So I got an email today from an awesome reader of the blog. Just read…

Hi guys, just thought I would let you know about this. I recently saw someone placing my own site design in their personal portfolio as something they made and in the comments section of my blog entry on the subject someone noted that one of your designs is in there as well.

You can find the link and details on my blog entry, http://joshuabryant.com/asinne

First of all, we just want to say thanks to josh for taking the time to warn us of this INSANELY BLATANT copy of our work. It’s really cool to know that designers will actually take care of one another and not allow shady wanna-bes to steal their work without asking. It fact, it was really nice to find out from josh, simply because we think his site and work is bad ass and had not seen it before his email. I guess some good can come out of this right?

In the end though what is a designer to do? Well, it looks like someone (probably josh) sent them over some emails letting them know that stealing wasn’t cool. Now when you head over to http://inclinationstudio.com/ (the people that ripped off our work) all you get is a coming soon. So let that be a lesson to all you fakers, thieves, and con artist. Eventually we are going to find our own work and if not, another designer will. The design community knows how to watch the backs of it’s fellow members. So just do what we did. Work hard, and come up with your own ideas and skills. Your client will thank you.

thanks josh.

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!

(more…)

There are thousands of creative people in the world but it seems only a handful get their projects done. Many folks have come to me with the “I have an idea for a great website” or the “I have this great application that needs to be coded” comments but nothing ever arises from it.

In some situations. they ask for my help bringing their concept to life. However, I have found there are only so many in hours in the day to write software and taking on everyones bright ideas just isn’t feasible. In most situations, the people whom invent the ideas are quite capable of carrying it out on their own but never move forward with it.

Then there are developers that actually have an idea, build on the idea, write down some concepts and start writing the software. Months into the project they lose heart, interest or just never get it done. Most of those same developers start a new project and never tie off the ends of the first project. They repeat this behavior several dozen times.

If you never finish a project you really have gained nothing mentally positive from the experience. Sure, you may have learned some neat techniques and creative design concepts but there is no satisfaction. You really gain satisfaction by publishing “version 1.0″

Nobody may use your first release or even know it exists. But, without hitting this important milestone you can never really look back at the idea and be proud from what you learned and what you’ve accomplished. There is a high level of satisfaction for calling something “done.”

(more…)