Forgive me for the geeky summer-themed title for this post. However, the sentiment of the title is true. My website company, Usable Web Solutions, LLC, is heating up with business this summer.
Some of my clients are rebuilds of existing websites, others are just looking for hosting packages, and some are looking for the total deal. That’s fine with me. I’ve been sure to give myself off a bunch of time in July and some more time in August so I can complete some of these projects. Since I started this company a few years ago the summer has always been when things start to heat up. Ha! Had to use it again.
When these projects are complete, I will be sure to add links to them on this blog so you can see the fruits of my labor.
The other big Usable Web Solutions, LLC project that I have for myself this fiscal year is to tighten up my existing contracts and make sure that, where applicable, I have subcontractor agreements in place. I’ve done a good job of marking how much time I spend on each of my clients’ sites (as well as my own) and that should come in very helpful when I do my taxes again next year.
Other than a few other administrative odds and ends that I have to attend to (such as preparing an online payment portal for my clients), the website company is coming along just as I had hoped for at this point in time! Some people often ask me why I don’t spend more time working on the website company and the truth is that I really don’t want to make the company too big. I have a small niche that I want to fill and I’m filling that niche very well.
And any time you can convert a hobby (creating websites) into a way of spending time that creates a positive cash flow, I think you’ve done something right!
I’m curious Joe. Do you hand write all of your code or are you a Dreamweaver guy?
At the moment, I rely on Dreamweaver, but I sincerely hope to drop it and move to handcoding sometime this year. I’m an HTML guy, now who has finally learned CSS in the last six months, but I would eventually like to get into PHP, ASP or ASPNET and being able to run databases. That part, I know I’m a few years from…
What’s up, Martin? I always hand write my own code. I’ve never used Dreamweaver and I have little interest in trying to learn it. In fact, I had it installed on my computer and I actually uninstalled it because I didn’t care for it.
I usually design the site in Photoshop and then dice it up and hand write all of the code from that point. I think that hand writing gives me the most control over every aspect of the site.
Dreamweaver adds extra code that you don’t need… kind of like “bloating up” your page. Makes it harder to validate later on.