FocusMinded.com

Either I was bookmark crazy this week, or it was a week of some very bookmarkable content. I give you bookmarks this week covering SEO, colour, email skills, dotted lines, WordPress, website redirection, making money, and redundancy. If you’ve found something to be bookmarkable send it to me or comment it below.

• Leo Babauta guest contributes 10 Essential Email Skills for Any Freelancer on Freelance Switch. These 10 skills or ‘tips’ will greatly increase your email efficiency.
• Colour Lovers published 32+ Common Color Names for Easy Reference, a super nice visual display for picking common colors. Especially when a client wants something in Crimson, Coral, Salmon, or even Puce.
• One thing many web designers stumble with today is CSS Redundancy. Using selectors that are not being called by your HTML. Let’s face it, sometimes we remove things out of the HTML and forget to clear that information out of the CSS. CSS Redundancy Checker to the rescue!
• Redirecting Traffic from one URL to another using .htaccess from Bookmark Bliss is an excellent resource to have. If you’ve ever switched sites, domain names, file locations, or permalinks (WordPress) then you have likely needed this but didn’t have a quick reference handy. This nice little gem is an easy to understand and concise how-to redirect your potential 404 traffic with a search engine safe 301 redirection.
• Dosh Dosh as always provides some valuable money making advice. This entry is no exception. He writes that Thinking Like an Entrepreneur Will Help You Make Money.
• It seems that I am starting to use WordPress for more of my clients for control and ease. I am quite surprised I’ve never tried to Customize the WordPress Login Screen. Thank you Binary Moon.
• If you do not know all there is to know about search engine optimization, then A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon by SEOmoz is just what you need.
• Since I use Photoshop to mockup web designs for my clients. This last bookmarkable is how to Make a Dotted Line in Photoshop presented by BittBox.

Who

Jonathan Snook of Snook.ca is the first freelancer to be interviewed by Focus Minded for Freelancer Friday. He maintains a very popular blog and is involved in many personal projects. He is also 1/4 of Sidebar Creative, a collective of 4 very talented individuals.

Background

I have the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan on a fairly regular basis, usually to bug him for his opinion on a new design. However, I’ve been known to ask some questions about his freelancing business. These questions happen to strike the idea of interviewing those more successful than I to gain a greater insight into the business of web design and development. I have truly learned a lot from Jonathan and I hope you’ll enjoy and learn from his answers.
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We have all been there, a business card is thrust your way. What most of us do is take the card, stuff it in our pocket and then toss it when we get home. FORGET that kind of thinking right now, you just threw away a potential opportunity!

A seldom utilized networking technique is the art of business card networking. This is the process of exchanging business cards with others. Sounds simple, right? So why did you just throw away that business card? If you get in the habit of following these 4 steps, then you’ll be a master networker. No college degree required and no special linguistic skills needed.

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Three weeks ago I celebrated my first wedding anniversary and we had a wonderful celebratory night out. It was, however, a really rough year for us. We’ve commented to several people, how we are just grateful to be alive!

Last year I made the choice to go full time into website design and suffered all year because of that decision. You see, I am not really that good of a designer. My strong suit is programming, but I lack patience, in fact I am more of a business man and a visionary than a website designer or developer. Yet, I learned some very important lessons along the way and I want to share them with you.

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Unbelievable that another week has gone by already. Nevertheless I have a nice list of bookmarkable links for you. If you’ve found something to be bookmarkable send it to me or comment it below.

• Daily Blog Tips presents How to Find Short Domain Names.
• Ronald Huereca of Devlounge is part of creating a very sweet plugin, WordPress Automatic Update. It is still a very young project, but could prove to be the best thing ever for WordPress CMS users.
• Scott Gledhill writes about Corporate Web Standards on Digital Web Magazine. A fairy tale no longer, give this article a read.
• Sarah Pacopac of BlueJar.com writes a contest entry called The 3 P’s for Creating a Successful Website.
• Raj Dash of Bootstrapper answers How Entrepreneurs Brainstorm with a list of 7 of the common methods.