The upside is that there are two Ethiopian restaurants within walking distance of their offices, I’ll be working in the state of Virginia again and most of the staff heading up the redesign at PBS used to work for AOL. I have a feeling I’ll be learning a lot at this gig.

Within all my signed contracts I have a clause for non-refundable deposit, which is 30% of the project costs. I do this so if I do wireframes and concept designs and then the client changes their mind, I don’t get screwed for free work… or so I thought. I have been using Google Checkout for my payments mostly because it was free for an introductory time period. The client was none too happy when they requested the deposit back and I referred them to the signed contract. They then threatened small claims court and I said “Go ahead, we have the signed contract and I have the work I did to back it up.” When they realized that wasn’t going to get their deposit back, they initiated a dispute through Google Checkout. Google contacted me asking for my side of things so I sent a copy of the signed contract plus the wireframes and concept designs. Four months later, Google decided in favor of the client and $1000+ was withdrawn from my checking account.

It would seem to me that Google doesn’t give a rat’s ass about signed agreements or work delivered and I got screwed well and good. There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to dispute their decision and at this point my only recourse is small claims court and my blog. As I’m sure happens in most cases like this I just want to be rid of this awful client (which is why we parted ways in the first place) and be done with it. However, I will never be using Google Checkout again for online payments. As a matter of fact, I don’t know that I’ll ever accept online payments again for services if this is what I can expect for support from the payment collection provider. I’m sure it will be an inconvenience for some clients but I will not take the risk again of doing work for nothing, those days stopped for me long ago.

It would seem that while installing the Leopard OS, it does some very stringent testing on the RAM. I looked at all the specs and my Powerbook PC met them but what Apple doesn’t state on their site is that Leopard has some issues with non-OEM RAM. In other words, if you have non-Apple RAM installed on your machine, you may not be able to install Leopard. The current solution from the ‘Geniuses’ is to use another machine to install Leopard from. So the lesson here is to make sure you have some OEM RAM in case you need it to install Leopard because it’s not very forgiving during installation. Rumor has it once installed, there are no problems. Funny how that works. Unfortunately, it has left me without a work machine for two days (and counting).

I now find myself considering a back-up machine. I have this PC I’m posting from but I’ll be damned if I use it for work other than site testing. If I do decide to get a ‘back-up’ Mac, I don’t know what I’ll get. I like not having a desktop machine and all that goes with that. I like the footprint of working solely from a laptop. So I guess I find myself a second laptop that will gather dust in case an emergency comes up. Of course, I guess if I weren’t so PC-phobic, it would be cheaper to purchase software for that machine. However, typing that sentence made my skin crawl, so I don’t know how that will go over.

Suggestions? Insults? Wanna poke fun???? Oh yeah, another lesson I learned from this whole ordeal is to do more regular client file back-ups. Like, have them on my laptop and my portable HD. *Smacks forehead!*

Web Design Proposal PDF

Keep in mind that the proposal you see fits my own needs and the way I conduct business with clients. You should definitely think of this as a template to help you create your own proposal.

I suppose I’ll be going through the same process Lorissa did to have the content taken down. The dipshit is linking directly to my images and he’s hijacked my RSS Feed as well. Anyway, hat tip to Jon Norris from OnWired for the link to Copyscape, I had no idea such a service existed.

Update: The site was taken down and an apology was given. He told me it was “just for testing” though I don’t believe that for a second but hey, I’m cynical.

Since I was so taken with this, I decided to do a little pictorial tutorial of the process for all you Apple OS X Tiger holdouts. This is an image heavy post, so it may take a while to load.

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For my British friends, this post was inspired by beans on toast. For anyone else, I hope you find this useful. Cheers!

As I’ve discovered recently things sometimes slow down in the freelance world (of course I knew that before it happened but that sentence made a good segue). In my situation, I almost, almost, had to start hocking stuff to get money to make rent and car payment and I considered a “real” job briefly. I have no staid advice on how to make things pick-up but what I can offer is these two gems—save money and buy lots of peanut butter. That’s the only thing that got me through the last couple of months. I have both checking and savings accounts and never touched the money in my savings account… that is until I absolutely needed it recently. My savings account is almost all but depleted but I’m handing in my rent check tomorrow.

When There’s Nothing to Do… What Do You Do?

In the interim, I’ve developed some bad habits in my “down time.” I’ve begun watching, obsessively mind you, television, reading fan fiction of all things and not eating properly as well as completely screwing up my sleep/work schedule. This in turn has caused me to be slightly depressed, makes me not want to leave my home and when work does come in, it makes it a bit harder to get in the groove. So I’ve decided in the future when I hit slow times, I will continue to design things whether there is a need or not, just to stay “in practice” and save even more money in cases of emergency.

In hindsight I could have spent more time blogging to keep my head in the game. I could have gone to bed before daybreak and I could have gone for a walk instead of watching so much television. Oh well, you live and you learn, trial and error and all that jazz. I’m just happy that things are turning around and I didn’t have to get, gasp, a real job. How would I ever get used to dressing in something other than my pj’s to work?

My latest completed project is for WallFly Marketing, a new marketing firm. I was responsible for the front-end design, coding and Wordpress implementation as well as the logo.

My latest completed project is for NASO, a sales outsourcing company. I was responsible for the front-end design, coding and Wordpress implementation. The site is aimed to appeal to businesses and the site needed to be easily updated using Wordpress as a CMS.

I was contracted by Digiwize, Inc. for this project.

My latest completed project is for The Maxx Club, a youth club in Connecticut. I was responsible for the front-end design, coding and Wordpress implementation. The Maxx Club folks wanted something that appealed to their youth market and a site that was easily updated so I installed Wordpress as a CMS.

I was contracted by Digiwize, Inc. for this project.