When you think about growing a business, you think about how to attract customers. You might build a web site, create marketing materials, and look for ways to get your message to the masses, but have you ever considered ways to repel clients?
Separating the wheat from the chaff is a big part of creating a successful business. As one Inc. magazine article noted, “A person ought to be able to…in five or six seconds have an idea of what you’re selling and whether it applies to them.” Weeding out those who are not well-suited for you and your business is just as important as attracting those who are. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, Darrell wrote that he is discontinuing his personal web site. Yes, designing and maintaining an attractive and effective web site takes time and money, but even in today’s environment where most of us leave our footprints on the web through social networks, Twitter and the like, there are still lots of good reasons for maintaining a professional web site.
A personal site can — and should — be the hub of your other web activities. Your site should have links to the other places where you’re active on the web, and more importantly, those other locations should have links to your professional site. Having your own site gives you flexibility and control that you can’t rely on anywhere else. Twitter limits how much you can write. LinkedIn has a fairly rigid format. Facebook Pages can be fairly flexible, but customizing them requires a fair amount of programming. It’s difficult to use such sites to show off a professional portfolio. And while these sites are free right now, they could charge fees at some future date.
Content is king. Darrell’s right that it takes time and energy to maintain an updated, relevant site. But almost any modern, well-designed site will include some sort of content management system that makes updates easy.
I don’t update my company’s site all that often. And our blog rarely gets a new entry, now that most of my blogging efforts are concentrated here at WWD. But I make a point of announcing when we post new web sites for clients — a process that only takes a couple of minutes. And I’ve put my Twitter and Facebook feeds on the site as well, which I use to share information that I think may be of interest to clients, as well as announcing any technical issues that may affect them.
As a side note, it’s worth remembering that domain names can also be used for email. Professionals should always use email addresses with their own domain names. That way, it’s not necessary to change your email address if you change providers.
These days, hosting and domain registrations are cheap. And if you’re not a designer, and you don’t want to spend money to hire someone like me to produce a custom site, there are lots of “build-it-yourself” options for creating sites. So even in this era of social networks, there’s really no excuse for not having a professional site.
Do you maintain a web site for your professional activities? How often do you update it?
Lately, my inbox has been filling up with notices. Notices about the impending renewal date of my web-based server space, and the domain names attached to said space. Which means, as the emails ominously remind me, that once it lapses, neither I nor anyone else will be able to get at that data. I know I’m meant to be terrified of this possibility, but I just can’t muster an appropriate degree of fear.
I thought about it long and hard, but in then end, there were just too many reasons against keeping my own server space in operation, and too many reasons for storing and publishing my data, portfolio, and contact information elsewhere. Here’s what convinced me to stop the madness and save a little money in the process. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever wanted to do more than just send someone a web page, or post a link on Twitter? If I could, I would present every link I ever wanted to share in person, so I could explain to the person I was sharing with exactly what it was I wanted them to see, and why I thought they might enjoy it or find it useful.
You can always provide a covering letter in the body of your email when you send something along, but a recently launched web app provides a tool that’s much more useful in sharing that context along with the web content you choose to share. Layers.com allows you to layer images, text and video on top of any site of your choosing, and then to share your annotated version with whomever you choose. Read the rest of this entry »
Finding work on the web isn’t easy. The time I’ve spent looking for work on freelance job sites has always left me fairly underwhelmed.
OK, that’s a huge understatement. I dislike having to sign up for different services to access the details of the jobs they’re offering. I loathe having to wade through the reams of alerts I receive from each one. And I can’t be bothered trying to remember which ones require me to buy a subscription in order to pitch for jobs, and which ones don’t, as well as all the other little nuances of each service.
I can safely say that so far, my job search subscriptions have not paid off. For me, the tedium and frustration of tracking all these individual subscriptions has far, far outweighed any value I’ve obtained from them. Last week I wound up just trying to search direct through Google in a desperate attempt to find the kind of project I wanted at a decent rate. Yes, I was that fed up. So when I heard about DoNanza, a service that’s touted as “redefining the search for online projects,” I hoped it might actually live up to its own PR. Read the rest of this entry »
This isn’t so much a full web app review as it is an announcement to heighten people’s awareness of a big no-no in web work. It’s not as much of a problem as it used to be, since I think people are getting better at avoiding this particular pitfall, but nothing annoys me (and clients) more than visiting a site and finding nothing but an “Under Construction” or “The site is currently being redesigned” page. In all likelihood, unless the page being visited is for a hotly anticipated new product from a major company, your visitor will never come back.
There’s one sure way to stay out of trouble, and that’s to wait to launch your web site until you actually have some content in a presentable form to show people. If, for whatever reason, you can’t wait that long (maybe your client wants to build the sort of anticipation normally reserved for companies like Capcom and Apple, for instance), then your placeholder should be functional rather than static. That’s where LaunchSplash comes in. Read the rest of this entry »
A little while ago, I reviewed the service offered by GigPark, which was essentially a referrals network to help people find and share service providers. Qapacity is a new tool that works along the same lines, although it goes about it in a completely different way. Qapacity seems more geared towards attracting service providers themselves, but it still has a lot to offer those looking to shop, not sell, too.
If you’re looking for another venue for promoting your services or investigating service providers to partner with, Qapacity is definitely worth checking out.
Read the rest of this entry »
When you think about growing a business, you think about how to attract customers. You might build a web site, create marketing materials, and look for ways to get your message to the masses, but have you ever considered ways to repel clients?
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
