I really hate calling it quits on clients, especially clients that I’ve previously had a decent experience with. However, sometimes you still have to call it quits – whether they aren’t willing to pay you, or aren’t willing to pay you enough for the amount of time which you put into their site.

I’ve recently had to call it quits on a client I’d been working with for some time. In the past they had been a very good client and allowed me my space to work, but whenever said client changed for the worse, I knew it wasn’t fair to my other clients (or even to myself) to continue with the casework. Read more »

Well, just as I was leaving this morning, something came up, and now the trip I was going to make with my family has been cancelled. Thus, normal operations will follow for today and Monday.

I am very surprised at myself.

And I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean as in – wow, I can’t believe it’s a redesign!

As you can see, the comment form is back to where it was before. Provided it’s not abused by spammers again, it should hopefully stay as it is. If spammers do choose to abuse it as much as they possibly can, expect a much stricter captcha to be put into it. Oh, and yes, I’m aware that it disappears after you submit it; that’s to prevent you from re-submitting it. No, really, it is!

There are a lot more small tweaks to this theme than meets the eye. The older one was a bit more static; it worked pretty well, but I mostly wanted to do a few things with this design that I hadn’t done before. Read more »

I’ve decided as of today that I will be creating several new changes to the layout scheme here on BeLink’d. I’ve got a new design pending, but essentially what I’m looking at is an almost complete rebranding.

I’m going to retain the logo; it’s the logo I’ve used ever since I created the design. It was inspired by the old Firefox loading, and the position it occasionally paused in when a page loaded quickly. However, I’m going to try some other very different things in the next scheme, and we’ll see how well they play out.

For now, though, this weekend I’ll be in California, spending some time with family and friends to see the fireworks and to celebrate Independence Day. It should be fun, even if it does put me back a notch on the redesign (workaholic? I don’t know what you’re talking about!)

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 »