WooThemes Launches - Wordpress Theme Club with excellent premium themes!

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Out friends from PremiumNewsTheme.com have rebranded themselves and relaunched today as WooThemes! The site and service that they have put together, a wordpress theme club, is an absolutely outstanding idea and I encourage you to check it out.

A collaborative effort by Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks, I can only imagine what kind of success WooThemes is going to be. With some already great looking themes designed and out there, it is hard to think that they will be able to out do themselves and create something even better.

The concept of WooThemes is great also - you sign up and pay for three or six months membership and get access to any and all themes that are already available and then any that launch during your time as a member. Sounds good doesn’t it? The only better part is the reasonable price! A single user subscription will get you access to over 10 themes right away and more on the way, for only $150.00! Each theme was previously selling at $50+, so this is a great deal for you.

I sent a twitter out to @adii to find out what the hardest part of setting up and launching WooThemes was an his simple reply was “woothemes = blood, sweat, and tears” If you are looking for an indepth follow up on the process of launching WooThemes, keep an eye out on Adii’s site.

Congrats goes out to the guys for a successful launch today!

ProfessionalGFX Website Development Business Updates

Wrapping up projects seems to be the theme with my website design clients lately. I have been very close to finishing up two project this week and then there is an “oh one more thing” email…yet it is never just one more thing. So, knowing when to say “OK, enough is enough. No more revisions can be done at this point” is about where I am at. This is a hard spot to determine what is too much or too little but you need to determine that point, otherwise your clients will walk all over you.

So, right now, I am working on things for two clients. I am looking to wrap them up in the next week to two weeks and get paid. If I can do this, I will be happy! That will also allow for me to start slowly searching for new clients to work with and also try to get referrals from my current clients.

With that all being said, I have been looking up information on outsourcing design work to assistants in India, Canada, and other countries to free up my time with future clients. I have also been recommended the main different services out there that will convert your PSD files to valid code such as HTML, CSS, etc. This may be a good way to go too! I have also been talking with other bloggers and web developers out there such as Ellis Benus who has started using similar services and has had good results.

Besides, this, there is not a whole lot going on at this side of things. I just have not had as much time to focus on this venture as I would like because I know it is the one that can generate the most income for me in the least amount of time. My goal is reach $10,000 worth of income by the new year through web design related tasks (including designing, updating, hosting, etc). To reach this goal would prove the viability of the venture and also the opportunity to get out of the rat race and be on my own.

Met with an accountant yesterday; here are some of my thoughts!

Sunday I blogged that I was going to be meeting with an accountant and listed a few questions that I was going to ask him to dive deeper into the realms of setting up a business entity, such as an LLC or a C corp. The basis for the meeting was because with the amount of money that I had been bringing in recently from ebay and my website development business, there was some money that was not being reported as income and instead was just being deposited and not being accounted for. So there were some worries about the possibility of getting audited or having different problems with paying state taxes.

So, I wanted to learn more about my options, discuss my ventures, and see what may be the best idea for me as an entrepreneur. Now, before I go any further, I want to STRESS that this is advice that was given to ME and is specific to my case. That being said, it is always best to get your own advice from a certified professional such as an accountant or lawyer or both! So, with that, I am going to just talk about some of my different options, the answers to some of the questions that I asked, and what the future holds for how I do business. Read more »

ProfessionalGFX Secures New Website Design Client in Ellicott City, MD

ProfessionalGFX Secures New Website Design Client in Ellicott City, MD

I am happy to announce that my web design business, ProfessionalGFX, has secured a new client in the Ellicott City, MD area. This is a great accomplishment for ProfessionalGFX because this is the first time that I have heard from a potential client that they found my website through the search engines. And the other good news is that apparently out of all the companies that he contacted, I was the quickest to respond – and yet it took me two days to get back to him. So, it sounds like to me, even though there are other companies and businesses in the immediate area that are offering the same services as I, I seem to have the upper hand on them just by being able to respond semi quickly.

The scope of services are going to be pretty basic by outfitting the current website with a completely new design, a couple more pages, and some new images. I will also work in some keywords and a few other SEO strategies. My client is in the industrial chemical cleaning business, so most of his clients are from referrals and not finding him directly on the internet. The business is very face to face as far as interaction goes, so displaying basic information about the business, the industry, and his niches will be enough to get someone interested in picking up the phone – rather than displaying a full line of products or having the opportunity to purchase online.

I am waiting to get the contract and down payment from the client and we should be getting started next week. With luck, I will be able to wrap everything up in the middle of June.

This new client will definitely be a boost to my new method of savings that I wrote about the other day!

As we go along with the process more and move towards wrapping it up, I will be posting more about what different tactics are implemented to help his business out.

If you are looking for a low cost and effective web design service in the Ellicott City, MD, Baltimore, MD or Washington D.C. area, feel free to get in touch with me to discuss your project!

Time to change your time management strategy?

After reading the chapter in The Four Hour Work Week about managing your time more effectively, I have decided to implement a couple of the different tactics to see if I can make my use of time more efficient and effective as opposed to just wasting time on seemingly unimportant tasks.

One of the points that Tim Ferris makes in The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW) is that if you stopped doing things during your working hours that were unimportant or that had no real effect on your actual work, you would therefore be able to get your actual work done a lot quicker and be able to take the rest of that time off – the idea being that you could cut your work load of a normal day to by a few hours a day and get the same amount of work done if not more. His suggestion includes to stop reading newspapers, watching TV, or surfing the internet and looking on sites like Digg.

Now, I do not know how far I would actually be able to take this to stop randomly surfing the internet because I do love watching hilarious YouTube videos or reading good stories on Digg.

So, what am I going to do you may be asking. Another suggestion that is provided in the book is to set time limits for activities that you work on. For students, this would be say the amount of time that you spend knocking on some homework, working on a project, studying for a test, or relaxing. My method to be more productive, on top of having a to-do list, is going to be to rank the tasks by the importance and group them into different categories. Then, I will be able to dedicate certain amounts of time to each category. My to do list may look something like this then:

School Work

1. Homework assignment due by Tuesday
2. Homework assignment due by Friday
3. Paper due by Friday
4. Project research (on-going)

eBay Related Tasks

1. Sort through eBay listings and update any old information
2. Relist any unsold items and adjust the listings if needed
3. Take care of packing any sold items

Website Design Tasks

1. Complete concept design for client A
2. Contact client B about starting work on project

Now if I devoted an hour each day, when needed, to knock these tasks, I would be able to easily complete everything that I needed to for that day or couple days at a time. The catch to making this technique work is eliminating all of the other distractions that you have going on – TV, email, phone calls, instant messages, friends, etc.

If you can disconnect yourself from everything else for an hour straight and focus solely on the task at hand, you should be able to find yourself much more productive and also find that you have a lot more free time to do the things that you want to as opposed to the things that you have to. These might include spending more time with your friends, spending time with your family, traveling, enjoying your surroundings, etc.

Give this technique a shot and see if it works for you. Dedicate at least a week to making this work so that if the first couple days that you try it different things come up that you could not predict from the start, you will have more chances to plan for those distractions and eliminate them in the days following. I would love to hear how this time management technique works for some of you.

I will be sure to report back about how it works for me in a week or two!

Pimp My Ride…I mean FireFox!

FreelanceSwitch posted today 12 extensions essential for web developers and designers. The list is pretty well put together and has some great find on it.

Check it out!

Page Rank Update for Dorm Room Biz

Last time there was a big update for page rank, Dorm Room Biz was a PR 3 site. This mainly because it also fell at the time that the site had a lot of down time, we were switching hosts, and we were also redesigning the site.

Now that all of that is finished and I have been able to produce content for the site as well as bring on Bobby to help with the writing, we have been able to continue to grow the site. 

Now, Dorm Room Biz is a PR 4 site, which I am happy about. So, please keep reading the site, linking to us from your own sites, and enjoying the content that we are providing…and be sure to look for more great stuff coming soon!

On side note, my Raven Symone fan site went from not being ranked up to a PR 3 site. I have some content and different updates that I am going to be doing to the site within the next 2 weeks, so hopefully after another 2 months or so, the site will continue to move up. 

It seems that most my other sites also got bumped up to a 3/10 ranking.

How did you fare during the big update?

Where do you sell a website? How do you price a website?

Looking to get rid of your website? Wondering where you can sell your website or blog at? Here are a couple resources to do so and also to learn how to value your website.

Places to sell your website or blog:

• SitePoint Marketplace
• Digital Point Forums
• BuySellWebsites

How do you value your website?

• Entrepreneurs Journey - How to sell a website
• WebsiteGear - How to sell a website
• College Start Up - 7 ways to evaluate the value of a website

Good luck with selling your website or even buying some. Check out the forums above if you are in the market to buy something as well!

Site Point offers Rails book for free download

I was venturing across a few Site Point books at the local Barnes and Noble today and decided to check out their web site to read a few more preview chapters. To my surprise they actually have a special going right now - You can download their ENTIRE Ruby on Rails book for free for 60 days (45 are left now).

You may download it at the link below:

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/