighting each other but helping each other at the same time. I can’t actually think of any other industry like it. I wonder how many of us put students off from entering into this world, rather than encouraging them to join it?

A Short Recap

The day started off with @hereinthehive, who you may know from @speaktheweb. He gave a compelling talk about the web and its history, as well abstracting our definition of what the web is into segments, periodic tables, and objects. Fascinating stuff. @elliotkember was next up with an excellent presentation on JQuery which had everyone interested. Elliott, by the way, also had by far the best slide transitions of the day. Mmmm sparkles.

After a short break @jamfactory and @Efergan took to the stage with a truly excellent presentation on what to expect from the web design industry, with some excellent insights. And skipping action. @Anna_Debenham followed as the last speaker before lunch with a very detailed talk on how she got into the industry and what others should look out for.

With a full stomach, @iamkeir and @tholder took up the torch and delivered a valuable presentation on working relationships – I think I probably learned more from this presentation than any other, purely because diplomacy really isn’t my strong suit. Another break for some “networking” and I was up next! More on that later.

The final (Keynote) speaker of the day was @MarkBoulton who, after some very kind words about my talk, went on to deliver an amazing insight into working with clients that can only possibly be gained by working in the industry for over ten years. I’ve already put one of Mark’s client communication strategies into action this very day – which I’m hoping for a good response from!

The whole day was organised by the fantastic @AlexOlder – who really pulled it out of the bag and put on a truly great event, with a new record for attendance in @webdevconf’s fourth year. Let’s hope next year is even bigger!

My Session

So, my first big bit of public speaking… I’m actually very pleased with how it all went and I think it was pretty well received. Essentially I wanted to talk about what I’ve been doing with this site/blog for the last two years, and some of the successes and failures that I’ve had with that.

I won’t go on about it though, instead I present to you here both video content and slides from the talk itself. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below!

Slides:

You can also download the full copy of these slides (with proper typography and not ugly, SlideShare-induced, Arial) from the awesome @noteandpoint website here.

No related posts.

Some of you will already know this from following me on Twitter but for those who don’t: I’m speaking at WebDevConf in Bristol at the end of this month – and I’d love you to be there too. Today I’ll be giving away two free tickets to two lucky people, but before we get into all that: let me give you a bit more info.

The Lineup

Of course I’m not the only person speaking at WebDevConf, I’ll be joined by the likes of Mark Boulton, Anna Debenham, Elliott Kember, Gavin Strange, Dan Efgran, Dan Donald, Keir Moffat and Tom Holder. Good times for one and all!

The Session

So what am I going to be talking about? Well the conference was founded with the aim of getting web design students in touch with the industry, so I thought it would be great to give an insight into my journey of starting up a web design business over the last couple of years – particularly with regards to personal branding. Here’s the synopsis from the WDC2010 site:

Personal Branding: The Ultimate Path to Fame, Wealth and Success

Paul Boag, Elliot Jay Stocks, Mark Boulton, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Chris Spooner, Jon Hicks, Ryan Carson. These are all house-hold names in on the UK web design scene but they also all specialise in different areas. For them, and many others, their key to success is what unites them: personal branding.

Breaking into the web design industry isn’t easy, every year hundreds of extremely talented students graduate hoping to make a dent in an online world which is becoming extremely full. How can you stand out from the crowd? How can you become someone who is both known and respected? What should you do to start a successful career? Unfortunately just doing great work these days isn’t good enough if you really want to get somewhere, there’s a great deal more to focus on.

Referencing his own experiences in the last eighteen months of running a web design agency and numerous case studies from some of the most successful web designers in the world, John will demonstrate how anyone can build a successful personal brand around a career in web design.

Can you do it? Come to Bristol and grab the nearest seat you can find at the Exhibition and Conference Centre. Let’s see what inroads we can make.

Want to Attend? Have Some Free Tickets.

WDC are very kindly allowing me to give two completely free tickets away to the readers of this blog, so, that’s what I’m going to do right now! If you’re up for coming to Bristol on October 27th to see some great speakers and undoubtedly share some great drinks, then here’s what you have to do to win:

Push this button:

Tweet

Done! Winners will be chosen at the end of the week and don’t forget that even if you don’t get a free ticket you can still get a 15% discount from the advertised ticket price by entering the code onofollowers during the ticket checkout process!

Related posts:

1. Speaking

The longer I work in the web design industry, the more mistakes I make, and the more “truths” I figure out. There are loads of preconceptions that float around from month to month in our industry, and today I thought I’d take a little time to debunk a few of them. Let’s begin.

The bigger your reputation gets, the more money you make!

Not true at all. Unfortunately one of my biggest failings as an entrepreneur is that while my reputation and my personal brand have both grown exponentially, my bank balance has not. I’ve talked before about how The world’s best web designers are unknown, I would say that the world’s richest designers are equally unknown.

The more money you make the better you are at web design!

Fail. I know far too many web designers who are making a decent living by really sucking at their jobs. A roster of regularly paying clients does not mean you’re good at what you do, it means you’re good at selling what you do.

Web design is a saturated market, there is no money to be made anyway!

Wrong again. On that basis, every single industry in the world is a saturated market. People called the mobile phone market saturated until the iPhone came along, they called the social networking market saturated until both Foursquare and Gowalla came along. The cream will always rise to the top of any industry.

It’s easy to get rich off web design!

Actually it’s very hard. This is a service industry, so people are paying for your time, and there are only so many hours in each day. It’s not very scalable, so starting an agency with multiple people is the only way to make more than a freelancer income, and you need to be really, really good if you want an agency to get anywhere. Do not take this lightly. If money is your ambition, then web design as a service is not the answer in the majority of cases.

Going to web design conferences will teach me important things!

No! It won’t. Honestly, unless you’re a beginner then the chances of learning anything concrete to justify the ticket price of a web design conference are pretty slim. Treat conferences as a social / networking opportunity, because that’s what they really are and that’s where the value is. Though due to the incredibly high prices of most of them, that might be a hard justification to make to yourself. There are exceptions to this, of course, WebDevConf at the end of this month is only £35 per ticket, not hundreds.

The famous web designers are all far too important to care about little old me!

I think there’s only one of the “big boys” who I’ve come across that hasn’t bothered to reply to an email, if you need help or advice with something then just ask them, don’t sit there idolising them.

The famous web designers are all DOUCHEBAGS!

This statement is common amongst web designers who work hard but haven’t managed to achieve a reputation. It’s usually triggered by jealousy and/or resentment. We all go through it at some point, so, don’t worry – it’s just part of the process. If you take a step back then you’ll eventually see that most of them are really friendly people, doing the best they can at a job they love. Very few of them have any sort of real ego to speak of. Every preconception which I’ve personally held about a “big wig” has turned out to be totally wrong when I’ve met them.

Some of the famous web designers are famous because of their contacts, not their abilities!

Not a misconception, this is absolutely true. Guess what though? Welcome to life, *waves*. This is true in every situation, profession, industry and market in the entire world. Accept it, and then either move on or find a way of using it to your advantage.

There is sexism in the web design industry, women are not treated fairly!

Oh would you please give-over. Women do just fine in this industry. Ever heard of Veerle Pieters? Molly Holzschlag? Cyan Ta’eed? Skellie?  The women in our industry who are really successful are just getting on with it, doing amazing work and being recognised for it. Blog posts showcasing the “top 50 female designers” only serve to foster the divide even further, why does it matter that they’re female? What’s next? Top 50 Jewish designers? Black designers? Arabic designers of African-American descent who live in Wyoming but were born in Tennessee? Ridiculous.

If you feel that women designers are treated unfairly then write a post titled “Top 50 Web Designers” and include both men and women, ranking them as you see fit. This eliminates the divide instead of focusing on it.

No related posts.

I seem to write a lot on this blog about accounting, which is ironic because I don’t like the subject much. What’s really amazing though, is that after going through a lot of different agencies (and the really laborious processes that comes with moving between them), they have all sucked. So with a lot of inspiration from Matt Mullenweg, here’s how I’d do it.

The Name

Accounting is boring. I’m sick of new companies that try to make it “cool and edgy” (pretty colours don’t make accounting any less boring) and I’m tired of old companies who have such a mind-bogglingly low level of creativity that when naming a company, they simply combine the surnames of all the founders into a long, meaningless string. It’s amazing(ly stupid) that almost no accounting companies in existence actually use the word “accounting” in their branding.

On that basis, I’d name my company something like “Hate Accounting!” but I’d refer to it lovingly as “HA!”

Hate Accounting. We do it, so you don’t have to.

Year One

Year one would be focused mostly on client acquisition. We wouldn’t need seed capital to develop fancy software because we would have already teamed up with FreeAgent to take care of all that for us. We wouldn’t need to spend money on anything really, because our selling point would be really good service.

We would do everything online. Our first order of business would be to establish a deal with HMRC and EchoSign so that we’d not only be incredibly environmentally friendly, but we’d save clients from stacks of boring paperwork too. We would give the forms descriptive names like “Accountant Authorisation Form” instead of something like “2354-1a”. We would never bore clients with jargon.

If we did ever have to send you something by mail if would come in a bright pea-green glossy envelope with big typography saying “You’ll hate this.” on the front, and then much smaller in the corner: “HA!”. Inside you would find a marked form to sign and a postage paid, pre-addressed envelope for wherever we want you to send it. We would make it a company policy to send you these things absolutely no more than once a month, preferably less.

In short, year one would be all about doing things differently for our customers to make things easiest for them, not for us. As a result we’d hope to get people talking about how good our service is.

Website

Unlike every other accounting website in the world, our site would be functional. It wouldn’t be a meaningless marketing website, and it wouldn’t try and build a damn community around accounting (no one cares).

It would basically be a very simple web app, we’d let your log in to your own customer area. You’d be able to see your latest finance notifications and options (through the FreeAgent API), you’d be able to see notes from our team on what work had been completed each month, you’d be able to leave messages for them and vica-versa.

You don’t want to be spending a lot of time on our website cause you don’t want to have to deal with your accounting headaches, you hate accounting – so we’re doing it for you. We would build our website with the sole intention of having the highest bounce-rate possible, we’d want you to visit our site, find what you need, and then leave again. All in under 20 seconds.

Marketing

Our first marketing strategy would be to go after niches. We’d probably start with the web design industry, seeing as that’s one I know pretty well and it’s full of potential business. We’d be involved in social media, but only to support existing customers or help out potential new customers. Not to spam people whilst going on about how “cutting edge” we are.

Our biggest marketing strategy of all would be word of mouth recommendations, so we’d do things that would really get our existing customers talking about us. Who are you more likely to listen to? Your friend James? or some random advertisement? On that basis we’d have an agent give you a ring each month (or whatever time interval you’d prefer) to give you a run down of your finances, in plain English. They wouldn’t ask you for a single thing, they’d just relay information back to you and then tell you about ways in which you could save money. Eg. “If you purchase X piece of equipment for your company before X date, we can actually write off 50% of that on your tax bill.” Simple.

We would make sure that everyone in the company cared about our customers, not just their balance sheets. Our accounting agency would be about making your company money, not just filing your tax returns.

Business Model

The business model for this would be the simplest of all. We’d be completely honest with you, we’d know that when we set you up with a FreeAgent account, their software is doing 90% of the accounting work for you. You would be using us for peace of mind and customer service, so that’s what we’d charge you for. £30 a month – no setup fees, no cancellation fees, no hidden charges for corporate or personal tax returns, no hidden VAT that we sneakily add on the end. Just £30 each month. That’s about half the price of even the cheapest other accounting companies.

We’d also take another leaf out of FreeAgent’s book and say that for every customer you refer to us, you get 10% off forever. Refer 10 customers to us, and you’ll get our accounting services free of charge. Refer more than 10 customers to us, and we’ll actually start paying you to allow us do your accounts.

Everything about our business would be about designing an experience for the customer. A pleasurable one.

Exit Strategy

Once we’d gotten to around 1,400 customers we’d be turning over half a million pounds each year with a pretty decent profit margin. At this point we’d start looking very attractive for an acquisition by a larger company. We’d only have one real barrier here: we’d refuse to sell to any existing accounting companies with their delusional old-fashioned business models.

Of course ideally, seeing as we’d be cuddled up with FreeAgent anyway, they’d make us an offer we couldn’t refuse, and proceed directly on to world domination with their new accounting division to support their already-fantastic software.

Accountants take note: your customers are the ones paying your bills, and your customers think your current way of doing business pretty much sucks. The first company to step up in this regard is going to make it, and make it big.

Related posts:

1. Accounting Corner: VAT & The Flat Rate Scheme

Where is the tech industry going and how can we stay one step ahead? This is the question that most of us are asking ourselves on a daily basis in one form or another. What’s the latest CSS3 technique? What HTML5 elements can I harness? What web application can I build that will be just like Twitter… but better? What is the next technological revolution? What is the next big thing? I can’t answer most of those, but I can tell you that the mobile web is not the answer. Let’s go back in time for a moment:

1999

For most people, this is where the mobile web starts. Mobile operators begin to hype WAP as the next big thing as the first handsets become available. We’re all amazed that something which can fit into the palm of our hand can look up CINEMA SHOWING TIMES. Zomg, bitches, the future is here!

Personally, I enjoy rocking out with my Nokia 7110 (as seen in the Matrix) did you know that flip-down plastic bits and scroll wheels are the next big thing for mobile phones? It also has infra-fucking-red. Hell yeah.

2000

According to the WAP Forum (basically the W3C of WAP) in less than two years, all new digital handheld devices will be WAP-enabled. Business technology advisor Gartner predicts that the mobile phone will become the most widely used Internet access device in the world, with the number of installed mobile phones topping 1 billion after 2003.

The president of Ericsson (yeah, remember them?) says that “Mobile Net will soon outgrow fixed Net”. So, the mobile web is almost here.

2001

With people becoming quickly dissatisfied with WAP and its painfully slow performance, GPRS emerges as the next big thing. GPRS is good because it provides a constant data-connection, a bit like DSL vs Dial-Up. MMS, 2G and 3G services begin to emerge, built upon this technology.

The BBC proclaim a 3G mobile revolution with this new technology. The mobile web is almost here.

2002

Carriers continue to battle over 3G licensing to make sure the they have a firm hold on the mobile web, in the mean time Palm (rememeber them?) start ramping up production on a mobile web browser. Because the future of the mobile web lies in PDAs and Palm are leading the charge. The mobile web is almost here, we just need some better PDAs and stuff.

2003

This is a big year, because Opera actually kickstart the mobile revolution! Who knew? What about those revolutions before? lol! They were just silly people with waps and geeprs, the heart of the mobile web lies in the browser and our new browser is available to all Nokia 7650/3650 users. POW. Eat that. “We now have truly started the era of the mobile Internet.”

Can I get a what-what? Smartphones for Christmas everybody! You better get ready, cause the mobile web is almost here!

2004

Facebook is here, holy wow! Someone should make a movie about this. Elsewhere on the interwebs, the mobile internet has its best ever month and apparently this trend looks likely to continue.

CNN say “Net-ready handheld devices — Palm Pilots, cell phones, and the like — are growing at a faster rate than new PCs. Right now there are 182 million mobile Internet users worldwide, according to IDC. By the end of 2007, that number is expected to reach 576 million.”

(hang on, didn’t they say a billion by 2003 before? and now it’s just half a billion by 2007?)

2005 – 2006

Snoozefest. Mobile data gets faster, handsets improve, blah blah. It’s almost here. Be patient.

2007

Holy. Eff. Have you seen this? The iPhone is off-the-heezy! For the first time the internet actually looks good on a phone. Epic wow-factor, everyone is going to want one of these. Everyone in the whole world. Ever.

According to BusinessWeek, the mobile web is now taking off. Ignore all that stuff before, we were just kidding about that. It’s the real deal this time, cause the iPhone is just getting up to speed – so basically, the mobile web is almost here. Watch this space.

2008

Well, as predicted: the mobile internet revolution is here. The important thing to note is that it’s not quite here yet, it’s here in the sense that it’s just arrived but it needs to take off its scarf, sit down, have a cup of tea and watch some Hollyoaks. You know, then it’ll start actually doing some shit. The mobile web is almost here, just give it a second, ok?

Now let’s make some more crazy-ass 3-5 year predictions, those have never failed so far!

2009

BusinessWeek are at it again, the mobile web will overtake desktops as the most popular way of accessing the internet. I know that same claim was made by someone 10 years ago who I can’t quite remember – the son of Eric or something, but seriously this time, I’m not messing about.

2010

Right, I know that if I was a boy crying wolf you probably would’ve kicked me in the nuts by now and killed all my sheep with your own bare hands before selling their bodies on to a tradesman of questionable moral substance – but just listen to me for a moment: the mobile web revolution has NOW arrived. Srsly.

Ireland are a bit late to the party and reckon it’s all just starting up now, thanks to the iPad.

But wait – don’t get ahead of yourself. Apparently, the next billion people coming online will be on mobile devices. So actually the mobile thing is pretty cool right now, but it’s going to get started properly in just a minute.

I Have A Question

I have been watching bloggers, the media, web designers, people on twitter, and pretty much every speaker at every web design conference since the release of the iPhone talk about “the mobile web” and how important it is. When is it going to fucking get here? The same ridiculous predictions have been made for the last 10 years, and while we’ve come a long way… mobile web usage is most certainly not exceeding the desktop.

Let’s Make a Few Distinctions

The people in the web design industry who hype the mobile web the most are the same people talking about “Responsive Web Design” which, for the un-educated, means “making pretty alternative stylesheets for iPhone and iPad”. These are also the same people who cite developing countries as the primary reason that the mobile web is set for continued growth, exceeding that of the desktop.

At what point did an iPhone with a contract with a value of over £1,200 become a great device for developing countries?

Wired recently wrote about how the web is dead, but the internet is stronger than ever. I think that same applies to mobile.

Will mobile phone usage be replaced by mobile internet? Almost definitely. Voice calls will go to VOIP, SMS will go to email/instant messaging, MMS will go to email. These technologies are already accessible to more people than ever before, and I’m sure that trend will continue. But, replacing desktops? Being used for things which you would normally use a computer for? I don’t think so.

What are the largest blocks of time that anyone spends on a computer? Sitting at a desk, doing some form of work. This isn’t what the mobile web was made for, and it never will be – there is no mobile device which is “better” at a work task than a desktop device (the clue is in the name). The mobile web is a convenience, not a necessity.

On the other hand, I send pretty much no text messages any more, I rarely make any personal phone calls which aren’t VOIP and I definitely don’t send any multimedia messages. All that stuff has been almost completely replaced by mobile internet.

Desktop is to Mobile as Car is to Motorcycle

For the average user, owning a desktop and mobile device is a lot like owning a car and a motorcycle. The car is your main vehicle, it gets you to where you want to go quickly and easily. The car holds everything you want it to, can be used in any weather conditions, and is suitable for use for a journey of any distance. The motorcycle is smaller, more flexible in day-to-day usage, and undoubtedly sexier. On the other hand, it’s limited in its capacity, it’s generally most useful in specific situations (eg. a sunny day), and it’s really not very comfortable to ride for long distances.

The car is the main device, the motorcycle is secondary.

If you visit Cambodia or Vietnam, you’ll see motorcycles. Lots of them. In fact you’ll see so many that you’ll quickly realise how in this part of the world, motorcycles far outnumber cars. They’re cheaper to buy, cheaper run, easier to store, and more simple to manufacture – the secondary device for the first world becomes the primary device for the developing world. Does this mean that you need to start offering dedicated motorcycle parking for your shop in London? Erm…. don’t think so.

Increased mobile usage in developing countries pushes global mobile web statistics higher and higher each year, but using this data to justify a dedicated mobile website makes about as much sense as offering parking for Vietnamese motorcycles in central London. For the overwhelming majority of you, they aren’t your audience and they never will be.

So now you’re thinking “Ok, but mobile usage data for my country is way up! Like 110% up! Suck on that!” – The question here is what type of usage is up? Millions of new people screwing around on Facebook and Twitter on their mobile phones is meaningless, there are also millions of new people screwing around on Facebook and Twitter on their computers. Unless you’re building a site which is relevant to mobile users then you shouldn’t assume that just because overall mobile usage is up, it’s important to your site.

In Closing

For the time being, arguments about the importance of the mobile web are mostly pointless. Like arguments over whether or not to support IE6, the only thing that really matters is your own usage data. It means nothing that “global mobile usage went up 148% last year” and it means nothing that “IE6 still retains a 22% global browser market share”. Those statistics are vastly skewed by data which is of absolutely no relevance to the question of whether or not YOU should be concerned about them.

This site receives less than 1% of visits from IE6 and mobile devices put together. I couldn’t care less whether the mobile revolution has arrived or not. For the time being, it doesn’t affect any decisions which I need to make here.

Overall, the mobile internet revolution is far more relevant to companies who do what we’ve always done with mobile technology: communicate. The revolution is for social networks and telecommunications… the entire web isn’t about to turn on it’s head and it’s about time that we stopped waiting for that to happen.

The mobile web is already here, it’s been here for a while now. It just isn’t exactly what we expected.

No related posts.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be sent on a bloggers press trip to Valencia in Spain on behalf of vtravelled.com. It was an absolutely incredible experience which I will remember for a long time to come. Before departing I had expected to be amazed by the country, the weather, the food and the accommodation – and I wasn’t disappointed. What I hadn’t expected, was how amazed I would be by the group of twenty travel bloggers whose company I had the pleasure of sharing for a week.

As a community, we web designers have it pretty good. Generally speaking everyone gets on pretty well, generally speaking most of us are helpful and considerate to each other. But, we can get very caught up inside our little bubble sometimes. HTML5, CSS3, web standards, browser support, content management systems, hosting platforms… the list goes on. We enjoy these things and so we spend a lot of time obsessing over them.

Everyone now and then, however, we go a bit too far – getting into debates about whether or not an IE6Update script is morally wrong, or writing blog posts proclaiming the web celebs to be a bunch of talentless back-patters. Little rifts become more evident still at web design conferences, with clear ‘groups’ emerging (at least in the UK).

There are good sides and bad sides to every community. Being dropped headlong from one directly into another was a really interesting experience. Travel bloggers have many similarities to us and equally many differences. The similarities don’t warrant much discussion: they use WordPress (almost exclusively) and they use Twitter and other forms of social media (particularly StumbleUpon, weirdly). Their businesses, reputations, and livelihoods live in the online worlds – but their work does not. This is where we get into the differences.

The Egos

Arriving in Spain with three fellow Brits, we meet at the hotel with travel bloggers from the US, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and of course Spain itself. It’s a pretty diverse group.

In our midst is none other than @AdventureGirl, a prolific travel blogger from the US with 1.4million followers – she is by far the most influential in the group with regular appearances on American TV and people such as Ashton Kutcher in her phone book. Prior to meeting her I expected her to have an ego the size of a small elephant and an air of superiority about her… you know… like most of the web designers with more than 20,000 followers. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

AdventureGirl, also known as Stef, is one of the sweetest and most interesting people who I’ve ever met. She’s a veritable fountain of knowledge on travel and tourism, but at the same time she makes an obvious effort to talk and listen to everyone else. It sounds obvious.. but I don’t have enough fingers on my hands to count how many times I’ve been brushed off by speakers at web design conferences.

Stef isn’t the only successful person in the group, in fact absolutely everyone on the trip has an impressive list of achievements. What strikes me most though is that none of them are boastful or superior in any way. We have a fantastic dinner on the very first evening with everyone getting along well. This continues for the entire duration of the trip.

Maybe it’s because you can’t be a “better” traveller than anyone else in the way you can be a “better” designer or developer – but there seems to be a real lack of the aggressive need for everyone to compare themselves to each other.

The Outlooks

As web designers we typically sit at desks for thirty to sixty hours a week, that’s the job. Travel bloggers fly all over the world, often with all expenses paid, that’s their job. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this one trip has made seriously consider giving up web design and joining them. Maybe the grass really is always greener, but sitting in the Spanish sun on a Friday afternoon didn’t leave me with much doubt with regards to where I’d rather be.

The point of all this is that these people aren’t in a bubble. They go from country to country, culture to culture, first world to third world. They seem a little less concerned with the trivial and a little more concerned with the big picture.

On some level, they all want to change the world. I like that – a lot.

The Knowledge

We techies assume we know.. well.. pretty much everything. We were Tweeting while the rest of the world was discovering Facebook. We’re now “checking in” all over the place, which most of the world will probably eventually also catch on to. We spend an overwhelming amount of time talking to each other about how to educate our clients about social media and the web.

Well – the travel bloggers already get it. They already get it, they’re already doing it and I’m sure they’re not the only ones. They understand Twitter – hell they seem to understand Twitter better than we do. The entire trip was organised by a group of people on the tourist board for Valencia who understand the value in new media marketing. None of us were asked to write any particular piece, none of us were asked to tweet, none of us were asked for stats on how many people we could reach. They did their homework, embraced the mantra of new-media customer service and let us do the rest.

They are so much further ahead of the game than I’ve personally ever given anyone outside of the tech community credit for.

What We Can Learn

I learned a tremendous amount on the trip and I really think that there are some strong points that everyone can benefit from in one way or another. What are you working on right now? Does it matter? I mean does it really matter?

1. Take a step back from the internet bubble – there’s a whole world out there and life, really, is far too short. I know it’s a cliché and I know you’ve heard it so many times that it may have ceased to have any real meaning, but it remains true.
2. Stop with the egos if you’re one of the big boys, and if you’re one of the rest of us then stop pandering to them. We don’t always need to rank ourselves and each other by who is “best”. We criticize our own community for back-patting, but that’s cause we’re doing it in the wrong places. Stop patting the backs of everyone who’s heard it a million times before and give some encouragement to someone who really needs it.
3. There are whole communities of people out there who “get it” – and they aren’t web designers. I’ve had eight enquiries since getting back home, and you know what? People who “get it” are the people who I most enjoy working with. If you’re a freelance web designer looking for business then this really needs to sink in!

By no means am I claiming that the travel industry is flawless, and that everyone is happy all the time. A week isn’t long enough to really immerse yourself in any community and understand it fully. Indeed by the end of it a few negative similarities were showing up: For example one bitter blogger kicking up a fuss on Twitter about how worthless these trips are, purely cause she wasn’t invited. That sounds like something a certain web-design-industry-diva would do.

On the whole however, I really liked what I saw.

In Closing

Being so warmly welcomed into a completely different community to my normal day-to-day life was a really refreshing change of scenery. In the same way that we so often take design inspiration from obscure places, I’ve managed to take some life-inspiration here. I would encourage everyone reading this to find a community outside of the web design industry to involve yourself in, because sometimes a little diversity is exactly what we need to keep us going, to keep us inspired, to keep us motived.

Maybe, a little diversity is all we need to come up with that one idea that really will change the world.

Credits:

You can find all of my photos from the trip over on Flickr.

The trip which I went on was sponsored by the Land of Valencia, with flights provided by the Spanish Office of Tourism in London.

No related posts.

I haven’t written here much recently and I think it’s about time for an update. I have a lot of different things to mention so I toyed with the idea of doing individual posts for each, but in the end I thought it would be most productive to just do them all in one fell swoop.

Changing Direction, Re-branding and Moving Forwards

When things stay the same for too long, they get comfortable. If there’s one thing I don’t like being; it’s too comfortable. Comfortable is boring, comfortable is not innovative, comfortable is playing it safe. With that in mind, it’s time to change things up a bit.

Over the coming months I’m going to be killing off the Lyrical Media brand (not the company, just the brand). Why? Well, over the last eighteen months I’ve tried lots of different ways of marketing my business. By far the most successful of them has been through this blog and my personal Twitter account. I’m finding that clients come directly to me, John O’Nolan, not Lyrical Media. In fact since the beginning of 2010 I’ve had at least one enquiry a week through Twitter or this site – and no enquiries at all through Lyrical Media’s contact form.  The site is stagnant, very limited, and it needs to go.

I’ll be moving my portfolio over to this site, which will get a redesign, and I’ll be adding new ‘photography’ and ‘travel’ sections (more on that in a minute).

Changing my Business Goals and Ambitions

You might be thinking “but how are you now, as an individual, going to take on staff?” – well I’ve thought about this a lot, as it was high up on my original list of goals. Gradually, however, it has slipped to the point now where it doesn’t matter at all.

In the long run, I don’t want to run a web design agency. I want to work on the web, I want to design and build websites, I want to work with other people… but I don’t want to run a web design agency. The last eighteen months has taught me that I’m almost 100% happy with what I’m doing, but I’m not quite there yet. So what parts am I not happy with? Well… head on over to clientsfromhell.net and see for yourself. I’ve had some really amazing clients, but they really have been in the vast minority.

So at the end of last year, @Japh and myself started up a little side-project called @BioThemes. This is not just another premium theme company, it’s a whole lot more. I can’t really say much about why it’s different (wouldn’t want to lose our competitive edge!) – but I’m extremely excited about getting it off the ground in the coming months and selling products instead of services.

I’m still going to be doing client work – but once BioThemes is up and running I’ll be a lot more selective about it. Client work isn’t scalable, there’s only one of me and finite number of hours in each day. That’s the main reason for this shift.

Broadening my Horizons

I was born in Scotland to English and Irish parents, grew up in The Netherlands reading and writing Dutch well before English, spent six years in The Philippines, before finally moving to England in 2004. My father worked all over the world, so I’ve visited an estimated 200 cities across 23 different countries. All that travel (especially during my teenage years) made me want to do just one thing: settle down and go nowhere.

The grass is always greener, so while some dreamt of sandy beaches and crystal clear water in some exotic foreign land, I dreamt of living in a place where I could have friends who I’d known for a longer than a couple of years – and some sort of place to call ‘home’. To this day I still have no-fucking-clue what to say when people ask “Where are you from?”

So until very recently, I hadn’t been outside the British Isles in about 6 years.

However

Last week I went on a trip to Valencia on behalf of @vtravelled, organised by the Valencia Board of Tourism. I was fortunate enough to be provided with flights, stunning accommodation, amazing food, and a truly fantastic group of other people to spend the week with. This subject most definitely warrants its own article (which it will get) but suffice to say that it was a jolt to the system in terms of evaluating my life a little.

Sitting in the sun on Friday, surrounded by people speaking another language, and a totally different culture to England made me realise that I really would not rather be doing what I normally do on a Friday: Sit in my very small office, work all day, take a short trip to Sainsburys, and then work all night.

Travel just moved way up my list of priorities – the whole week was incredibly refreshing. Like I say, more on that soon.

Related posts:

1. Random Lessons From A Freelancer

I’ve got some rather exciting news to share today which some of you will already know about from a few tweets last Thursday. I’ve just officially joined the core WordPress UI Team – so I’ll be helping to design and develop the WordPress platform on an ongoing basis.

How it All Started

Since the end of 2009 myself and @Japh have been working away coming up with ideas for building a business on WordPress. Themes, plugins, you know, that sort of stuff. Our main ambition with this endeavour was (and still is) to be different. I mean good-different, not Kanye-West-different.

I thought it would be foolish to even consider building said business without being actively aware of what was going on with the platform, so I subscribed to some WordPress mailing lists (yes, they still have those) to stay up to date. One of these lists is for beta testers, people who run installations of the next version of WordPress prior to release and report back with any bugs. It is on this mailing list, where the story really begins.

At the beginning of 2010, whilst checking out one of the very earliest copies of WordPress 3.0, I came across a small bug. It was a small warning message that shouldn’t have been there. Pouncing on the opportunity to finally contribute something back to the platform I eagerly sent off this bug to the testers mailing list and, as it turned out, to the attention of the seemingly omnipresent entity that is Andrew Nacin (one of the WordPress core developers).

Now, I don’t want to write an autobiography here, so we’re going to have to skip a few chapters to keep things coherent. To cut a long story short: Nacin guided me through the process to properly report a bug, have someone reproduce it, fix it, re-test, and so on until it was completely eradicated. He was extremely friendly and welcoming throughout this process (despite some truly n00by questions from yours truly) and he got me introduced to the WordPress bug tracking system, which is basically a forum where each thread is a conversation and code snippets between developers who are working on WordPress.

Any developers reading that last paragraph may have shed a few tears at the painfully oversimplified metaphor used there, but the less techy among you I’m sure will appreciate it.

Getting Involved

Once I’d been introduced to this new world I started meeting people (notably @kimparsell and @andrea_r) who were happy to chat to me about WordPress bugs and other issues well outside of the one which I originally reported. It was at this point that I came across a ticket (or thread, to continue with the forum metaphor) proposing the use of tabs on the themes screen of the WordPress admin interface. I thought the idea was good but I didn’t like the way it had been designed – so I chimed in with my, in retrospect, rather convoluted opinion. Unfortunately however, I was told that the decision had been made and the tabs would not be changed.

I understood this response, but I wanted to figure out how I could contribute on issues such as this one from the start – and so I discovered and joined the WordPress UI Group.

Now if you want to know what I’ve done with the UI Group in detail and how designing for WordPress works, then you should definitely check out the post which I authored for Web Designer Depot a couple of weeks ago:

Designing for Over Twenty Million Users: WordPress 3.0

If, however, you can’t be bothered – then here’s a very short summary. The WordPress UI Group is composed of people who volunteer their design, front end development, and user experience skills to improve and develop the WordPress platform on an ongoing basis. What that consists of is a weekly meeting (over IRC text chat), and as many tasks that are decided on in these meetings as you feel like trying out.

I did a lot of these tasks.

Fast Forward

Now, just over 3 months down the line, I’ve gotten fairly heavily involved and I’ve worked on a whole host of different areas for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. I’ve met an amazing group of people who work tirelessly to keep on building and improving the platform which runs 8.5% of the entire internet, and I really do mean tirelessly. You genuinely can’t imagine the amount of work that goes into a release by people who are doing it entirely for love, not money.

In the mean time I’ve written some big posts about my involvement in WordPress, such as the one for Web Designer Depot – and we’ve also interviewed Mr Andrew Nacin (the catalyst for all of this) on the ExplicitWeb Podcast to talk in detail about WordPress and the core community.

I was driving on the motorway one week when my phone beeped with the reminder to tell me WordPress UI time was in 5 minutes. Did I blow it off? Nope, I pulled over, found an IRC client for iPhone, bought it, installed it, and got into the meeting right on time. I haven’t missed a single one yet. It’s addictive.

Good-addictive, not heroine-addictive.

Joining The WordPress UI Team Officially

Side-note: Did you just skim-read down to this heading? If so, shame on you. Go back up to the top and start again. This isn’t some cheap design blog with pretty pictures, wishy-washy content, and overpriced ads. If you didn’t, I do beg your pardon and please carry on.

So here’s what this entire post has been leading up to: Last week Jane Wells (the head of UX for WordPress) asked me if I would like a more extensive and official role in the WordPress UI Team.

I gleefully accepted!

You can read Jane’s announcement on the subject, but in summary this means I will be taking a more active and direct role in the UI Team. It’ll be a huge honour to lead the weekly UI meetings, project managing the UI aspects of the WordPress projects for Google’s Summer of Code, as well as of course continuing to do a lot of hands-on work for WordPress in general.

It’s been a roller coaster ride so far and it’s only just begun.

Closing Notes

At the start of this article I mentioned that I originally got involved in the core WordPress community because I was taking steps to start a business based on WordPress. Doing this has totally changed my perspective on what, why, when and how to do this.

Interestingly, not a single other person from any premium WordPress themes company is actively involved in the core WordPress development community – which really blows me away.

Finally, if you’re interested in getting involved in any way, get in touch. The UI Group was only formed at the start of this year, it’s a very small group of people at the moment and we always welcome newcomers!

Related posts:

1. Designing WordPress: Keeping 30,000,000 Users Happy
2. WordPress UI Labs

There are little things that I learn in this job almost every single day. Sometimes they’re just handy bits of information or useful resources, other times they’re real eye openers to things I’ve been doing wrong. I thought it might be useful to write some down in case anyone else can find some value in them.

On Rates

Every day I learn something new about what to charge clients and how to do it. In the last 12 months I think I’ve quadrupled my rates, which suggests that I was doing things really wrong to start with. Here’s a handy benchmark: Take what you need to earn in a month to cover your expenses, double it, then divide by 10. Make sure your daily rate isn’t any less than that number.

On Timing

I constantly, constantly underestimate how long things are going to take. It’s so easy to estimate time for something but then fail to take into account that bugs will come up, clients will want revisions, and sometimes everything will go wrong. Nowadays I try to take every time estimate and double it, this tends to be much more reliable.

On Motivation

You can’t control it, it comes and goes. If you aren’t feeling motivated at all but you really need to get work done, I’ve found that the most helpful thing possible is to fully take your mind off everything for 15 minutes. How you do this will be different for everyone, personally I try to get outside of the house and, if possible, chat to someone else on the phone. In fact it was having a good chat to @Japh on the phone just now that gave me the inspiration burst to quickly type up this post.

On Productivity

Much like motivation, it’s a hard one to control. I’ve tried cutting out all distractions and keeping everything (twitter/gtalk/msn/etc) “off” but it didn’t make me any more productive, it just put me in a bad mood. I’ve found that my productivity goes in cycles, so these days I’ve just learned to run with them.

On Clients

Some clients are better than others, but all clients come with challenges. Learn to accept them, and for god’s sake don’t slag off your clients on Twitter. I see so many people doing it and it really boggles my mind. Some people are preaching to their clients about how great and transparent Twitter is, and then talking about them like they’ll never read it. Madness.

On Marketing

Don’t be shy, talk to everyone. I would’ve been out of business within a month if it wasn’t for the fantastic network of peers that I’ve established. Make friends with people, because as has been said time and time again: It’s not what you know, but who you know. If you’ve ever wondered why some mediocre web designers get tons of big clients and magazine features – here’s your answer.

On Red Flags

If a potential client offers you revenue instead of money, talks a lot about “an ongoing relationship”, tells you how bad their previous web designer was, or quibbles over payments or contracts… run a mile. Don’t be blinded by the fact that it might be a lot of money – with this sort of client you’ll probably never see a penny, as I discovered only too painfully myself.

On Developing Your Skills

Never stop learning, always make sure you’re picking up something new, but try not to diversify too much. No one in the world is looking for a “graphic designer who can build adobe air applications and also has experience with Ruby on Rails” – it doesn’t happen. I focus purely on design, front end development, and WordPress. Those three things complement each other and they serve me well.

On Goals

Set them, keep track of them, have a time limit, and review them. Try and make sure you’re always working towards something – my idea of hell is working for the sake of working, and living for the sake of living. I don’t want that, I want to do something with my life. That means never sitting still and just being content with something that’s easy.

On Side Projects

Do them and have fun with them. My article about Moo’d Cards was just a random idea that I had one day and it ended up getting me a lot of traffic just because I blogged about it. If you have an idea that you think could work – go for it. Don’t put it on the back-burner for later. Once you’ve done the first version, you’re far more likely to come back to it in the future.

On Effort

Put 100% into everything. Half hearted attempts at anything will get you nowhere.

What About You?

These are just some of the things that I’ve picked up in the last year or so, but what about you? Got any tips to share? Let me know below in the comments!

Photo by hellosputnik

Related posts:

1. A Big Sweeping Update
2. Starting a Business: 2 Years in Review
3. Designing User Experience: Business Edition

Alright, so this isn’t the most thrilling post-title ever. Hell, if you clicked through from Twitter then you must be either very loyal, or very bored. Accounting isn’t fun and it isn’t particularly interesting but it’s important. For legal reasons I should mention that I’m not an accountant; anything written here is based solely on my own experiences and is not intended as financial advice.

What I’ll discuss here is only really relevant to anyone who is set up as a limited company in the United Kingdom.

VAT, The Flat Rate Scheme and What Accountants Tell you

In the UK, all businesses must register for VAT (Value Added Tax) if they turn over more than £68,000 per annum. If you are registered for VAT then you have to charge VAT to all your clients, so add 17.5% on to whatever your prices are. A minor plus-point is that you can also claim back VAT on any expenses – so that new iPad will only cost you £360 instead of £430.

When you first incorporate a limited company in the web design sector, most accountants will strongly advise you to voluntarily register for VAT under the “Flat Rate Scheme” which means you charge your customers 17.5% VAT, but you only have to pay HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) 10% – meaning you keep a 7.5% profit on every sale. Sounds great, right? Free money – wohoo!

Forget about it.

Why That Makes Absolutely No Sense

To sum it up as succinctly as possible: VAT sucks. It is the biggest, most royal pain in the arse that you could possibly come across as a newly established business. You have to file VAT returns four times a year and you can never easily know how much of the money in your bank account is yours and how much should be held back to pay your next VAT return.

Oh, and the Flat Rate scheme doesn’t allow you to claim back money for expenses either, sorry.

Here’s the real kicker though: Speaking from experience, all of my clients have a fixed budget (even the really big ones). They don’t have a budget +VAT, they don’t have a budget which can be stretched by around 20%. They have a fixed budget.

Rather than try to laboriously explain this – let’s take a look at a simple example.

• Client1 wants a website and has £5,000 to spend.
• WebDesigner1 is registered for VAT under the Flat Rate scheme, which his accountants have told him is brilliant.
• WebDesisnger2 knows better and is not registered for VAT at all.

Both web designers make less than £68,000 a year, so VAT registration is completely optional.

• WebDesigner1 invoices the client £4,250+VAT (£4,993.75) – he pays 10% VAT to HMRC (£425) which involves several hours of admin and additional accounting costs, he finally keeps £4,568.75.
• WebDesigner2 invoices the client £4,993.75 – he keeps £4,993.75.

See what happened there? If your client has a fixed budget then you’re actually losing 10% on every project, not making 7.5%.

In Conclusion

My original accountants talked me into registering for the VAT Flat Rate scheme a year ago and it has caused me nothing but problems and headaches. I’ve just managed to de-register after an extremely long and painful process involving a lot of paperwork.

Once again, I’m not a financial advisor, but for anyone who is in the service industry doing business with clients who have a fixed budget – I would NOT recommend subjecting yourself to the VAT Flat Rate scheme.

Photo by alancleaver

Related posts:

1. Starting an Accounting Agency

For a long time, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of the currently available web design podcasts. I longed for something a little shorter and a little more down-to-earth. I got chatting to my good friends @erisds and @robhawkes a couple of months ago about this… and it turned out that they felt the same way.

Introducing ExplicitWeb

On the 9th of March 2010: Rob, Hannah and myself recorded the pilot episode of our brand new podcast, called @ExplicitWeb. We aren’t trying to do anything revolutionary and we aren’t trying to change the world. All we want to do is record some good content, have a good time, and hopefully get to meet a few new people.

Every couple of weeks we record an episode where each one of us does a 10 minute segment on… well.. whatever we feel like. Soon we’ll be getting guests on the show and coming up with some new features which we hope will be truly superb.

The point of all this is that it’s quick, easy and, most importantly, fun!

What Do You Think?

I would absolutely love it if you would check us out on iTunes, have a listen, see what you think – and subscribe! You could even leave us a review if you’re feeling really giving :)

No related posts.

Grab a coffee, get comfortable and make sure you read this post in full. It’s dawned on me in the last couple of days that I’ve screwed up my pricing big time. I’ve made a really obvious mistake that’s meant I’ve been losing 80% of all my money.

The Phases of Pricing

There are some fairly consistent phases that freelancers (or small web design businesses) go through when it comes to pricing, it’s basically a learning experience moving from one to the next. Assume about a 6 month gap between each one:

When you start freelancing you generally charge project rates, £500 and you’ll do absolutely everything. Generally you do this for a while until you realise that clients like to add stuff on mid-way through on a regular basis, so you end up doing more work than you quoted for.

The next phase is to try to implement some god-awful complicated contract that ties the client in to only the specific work that you quoted for in the first place and nothing else. This doesn’t work either. The second you start having arguments with a client about what is and isn’t in the contract, the project is pretty much dead.

After a while you decide that the best way to go is with an hourly rate. You give the client an estimate of the number of hours that it will take to complete a certain amount of work, then you charge them for the actual number of completed hours. This kind of works but, as I’ve discovered, only on small projects.

The Issue With Hourly Rates

I recently quoted a client 110 hours of work to redesign their site and build the new version of it on WordPress. It’s a pretty big project, so it has a detailed list of milestones to hit. After the quote had been approved I mapped out these milestones, as I do for all larger projects, but a couple of days ago I realised a rather drastic error with this.

While 110 hours was an accurate quote for the work, it was assuming that I would do all the work back-to-back, with no breaks. It didn’t take into account time spent waiting for feedback, or anything else really. The milestones which I’d mapped out spread over 8 weeks… assuming that I work 35 hours a week this means that the project would actually be taking up 280 hours of my time.

Re-calculating the project quote with 280 hours instead of 110 brought my hourly rate down to about 1/5th of what it should’ve been.

Big fail, and it’s not the first time I’ve done it.

Of course, some people would say “but of course that’s correct, you take on other projects at the same time to make up for the down-time” – but that doesn’t really work for me. For larger projects I don’t really like to take on more than one thing at a time; I find it hard to spread my focus that thinly. I still take on smaller writing commitments and so on but I don’t like to juggle big clients.

So in a nutshell, this is why I have a high hourly rate but I’m only just getting by in terms of finances.

The Next Phase of Pricing: Daily & Weekly Rates

Hourly rates still work for small projects. For a 1-page design, charging for “10 hours” of work makes perfect sense. For bigger projects I think it’s going to be a lot more efficient to charge daily or even weekly rates. Having a daily or weekly rate ensures that you’re getting paid for down-time. It’s also a far more realistic metric to track. How many hours have you spent on your current project in total? Not only do you probably not know, but you probably wouldn’t even be able to work it out. Days and weeks on the other hand are a little more tangible. There’s still the issue of how many hours are in a day, which may fluctuate, but overall it’s a lot more stable.

There might still be a better way of doing it – but I’m fairly sure that this will be an improvement.

What About You?

I’d love to hear which of the phases of pricing you’ve been through and what you’ve found to be most effective in not letting that down-time go to waste!

Photo by Jessica Rabbit’s Flickr

No related posts.

I’ve just come back from a fantastic 3 days in Newcastle where I was attending the DIBI (Design It, Build It) conference. There were many fantastic speakers but one of them covered a concept that really got me thinking.

Blasting Expectations Out of The Water

Admittedly I’m a bit biased when it comes to evaluating @Adii’s talk at DIBI. I’ve known him for a few years and I’m a big fan of his work, so he could have talked about pretty much anything and been greeted with my approval. That being said, I did not expect for him to prove to be the most thought-provoking speaker of the day, which is exactly what he turned out to be.

If You Don’t Design it, You’re Doing it Wrong.

The premise of Adii’s talk was simple: you need to design everything, and involve design in your business from the very start. For some designers in the room this didn’t resonate, I saw a couple of tweets about “preaching to the converted”, but as Adii himself explained at the very start: he was coming from a business angle.

Adii discussed how his company, @WooThemes, don’t just design interfaces; they try to design every bit of interaction that a customer will have with them, including customer service. If a customer has a complaint about a product then the way in which that customer is handled is designed for a specific outcome: a happy customer.

Up until now I’ve always understood UI (User Interface) design and usability, but I’ve never full appreciated UX (User Experience) design to be something totally separate to both of those things. To be honest I don’t think it’s my fault, most UX blogs cover usability and accessibility, not user experience.

A Few Examples

Just to make this a little less conceptual, let me give you a couple of examples:

• User Interface Design – A button
• Usability Design – A button which stands out from its surroundings and is easily click-able
• User Experience Design – A button which has your name on it

Function, action, emotion. What Adii was getting at was designing the last part in particular, designing user experience and creating an emotional reaction. Seeing a button with your name on it is familiar, it’s easy, it’s recognisable. Be honest, how often have you considered the emotion that your user (or customer) will experience? Here’s how it applies to WooThemes customer service:

• User Interface Design – A contact form for a user to submit a complaint
• Usability Design – A contact form with only 3 fields that’s clearly labelled
• User Experience Design – Having someone respond to the message within 10 minutes with a full refund

Function (it works), Action (it works well), Emotion (it just made me really fucking happy). Here’s one last example that shows how this can apply in the offline world:

• Product Design – The original iMac
• Usability Design – Everything is built in, no confusing cables
• User Experience Design – When you open the box, the first thing you see is a handle – to help you lift it out.

That’s right, Apple actually changed the design of their entire product just for the sake of the user experience when you open the box and need to lift it out.

Stop Thinking About Interfaces, Start Designing Experiences

I wasn’t getting this point all the way up to the end of the talk, when I asked during the Q&A: “What’s your opinion on products such as BaseCamp and HighRise by 37Signals, who don’t design anything – they just build it and then throw on an interface that works.”

Adii’s response was instant: (quoting from memory) “The user interface may not have had design at its heart, but the user experience was designed at every single stage – this is what made those products so successful.”

It’s taken me a full 48 hours to fully appreciate the idea behind what Adii was talking about: the idea of designing user experience.

Conclusion

All of the talks on the Design track of DIBI were excellent (and I’ll be discussing them on the next episode of @ExplicitWeb), but for me Adii’s was the one that really got me thinking, not about graphics, not about CSS, not about fucking internet explorer. It got my mind working with regards to designing the layer beyond all of that stuff.

Food for thought.

Related posts:

1. Starting a Business: 2 Years in Review
2. Random Lessons From A Freelancer
3. Lyrical Media V2 iPhone Edition

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post about my average working day. I thought that today it might be interesting to have a recap on what my hours are like now and how productive I’m being. Has anything changed? Let’s find out.

Working till 4:00am

Not that much has changed I’m afraid. The main thing I’ve discovered is that my productivity goes through cycles – and various international time-zones, as it turns out. Right now I’m on 8:30am to 1:00am, but from December till March I was on a fairly consistent 10:00am to 2:30am, sometimes even slipping into 11:30am to 4:00am.

Once I get into one of these cycles it’s very hard to break myself out of it. I tried for several months to force myself to work around ‘normal’ hours but I just ended slipping right back into my old pattern the next day. I’ve basically learned to accept this now.

It’s probably something that varies from person to person but I’ve found that I’m most productive if I don’t try to force myself in to any specific schedule. I’ve accepted my imperfections.

The Same Number of Hours or More

In the post last year a lot of you commented saying that it seemed like I had a very long working day. Well, not much has changed there either! Perhaps you were hoping that I’d be raving about being rich after a year and only working a couple of days a week?

Starting a business takes a lot of hard work and a ridiculous amount of drive. If you’re planning on leaving your job and working for yourself from nine to five, forget about it.

Several people have asked me how I’ve managed to get set up and land big clients like Virgin Atlantic and Ubisoft within 9 months. To be totally honest I don’t think I’m special and I certainly don’t think I have more talent than anyone else. However, I do think I’ve put in as much work over 12 months as some people put in over three years.

Someone who plays basketball every single day and night for twelve months will improve so much that their skill level will be equal to someone who just played for a couple of hours each Saturday for several years.

This is not speculation, you really need to ask yourself: “Is this what I really want? Am I willing to work as hard as I’ve ever worked in my life to get it?”

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

That last part all sounded a bit serious, so let me lighten the mood a little. When I say to people “I usually work for around 16 hours a day.” They always have the same sort of reaction: “OMG No Wai?!” (or similar). The problem here is that when you say ’16 hours’ to most people they think about being in an office for 16 hours, being told what to do by their boss for 16 hours, sitting in silence and boredom for 16 hours. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

I work at home so I have silly comforts like being able to work in any sort of clothes, use my bathroom, my coffee, my kitchen. There’s no one to tell me what to do, or how to work. I have three monitors, so on many days I’ll sit at my desk with Twitter on one, the latest episode of Lost playing on another and my work in the last one. If I get bored of working on something, I just stop. I don’t have anyone looking over my shoulder, so if I feel like screwing around on YouTube for 2 hours then I do.

I work in a way that keeps me absolutely and totally content… does 16 hours still sound like a lot?

Let’s put it this way: If money was no object and I could live the rest of my life without needing to make any, what would I be doing? I’d be sitting at my computer, trying to come up with amazing new uses for the web, meeting excellent new people and relaxing doing my favourite things in between.

Oh… wait a second…

Conclusion

If you want to get anywhere in life then you’d better be prepared to work for it. No one is going to hand you anything on a plate – but if you find a job you love, then you’ll never “work” again.

If you work for yourself, what are your hours like? If you don’t, what do you imagine they would be like if you went freelance? Am I crazy?

Photo by Professor Batty

Related posts:

1. My Average Working Day
2. The Reality of Home Working

The Story

This is a slightly delayed post on my part but I just wanted to point everyone to an article that I published on Web Designer Depot last week. As many of you already know, I’ve been working with Virgin Atlantic for the last few months and that culminated in a big launch last week, along with a detailed case study about working with them.

If you don’t want to read the full post and just want to see the completed site, then head on over to vtravelled blog and enjoy!

What Do You Think?

I know this is a really short post but, as always, I’d really love to hear your thoughts!

Related posts:

1. The Reality of Home Working
2. My Average Working Day
3. Working The Graveyard Shift

Sometimes, like last month, everything seems to go wrong all at the same time. Thankfully this month karma seems to have evened itself out again and a lot of really good things have happened. I thought it’d be good to catch a few small updates and a couple of lessons!

What’s Going On

After a decidedly mediocre start to 2010 and a veritable drought of clients, I’m fully booked for the foreseeable future again. It’s funny how just 2 weeks of no work can really get you worried, even though I knew that things were in the pipeline I was slightly overcome by the panic of “I’m not doing anything”.

Since then, I’ve had a really enjoyable month’s work on several smaller projects and one big one. 12 months in, I’m finding that my skill-set is becoming more refined and the variety of work that I do is slowly reducing. A year ago I was doing hosting, email marketing, design, development, seo, social media marketing and consultation. Now I’m finding that the majority of my clients are coming to me for graphic design, WordPress development, and online marketing consultation – the three things which I absolutely enjoy most of all.

Spreading Yourself Thin

I think it’s probably a natural instinct for a web-based freelancer to want to offer as many services as possible. I’ve seen a lot of people start this way, presumably thinking that the more services you offer, the more things you can sell to clients. The occasional blog post pops up about being a Jack of all trades and master of none too, which is usually met with some lively debate.

I don’t think that specialising in a single niche (such as UX, or front end development) is the way forward; in this sort of situation you really are limiting your prospects. That being said I think offering a “bit of everything” is arguably worse as you really can’t claim to be good at all of them. I think there’s a happy middle ground somewhere between the two that I’ve discovered: mastering about three niches that all complement each other.

Design is my first love – it’s probably what I spend the most time on out of everything. WordPress is, in my opinion, the best platform ever created and is something that I would be happy to work with all day for the rest of my life. Online marketing is where I love to exercise the logical side of my brain and come up with unique ideas that make sense. These three things really complement each other quite well: I can design, build, and promote a very wide range of extremely high quality sites. This means I’m saying goodbye to ecommerce sites, little static sites, and custom web applications. I’ll refer those enquiries to one of the many other amazing people who I’ve come to know in this industry.

Some Updates About This Site

Regular posting this year is something that I really want to get into the habit of but so far I’ve been rather unsuccessful. On this basis I’m going to try doing slightly shorter posts a bit more often. It’s quite daunting coming up with one of my big blog posts which need research and planning. I also know from experience that the longer the post, the less likely you are to read every word of it.

I’m also working hard behind the scenes to improve my writing style and make my articles as engaging as possible. I realise that the technical details of this endeavor are of little interest to most people but I’d love to hear if/when you read a post of mine that you feel was particularly well written. (Don’t worry if the opposite is true, I have enough people telling me all about those.)

Finally

I feel like there are loads of things that I haven’t covered in the last year, things that I’ve taken for granted along the way. If you’re one of the group of people who’ve read this blog ‘cover-to-cover’ so far, please drop me a line in the comments and tell me what you’d like me to write more about. I aim to please!

Photo by DavidSpinks

No related posts.

This post has been a long time coming, I think it’s important that I document both for myself and for anyone reading my blog that starting a web design business isn’t all bunny rabbits and dollar signs. Just like anything else in life, there are highs, and there are lows. This isn’t meant to come across as moaning, complaining, or trying to scare you about any aspect of working for yourself – they’re just my experiences so far.

The Day From Hell

The worst road.

Sometimes you just have one of those days – where it really seems like “nothing else could possibly go wrong” – and then of course it does. The most memorable one of those for me so far was about 6 months into my first year of business; I had a client site due to launch the next day, and there was still a lot of work to be done. I had planned on working a long 12 hour day to make sure everything was ready to go, but that didn’t quite work out.

I woke up, and went into my office to find that my broadband service was completely down for my entire area. In order to make sure I met my deadline for a client who was a real pain, I got in my car and drove 45 mins to the nearest cafe with wifi outside my broadband-crippled neighbourhood. When I got there I discovered that they didn’t take cards unless you spent more than £10, so I had to buy 3 coffees, a sandwich, and bag of crisps – just to be able to use the internet. I sat down, started working, and almost immediately my server went down for no apparent reason. After an hour or so of frantic phonecalls: I got it back up again, at which point my mouse died. I swapped to my trackpad, got about 10 mins of work done and then the cafe wifi died.

It Gets Worse…

Not a great start so far – but at least to brighten up my day the client gave me a call and started shouting at me cause the site wasn’t done yet, even though it was a day before the deadline. After that Twitter went down, which isn’t really a big deal, but it was just one more nail in the coffin, and when Twitter had come back I discovered that Tweetdeck had been repeatedly trying to login with some SSL error for 30 mins and had disabled my whole account. After that my iPhone died.

Finally everything started working again and I went back to my coding, which was followed pretty quickly by me accidentally sending a system email to every single one of the client’s 8,000 customers, and then overwriting the file I’d been working on all morning so I lost absolutely everything I’d done so far. Then I got another call from the client asking why we’d written page-copy for all the wrong products. When I pointed out that those were the exact products that they asked us to write copy for, they were still angry that we “hadn’t double checked with them to make sure it was right”.

At the end of the day I left the cafe and got back to my car to find a parking ticket. I’d paid up to 5:34pm and I got there at 5:38pm. Great.

When Money Flies Out The Window

or burns...

Another pitfall of working for yourself is that every now and then you just suddenly get nailed by a whole load of things that cost a lot of money, and this is where not having a “stable” income really kicks you in the face.

• I got a call from my landlord a couple of weeks ago to say he’s decided to sell the house that we rent – I now have 5 weeks to pack up and move somewhere else, and moving house is not cheap.
• On top of that, a couple of months ago I made the genuine (but stupid) mistake of driving to the post office to renew my car tax. In the 5 minutes that I was parked, whilst inside getting a new tax disc, a parking attendant spotted my out-of-date disc and reported me for it. So this month I’m also paying a £500 fine for that little error in judgement.
• A couple of days ago my dog (Herbie) started throwing up, a lot. He kept throwing up yesterday, and then again today. This evening I had to take him to the emergency vets. They don’t even know what’s wrong with him yet, but so far his overnight stay is costing me £250. Update: He now needs an £800 surgery to remove what is most probably a sock that he ate. Update2: It was a sock. Update3: Sock removed, total bill just under £1,200

All these massive outgoings – and for the first time in over 12 months I have no client work! I’ve been booked up 1 to 2 months in advance ever since I started working for myself, but this month I simply have nothing coming in.

Getting Fat

This could be you.

I’m really not proud of this one – in fact I’m genuinely hesitant to even include it. By the time I’ve finished typing this paragraph I might’ve even decided not to include it at all, so if by some miracle I don’t delete it, take this as a sign of my shame.

When I was 16 I lived in the Philippines, I was captain of the school swimming team, competed internationally, and I periodically trained with the country’s junior olympic team. After moving back to the UK I didn’t do nearly as much regular excercise, but I still maintained a fairly athletic build.

Since working for myself in a home office, my fitness has totally, totally disappeared. I’ve gained about 10KG’s (22lbs), and most of that is unfortunately in the form of a beer-belly, rather than huge biceps or something cool. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not even close to being obese or anything, but the difference between now and just 1 year ago is slightly depressing.

In Conclusion

Well, some of these things can be fixed, some of them can’t, and some of them are circumstantial – but all of them are just “realities” of working for yourself. Sometimes, stuff sucks. I’m not going to let myself get down about it or dwell on the subject, if anything it’ll just drive me to work even harder. But let me be clear, working for yourself sometimes creates huge amounts of stress, anxiety, and guilt. Not every day is a good day.

Photos by Juliana Coutinho – purpleslog – danperry.com – and fireflythegreat

No related posts.

I can’t believe that I nearly completely forgot about this – but as of a day or two ago this blog is officially a whole year old. Join me as we take a short trip down memory lane and see what’s gone on in the last 12 months, and where I plan on taking us for the next 12! Hold on to your hats, it’s going to be a big one!

A Year Ago

The only picture I could find of the first version of this site.

Almost exactly a year ago I was working for two complete morons who had absolutely no idea what they were doing with their company – and I’d had enough. I spent my last two weeks of employment building this blog, meeting up with friends to give me advice on working for myself, and getting incorporating Lyrical Media as a UK Limited company – before walking out of there and setting up on my own as a new member of the self-employed.

That means that as well as this blog being a year old, I have now also been in business, by myself, for a full year. If the statistic that 80% of businesses fail in year 1 is true, then I would say I’m doing ok!

Today

Well the company that I stopped working for are doing worse than ever, one director muscled the other director out of the company, lost 50% of all the rest of the company’s staff after I left, and has just relaunched the site with a truly awful web1.0 design. Given that they’re in their 5th year of business now and they’ve yet to break even, I’d say that’s pretty poor.

Mean while, I haven’t turned into an overnight millionaire, and to be totally honest with you I haven’t even been living the “high-life”, it’s been a lot of hard work – but it’s also been totally, totally worth it. In the end my year 1 salary ended up being 80% of what I was making at my job before I left it.

I think the most significant thing is that it doesn’t feel like it’s been a year. In the past I’ve always managed to get really bored of any job after 6 months – pretty much without exception. This time though, it feels like I just started out a couple of months ago, and on the whole things are still on the up and up – so they can only get better!

Tomorrow (and the next day)

So what’s next? Well, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about business in 12 months, and while my ambitions have largely stayed the same, my goals have changed a little.

Here’s the thing: I’m good at what I do, I know I’m good at what I do, and I can’t stand being commissioned to do some work and then having to hand-hold a client all the way through the process because 1.) they don’t know what they’re doing, and 2.) they won’t trust me to do it. Unfortunately what i’ve discovered over the last 12 months is that most clients fall into that category.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been exceptions – all of my work from overseas and from major corporations has been absolutely amazing, I think my main contact at Virgin Atlantic knows just as much about design as I do, which is both awesome and extremely motivating – she really “gets it” and it’s genuinely a pleasure working with her.

On the flip side though, all of my local-business work has fallen into the “don’t know, won’t trust” category – which I’m totally not interested in dealing with.

On that basis 2010 is definitely going to be an interesting year to say the least. I don’t intend on working with any local businesses at all, and I fully intend on turning down any local business enquiries that I get. I want to work with people who are really good to work with, because if I end up hating the people I’m working with then what was point of starting my own business in the first place?

Aside from that I also plan on exploring some other sources of income… but more on that another time. There’s plenty to do in year 2 of running your own business, and I’m only just getting started.

The Stats

I think at this point the tradition is to run through a list of various stats that a blog has built up over time, so if no one has any objections, that’s what we’ll do!

In the last 12 months of existence, this blog has managed…

• 76 posts
• 1,250 comments
• 7,000+ prevented spam comments
• 100,000+ visits
• 650,000+ page views
• 65+ gigabytes of bandwidth
• $266.25 advertising revenue (only started ads in Sept)
• $1,000 (est.) of paid writing work elsewhere
• $20,000 (est.) of referred web design work to Lyrical Media

The most popular posts were:

• How to Kill Your Business: 30 Day Payment Terms, which received 110 comments and 8,000 page views

• The World’s Best Web Designers Are Unknown, which received 104 comments, and 15,000 page views

• Getting Creative: Moo’d Cards, which received 90 comments, and 10,000 page views

Final Notes

Finally, I want to thank every single one of you who has ever left me a comment. Quite frankly if it wasn’t for you then I probably would have given up a long time ago.

If you’ve never left a comment but you’ve still been reading my stuff then I thank you too, and really genuinely hope to “meet” you in this year – in fact why don’t you email me right now and say hi? I promise I don’t bite. Much…

No related posts.

This post originally started out as a comment that I was going to leave on this article over at FreelaceSwitch, but after a couple of paragraphs I decided that it was something that I cared enough about to turn into a full article. It’s a really great post about new year’s advice for freelancers, but there was one point in particular that I felt was really more of an unfinished thought rather than a piece of succinct advice.

The Story So Far

The original FreelaceSwitch article.

In the FreelanceSwitch article, the author lists the following conditions for an ‘ideal project profile’

• A web writing, speaking, consulting or UX design assignment at my current or higher fee
• The assignment takes less than 15 hours a week to produce and is completed within one month or less.
• The client is okay with a remote working arrangement – face-to-face meetings are not necessary.
• The client is okay with deliverables created in my choice of software.
• Almost all communication will take place via email, using my email account (no agency aliases). If conference calls are needed, they are a maximum of once a week and one hour or less in duration. No instant messenger required.
• Invoice is paid in full within 30 days.

All of these are really good, I very much enjoyed the post as a whole and there are some awesome rules of thumb to follow there, it was just the very last point that bugged me.

Why?

I’m so glad you asked!

My Take on 30 Day Payment Terms

Why 30 day payment terms? The author makes it sound like having an invoice paid within 30 days is a really good thing to work towards, but it’s really not! I see freelancers put “30 days” on all their invoices and I never understand why… it’s like some magical number that people just pluck out of the air because they’re used to hearing “30 day money back guarantee” and similar sales pitches and warranties on products.

As a freelancer (or a small business), 30 day payment terms are a nightmare, you constantly have to plan your cashflow a month in advance, and then if the payment is late you’re looking at some seriously overdue money coming into your account. Don’t even get me started on what it does to your tax returns! It’s pretty much a 1-way slippery slope to losing track of your cash flow and going under.

Don’t just slap “30 days” on all your invoices because that’s what you see other companies do. Banks started handing out unsecured loans just cause that’s what other banks were doing, and look where that got everyone. Yes that’s a generalisation and is slightly dramatic, but the principle is there. Just like my view on IE6 browser support, you need to do what’s right for you, not what’s right for “everyone”.

How I do it

My payment terms have always been 7 calendar days, and not only have I never had any client (including multibillion dollar corporates) complain about it, but I’ve also only ever had one late payment… and I still got paid in 10 days rather than 30… no biggie!

That’s just for the initial deposit by the way – for the final payment, the work doesn’t go live until the client has paid the final invoice. Simple.

My latest scheme is to set fixed payment dates from the get-go to circumvent clients stalling with a lot of revisions. It’s not cool when you agree to 50% up front and 50% when it’s done in a week’s time, then the client takes a month to give you access details to the server… so any client delays now affect the live-date, but not the final payment date.

I’ll say something like “The site will take us 4 weeks of actual work to complete, so we’ll be charging 50% up front, and 50% in 4 weeks time. The time it takes to actually launch the site and set it ‘live’ will depend on how many changes you request and how quickly you’re able to sign-off the completed work, but the payment timeline is fixed.”

Why is this good? Because instead of saying “in 4 weeks time I’ll send you an invoice, which is due in a further 30 days” – I’m saying “in 4 weeks time the final payment is due”.

So far so good – I haven’t had any clients complain at all, and I’ve had no payment problems at all. It’s also worth noting that all my clients at the moment are awesome, and it was only the FreelanceSwitch post that inspired me to write this up, I’m not in any way complaining :)

What About You?

I’d love to hear about your most effective (or ineffective) strategies for getting paid on time, maybe even some nightmare stories? Drop me a line in the comments below!

Post photo by cybrgrl

No related posts.

All in all 2009 was a really good year for me and I feel like I managed to achieve quite a large amount, but I’m certainly not resting on my laurels. I’m going to do a quick review of the goals which I set myself a year ago and then dive right into everything which I want to achieve in 2010. All my goals for this coming year are harder to achieve, and there’s also a lot more of them. To avoid this turning into a mammoth post covering all my various goals and benchmarks, I’m going to keep this to just the calendar year and my personal goals. With that in mind, let’s proceed!

Reviewing 2009 Goals

Click above if you're interested in seeing a list of which business books I read in 2009.

I covered this briefly last month, but now the year is over and it’s time to look at what I did and didn’t manage to do. Overall I’m pretty happy with the success rate (81%); out of 13 goals there was only 1 that I didn’t manage to finish, and 2 that I didn’t manage to start – everything else got done!

1. Sustain myself comfortably between now and May 1st 2009 – Success
2. Find and successfully acquire some finance for Lyrical Media – Success
3. Release 8 WordPress themes – Success, but I didn’t release them, watch this space.
   
4. Code a WordPress plugin – Fail
   
5. Read 11 web/marketing related books – Success
6. Get featured on Smashing Magazine – Success
7. Get featured in a web design publication – Success
8. Get featured (or mentioned) in a web design podcast – Success
9. Take at least 1 big holiday (to see my best friends in Australia pls) – Fail
10. Take at least 1 small holiday (inside Europe) – Success
11. Develop a web application and have it ready for Beta testing – Fail, it’s not ready for Beta
12. Grow Lyrical Media to take on 1 full-time member of staff – Success
13. (bonus goal) Quit smoking – Success

Reviewing 2009 as a Whole

It’s easy to review goals and achievements, and they give me some sense of achievement – but if you’re reading this blog whilst thinking about making the jump into self-employment yourself, then they don’t do much in the way of giving you a “big picture” perspective. With that in mind, I could bore you with several thousand words of descriptive commentary… or I could create a simple graph!

I know it’s not a particularly aesthetically pleasing thing to look at, but it is functional. I’ve plotted what I consider to be the four most important parts of self-employed life, along with the three major events of the year that had the most influence on them.

The three major events in question were all significant, but the ‘bad client’ was probably most significant as they managed to drain my energy, my motivation, and pretty much my entire bank account. From a business perspective this meant I came very close to going under, which is why I now tell anyone who will listen not to take on any client who you have a bad feeling about.

Thankfully I started doing a lot more paid blogging, I got some advertising going on this blog, and I got 2 really awesome (and big) clients towards the end of 2009; Ubisoft, and Virgin Atlantic Airways. This new threefold approach meant that I was able to rapidly increase my income and make up for my losses in the middle of the year.

What About 2010?

Now 2009 is out of the way, let’s get onto 2010. I’ve got some really ambitious (and pretty intensive) goals for this year, and I’m totally committed to fulfilling all of them.

The first of the 365 photos which I'll be taking this year.

1. Speak at 3 public events
2. Go to 12 concerts/gigs
3. Exercise 3 times a week
4. Project 365 – Take one photo every day
5. Write 1 paid guest blog post per week
6. Write 1 blog post for lyrical media per week
7. Write 1 blog post for john.onolan.org per week
8. Be more positive – complain/argue less
9. Write and release my first book
10. Get 1 million page views in a single month on Lyrical Media
    

    This would work for my bonus goal of driving a supercar.

11. Get 5 full-page press features
12. Write 5 full-spread magazine articles
13. Sell 2,500 xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx*
14. Pay myself £xx,xxx** for the year
15. (bonus goal) Drive a supercar

*I can’t tell you what I want to sell 2,500 of yet, but it’s my biggest project for 2010 :)

**This is a salary equivalent to a 30% raise from what I was making in full-time employment before going freelance

That’s the list! I’ve already started on several of them, in fact this very post is itself contributing to goal number 7! Now the hard part is going to be keeping it up and not slacking off!

What About You?

I’d love to hear about what you’re up to in 2010 – if you’ve got any exciting upcoming projects that you’re able to talk about (or even if you haven’t) then please drop me a line in the comments below!

Related posts:

1. Starting A Business – 3rd Month Review
2. Starting A Business – 10th Month Review
3. Starting a Business: 2 Years in Review
4. Starting A Business – 4th Month Review
5. Starting A Business – 6th Month Review

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these (again), but I’m going to try out a new post-schedule for this blog so I can deliver content to you a bit more regularly. Quite a lot has happened over the last few months, thankfully the overwhelming majority of it has been positive – and the business is currently the strongest it’s ever been.

The Business

Once again, here are the headlines of what I’ve been up to since the last review post. Some of it you may already know from recent posts, some of it you may not.

• Completed about 8 client projects
• Won about 5 more clients
• Won 1 very big new client (under wraps for now)
• Smashed all my traffic records for this blog with this post (15,000+ visits in 3 days)
• Launched the new design for this site, with some great advertising space!
• Ordered new business cards from Moo
• Did a big FreeAgent review + competition on this blog
• Started writing a book about my first year of business
• Set up a Facebook Page to connect with more people
• Released my Moo’d Cards source files as an opensource project
• Replaced my RSS reader with a twitter account
• Picked up some new business books from Amazon (I’ll review the good ones later)

In Detail

I’ve been on the up and up since my last review here, which is a good thing because it got pretty hairy back there for a while! I can tell you now that the business came very close to going under a few months back when I had one particularly bad client who decided to screw me around for 2 months and then never pay me. It was a close call, but I’m very pleased to say that I’ve worked with nothing but really awesome clients since then.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed in the last few months is a real pattern of motivation-swings. Just like mood-swings they come and go, sometimes I’ll be insanely motivated and work non-stop, other times I just can’t stop procrastinating. I can only imagine that this is normal after the start-up honeymoon period is over, but I’m keeping a close eye on it nonetheless.

In other news I’m still in the process of switching accountants, though it looks like all my financial data went missing en-route to my new accounting company during the postal strikes. Not good. Should’ve known better and dropped it off myself. I don’t think there’s anything in there that would be particularly valuable to anyone, but you never know!

(Firefox just crashed for the 6th time today and lost more than half this post, so I’m officially switching to Safari as my primary browser now – I’m sick of all the instability and the massive memory leak. If anyone from Mozilla happens to be reading this: You’re losing supporters fast, fix it.)

Reviewing Goals from August

This is traditionally the part of the post where I review the last list of goals which I set myself… so that’s exactly what I’ll do!

• Take home a salary equivalent to what I was making at my job before I went freelance. This is my number 1 most important goal for the month. – Success, I’m just about there now!
• Launch this blog with the new design – MUST do this month. – Success, you’re looking at it.
• Write two (high quality) guest posts for other blogs – Success
• Finally get around to reading and reviewing “How To Be a Rockstar Freelancer” – Fail :(

Reviewing Goals for 2009

As the year comes to a close I think it’s also appropriate to also review my goals for the whole year and see how I’m getting on from that perspective.

1. Sustain myself comfortably between now and May 1st – Success
   
2. Find and successfully acquire some finance for Lyrical Media – Success
   
3. Release 8 WordPress themes – Can’t talk about it, but watch this space ;)
   
4. Code a WordPress plugin – Fail (so far)
   
5. Read 11 web/marketing related books – Fail (so far, I think I’m up to about 8)
   
6. Get featured on Smashing Magazine – Success
   
7. Get featured in a web design publication – Success
   
8. Get featured (or mentioned) in a web design podcast – Success
   
9. Take at least 1 big holiday (to see my best friends in Australia pls) – Fail, but they are coming here instead!
   
10. Take at least 1 small holiday (inside Europe) – Success, weekend in Dublin
    
11. Develop a web application and have it ready for Beta testing – Fail, it’s not ready for Beta
    
12. Grow Lyrical Media to take on 1 full-time member of staff – Success
    
13. (bonus goal) Quit smoking – Success, for about 2 weeks now
    

Goals for The Rest of 2009

This is a fairly big occasion – my final goals list for 2009!

• Code a WordPress plugin
• Read the last few web/marketing books for my 2009 goals
• Get my side-project ready for launch
• Dream up and release another cool Moo MiniCards project
• Write at least half of my book (this is going to be a tough one)
• Now I’ve stopped smoking – start doing some regular excercise (more on this another time)

What About You?

There’s not much left of 2009! I don’t know about you, but it seems to have gone incredibly fast for me – I can’t quite believe it. You’re looking at the words of someone who usually gets bored of a job within 6 months, so the fact that a year has gone by without me noticing is definitely a good thing.

What are you guys doing for the rest of 2009? Is anyone taking the jump into self-employment at the start of 2010? Give me an update in the comments below, or if you need anything please feel free to drop me an email via the contact page any time – if there’s any way I can help then I will!

Photo by Yos Wiranata

Related posts:

1. Starting A Business – 6th Month Review
2. Starting A Business – 3rd Month Review
3. Starting A Business – 2nd Month Review
4. Starting A Business – 4th Month Review
5. Starting a Business: A Year in Review