How I learned to love invoicing

Posted in Freelancing on 16 November 2011 | Comments

A few months ago I read Grace Smith’s article 8 Services That Power My Business where the online invoicing application Curdbee was described. I took Curdbee for a test drive and I’ve been using it for the last few months. I don’t use every single feature but I think it’s a great invoicing or billing app for any freelancer or small business.

CurdBee is a simple web application that makes billing a breeze. Use it to send estimates and invoices, track time and expenses, and accept online payments. Say goodbye to paperwork!

Curdbee is an app that allows you to manage your invoices and clients via a web interface. It’s not a full-blown accounting app but it has made invoicing a much more enjoyable and quicker task for me. Here’s why I like it…

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An evening out with Points Brighton

Posted in Freelancing Web development on 17 October 2011 | Comments

I’ve been to a few web conferences over the last 3-4 years and they’re great. You get to see some famous web folks and hear their presentations in large venues and meet with other designers and developers. At the same time, with conferences averaging 500 or more attendees, it’s sometimes easy to feel a little ‘lost’ at such events. For that reason, I also like to attend some informal, more grassroots-style, local events as well. Last Thursday evening, I went to the first Points Brighton event and here’s my short review of the meeting.

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Comments on this blog

Posted in Freelancing Personal on 28 June 2011 | Comments [2]

I try and operate a sensible comments moderation policy on this blog but I see a lot of blogs that do not do this and that have a free-for-all comments policy (it seems). I think that approach devalues comments especially on high traffic/high visibility sites. If I was in charge of those sites, I would have tougher moderation on comments. Here’s what I do here.

• Comments that don’t add value don’t get published. This means that comments that simply say “Nice blog, I appreciate your posts” will not get published. Whilst it may be nice to hear these sentiments about your blog, I’m never sure how genuine they are since many such comments are seemingly made just for the sake of getting a commenter’s website linked (even though the links have rel = "nofollow").
• Comments that do not provide the commenter’s real name don’t get published. Any comments from “web design los angeles” or similar won’t see the light of day. This is some misguided attempt to get search engine credit via link keywords (it’s misguided because of rel = "nofollow") but if you cannot put your real name on a comment, well….
• Comments should say something about the blog post, not just your personal site that you want to promote.

This is a perfectly sensible policy I think. Please add your own thoughts in the comments!

It's been a funny old year

Posted in Freelancing News on 14 October 2010 | Comments

Earlier in the year, I found myself twiddling my thumbs on a few occasions when freelance web design work seemed to be very slow. Of course, I was actually doing other things, trying to generate new business, working on personal projects etc, so I wasn’t exactly idle. Nevertheless, it was a quiet period between spring and summer.

Since then, I’ve been so busy that it’s felt like my feet haven’t touched the floor on a few occasions. I think this is what they call the Feast or Famine cycle (see also How to Avoid Feast or Famine Cycle). This has made it a lot more difficult to keep publishing articles here but I plan to rectify that in the next few months with some smaller ‘tips and tricks’ posts. Hope you like ‘em.

What I did in my summer holidays: One of the personal sites I started during my quiet time was Clive Goes Cycling where I have been publishing cycling-related articles. For this, I’ve concentrated on the content so the design is a WordPress theme by StudioPress. Hat tip to them for the clean design!

Five advantages of coworking for freelancers

Posted in Freelancing on 11 January 2010 | Comments [4]

Last year I tried out coworking at Lewes Werks on a couple of occasions and, even though I did not do this as often as I would have liked, I plan to do more of this in 2010. I have been thinking about this for a few days so I thought I would write down a few of the advantages of coworking (as I see it, from a newbie’s perspective).

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