Hey all you Freelancers !!

The word Freelancer sounds very interesting to most of us. We visualize freedom, space, enterprise, fame and sure the big motivator...money & loads of it !!! ;)
But really, is freelancing and the life of a freelancer so much attractive? Is it really so catchy?
People have many reasons and ways to favor the career of a freelancer. Job of interest, steady income, own timings, no boss over you and you could create what ever you ever wanted...
Well, this is true (rather could be made absolutely true) if one follows some basic guidelines soon [and for always] when they started on their own:
1] Work as if you were still an employee: This makes sure you don't get carried away in the freedom breeze to do what you liked and then getting back to your desk. This could prove to be a major time killing factor.Your output could get affected.
2] Dress just like you did for your office: It feels so cool to come in shorts and slippers and start working for the day.Sit easy on the sofa and chatting with a friend or tweeting and working,enjoying etc. but remember, the more comfort level you get into the more you get prone to miss out on your productive wits ! This is very true, believe me.
3] Set time lines: Give yourself limited time to complete your job. Do I need to elaborate more on this? I don't think so.. :)
4] Work Schedules: Just like point 3 above, set your "office" timings. Sure, easy working hours sound sooo comfy but you could soon find yourself working throughout the night and sleeping throughout the day and then feeling down when you woke up. This could lead to a vicious stress cycle !
5] Prioritize: Set your "to-do" list and follow it. This ensures that you got on your work schedule well on time and are heading towards productivity.
6] Keep watch on yourself !! You need to "treat" yourself as your own employee. Appreciate productivity,accomplishments and point out your shortfalls. Beware, you are more exposed when you go alone...
7] Keep yourself occupied, happy and focused: This makes sure you remain your boss :D
No matter how much we dislike our boss but they are a necessary factor making us walk on line (I am talking only about productivity right now).

Follow up and assess your performance,growth and future going solo...This is an important factor helping you stay,both: motivated and a successful Freelancer !!!

Google Foodle !

Yesterday I was with my friends on an outing and while having a really nice time on a long drive we just started getting hungry. One of my friends is a MacDonalds maniac while I prefer Pizza Hut,no wonder another friend preferred going only to Dominos.
We didn't knew the location so well and spotting MacD on the highway we stopped and got our stuff.
While having our munch someone gave the idea of having those "food outlets" maps of the places when we went out. To my surprise (and interest) another friend started telling us about the latest feature which would come really soon where your mobile phone would act as your shopping assistant !!
According to my friend, the businesses which get listed with Google come up on google searches. Now the new thing that is about to come is that the business (or your favorite retail,grocery store,food outlets) once listed would come on something like a shared platform (between Google and your mobile service company) where you could put your shopping (or anything) requirements as a reminder and your phone would not only remind you when you wanted but would also give you an entire list of the stores having the items you needed and that too those ones only which fall near your physical location (or option driven) at the time .
Now if you are on your way to the office in the morning and your wife tells you to get grocery in the evening (quite difficult to remember these things !!!),your mobile could turn out to be your savior. All you have to do is to first select your route back from office and then run (something like a search) for "grocery" and you would have all the grocery stores listed with Google with their addresses,locations,item details etc. which fall on the route you take back from office !!!.
Cool, isn't it? and I know this is in fact not a far thing. We do have google work for us when we need locations,find stores or businesses which we have to visit.

Just imagine what a simple google listing could do for your business.

Legality of your Blog.

My last writeup was on the basics on which one could frame their articles for effective results.
This time I would focus on the Google laws & the adherence or the lack of it could lead to an entire blog being banned by your favorite Search Engine.
A blog should echo your originality,freshness and your "physical" impact. This means that one should not copy material from other sites. I have come across some people who do this and they say that Google is too busy on the PR thing that they won't ever find out. I am sure that you guys too are aware of Copyscape :)
Also, in the race for revenue people end up getting so many advertisements on their blogs that it appears like an advertisement site ! Sure this makes the visitors form opinions about the content and loose interest (or in other words "when visitors loose their interest in a blog,the blog's relevance looses all its interest")
There are some blogs which place their hidden text (mainly keywords) in the same color as the blog background in small font sizes (to hide from human detection) for getting themselves as much "Keyword" satisfied as possible.
This is not a safe thing to do,Google has means and ways of getting such sites out from the crowd and then they might never include the blog in their listing. i.e. disqualification of the blog.
Keywords are good and effective on a blog but overdoing them works the opposite way.

Following the guardrails on the internet highway is an essential game or else instead of a blog inviting people,it could fast become it's creator's surprise !!!.

Articles, how important?

Articles are a very sure and easy way to help increase traffic to a site yet this part is often ignored due to the misunderstanding among many that it is a complex jargon to play with.
People forget simple SEO things and miss out completely on the "keyword" basics which if they include in their articles would surely work half way for them (if not for the entire thing).
Practice (in fact the daring to do this) makes one capable enough to write concentrated and focused articles. There is no replacement to the human touch which is completely lacking in automated article churning software doing rounds among many article writers these days.
The many jargons of SEO and Google can be easily solved by simple Google tools like Keyword tools etc.
I have come across people worrying about SERP, site hits, keyword density and then going the "machine" way by using article writing software and what not.
Definitely nothing beats a simple article better than a simpler written article !!
One must focus on not:
1) Spinning Articles
2) Generate Garbage Articles
3) Just rephrasing Articles
These practices have long become the subject of archeology and believe me no one has the time to spend reading what they know about already.

The other site is just a click away

Last Friday our creative team were having a project detail chaired by Raj, ourChief Idea Officer. During his details for our latest client he just made a comment and asked us to narrate it in our own words as to what we understood out of it. There were as many narrations of his statement as there were people attending this meeting and I thought it is better not to let it go unrecorded :)
While telling our design teamhe just paused and said "the other site is just a click away" (though this is a very known statement).
People spoke on the following points:
1)Attractiveness: If your site is not attractive enough to keep the visitor for more than 5 seconds then you have a competitor for sure who is doing better than you are !
2)Layout: If the layout is not "user friendly" and is a pain in the neck and to the eyes trying to make out what is where and how and why it is so then no one would even stay back for more than an eye wink on your site !
3)Color: An extension to the layout is the color theme you follow,don't go by your favorite inspiration and just end up copying it...just take the "basics" which make that site your favorite :)
4)Content: Yes, important and relevant,catchy,informative,concise. (do I need to say more on this, I know I don't have to, you got it already !)
5)Theory: Theory? are we having an exam out here?? Well, the question is the answer...Yes, we are having a test of our site every time we have a visitor.Combine all aspects and bind the site matter around the concept of the site.This thing surely goes way beyond the point 4 above.No book,film,advertisement,article,tv show is ever complete without a theory from it's inception to the last thing. The coding has to be on these lines and not the other way round [though I am not touching the programming part for now]
To sum up [this is boringly detailed though :D] you have to have a combination of all things.If your site is very attractive but falls out on the relevance aspect of the nature of your site or, for example, you just started selling your stock online but your product listing is faulty on the site then just imagine the impact on the customer experience out here...in real terms this means just the same old line...

"The other site is just a click away!!!"

What makes your Designs stand out !

Have you ever thought what makes our buildings so strong?
Well my asking this question doesn't imply that I am an architect of buildings but surely I am an architect of websites and find little differences in my job and an architect's job.
A colleague of mine yesterday asked me what I thought makes a good design. I pondered for a while (frankly the basic factors are many and I know a lot of my readers agree to it) and then told her about four basic factors..(a)Layout (b)typography (c) relevant designs & (d) color (yes the simplest always comes at the last)
You might wonder why I marked out only four but sincerely these are the basic factors which I think make a design make or break a site theme/message/purpose.
Now,starting with the first one, Layout is as important as having your maps prepared before you start building your house. You should be clear where you want what features,effects,images etc. (just as you would for your study,living or dining room).Use of "healthy" enough white space makes the site appear lighter and this can be best done utilizing wireframes.
Also, Logo Design goes a long way in establishing your business.Having your company/business logo at the optimum places would assist in making your logo come alive in memories of the visitors coming to your site. If needed have your logo redesigned.
These make your job a bit detailed but this comes a lot handy when you start having the features on your site. Write down as much as you can on the specifics for your details and include these in the wireframes. I mentioned white spaces,why? because they make different sections in your site "different". The visitor should know with considerable ease where he is on the site. The blocks,tables,divisions have to be "clear" for this.
Under Typography would come your selection of fonts and their styles,color etc. If you want people to make it easy going through your site then there is no way your avoiding this essential feature. Here you also have the backgrounds too to work on. Contrasts have to be just correct or else they would make your readers appear like drunk people walking along a busy highway in the night,dazed due to the traffic headlights hitting their eyes...
Now, Relevant Designs come in. I usually come across some really marvelous blogs,sites with equally impressive designs (blogs of teenagers,professionals,artists etc.) I must say I am fanatically inspired by people like them who make their sites so wonderful to keep on gazing at and admire. I love such people. Designs here includes not only placement of images but also of customized fonts with nice colors and some personalized effects like an animation of a pet of the writer (of a blog which I had visited last week) I was so much impressed with this guy's imagination.
Last (and the first too!) is the Color. NO need to have as much or as less of colors out there. Trust me,leave the job to your designer after asking them to produce their "best" color themes. Have sample themes from two and above and I bet you would certainly have an "original" for your site. Yes I stressed on original as this aspect is loosing to the copies going around these days.
I know there are many aspects interlinked and dependent on each other within the above four ones but in my opinion these are merely the startups on which the entire structures of wonderful sites exist.

The most difficult client

All of us work and work on designs day in and out for our clients & contacts for money and at times for friends (for free) :) but really we don't get a chance to come across a difficult client as ourselves when we decide to redesign our own websites.
You know that your site is your brandname and it goes a long way in declaring what you are on the web but this is not the only reason or end to the whole exercise of redesigning for yourself.
To start with,you face one single important question with an equally justified reason which made you start this redesigning task...the question being "from where" should you start doing the changes? You start recalling the time when you had all the buttons,designs,banners put there for "that" impact and reason and now are getting a bit jittery about what would be your redesigned site compared to the present one? You now tell yourself that it is time for change and you want a makeover at any cost as (you had the same site for the last two years,or someone compared your site to a rival's and pointed out some remarkable plus points in your rival's site etc.)
There might be instances of memory recall when you decide NOT to let the font styles and color conflict within the different sections of the site like they had in your current site. You might decide on changing the images section with videos features,inserting networking buttons,features and what not.
You might even think on having a Forum for yourself (though you might know that you would find it very difficult to maintain it). But you still decide on having one because "your rival has it!!"
Asking your friends would amaze you with the imaginative and simple solutions you would get and hints which surely could put your new site ahead of your competitor's if you implemented those suggestions.
You might also like to keep this under wraps and not let anyone know what you are up to.
I know some of my friends getting multiple sites made up with variations as basic as different color themes & Images (in the same layout),three or four layout styles with as many color themes and one (secretly "inspired") sample site from their competitor's !
After all the exercise and deliberations you would come out with two or three "finalists" from which you would select the best one and then would give a second look at your previous site (before changing it for the new one) just as you do while changing your car.
Finally you would feel comfortably seated in your new Virtual Office with all the smell of fresh paint and woodwork which is equally virtual.
You now happy, loving your site just as you do for your latest car :)