I’ll get the ball rolling on a positive note and share with you the perks that I’ve discovered so far.

1. You Choose Your Hours

If you aren’t doing any contract work and work from home you can basically choose which hours you are going to work. This sounds like a fairly basic perk but it has come in incredibly useful for me. Sometimes you can just pop in to town to pick up something, or make a quick visit to a client without having to worry about leaving work.

2. You Choose Where You Work

Wifi is available almost everywhere now, and what this means is that as long as the battery life on your laptop is half decent, you can work remotely from anywhere. It might be your favorite coffee shop, a nice quiet library or even the pub!

3. You Choose How to Work

There are no surprise deadlines when you are work as a freelance web designer because you set them yourself, and how you work is completely up to you. When you choose how you are going to work nobody else needs to be taken in to consideration; Hell you can even design that website in bed if you want to!

 4. You Choose Your Clients

When you work on contract you get lumped with all sorts of work that you probably don’t want to do. Fortunately, if you get offered a job as a freelancer and see no real gains in doing the work, you don’t have to accept it, its a simple as that!

5. Freelancing is More Rewarding

Contract work doesn’t bring many huge moments of reward with it, but when you get out there yourself and bag a web design or SEO job there is a real buzz and your confidence will be booming…which leads me on to my final point

6. There is more money in Freelancing

Lets be honest with ourselves for a moment, we all work for money and freelancing cuts out the middle men you find in contract work. There is no greater feeling than payday when you’ve worked hard to build a website for a client.

I’ll get around to writing about the downsides of being a freelance web designer sometime this weekend.

For example, if I want to copy a few scripts to make a jQuery plugin work I will look at the page source and copy/paste that way.

One annoying thing with Firefox is that once you start clicking links in the source code there is no way of going ‘back’. The navigation is stripped.

A simple solution to this problem is to hit the backspace button on your keyboard.

Saved me a lot of headaches when I figured this out.

Alex of Stand Out Pr wanted a chic and clean looking website that he could easily update himself, so I built the design and then integrated it in to WordPress.

If you would like to see the website you can click here.

Any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

More details will follow in the portfolio section of my website.

I think I learned that the success to working ‘on the move’ is to be prepared and make sure you pack everything you need in order to work efficiently and in a variety of alien environments.

As I was taking quite a bit down for the wedding anyway I wanted to make sure my laptop bag was light.

Here’s what I made sure I packed:

Laptop – Obviously essential
Charger – Essential
Headphones – Ideal for making your own quiet time.
iPhone – Music and contacting people

These four things seemed to be enough to keep my happily coding HTML and CSS, especially the headphones/music.

Do you freelance on the move? Leave a comment and let me know the essentials that you pack!

1. Firstly you will need to design and build your template as a static HTML page and make sure that all your images are hosted somewhere on the internet that can be referenced by any computer. To explain a little further, you must have them stored somewhere such as http://www.yoursite.com/email1/image.jpg so that when they are sent out to your customer or client they will see the images. Full file-paths are a must for all images.

2. Make sure you use HTML tables (yes it pains me to say that) for your design as this is supported by all major E-mail clients and will ensure that it is seen properly by as many people as possible.

3. Once you are happy with your build and have the images on live web space, view the static page in your browser and then select all – Cmd/Ctrl + A and copy.

4. Finally paste your clipboard in to a new E-mail and you should see your E-mail rendered in there perfectly.

Go ahead and give it a go!

I’m extremely paranoid about the information I share and any way of controlling this is a huge bonus for me. If you feel the same way you may like this little tip.

Now that people can ‘subscribe’ to your updates it opens up your content to be available to anyone who wants to subscribe. I’ve noticed recently that people who have requested me as a friend are automatically made subscribers and can see the updates that I make. I don’t like this at all!

There is a very simple way of stopping this which I discovered today. Browse to your timeline and you’ll see a few boxes on the right hand side such as ‘likes’ ect.

Next to this is a plus symbol or an arrow suggesting there are more options. Click that and you’ll then see the option ‘subscriptions’.

Click on that and you will probably see a few people that have tried to friend you and as a consequence become a ‘subscriber’. Next click the edit tab at the top right and there you will have the option to stop your updates being public.

Great tip if you like having full control over who your content is going to!

You will receive a private message saying something along the lines of “Hi. some person is saying bad things about you here” followed with a link. I actually got an E-mail of the private message and followed the link through that.

When you click the link you are taken to a fake Twitter log-in page. The design/coding is exactly the same so you will think you are simply logging in to Twitter. It is NOT the Twitter website. If you want any clarification check the URL too. I actually noticed this particular scam was using some sort of play on twitter.com.  I think it may have been tvvitter.com which I think is actually pretty smart.

On this fake log-in page there will be the option of entering your username and password. Do not enter them. This will basically email the spammer directly with your account details and you will start automatically sending out the “Hi. some person is saying bad things about you here” messages to all your followers…ouch!

After a few blushes of my own, the way to solve it seemed to be to firstly change my password (an obvious start) and then to simply browse to the ‘messages’ area of Twitter and delete all the messages the spammer had sent out (pretty sure this was automatic). This will help prevent the virus from spreading as others will then not be tempted to click through. Its also good for your brand or business to solve these problems as it may have a detrimental effect on your image.

If you receive any of these messages in the future simply ignore or delete them where possible.

I hope this is a useful warning to twitterholics out there! You can follow me @tomdurkin.

*The act of stealing passwords or data by convincing someone they are on another website.

If you run Facebook pages and want to design your own cover photo you will need the dimensions.

They are as follows:

850px (Width)
315px (height)

Good luck with your design and please leave a comment to your page if you have uploaded your own!

According to Facebook this new feature shows interactions with the Page over the last 7 days – anything from likes, to comments on wall posts to photo uploads.

I find this an interesting one as I feel it could have a number of effects on the way in which people start to use Pages and make judgements. If no-one is currently talking about a Page, will people be inclined to ‘like’ it?

On the flip side of the coin could this could encourage administrators to start over-sharing to try and push figures?

If you have any opinions on the new feature, please leave a comment below and we can start a discussion!