Whether you freelance as a writer, a programmer or a designer, there are certain tasks that you’ll do again and again and some that you’ll do infrequently.  Cheat sheets can be a huge help for both those tasks that you do all the time, and the ones you do infrequently enough that the exact way to do them can be a bit hard to remember.  Whether it’s formatting a certain type of writing or how to use certain tools in Photoshop or Dreamweaver, cheat sheets can carve minutes to hours off the time it takes to complete a project.

Any kind of a template can be called a cheat sheet, and the beauty of them is that you only have to create them once.  You might have a template for press releases or grants, for a website design, or for CSS style sheets to help get you started. There’s no point in rewriting the same code a hundred times for a hundred different projects, so use a cheat sheet template as your basis then make the necessary changes.  Just be sure you use your template only as a starting point to avoid having to redo the basics.  Then make each project unique.

A trend among new freelancers is to take jobs at extremely low pay, sometimes no pay at all, to get a foot in the door or have something to put on a portfolio.  These freebies, they think, are just a way to get started and have work to point to when prospecting for clients.  And having something to put on that writing or design resume can make a big difference—you wouldn’t hire a typist, for instance, without some assurance that he or she could actually type, so no one’s going to hire a web designer unless they can see a website you’ve actually designed.  So a freebie or two let you create professional work for a client that you can use to get paying work.

The problem with these freebies is that so many people trying to break into freelancing are so willing to do them, that it tends to undermine their entire field.  If a client has 20 freelancers willing to do a project for free or for unbelievably low rates because someone wants the experience, and your rates are $50 an hour, your rate is going to look extremely bloated comparatively.  Even $20 an hour might seem high if almost everyone else is offering to do the same work for $5.  The more freelancers who are willing to do work for slave wages, the less everyone makes as a whole. 

How you handle an angry client probably decide whether you’ll get business from that client again, and whether or not they would recommend or discourage their business contacts from trusting you to do freelance work for them.  You don’t want to risk a client being angry and pointing out what he believes to be your shortcomings to everyone in his email address book.  Whether the client is angry for a reasonable reason or not, it’s in your best interest to deal with it quickly and professionally.  Once the situation is resolved and the client is happy again, then you can decide whether they were  unreasonable, and whether you want to work for the client again in the future.

First, take immediate action.  If you know your client is upset about something, anything, face it immediately.  You’ll look proactive and concerned about your client’s needs.  You might be tempted to wait to contact the client after a cooling-down period.  But don’t assume that everyone feels anger the same way.  The longer you wait to deal with the situation might end up being just a longer amount of time for your client’s blood pressure to rise.  Wait too long, and you might find you’ve lost the client completely.

Second, listen to the problem and acknowledge it.  The worst thing you can do when the client is trying to tell you what’s wrong is to interrupt or even try to explain that the client’s anger is unjustified. 

You might think that there are no freelancing pitfalls or drawbacks, at first glance.  Freelancing, after all, lets you set your own hours, work as much or as little as you want (within reason) and gives you an incredible amount of professional freedom. On the other side of the coin, though, are some potential problems.  Fortunately, you can learn to avoid these freelancing pitfalls with a little bit of planning.

Isolation is a freelance pitfall that takes many new freelancers by surprise.  Happy to be away from the drudge of the office and working independently, many freelancers find out right away that being alone for most of the day is hard to get used to.  Gone are the the co-workers heading out to lunch together, the water-cooler chatter, and all the social aspects of the workplace.  Now you have only yourself to talk to all day.  To avoid this freelancing loneliness, network with other freelancers online.  But don’t limit yourself to Internet relationships. Go out to lunch with friends occasionally and intersperse more social things like returning phone calls or calling a friend between your more concentrated tasks.

Which one works best?

Are you a newbie in the PHP language? If you are, for sure you have encountered two kinds of PHP approaches programmers use nowadays: the procedural and the object oriented (OO). Different experienced programmers have already used both approaches, and most probably they would recommend only one kind of PHP approach to you. There are some who would say that it’s best to stick with the traditional procedural, while others would say that OO is much better to use. It can be quite confusing as to which approach to follow, but in order to make a choice, you must first know the pros and cons of using procedural and OO PHP.

For novice programmers, procedural PHP is probably the first PHP practice you will be exposed to. It’s because it’s the approach almost every programmer knows how to use, and its traditional tenets have already been established and easy to learn. Most web pages operate in a procedural manner, i.e. this tag, then this tag, then this tag, and so on. Using procedural PHP code with HTML is rather straightforward unlike OO, and programmers are given more space and freedom to create their own styles using the procedural approach.

Procedural PHP works heavily on the performance behind the code, thus programmers tend to come up with codes only they can understand. This is one of the major disadvantages of procedural PHP; in the effort to make things faster and more efficient, you create codes that cannot be used by anyone else, unless they get to figure what the codes are. Procedural PHP is also quite difficult to maintain, extend and distribute, unlike OO.

In order to be successful as a freelancer you must be organized.  Your success depends on it!  You have to know how to quickly transition from one project to the next while keeping your life manageable.
First thing – clean it up!  If your desk, your closet, your car, or your life is messy and mismanaged, chances are your projects will be the same way.  Throw away old paper and notes you don’t need and shred your old documents. Have you ever paid attention to how you get that unsettled feeling whenever things are messy, dirty, and cluttered around you?  Think about it.  You sleep better on clean sheets, you feel good (and save 5 minutes) when you can walk into your closet and see everything organized and the list goes on.

Second – make sure you have a superior filing system. Every item and piece of paper should have a designated nook or drawer.  There should never be a time when you (or anyone else in your house) should have to “find it”.  This will save you loads of time when you need to pay bills, keep up with clients, or keep track of tools to fix that leaky faucet.  Even have a place in your wallet where you can keep your ATM receipts, purchase receipts, (and in even those parking tickets) so you can log them into an expenditure tracking system like Quickbooks.  This way, you can keep better track of what is going in and what is coming out of your pocket.  Make sure you have designated pouches for each set of receipts so you don’t get them confused, and when you get home, file the ATM in the banking stuff, and that Taco Bell receipt under food purchase.   Make copies as needed and include them in your Quickbooks – just in case you’re ever audited.  Yes, structure is needed when you are in business for yourself, and the first order of business is just that: order.

It is already well known that that content plays a truly vital role in the development of a website, at least as far as search engine optimization and appealing to website visitors are concerned. However, as websites grow around their constantly expanding content bases, it can be difficult to come up with a website style or template that is accommodating. Here are some basic tips for learning how to style heavy content websites for better visibility, better maneuverability and user friendliness.

The first thing to know is that both visual appeal and functionality are absolutely vital when it comes to styling a website. If you have a constantly growing collection of website content and are looking to style your website accordingly, you need to find a healthy balance between visual appeal and style, and functionality and maneuverability.

If you have a large amount of content on your website, then it is vital that you provide a site map to your visitors. This will benefit you in two different ways: First, it will make sure that search engine spiders can more readily find all of the content on your website. Second, it will help to make sure that human visitors can find the content pages that they are looking for, even when the navigation on your website prevents them from finding the pages that they seek.

Outsourcing is the process of subcontracting with a third-party agency or company that provides a specific service using minimal time and costs.   Organizations (clients) and suppliers enter into a legally binding contractual agreement for a specified amount of time.  The contract defines the transferred services and both parties agree to use whatever people, assets, and other resources are available to fulfill the contract within that particular timeframe. The entire process first begins with the client identifying what is to be outsourced and searching for and choosing an outsourcing supplier.  A proposal is suggested and a supplier is chosen based on location and the lowest possible cost to the client.

There are many organizations that are already utilizing outsourcing.  Call centers, customer service centers, web developers, marketers, writers, and designers (and now lawyers) are only a few already tapping into this business.

But, is it worth it?

Well, let’s talk benefits: There is a great deal of benefits, but for the sake of time, we will focus on the three more prominent benefits: cost, convenience, and service.

We have all been hearing of Web 2.0, as it is mentioned in almost every activity done in the internet today. Indeed it has been one of today’s buzz words, but what exactly does Web 2.0 mean?
Web 2.0: A Trend in the World Wide Web

While many others think that Web 2.0 is a new version of a certain internet application, it is actually term coined to describing the changing trends in internet technology through enhanced web design, collaboration and functionality and secure information sharing. Web 2.0 served as the evolution of the internet from being mainly an information superhighway into web-based communities via hosted services such as blogs, social networking sites, video sharing, wikis and folksonomies. The term Web 2.0 suggests a new version of the World Wide Web itself, and not to a specific technical specification.

In Web 2.0, the internet has become more interactive and endowed with a more human technology. The main target of Web 2.0 is to strengthen global communities via live communication, and as well improve software developments via continuous updates to accommodate the changing styles of people and societies worldwide. People can therefore build communities out of the interactive facilities and run software-applications through a browser. Examples of these include rich media such as OpenLaszlo, Flex and Ajax.

Because of today’s changing trends in career and business, more and more people find it more beneficial to work on a freelance job. Among other things, being a freelancer gives you more space to work, more allowance to be creative, and doesn’t bind you under a company’s rules and regulations. But if you are looking for more reasons on why you should be a freelancer, then check out the perks below: