1 ad. 2 months. $100.

Why?

The search engine snowball effect.

The article has some good keywords, a good title, and some really useful information. The comments just came on there own and now I’m getting 1 – 3 comments a day. Comments are the hill for my snowball (or search engine ranking for the post), and the more comments the bigger the snowball gets. Each comment (well some) contains more useful keywords and more helpful information and my sites ranking gets higher and higher.

For example, on December 5th I had 197 unique visits to that page alone. All of them were from a search engine and there were 151 different search terms used to get to the site. only a few of the search terms are keywords I used in the post.

So there it is, the search engine snowball effect. I don’t know if this term has been used before or not but that’s what I’m calling it. Man, this post makes no sense. Remind me to never write when tired.

How did you get started as a web designer?
I fell into it really. I had always been playing around with computers since the 1200baud modem days. When I went to college I first tried computer programming, and quickly moved into the visual communication program at NAU. I figured Art + Computers = Easy college degree. For a while I thought Flash was the answer to everything. I really got into the “web” my senior year in 2002-2003.

How long have you been working as a web designer?
I had a 4 month stint at a local web design company in 2003 before I founded obuweb.

What part of your job do you like the most?
Well depends. I do not build too many websites anymore as I mostly handle the business end of the process now. So the part of my “job” I like the most is really seeing projects come in that are challenging and then working with my staff to discover and implement a solution.

What was the first website you ever built?
Back in ’95-96 when I used to play in the MUDS (look it up) I built a website for my clan and some of the other players. It was your classic 16 color “Times New Roman” laden piece of history, Complete with animated gifs.

What’s the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as a web designer?
The client will always choose the design you like the least. So you better not show the client anything you are not comfortable looking at for the next while.

What’s the most helpful thing you’ve learned?
Leverage

What is a typical work day like for you?
1 hour commute to my office in scottsdale, grab a mocha at starbucks along the way. Spend most of the day chasing down new work, managing current clients, and discussing solutions and new ideas with the staff. 1 hour drive home.. typically a 12 hour day.

What are some sites that you visit daily or regularly?

• inc.com
• fastcompany.com
• bloomberg.com
• google.com/analytics
• audizine.com

Any other words of advice for new web designers?
Unplug: Play sports, drive fast, chase girls/guys, go hiking, do some charity work, break some minor laws, meet your family, and have a face to face conversation with your parents on why you forgive them for not being perfect. The experiances you have away from the glowing LCD will sharpen and refine your talent and allow your creativity to expand to new heights. Do not take yourself so seriously, but remember everyone is faking it until they make it. And use an old fashioned #2 pencil and paper to sketch designs (Mr. Gomez swears by it).

Thanks for the interview Joshua!

Clients may want a low price but they also know that they get what they pay for. If you pay a designer or developer a low rate you’re probably gonna get a low quality website.

But the real trick to finding good jobs isn’t learning what to charge your clients, it’s learning how to pick clients. The clients that understand how beneficial your work is to their company are the clients you want to get and they’re the clients you’re going to want to help the most. It’s a win-win.

Moral of the story: don’t cheat yourself even if it means you don’t get the job. And to those who are looking to have a website built, don’t always pick the lowest bidder. It may be cheap but it won’t be worth it.

The interviews are really just a series of questions that I asked everyone. This first interview is an interview with Sean Tierney of Grid7 and JumpBox. He’s a local web developer that I met at Refresh Phoenix and you can check out his blog at http://scrollinondubs.com.

How did you get started as a web designer?
By summer of my Junior year in college the web was starting to get interesting. I had taken a psychology course where the professor made us publish our experiment via the web and in so doing, I had learned to use a primitive tool called Adobe Pagemill to create my first web site. That summer I talked my way into a internship doing data entry for a local ISP in Tempe, AZ. I was surrounded by code everyday and just began to soak up the syntax for how things worked and started doing some design. I moved from intern to salaried employee a few weeks into it once they realized I was doing more than just data entry. That’s how I picked up HTML. From there I learned Photoshop, ColdFusion, databases and some Flash. You never stop learning in this industry, that’s one of the qualities that makes it so great.

How long have you been working as a web designer?
Well I’m not actually doing web design at this point. I’d say I was a true web designer for only about two years. The past six years were spent more as an application developer writing code to interact with databases and external systems. As of the past six months I’ve taken more of a business development role with JumpBox and Grid7.

What part of your job do you like the most?
The community and the opportunity. So many other industries are cut-throat and limited in how much you can actually advance. Technology and the web is evolving so fast that there are constantly these pockets of opportunity developing. It really is still a new frontier in terms of what is possible and anyone can make it big by discovering and developing one of the many new opportunities. I love the fact that your reward is so directly yoked to your efforts. Also all the relationships you build along the way with other entrepreneurs striking out on their own and pursuing their dream – there’s no other field that is so conducive to this type of exploration.

What was the first website you ever built?
The first professional web site I built (or will admit to building) was the site for Greyhawk Golfcourse. Of course the actual first site I built was the one that published our psych experiment Junior year.

What’s the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as a web designer?
Know when to turn down a client and know your own value. It’s too easy to get beat up on pricing or with push-back when the client feels he/she knows what’s right. You have to remember that they are hiring you for YOUR expertise. It’s a tightrope walk sometimes to deliver what clients think they want vs. what you know they need.

What’s the most helpful thing you’ve learned?
That the game has really changed in that the power of search is so compelling that you don’t need to remember details and syntax so much as form a mental index of the capabilities of the various technologies. You can always look up the details in a reference guide but it’s more important that you are constantly scouting to understand the landscape of the technology space. For instance I need to know that Flex, Open Laszlo and Java applets are all ways of delivering rich interfaces – each with their advantages/disadvantages. But I don’t need to remember the syntax for binding a checkbox to a datasource in Flex- that type of thing can be looked up at development time. Instead I need to know enough about the technologies listed above to be able to make an intelligent recommendation to a client when I’m asked which technology is appropriate for their project.

What is a typical work day like for you?
– Wake up about 8:30am
– Drive to the office
– Make some breakfast and check email & read blogs
– Put out any fires and address the urgent things
– Meet with the employees and confirm the plan for the day/week
– Working: business stuff, making various contacts, quickbooks stuff, writing articles
– Foos game
– Coordinating with our PR person, handling the fundraising activities
– Go home
– Intermittently on email/IM, writing a blog entry, reading a business or leisure book or periodical

What are some sites that you visit daily or regularly?
funny you should ask, I just posted a list of my “time wasters” I call them. You can read that here: http://www.scrollinondubs.com/?p=140. I’ve been really into CambrianHouse.com lately. This is a project similar to our Grid7 labs effort in that it’s a community of developers/designers that come together to execute side projects. Our focus has been completely dominated by JumpBox so we shelved all the
ideas we had brainstormed under Grid7. I submitted all these to CambrianHouse and got some great feedback on a couple of them. I’m still very optimistic for the virtual co-op idea so I’ve been engaged in a lot of the discussion in the CambrianHouse forums on the best way to achieve this.

Any other words of advice for new web designers?
Don’t underestimate your value. Sometimes it’s tempting to reduce your rates or give into a pushy client but ultimately doing so devalues your work and it’s a slippery slope once that starts. Conversely, if you can execute well for only a handful of clients and then raise your rates and position yourself as an expert in xyz niche, you can be choosy about who you will work with and gain the respect of your clients. In the end that’s the path for the most pain-free work because they defer to your judgement. The hardest thing is in asking for that big number on a project but once you do it, you’ll find that there’s a weird chicken/egg phenomenon where people assign more value to the things for which they pay more money.

Other than that, have fun with it. It’s a job that puts you in contact with so many different people and businesses. You can really go many directions afterwards because you’ll be learning about all kinds of industries. And there’s nothing more satisfying than knowing you helped someone else grow their business and pursue their passion.

Thanks for the interview Sean!

1. ALWAYS carry paper
2. Be descriptive when writing it down
3. Plan for not planning on it
4. Good environments matter
5. Think big picture down
6. Organize your thoughts
7. Know when to stop

These 7 tips are great to help you remember your ideas but they can also be used to help you manage your time.

1. ALWAYS carry paper
Keep a written to-do list with you anywhere you go. It will remind you of the things you still need to get done and you can easily add another item to your list even when you’re out.

2. Be descriptive when writing it down
Keep items on your to-do list short but descriptive. If you’re meeting with someone write down the who, what, when, and where. Always make sure you will be able to understand your list later in the day.

3. Plan for not planning on it
Leave room in your day for pauses, breaks, and other distractions that may come up. You don’t have control over some distractions and you never know when they’re going to happen so leave time for the unexpected.

4. Good enviorments matter
Clean up your work space and remove clutter from the area around you. Get comfortable and organized so you don’t waste time searching for things.

5. Think big picture down
Think through the step-by-step process needed for your task so you don’t skip anything. My mom always says to do a good job the first time so you don’t have to do it again. Plan out the things you need to get done and think through the most efficient way to get them done.

6. Organize your thoughts
This goes back to keeping a descriptive to-do list and thinking about the big picture. Do things in an order that works best for you.

7. Know when to stop
Instead of spending an hour working on a project fighting to keep your eyes open at 3 in the morning, get some sleep and get a fresh start on it in the morning. Take time to get away from your work and take a walk or eat something and rejuvenate yourself.

So make to sure to read Glen’s article to use these same 7 tips to help manage your time and your ideas.

The other day I wrote a post about someone I know who runs a profitable web design company but knows very little about web design. She’s successful because she knows how to promote her company really well. And while I don’t know how she promotes her company, I do know the things that I’ve done to promote myself as a freelancer.

1. Start A Blog
Get your own domain name, install WordPress, and write good content about web design. Not only will it show potential clients that you know what you’re talking about but it will also let them get to know you as a person. A blog is a great way to improve your search engine rankings and it can double as a portfolio too. Clients always ask to see my portfolio (which isn’t that great) but will hire me because they like my blog even if though they aren’t too impressed with my portfolio. Having a portfolio is important but having a good blog has been even more helpful to me as a freelancer.

2. Submit Your Site to CSS Galleries
There are way too many CSS galleries out there right now but they are good for getting a few more visitors to your site. If you get listed on sites like CSS Beauty, Stylegala, or CSS Mania you’ll get plenty of visitors for a few days and it’s also a great ego booster. This site got listed on CSS Mania last month and that day I received an extra 590 visitors and atleast a few of those visitors have stuck around.

3. Create a Theme or Plugin for WordPress
I recently created the Deep Blue theme and so far it has had over 1,000 downloads. Each site that uses the theme provides a link back to this site so if everyone who downloaded the theme used it for their blog then I would have 1,000 more incoming links. This gives me a significant amount of unique visitors daily, it helps my search engine rankings and gives me one more project that I can add to my portfolio.

4. Comment on Other Blogs
Post relevant comments that will add to the conversation on other blogs. The first comment is the most read comment so you are likely to get more visitors if you’re one of the first people to leave a comment. If the discussion continues repeat commenters tend to grab my attention more then those who comment once and leave. Always include your website in your comment and make sure you’re comment doesn’t make you look like an idiot

5. Check Job Boards
Some of my favorite sites to look for jobs include the Looking To Hire section of SitePoint, CSS Monster, Craigslist, and Programmer Meet Designer. All of them are updated often and regularly have some job that I feel like I can do. There are a number of other sites for freelancers that require you to pay to join but I’ve found that these sites are pretty good and they’re free. If you ever see a job that you know you can do, always email the client to introduce yourself and find out more. Even if you don’t get the job atleast you tried.

6. Participate on Forums
Much like commenting on blogs, every time you post something on a forum you can include a link to your website in your signature. The more helpful you are and the more often you post the better. People will start to notice you and will seek out your help. My favorite forum: SitePoint.

7. Get Involved in a Community
What more can I say about this that I haven’t already said. Find a Refresh or BarCamp near your city. If you don’t have one, contact some local web design companies and start one. You won’t regret it. I promise. This has been the most helpful resource for me as a freelancer and a great way to promote myself.

These are some of the things that I have done to promote myself as a web designer and I hope they can help you too.

Does your school use a web filter that prevents you from accessing your favorite sites? In this article I’ll walk you through steo-by-step how I managed to bypass my school’s web filter.

At my school, even common sites like Gmail were being blocked by the Barracuda web filter. School web filters are way too restrictive. I needed a way to bypass the web filter to access basic sites for legitimate reasons. The school was unnecessarily blocking scholastic sites with educational information that I wanted to visit. These tips and tricks will help you bypass common filters including WebSense, ContentKeeper, Lightspeed Systems, and others.

My school uses WebSense to filter websites. It works great and that’s the problem. Almost every proxy, blogspot blog, game site, social media site, and email is blocked by WebSense. There is also an option for school administrators to add a specific url to the list of blocked sites.

The software keeps track of student’s browsing history. More then once, I’ve found a proxy or site that wasn’t blocked by WebSense and the next day when I checked the site it was blocked. I don’t know why but I think this was because somehow WebSense records your browsing history and creates a list of questionable sites for the administrator to approve or ban.

So with any of these tips just beware that if a site works today it could get blocked tomorrow!

1. Use a proxy

A proxy website adds an additional layer of anonymity and can by a quick solution to bypass your web filter. On a proxy website you can enter the url you want to visit and it gives you access to the site via their server. Many proxies get blocked quickly by web filters but there are so many out there that it isn’t hard to test a lot of proxies to find one that isn’t blocked.

Here’s a list of some popular web proxies:

• Hidester
• ProxySite
• WebProxy.club

2. Use HTTPS

I mentioned that Gmail was blocked at my school but that isn’t entirely true. If I accessed Gmail from http://mail.google.com it was blocked but if I used https://mail.google.com it worked! Both url’s work but for some reason many web filters don’t block the HTTPS version. This is by far the easiest method but results may vary depending on which filter your school is using. Also, some sites will automatically redirect you from http to https which obviously won’t work.

A similar trick would be to try the www and non-www versions of url’s to see if one is available.

3. Run Google Chrome on a USB stick

There’a a great article on ghacks about how to install Google Chrome to a USB drive. Head over there for more detailed instructions. The basics are:

1. Install PortableApps on your USB drive
2. Install their portable version of Google Chrome
3. Plug the USB drive into any computer
4. Run Google Chrome directly from the USB drive

This option takes the most preparation but really comes in handy. You can save all your bookmarks, files, and install additional apps all on a USB drive and run it from virtually any computer. If the web filter is browser based it won’t effect your portable version of Google Chrome on the USB drive.

4. Google Cache

You may not know what Google Cache is but you’ve probably seen it. On most results in Google there is a little green arrow under the page title next to the url. If you click on that arrow you’ll see an option for Cached.

If you click on Cached the resulting page will have something like this appended to the url: “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:”. Google is essentially acting as a proxy for you to see an older version of this page. If you need to interact with the site or log in this method won’t work but for purely informational content it works great and is rarely blocked.

If none of these tips work at your school, well, that sucks for you but it worked for me so I hope this helps. I just wish someone would have told me this when I was a freshman.

Summer ended which meant school started and I didn’t have the time to work anymore. I continued to play around on the web and I started my own blog. Having a blog opened up a number of opportunities and I did my best to keep learning new things through other web design related blogs. After school one day I came across an article written by a man who owns his own web design company right here in Arizona. I don’t remember exactly what it said but to me the article said, “Come meet a lot of really cool people who can help you with your career.”

I was thrilled. I was nervous. I went to the meeting. It was awesome.

At first I was reluctant to go. I figured I was going to be the only teen. I had very little experience and I didn’t know what to expect. The only other web designers I had ever met were the few people I had worked with over the summer.

I went to the meeting and when it was over I knew I would be making a lot more trips to Phoenix. The meeting was inspiring and since then I’ve learned much more then I have ever learned from the web or from school about web design and business. Because of this community I’ve had tons of opportunities I wouldn’t have ever had otherwise.

I mean how many teens get to go bowling with some of the best web designers in the state? Honestly. I’ve had a number of job opportunities, learned more then I even realize, had some good ideas, and even some interesting thoughts that I wouldn’t have had without a local offline community close to where I live.

I’m very thankful and consider myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to get involved in a community like this one. One of the most important things I’ve learned from all this is the importance of networking and getting to know as many people as you can. If you’re like me and you’re new to something it’s even more important to get involved and talk with everyone you can.

The phrase “It’s not what you know, but who you know” is definitely true when you’re just starting out.

After going to the meetings each month I decided one community wasn’t enough. I wanted to meet even more people and that’s where some effort on my part came in. In the past 6 months I would guess I’ve met or atleast talked online with 100+ people that I didn’t know before I got involved in the communities.

What I’m really trying to say is that if you want to do better in whatever it is you’re doing, meet as many people as you can. Get involved somehow and get to know the people in the area you want to excel in. They’ll help you without even knowing it.

“For those not yet familiar with it, Refreshing Cities (an unofficial group name) is a social/business organization created by designers and developers across the country who are tired of not having a well-rounded web organization available to them. It was created by the community for the community.”

Dallas was the first city to be refreshed and since then Phoenix, L.A., Pittsburgh, Boston, and most recently, Seattle have joined in. The Refresh Cities create an offline community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of Internet developers in their area. Sound good? It is.

I think that out of all the Refresh Phoenix members, I get the most out of these meetings. I’m the youngest second youngest member and therefore have much less experience then many of the older members. I’m just a teenager. I haven’t been to college. I don’t know anything about running a business or freelancing and I’ve only been creating websites as a job for less then a year. I can use all the help I can get.

The Refresh meetings have helped me in so many ways. The best thing about them is that their are so many cool people to talk with and they all know a lot more then me. It’s great to pick their brains. I learn a lot from them just by listening but some of the time I get so confused I just nod my head and act like I know what they’re talking about. I’ve also been able to get help and suggestions for my own projects from people at the meetings. I think all the Refresh members really enjoy putting the sites they’ve seen or the usernames they talk to with faces and speaking with the people face to face.

Many people come to the meetings just so they can find a job or find good people to hire. This is the best place to look and if that’s the only reason you come, I don’t think there’s a problem with that. That isn’t why I go because right now I’m way too busy enjoying sports but as soon as school ends I’ll be in need of a job again and the meetings will be a good place for me to look.

The meetings are appropriately named because Refreshed is exactly how you feel when you leave the meetings. I always feel better prepared and more excited about my (future) career when I leave. It’s great to see the wide variety of talent in the Phoenix area and I’m glad the Refresh movement is marching on. I think it would be cool if in the future when people think of Internet Development the word Refresh came to their mind. Every web developer, designer, guru, etc. can benefit from a Refresh in their area.

For those Refreshers in Phoenix the next meeting is on February 7th at the Common Grounds Coffee House. ASU’s Technology Officer, Dr. Adrian Sannier, will be speaking. He’s a great speaker and you should also check out his podcast and blog. I hope to see you at the next meeting!

This won’t be very encouraging and definitely not very convinving to any Firefox user, but the page looks fine in IE. If they are trying to convert Firefox users, they should think about making it look good in both browsers. So I went ahead and installed the program even though I wasn’t very impressed and loaded up the About Me page of this website. I let you judge which browser it looks better in, but my vote goes to Firefox. My first thoughts were filled with confusion and disgust. In my opinion the new design isn’t that great and why does it look so much different from IE6? The text is wierd looking. I don’t know how else to explain it but it also makes the dark grey words look almost purplish. Maybe it’s my monitor but I’ve never had that problem before.

The Things I Liked

I was glad to see that it now has much better CSS support but I’ve noticed there are still some errors that were also present in IE6. They have finally adopted tabbed browsing and RSS integration which is handy and much more convenient since everyone seems to have a blog these days. They announced earlier that they would be using the same feed icon used by Firefox and many other browsers and I’m glad they did.

With all the things I like about the new version of Internet Explorer there is one commonality in all of them. They are all included in the current version of Firefox or have been included for a long time! All Microsoft has done is create a worse version of Firefox. For those of you still using Internet Explorer, please switch. You don’t even need to switch to Firefox just something other than Internet Explorer. I encourage all IE users to check out the Browse Happy website and choose a browser that is better for you.