I’m feeling inspired, confident, connected, and very very tired. I’m on the train home from WordCamp London 2019. Recently, I’ve seen some tweets and heard people talking about how they don’t go to WordCamps anymore – or that giving talks at them is a waste of time. Everyone has their own reasons and motivations for…
Search engines have a big problem. There is so much data out there and it’s hard to work out what is what. Humans are great at inferring the context of web content, but this is much more difficult for Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.. That’s why the biggest search engines have come together to create a…
I’m putting this here for my own sanity. If I had £1 for every time I’ve tried to solve this issue! The goal here is to have a background image that covers the whole of the browser window. Ideally we want it to scale, stay centred, and keep it’s correct proportions. My go-to article on…
This morning I built the Website Budget Calculator. This tool is meant to be used as a way for potential clients to work out how much they should invest in their website – based on the value based pricing approach. I’m interested in, but sceptical of, value based pricing. I’ve listened to talks and podcasts, read…
This post is based on a talk I gave at the “Finding a developer” event, by Enterprise Nation on 13th March 2014. First contact – How to pitch to developers from keithdevon The current state of play There are a lot of great developers out there looking for work, and a lot of great clients…
Today I added a line to my contact page stating that my minimum budget for a new project was £2,000. I wanted to explain why I’ve done this. I’m in the privileged position of getting lots of enquiries for new work. Some days I get up to five enquiry emails. I’m so grateful for this.…
Contracts are a hotly debated part of the freelance workflow. Many people don’t use them at all. Others will swear by them, and never start a project without one. Where do you stand? [yop_poll id=”2″] Do you use another method? Add your thoughts in the comments.
On 8th April I gave a talk at the Untangle the Web meetup at Google Campus in London. As a freelancer there is a lot of advice out there, especially in the web industry. You’ll probably have heard some of these tips before, some might be new. They’re not necessarily the best, or most important,…
I’ve been freelancing for a while now. I’ve also been developing WordPress sites for a while. In that time I’ve used many different tools. Some have been great, and some less great. Here I share a list of the tools that I’m currently using: Accounting I use the excellent FreeAgent* to keep track of my…
Since I listened to Kieran O’Shea’s talk at WordCampUK, I’ve been taking security much more seriously. Kieran had some pretty scary statistics regarding hacking. For example, 90% of all businesses have been hacking victims in the last 12 months, and, there is an average of 156 days before victims realise that hacking has taken place.…
What does “affordable web design” mean? Affordable: something that can be afforded low-cost: that you have the financial means for; that can be afforded; believed to be within one’s financial means So, affordable web design means a web design that is within one’s financial means. Right? I think that what people normally mean by affordable is “cheap”. After all, how can anyone else know…
As a web designer living in East London I recently decided to take a look around at the local scene. A Google search for ‘web design east london’ returns lots of hits and as always the style and quality of the sites varies dramatically. Just for fun I’ve decided to rate the first five entries…