All to often I hear horror stories from different people about how they got burned by a fly-by-night web company or a shady freelancer. It saddens me each time I hear these stories, so this is my advice to help you avoid a bad experience.

1. Demand to see a Business Tax Receipt (Sometimes referred to as an occupational license). Hillsborough    County requires all businesses to display a valid tax receipt per County Ordinance 95-4.

2. Get a contract signed by both parties describing work performed, and payment amount.

3. Make the check out to the business and not an individual person.

4. Don’t pay more than 50% of the total cost of your project up front.

5. Look for a portfolio with at least 15 different websites w/ legitimate business information.

6. Ask for references.

7. Ask for a client list.

I recommend this video to anyone who is interested in
e-commerce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2kOGo8R5w&feature=related

Alex A.

The jury is out regarding education but I can tell you that at the last design firm I worked at the “art director” graduated from an online university, one I hadn’t heard of before. And she even made a note to tell me that she graduated Summa Cum Laude. No Comment.

From what I have gathered in the trenches of the cubicle, as far as new technology and continuing education with 9-5 design firms. There isn’t any!! The designers and developers that work there usually knew their craft very well when they started. But they remain stagnant after assuming the position. Imagine 8 hours of irrelevant emails, meetings where the sales guy rambles forever, topped off with some dirty office politics, are you really going to be excited about learning new things related to your job? Probably not. 9-5′ers don’t learn anything new. That is until the market…oops, I mean boss demands it, and by that time they are way behind the curve!

When design shops open up they devise a system of one size fits all for e-commerce, content management, and web design. They stick with that system for years. And in the web world…those might as well be dog years because technologies rapidly evolve and die. Yet average consumers are oblivious to this. The fact is you may have a graphic designer creating your website. That may very well be O.K. Until you want that same website Search Engine Optimized and all your content is positioned in tables instead of DIV tags. I watched this go on at larger firms. Correct techniques were written off as taking to long.

The moral of the post….Research what your getting into and talk to many “web people” as you can. Who is trying to sell you and who is telling you real information? Who is relying on name recognition (e.g. Microsoft) and who is showing you functional design and code? Who will take the time to understand what you are looking for, and who will tell you that your maximum number of revisions are up?

You can enjoy a great personal experience with a seasoned freelancer or take your chances with a 9-5er.

Another way to put it…Some people prefer local restaurants, and some people prefer national chains.

Alex A.

I recently saw a guy on the side of the road holding up a sign that I thought said “Westshore Pizza”. It later turned out to be a sign for “Old West Pizza” as I later found out when I had the craving for a Stromboli. I decided support this local business owner even though I was expecting something slightly different. It turns out that there is a new strip mall that lies adjacent to the super Walmart on 60 where I live. They are slightly behind the Walmart and less visible than one may want. While I waited for my cowboy sticks to finish baking I had a conversation with another retailer located in the same shopping center as he prepared for a grand opening celebration the developer had planned for the strip mall. I encouraged him to open up a sister store offering all the same merchandise he carried in his store online. It’s an opportunity to more than double your income! You can offer all your products to a global audience without the overhead. The only real cost would be for the development of the site and your hosting package. You’re going to spend some time entering products into your store through the Admin panel. Which can be done while enjoying a cold one on the weekend. It could be possible that your online store actually keeps your business a float, or a significant piece of your income. As i know from dealing with past clients. The moral of this post. If you are a local business owner specializing in a form of retail. Now is the time to seriously consider an e-commerce site as an added source of income as we enter into a period of “turbulence”

Alex A.

I’m currently embarking on a journey to create an e-commerce website using Coldfusion 8. I think Coldfusion is one of the most underrated programing languages out there. I have recently decided to give up defending it against other languages. Well except for this post. I would say that PHP is a great language as a matter of fact this WordPress blog is running on PHP. It’s a language that I want to become decent with at some point in the future.Asp has the name recognition of Microsoft and really thats about it in my book. As far as security is concerned Hannaford Grocery stores just had their credit card data breached and they use asp.net. Usually when you hear about a company getting their data compromised it usually an asp application that was breached. Security really depends on the programmer and not the language.

Coldfusion cuts development time down drastically and anyone I have ever know that uses Coldfusion loves it. It operates on Apache servers as well as Windows servers. Asp can NOT claim that feat. The markup is actually compiled into Java before it’s executed. But Coldfusion is our little secret if I can code something in less time with fewer lines of code then that makes me a more efficient freelancer. Meaning I can spend more time on the design and the front end. There are a lot of ecommerce sites out there but very few of them look stunning.

I will post a link to my Colfusion powered ecommerce site as soon as it finished. Hopefully within a week or so.

Look out for a special introductory price too!

Alex