Today, I am trying something a bit different. I’ve put up a premade site under my portfolio; depending upon how much popularity this theme and the others I plan on posting receives, I will be considering creating a page dedicated to premade web templates.

Normally I charge $20/hour for a project; for a full project, this amounts to around $400+, though I’d say my average is around $500 depending on the amount of programming and changes requested. I allow clients to have an unlimited amount of requested changes, but at the same time, I do not work for free.

This theme in question is very flexible; its navigation can be requested to be placed anywhere (though I would suggest horizontally), and it can have contact information placed opposite of the logo. The image can be edited or left as-is, and because it is content rich, not only will it have a greater amount of SEO, it will also show flexibility for what one might wish to put in there; RSS feeds, social networking links, or even just more content about your company in general. Read more »

It feels strange changing the header on my emails, but that’s what this week has turned into: change.

This week, I am moving six hundred miles away from Las Vegas, Nevada, into the city of Sacramento, California, in part to further my education in software engineering (I am learning this to further my programming skills; I will still be designing) as well as to look into more design-type jobs.

While Las Vegas has plenty of jobs in my area of expertise, I am looking forward to the change. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that I finally have the opportunity, I’ve definitely become terribly excited over it. I will be leaving Las Vegas Thursday morning and stopping in Fresno for the night, and then continuing onward and upwards to Sacramento the following Friday morning. Read more »

I rarely make my political beliefs public, as I feel that they are something which I hold close to my heart. Nevertheless, I am always willing to take on any project, no matter how controversial it may be – and that includes political or religious projects. My work with Forward Focus Media can only be described as one word: rewarding. Honestly, I have greatly enjoyed the month of work which I put into the site, and the month which I worked closely with the people behind the company.

That being said, I’m quite sure that they give their clients the same amount of brilliant treatment. If your political beliefs happen to fall under “libertarian” or “conservative” and you happen to be politically involved, this Alabama-based firm can certainly help you out – but how? Why not check out their site to find out!

Specifically, my work with this site was to customize a pre-built Wordpress template. The original design was very nice, I must admit, but I saw many ways in which it could be changed in order to better suit the site’s purpose. From coding an RSS puller in order to display their latest posts to editing a Twitter widget, the facelift to this design was actually pretty large; I may as well have written the theme myself from scratch. However, Forward Focus had already selected this template, and I noted that certain things could be thrown out altogether and that certain things could be redone. We started small, working on the graphics you see – the logo was provided, but I did create all of the graphics such as the Twitter and Facebook graphics (after all, graphics were how I was pulled into design in the first place).

In a past post, I compared several different job boards which I utilized in my daily life. I summarized the most effective job boards as those which cost a freelancer a very insignificant amount of money, did not spam the freelancer, were not overly intrusive to the normal business operations, were easy to sign up for, and did not compare freelancers to one another. Generally speaking the post was met with nods of approval; after all, why should my earnings on one site determine whether or not I was a decent web designer? For all that site knows, I could have already grossed double the amount reflected using a different service. And, additionally, why should I limit myself to one service when I know that job posters will be posting to different sites? And after educating myself and working towards certifications with W3C and Adobe, why should I pay for another web site to certify me?

Then, I recently noticed that CSS Mania had released their own job board. There is no subscription fee; the site is paid for by the advertisements on the main CSS. Read more »

It seems to me that spammers are getting more and more creative.

One of the most recent spams I received was actually through two IM conversations. The first was on GTalk; I have a GTalk account set up specially for BeLink’d to communicate with clients et cetera without utilizing my personal account. Well, I received a friend request; not sure what it was, I accepted.

Later that day, while working on a site, I received an IM asking if it was a good time to discuss web development software that I had been solicited in the past over my work line. I told said marketer to please remove me from their contact list when they initially called me, and now I was being IM’d by them.

And that wasn’t the last time. I also use Skype for personal, and received a friends request from a random person. I add them… and it turns out to be yet another marketer. Wonderful. Blocked and removed; the major annoyance, however, is that now they attempt to message me and send me notifications, which are… excessively annoying. Read more »