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Another great thing about being a freelancer is the number and diversity of clients you can have. By introducing them to each other, you are creating valuable connections that will likely result in more work for you. If you can help your clients be successful, it’s almost a sure bet that you will benefit, too.
Here are 5 ways to introduce clients to each other:
Drink More – Ok, maybe not alcohol, but schedule a coffee meeting between two or three clients that share a similar industry (but not direct competitors). Introduce them to each other, and see how the conversation goes.
Eat More – Host a BBQ and invite a few of the clients that you enjoy working with. Don’t have a place to have a BBQ? Plan a picnic in a local park or at the beach. It doesn’t have to be a large expense, just tell them that you’ve reserved a spot, and they are welcome to bring their own picnic lunch and have a relaxing day.
Play More – If you share an interest in sports, invite your clients to a game. If you’re like me and don’t have the sports gene, host a LAN party or xbox tournament.
Write More – Create a newsletter or email to share amongst your clients. If you have a regular newsletter, create a “featured client” section. Send regular updates when new clients sign up. If your clients think you’re busy and successful, they’re more inclined to recommend you to others and keep work coming your way.
Give More – If you like to volunteer, invite your clients to join you. Community gardens, local shelters, and local or national associations can use an extra set of hands, even if it’s just one day at a time.
As the host, it’s your responsibility to set the tone for these meetings. Find the balance of professional and casual that works for you, and then take steps to find the people that share your values.
Good luck, and have fun!
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The Dominion WordPress theme has been updated to version 1.1
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its a multi social plugin thats is used to tweet via your site
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The Reaction WordPress theme has been updated to version 1.3
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Freelancing can get quite lonely and you may feel rather disconnected from the outside world. While many advocate working in an environment filled with others (such as your local Starbucks), the fact remains that you just don’t get the same benefits of being able to bounce ideas off of colleagues. While this may seem an unfortunate side effect of going solo, I have the mindset that working independently doesn’t mean that the array of community focused efforts online can’t benefit you.
Freelance Isn’t Loneliness
Being a freelancer means being in charge of your destiny, it doesn’t mean that you need to become a caveman in some contact free environment. Whether we are emailing, tweeting, reading the latest Freelance Switch article or something entirely different, it’s the way we choose to communicate that dictates how we run our businesses and keep our knowledge current. Participating in social events at our own choice can increase our sense of independence whilst maintaining useful relationships.
The loneliness we suffer is often caused by our own lack of willingness to spend time outside the projects we work on for clients, effectively leaving us as drones of our own productivity. While the idea of putting aside an hour a day to cultivating yourself socially may seem like wasting time, the fruits of your labor make themselves apparent as you’re not only helping others better themselves but you gain meaningful personal and business relationships that may well help you in the future.
Business Networking Sources
Firstly we should pay close attention to the places where social interaction can occur that may enrich ourselves and our businesses. The list below outlines just a few of the potential networking opportunities that could benefit you over time:
- Blogging: Passing on your own knowledge or contributing useful comments.
- Forums: Showcasing your skills, helping others, getting support and more.
- Conferences: Word of mouth, chatting with experts and learning new skills.
- Social Networks: Gaining support, friends and followers with links or content.
- Side Projects: Money earners, extra-curricular activities or contributory work.
- Mentoring: Potentially gaining potential employees or job opportunities.
- Meet-ups: Getting like-minded people together to interact and gain leads.
- Skill-swaps: Offering services for others in return (bi-directional outsourcing).
Each of these sources has their own pros and cons so it’s worth weighing up the cost vs benefit ratio before undertaking a specific method of socializing. It’s also worth highlighting that it depends on the amount of time, effort and energy you put into each that will determine what kind of response you get. Not every solution will be suitable for every kind of person but finding something that works for you (over the long term) may undoubtedly help you escape the trappings of freelance isolation.
Recouping Your Investment
So what are the benefits of participating in communities and why should you spend time taking part in such a convention, well amongst the many benefits, the below should seem somewhat tempting, even to an individual with little free time:
- Giving back: You should get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping others.
- Contacts: You may gain friends or colleagues that work in similar fields.
- Advertisements: Potential opportunities to highlight your sites and projects.
- Potential leads: You may be approached to undertake their paying projects.
- Free assistance: You can gain useful assistance with your own questions.
- Resume boost: Showing community spirit gives your resume a nice edge.
- Education: You can learn plenty by helping or chatting about subjects.
- Social interaction: You will make friends and become less socially excluded.
- Reputation: Helping others and showcasing your talent boosts credibility.
- Experience: You gain communication skills which may help you gain clients.
- Job prospects: Regular contributors may be offered full time (paying) jobs.
As a regular contributor to a well known web design forum, I have myself benefitted from several of the above benefits which appeared entirely as a lovely consequence of my attempts to simply gain a few extra friends in order to stave off the loneliness of working from home on a daily basis. So many people get so much out of contributing to communities as a whole that it often surprises me that the vast majority of working professionals still haven’t considered the importance networking can have.
Set Yourself Networking Goals
As you read this article, the benefits for business networking should become quite obvious, and the ideal response would be for more of those individuals who stay in the background, simply reading about what others are contributing to get involved themselves. Perhaps you might be shy or have little in the way of free time, but being a freelancer shouldn’t hold you back. It’s important as a solo practitioner to cultivate yourself in the community if for no other reason than to establish yourself.
Why not set yourself aside an amount of time over the coming year by establishing some networking goals you wish to accomplish. It could be anything from setting up a blog to build up a user base to spending more time cultivating a crowd in Twitter. Whatever method you choose, you should place an emphasis on making the communication work in both ways (not just to advertise your products and services). Who knows how such interaction could improve your business and life in the future?
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Last week we were ask some questions about our new Warp 5.5 theme framework. This was a part of the research done by Team EaSE for their Joomla! Template Tools Part Three article which is published in the latest Joomla! community magazine issue. We don’t want to hold back this interview so everybody can enjoy reading! Here we go:
Why is a framework needed for template development after all?
Each time when you are developing a template you usually deal with the same things, for example you use a certain folder structure to organize your PHP, CSS and Javascript files or you rely on features like layouts, compression and caching. And because you dont want start from scratch coding all these features all over again and again, you better use a framework to provide you with a structure how to organize your template files and also a rich toolset to solve your common problems. That way you take your time and focus on the more important individual parts of your template design.
Is your template based on a third party layout system, e.g. one of the grid systems out there?
In our current Warp Framework version 5.5 we do not use a third party layout system. The CSS layout we use, is a composition of all the best-practices we learned about in last years developing templates. Typically our layout system evolves over time and we update it to match the latest web standards and capabilities of modern browsers.
Is your template based on page elements regarding usability and SEO?
Yes, we built in SEO features to improve the overall website search-engine friendliness. First all our template mark up validates to current web standards to provide a clean HTML output with no bloated code. Also we use graceful-degradation for the template Javascript effects, so if your browser has its Javascript support disabled you are still able to navigate through the website, because the dropdown menu will be working with CSS hovers. Further when using a 3-column-layout we order the websites HTML output in a way that the main component output will always be first followed by the left and right column. That way the your websites main content gains importance compared with left or right column.
How does your framework differ from those of your competitors?
When developing the Warp 5.5 theme framework we wanted it to be as modular, flexible and extendible as possible. We also looked at other template frameworks but we did not found anything that meet our expectations. So we started to design the new framework in a way that every tool or helper as we call them in Warp, is a modular component doing a single task. Like the good’ old unix philosophy: “Write programs that do one thing and do it well.” Also we wanted a clean separation between the individual template and the framework. So we extracted the framework from the template, and now the new Warp framework is placed in a separate directory. Applying updates or patches to the framework is easily done now, because all the generic framework source code can be updated independently from the individual template code.
Which products are currently in production release utilizing this framework?
We recently updated all our YOOtheme templates starting from 2009 to use the Warp 5.5 framework, which are 20 Joomla! templates in total.
Can you tell us a little about the team who helped develop it?
Developing the Warp framework involved our whole team at YOOtheme with each one focusing on different aspects of the framework. Basically each team member brings in the in-depth knowledge of a subject like HTML, CSS or Javascript. Bringing all these creative minds together made it possible to build the theme framework like Warp.
What are the obstacles facing novice users of a framework? How should they prepare for a project which uses one?
In general its really easy to install an YOOtheme template which uses the Warp framework because it uses the normal Joomla! extension installer. And within templates settings you can also change the templates options and choose form the preset styles which are included. This is everything pretty easy for also the novice user to get started. Further we have provide documentation page which provides all the answers to common questions for beginners.
Are there users whom, in your opinion, should not use a framework for their Joomla project? Why or why not?
We think, its recommended to use a framework for your template development. Basically the framework and its toolset provides a solid foundation which you can build upon, also if you don’t use every feature framework has to offer. Even if you design basic template for a micro-site you can benefit from framework features like a layout which is cross-browser compatible by default. Once you have understand how to use the framework you will save some time to built a template for your next website.
Is there any update functionality built into the framework? Either an “click here to update” or a latest version notification?
At the moment we are working on this update notification feature and we plan on releasing it with our usual Warp framework updates in the next weeks.
What is the future for frameworks? How will you develop yours through future iterations?
As the web standards like HTML and CSS evolve, our Warp framework will progress too. We constantly look through the web for new stuff and innovation regarding frameworks and template design. If we learn about a new feature we will evaluate it and extend our framework to implement it. Right now we have a lot of new ideas we want to add to our framework over the next months. You can follow all our announcements of framework updates on our YOOtheme blog or through our twitter tweets.
We hope you enjoyed reading. More update on Warp comming soon!
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Vector – Flower Decoration Background by DragonArt
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