Freelancefolder

A Freelancer’s Guide to Cloud Hosting Versus Geo Hosting

Posted April 22, 2011 in Programming, Tools/Resources

If you’re new to freelancing or are just beginning your online business, you probably started off or are still hosting websites on a shared hosting plan. This is a type of geo hosting that basically consists of renting space on a physical web server (which provides the means of putting your website(s) securely online) that resides in a certain geographic location from a hosting company.

But have you thought about what happens when your business grows and your websites’ traffic or storage needs become too much for that shared environment?

Traditionally, when you outgrew a shared server, you only had two choices to resolve the problems, moving to a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server. But recently, the popularity of a third option, called cloud hosting, has been on the rise.

Here’s a guide to help you out with the shopping process of moving up from shared hosting.

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8 Web Development Mistakes that Make Any Site Look Bad

Posted March 7, 2011 in Programming, Web Design

Whether you’re a developer, a designer or just an entrepreneur, a professional website is nearly impossible to do business without. While most people spend endless amounts of time to get the design of the site just right, most people don’t even pay attention to what’s behind that design. Unfortunately no matter how awesome your website looks in the front-end, bad development can ruin your visitors’ experience and make them run away quicker than you can say “HTML5″.

It is worth it to pay as much for development as for the actual design itself. Here are eight web development mistakes that could be costing you business.

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8+ Stereotypes about Freelance Web Developers–Busted

Posted February 1, 2011 in Programming

Every industry has its share of stereotypes and web developers aren’t an exception. While poking fun of these stereotypes amongst ourselves is a fun pastime, it can quickly get out of hand when it’s a client or someone outside the development industry who becomes biased thanks to them.

Just like everything else, freelance web developers aren’t the same by any means. We’re so completely different from each other, even our code would come out completely different if we were all to sit down and code the same thing.

So what are some of these stereotypes? Are they helpful or harmful to web developers in general?

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What Happens When the Website You Are Working on Blows Up?

Posted January 17, 2011 in Managing Clients, Programming

It’s every developer’s nightmare. You finally get approval from the client to go live and launch the client’s website and then BOOM! Something happens and the whole site blows up.

I recently had this scenario happen. Thankfully, the site wasn’t live yet, but the client still expected me to fix the site, with no offer of extra payment, even though I wasn’t the one who blew up the site.

There’s no doubt about it. A site blow-up can be difficult to handle.

I ended up spending an entire unpaid day and a half trying to figure the issue out. I reinstalled the site and database several times, played with the settings and finally gave up and put it on my own server to test it out. Turns out, it was a server issue brought on by messing with the htaccess file in WordPress.

Fixing blown up sites is obviously not the best way to spend our work time, so I made sure to turn it into a learning experience for next time. So, what do you do if a site blows up on you?

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Which Content Management System Should You Focus On?

Posted January 11, 2011 in Design, Programming

The web is a fantastic place filled with everything anyone could ever want. The problem becomes though, is that there can be too much to choose from and we often suffer from choice paralysis–where we freeze up and are unable to choose anything at all.

Choice is not something lacking in the development world either and because of this, it’s important to choose one or two platforms to focus on otherwise you run the risk of not being good at any of them.

If you’re a front-end developer like me, it’s important to realize that it’s no longer enough to specialize in HTML and CSS.

Without some kind of CMS knowledge, you’ll find it tough to find normal PSD to HTML/CSS jobs, at least ones that pay over $80 an hour.

So the problem now becomes, which content management system should you focus on? It can be quite confusing, so let’s take a look at a few and the pros and cons of each.

[Editor's Note: the opinions expressed here are those of the author and not the entire Freelance Folder community.]

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How to Improve Your Productivity Using Agile Techniques

Posted September 10, 2010 in How-To, Programming

Improved productivity is the goal of every freelancer.

Ever since I started my one-man business, I have looked for ways to improve my productivity and get things done faster. There were a couple of methods that seemed to lead to small improvements, but overall none of them proved efficient.

That is, until I discovered agile techniques. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the ways that agile techniques can help improve a freelancer’s productivity. Specifically, I’ll look at agile methods in general and at Scrum methodology.

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Making Your Code as Beautiful as the Design Itself

Posted March 2, 2010 in Productivity, Programming

A website’s design gets all the glory. When someone visits a site, you’ll hear them talk about how awesome the design is–but, do you ever hear someone talk about how awesome the code is? Never!

Regular people can’t see code, nor do they care to see it or what it looks like. It’s precisely this reason that there’s so much ugly code in the web world today. People don’t see it so developers don’t believe that clean code is important, but it is.

It’s quite rare to find a clean coded site, even from huge companies who should have the budget to pay for a good developer. However, it’s just as important to have beautiful code as it is to have a beautiful design.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Web Development

Posted January 8, 2010 in How-To, Programming

The web development field offers a variety of languages from front-end development, like HTML, CSS and Javascript, to back-end programming, like PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. So how do you start learning how to code?

In this post, I want to offer a variety of great tips on beginning your journey to learning web code. At the end of the post, I want to share a simple site structure with you to get started in HTML and CSS.

I’ll focus on HTML and CSS in this article. HTML and CSS are the most basic web languages that everyone must learn before they can move on to another web language. Even if you plan to do all backend programming, you’ll still need to use them often.

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10 Ways To Increase Traffic By Changing Your Code

Posted December 1, 2009 in How-To, Programming

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a very complicated science. While no one knows exactly how Google ranks websites, we do have a lot of proven techniques.

Good SEO depends on several factors in your website, but when you usually think of SEO, you probably think of dealing with content and inward links. But did you know that there are several ways to improve your traffic and SEO by changing your code? Increasing traffic and rankings in code depends on three factors:

• Semantics – It’s been debated, but it seems Google gives higher rankings to validated sites, plus there’s less chance for major errors that can cause browser rendering or download issues that could turn visitors off.
• Download times – Users don’t leave your site because it’s taking 20 minutes to download-plus it’s easier for search engines to spider.
• Keywords – Just like regular SEO, it’s important to get those pertinent keywords into your code for good rankings.

Let’s take a look at how you can use all three of these to easily improve your site’s code, traffic and even your SEO rankings.

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