We see this a lot as a design and Development firm. A client comes in and says, “I love what you did for Client A, and I want you to do the same for me!” The thing that they never seem to mention is how their budget is around $500 to $1000 dollars and the site you built Client A took you almost 2 months of work to complete. So that $1000 of money wont even get you past the log-in script let alone the entire site build. While this really doesn’t sound like a huge issue, in fact it creates a lot of “what if” time for developers where we are earning nothing and booking nothing as well.

For instance. If we receive 10 requests for proposals (RFP) in a week without an idea of budget, that means we must spend an hour or more on each RFP in order to build a quote without knowing if that person can even afford the service they want from us. We are then forced to tell other potential clients to wait because we wont be sure which clients will pan out once we hand back those RFP as quotes to the client. So the question is, what is a company supposed to do? If you’re spending 10+ hours a week on the RFP alone, how can you weed through the clients that are better suited for out of the box low budget scripts? I’m turning to the readers out there for some help.

As a second question, why is it that most clients assume web development in general is cheap? Since when did spending months on a project become something that should cost $500? Especially when that developer is living right here in the US and is available for direct conference calls daily. Has the overseas market diluted our industry to the point that clients assume the least cost first? Discuss…

Many of us would love to build a precense on the Internet. But, so many of us have never written code, never drew graphics or understand what a “CMS” is all about.

The biggest issue, can we keep up with it? Let’s say you want to get into blogging but you don’t want to pay $15.00 to $120.00 bucks a month on a service provider. You want to practice for awhile and see if you can keep up with daily blogging and see if ad revenue can be accomplished by your blogging.

You might be a good blogger, the best, but you’ll never know until you try. The easiest way into the “industry,” if that’s what you want to call it, is to open a free blog at a place like blogspot.com or wordpress.com.

You can setup a blog in under 5-minutes and start testing the waters. Heck, you can even insert ads into some of the free ones (i.e. blogspot.com since its run by google) and see if you can make any money blogging!

Now, let’s not pretend you’ll be able to quit your job being a blogger. However, if you’re attitude and writing style bring in the readers you could possibly afford to host your site with a real provider and allow ad revenue to cover your hosting expenses. But how will you know?

You have to try. Don’t talk about it–do it. You’ll never know until you try.

As a software developer I’m constantly challenged with avoiding annoying spammers. I easily spend 30% of my time working against people that serve no purpose but to bother me. The challenge isn’t simply blocking bots and spammers on development projects, it’s balancing the blockage with the loss of real users.

A good test case, the techdiversions.com mailing list. The concept is simple, a side-panel area where visitors can sign up for our mailing list to receive industry news, video game promotions and game release dates. The mailing list, from a business perspective, keeps users remembering who you are so they come back next time to buy from you and not your competition.

Enter the spam bot. This little bot comes along each day and causes endless headaches for my wife, the store owner, when she wants to manage her mailing list and user-base. This bot, for whatever reason, signs up for the mailing list with bogus e-mail addresses five times a day with ten new sign-ups each vist. Thats around 50 new sign-ups a day!

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