As the new year is just around the corner, some of you might resolve to take a step forward into becoming a freelancer. With the way the economy has been, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the freelancer ranks grow in the next few months. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Build an emergency fund. This not only puts you at ease, it allows creativity to flow. What’s more, you won’t come across desperate to clients. Speaking from past personal experience, which includes both being dirt poor starving and comfortable with some savings, you want to live in the latter situation. (Not meaning to sound facetious.)

While I did manage to write 60 short stories and 900 pages of one computer programming book while I was freshly out of work for the first six months of 2002, as soon as my funds dwindled and I had to borrow money from family, I found it increasingly harder to write anything. (Of course, it didn’t help having to do 10-12 hour shifts of physical labor at crappy wages.)

2. Set a suitable work rate. Actually, set more than one rate, depending on the services you’re offering. You do not necessarily have to set a lower rate than others just because you’re a new freelancer. When deciding on your freelance rates – whether hourly or by the project, you should use a number of factors: your costs, desired profit, your skills and experience, your client, market demand and any others that are relevant to your niche(s).

3. Utilize the Web to the fullest. Most freelancers these days are “web workers,” but not all of them take advantage of the bounty available online. One benefit of running a freelancing business online is that you can bootstrap it with a blog/ website and social media sites for promotion. There’s also an incredible amount of free software for your operations, invoicing, managing finances, brainstorming (mind mapping) and more.

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Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it’s not, but if it’s related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine’s will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine… say Google… and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail’s from people requesting links because they don’t see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don’t just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn’t look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it’s page rank wouldn’t increase even though Google’s page rank is 10, it’s rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.

Sarfraz Shoukat – Website Designer Driven by Creativity
Building websites to increase sales, and build web presence
Did you start your business to create a website? or to run
your business? With competitive pricing and your project
delivered on time and on budget asorda.com may be the
web design firm for you!

Silverlight, which is used in more websites everyday, has several beautiful free controls, components & tools that will help you develop websites faster & better.

They are not very easy to find as they are hidden inside the blogs of Silverlight developers or .NET products websites & there are still not so many resources where you can read about Silverlight.

WebResourcesDepot have collected these free Silverlight controls, components & tools to help making your websites brighter.

GOA WinForms

Use the standard System.Windows.Form .NET library for both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. It allows .NET developers to write standard WinForms applications that will run on these two RIA platforms.

AgDataGrid Suite – Free Silverlight Grid Control

This free grid control has data grouping, data sorting, row editing, multi-row selection features & many more.

It is a feature-rich & very professional grid solution.

Visifire – Silverlight Charts

Visifire (see WRD post) is one of the most powerful & well-documented open source chart solution that can be found in the net.

It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. Animated 2D-3D column charts, bar charts, pie charts & more can be created with it.

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Silverlight Examples With Source By Vectorform

The examples below are produced by Vectorform and all of them can be reached from here. You can find demos for each of them & download the source codes.

Image Carousel

A Silverlight image carousel which rotates when clicked on left or right and displays the big image of the thumbnail clicked.

Silverlight Video Player

This video player has very simple controls like the play/pause button, sound & the process. It can display full-size videos & can scale to the browser size.

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HTML-Ipsum is a website presenting “Lorem Ipsum” text in HTML format.

It can also provide Mac-friendly outputs with:

• Coda clips
• Textmate bundles
• Menu bar app.

Several types of content is provided like:

• Long-medium paragraph, one sentence
• Unordered list – short/long items
• Ordered list – short/long items
• And a combination (with extras).

One feature that would be great is the possibility to switching to the “design-view” (although presenting the HTML is the main aim).

Bad Usability Calendar is a calendar displaying “user interface design tips” with a sense of humor.

It has examples of exaggerated use of fancy Web 2.0 design, cover flow, personalization, pull-down menus and more…

Examples from the tips:

• Don’t require login if you don’t have to
• Offer personalization where it adds value

It is presented in multiple languages, various sizes & PDF format.

EasyDiagram.NET is an open source ASP.NET diagram control.

Using AJAX, EasyDiagram.NET is very fast yet simple enough even for the beginners.

Some features of this free ASP.NET diagram control:

• Drag’n drop support
• Direct-draw and orthogonal modes
• Easy node adding
• Customizable lines & nodes
• Ability to react node clicks (via Ajax)

EasyDiagram.NET is definitely an amazing & professional-level control that is a must-have for every ASP.NET developer.

The Site: http://www.easydiagram.net/
Demonstration: http://www.easydiagram.net/newversion/index.htm

A very nice flash animations, good color scheme and the very important “the simplicity of the animations”, in the first look it gives a dam slow look but when you get in, you will be happy to browse through.

Website: http://www.creaktif.com

A formidable idea of the designer Jeong-Sun Park with this bulb car-fed in the shape of handle of door. Indeed, the object diffuses light in order to be better found there in the corridors. Examples in the continuation.

Ferdinand.Slider is a Prototype extension for creating simple image slideshows.

It uses a JSON file at any location as the data source which makes it possible to integrate with Flickr or similar services easily.

The extension has several options to set:

• duration of effects
• duration of image transition
• opacity
• background
• prev-next buttons & more.

It is also possible to add more features (like a menu) to the slider as it can be controlled from outside with commands like slider.Next(), slider.Prev().

Requirements: PrototypeJS 1.6.0.3+ & Scriptaculous 1.8.2+
Compatibility: All Major Browsers (except IE7)
Website: http://ferdinand.rs/javascript/ferdinandslider