While designing We Are not Freelancers we had one goal in mind. Our goal was to get featured on as many web galleries as possible.
This isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, we had never achieved it before so why would we do it now? From start to finish this blog took about 8 days to create but I think of those 8 days I must have spent every hour of them on the design.
Why did we want to be featured on galleries?
I tweet a lot and thanks to TweetDeck I am kept up to date with what the people I follow are doing. By watching them I have tried to pick up as many good aspects of their habits and tried to combine it to market our blogs.
I believe that these methods are working well and would like to share them with you:
…start of rant…
I believe that Marc and I are very good listeners. In fact as good as we are at listening we also suck at listening.
We were once in a meeting which contained way too many silent moments because we were so used to keeping out mouth shut that we never had anything to add.
This post has come about through my thoughts of how open source programs make money. It is a bit of a rant as I am only seeing one side of the coin here, so if you can then please enlighten me.
Yesterday I read a post on 37signals which spoke about how to make money twice. To me the best part of the post was in the first paragraph.
It said: “A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people).” What I loved about it was simple, “hint: charge people”. Brilliant.
I am a padding addict. I love padding so much that if I turned into a pillow I would probably be happy.
No seriously. I consider margins and padding to be more critical than 960.gs or the 10px method. You can have the best grid based layout but if your padding / margins are out it will not look good.
I usually spend more time making sure that all my padding is correct than if my site fits perfectly within a grid. It facilitates relevant information, separation and more importantly, white space management.
Don’t like grids? Try our ten pixel method.
There may be a proper name for this somewhere out there and it may be commonly known. If so we apologize if this has been repeated.
Grids are making a comeback and are becoming quite common in the web world. If your site doesn’t follow a set structure in its layout it may seem disjointed and difficult to navigate, read or look at.
When I began my web design career I didn’t do any design work. It was all programming.
Since Marc and I were three years old we have been wearing helmets (who knows why……). Helmets fueled my passion for racing (I often wonder if my blood is in fact petrol) and even when I began racing at the age of 14 I made sure that, despite my shoddy suit and 2nd hand kart, I had to have the best looking helmet. Natrually I always used to dream of being able to design my own helmet.
For the introduction of this post I’ll replay a conversation between a client and ourselves here at OBOX HQ… It went something like this:
Set the scene, it’s just after redesign number five, we’re finalizing the site, and while navigating the now totally-unlike-version-one site the Client pipes up… “Do you not think that maybe clicking around the website is a bit tedious?”
Marc and David get a bit Motivational again and discuss an incident that one of their friends found themselves in. Don’t let people knock you down with their words, take what you can from their critism and then walk away. Getting offended is not productive.
They also mention Michael Arrington taking a break from TechCrunch and that you should be checking Gary V’s Keynotekid website.
David and Marc chat about taking your design/development company to the very next level by watching the makings of movies.
There is always a way to push the limits and those documentaries are a perfect window into top notch, professional movie making companies.