Freelance Web Developer

You may be motivated to start your freelancing career after reading blogs and speaking to other freelancers. Everyone advice you to have a personal website to promote you service. In fact they tell you that websites as your identify on the internet. But what they don’t tell you is how to make your freelance website such that clients come to you. This blog guide you to build one such website.

First impression is the best impression

Home page is the first page to visit by any new clients. Since you are completely new in their world, they willing don’t want to stay more than 20 seconds there. This means you have got just 20 seconds to retain them.  You can do that by introducing yourself in just a line or two. Below is a quick example of mine.

Also note to have a good tagline for yourself that would convince your customer to stay back and browse rest of your website. If you achieve it, you have won a client – of course not an extent to get a order placed.

Today I have revamped a my blog design. The new design is attractive, mobile friendly and more informative. Cover photo of this article hosts the new design of the website.

But wait, what’s wrong with the old design ?

After using the old design for year and half I have found many drawbacks of the old design.In simple words It was not impressing the customer who have landed on my website. Below are the few things which every consultant like me must have in their website.

Have a vision: Have a vision for your website.Just having blog don’t get more customers. Vision of my website is to introduce myself & my service to my customer.

Today I have launched a brand new design for  my personal site. This new website design which you have landed on is more mobile friendly and loads fast.This is more attractive than the former one.

 

Today I got a chance to talk in one of the PHP Meet up . My presentation was about “REST API Best Practices & Implementing it in codeigniter”. Below is the presentation and few pictures of the same.

Last few days ago I got a request from a client to develop a website just like naukari.com. My first reaction for that was “yes! I can develop a job portal for you”. Then he replied “I want it exactly like a naukari.com”. So after that I requested him to give me the list of requirements. He said “I need all the features of naukari.com”. He just wanted me to clone the website! Realizing this I happen to explain him why this doesn’t work. Today I am writing a blog about the same.

Cloning a famous website will not help you to establish the business. The straight forward reason for this is that a person who wants to clone a website generally does not have a domain knowledge in which he is trying to establish the business. Want to realize this? -read the above paragraph again wearing the hat as my client. Read his replies and think of his approach to build a business.

We term such a kind of business as “me too business “.  Mostly these kinds of businesses build all the features of a famous website without knowing the reason for that. In fact one thing these people fail to understand is the big websites found today were not big from day one. They started small, studied the market, established in market, found a problem to solve, built a product/business which solves the problem and adds the business value. That’s the right path to walk on.

The other reason that makes the “me too business” to fail is their lack of understanding of problem. These kinds of businesses try to solve the same problem what already existing website without understanding the depth of the problem. Building a product is not about giving many features; it’s about solving a real-time problem. In fact the software itself is worth nothing if it doesn’t solve the problem to the fullest extent. It’s not the software makes the product, the approach taken to solve a problem does.

Today, I discovered that IRCTC is testing a new user interface. As per my observation not every request is routed to new interface, instead a random request is sent to this new interface after the user clicks on the “Find Trains” button.

At first I thought this new interface is public , however during my continued search for trains on different browser tabs I was landed on to the old interface. Hence I just took a screenshot of new interface.

To speak about new interface – it’s pretty good. Following are the few features I observed in the new interface:

Plan My Journey
The new interface includes few good enhancements.Now the auto suggestion for “To” & “From” station appears just after 1 letter is typed. Below the “Find Now” button a section appears after a click of “Find Trains” which help to filter the result by journey class – like 1A, 2A,3A,SL . Below that I  found 3 more sections like “Train Type” , “From Station” , “To Station” , for which I still wonder about the reason. May be “From Station” & “To Station” will list all the station which come between the specified stations before  search. As of now, these columns just display the specified stations before the search with a check box.

Let me start off my saying PHP Developer is not a PHP Consultant. If you have ever worked with a PHP developer before, you may have noticed few annoying things – unrealistic development promises, absence of long term commitments etc. May be you have seen a PHP developer quitting the project in between or not responding to your calls for weeks together. If you think why it is so – I would say that’s why they are called PHP Developers.

Yes, that’s a basic difference between a PHP Developer & PHP consultant. The PHP consultants are oriented towards fact & time. They speak the hard truth no matter what would be after effect – facts are facts!

Being made a point above, that is not an only reason to choose a PHP consultant over PHP developer. If you have spoken to a PHP consultant before the way they put their thoughts are much different than PHP developer.PHP developer speaks in terms of what needs to be developed , but PHP consultant speaks in terms of what needs to be achieved & how it helps the business or client. PHP consultant take the “ownership” of the project they do – let me tell you ownership mindset come by hard way.

Say you are a PHP Developer who takes up freelance projects. After few months of being in the field you always feel like you are paid less than what you deserve. If you ever felt so, then the person you have to blame is yourself. That’s because you may be having very few direct clients. Surprised how does this matter? Read on…

 

The first obvious reason is that the middle person between the client & you will take up his/her piece of cake. The left out is what you get. So that’s the very basic reason every one is known of. But let me tell you there are other reasons too.

From past few days many people asked me like how I get freelance project from the market. I explained them verbally & today I thought why let me not write about it. Many new business start ups who is looking out for freelancer had question – How to find PHP Freelancer in my city? The question has a concern hidden inside them. Actually the question was how to find trusted a PHP Freelancer online?

I had a one answer for all – Believe in freelancer’s social presence. Let me explain you the insight.

Today the Social media has grown to the extent that you can measure a person out of it? Many of my clients discovered me online thru my social media presence. Most of the clients would have gone thru my LinkedIn profile before they contact me.

The clients would have got a small impression about me before they even contact me. Believe me, that’s the truth. By this fact I don’t recommend the new freelancer to their profile with experience & projects. Please don’t do that. People are enough smart than you.

Let me introduce most promising JavaScript library for data rich apps development called Breeze.js. This isn’t one  among many many JavaScript library. I has a huge capabilities. We will explore these capabilities in this blog.

You store the data in database, query the complex data , do some manipulation on the data & like to store back the same on the database. Further you  save the data into cache for some amount of time  & sync with the database  later.  You display the data on UI & dynamically update content of the UI on data change.   Are these some internal  nature of your apps , then Breeze.js is tailor made for you.

So what all the breeze.js can do for you. Here is a small list