3by9

Dare to explore

The other night I watched 50 Cent on Ustream. At first I was a bit dubious and some parts were challenging to listen to (because the audio quality deteriorated) but in the end I’m glad I watched him. I’m not a 50 Cent fan but I went from not particularly liking him from being neutral and having some respect for him in areas.

That would have never have happened listening to his music.
That probably wouldn’t have happened looking at an interview.
It happened because he was chilling, talking to his audience and his crew (Banks was there along with another guy I can’t remember what his name is).

Unfortunately for the other two (Banks and what’s his name) I walked away with a negative impression. So bad of a negative impression I don’t see how they could turn it around. See, it goes both ways. If you have an opportunity to interact with your audience by all means do so but all people aren’t meant to do that.

Back to 50 Cent, he made some very good points which is why he “won” some of my respect. He talked about business, handling business, not wanting to carry people to their success, how people change when they get money, talked about some of the business decisions he made, how current trends impact the music industry, etc. He talked about life, how people are supposed to transition and grow up (and how Banks wasn’t doing that), how there is much to experience and the different cultures he experienced.

I’m still tripping I watched 50 Cent. Not only watched it once, I went back a day or two later and watched it again. Actually I listened to it the majority of the time (while working) because they were just sitting there talking. When someone sent me the link I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He has a social site and I suppose the streams and videos will be apart of that site. I don’t like the site and I’ll probably write an article ripping it apart later but he was honest why he was doing it: so he wouldn’t need other social network sites.

But, I had to be open to the idea of watching 50 Cent in the first place. The notion of trying and not letting the perceptions I had get in the way. I’m glad I did.

Be open to trying new things. You might discover you like things you never thought you would.

You need to wake up

I woke up today and I didn’t want to work. If you are reading this there is a good chance you woke up and you didn’t want to go to work either. If you have a salaried job you knew you had to go into work or maybe could get out of it, but either way you were going to get paid. I don’t have that luxury. We don’t have that luxury. Yeah we make money while we sleep, but if we stop doing work the money stops coming in.

Some people like to assume that working on your own is a luxury. That you can do whatever you want and honestly you can do whatever you want. You choose if you want to work. You choose how hard you want to work. You choose when you want to get something done. The problem is those decisions all effect your money and status.

Miss a deadline at work and you get yelled at for a bit. Miss a deadline with your own company and who is going to yell at you? The consequences go deeper than that. You miss a deadline and you start to miss out on a lot more stuff.

But at least you are doing what you love if you are on your own right? The problem is you can get so caught up in the loving part and forget that there is a business part behind it. There is that part where you have to keep in mind how the money is going to come in. Everyone always says to do what you love, but nobody says do what you love for free.

If you want to go out on your own you are going to have to learn to wake up. Trust me, it can be easier said than done.

Treat It Like A Business

Tyme, a random dude and myself got into a heated discussion over at Expert Idiot not too long ago about 9rules and the direction we were going. To be honest I don’t think much about that conversation except for one point that was made by Marcus that continues to ring in my head.

If I could offer you one piece of unsolicited advice it would be that you start treating 9rules like a business with a definitive goal to either sell for a certain price (ideal) or maintain a sustainable income (difficult).

Now for anyone this can be good advice, but I wondered what is so different from treating your company like a business and treating it like a passion or something else. I didn’t know how I was personally treating 9rules. Maybe I was treating it like a business and that is how I conduct business. Maybe I was treating it like a hobby. Maybe I was simply treating it as the one thing I believed in online. Either way to Marcus it didn’t seem as though I was treating it like a business in his sense of the word.

And to be honest with you…thank all the toes on the llamas of the Andes mountains for that.

You see as a business you are almost obligated to let go of anything that doesn’t make money. Something not working? Toss it aside and move on. From a business perspective then 9rules would’ve been let go a long time ago. Not because it didn’t make money, but because after so long it didn’t make X amount of money. Because there had been so many changes you would’ve let it go for something more stable maybe. Or even better maybe a new set of leadership should’ve been introduced to guide 9rules to the glory land.

Have you ever been involved in something that where the people behind it didn’t have a passion for it? It sucks. Maybe our fault early on and for the last couple of years was that we didn’t have a passion for money. We didn’t always do what was the “right” thing to make our big money maybe, but hell if we knew the exact path to take we would’ve taken it from the beginning. Not like we chose our own path for shits and giggles.

You see, we do treat what we do like a business. We aren’t always serious because business doesn’t always have to be. Our business is more about the three of us and how we interact with people than the bottomline and maybe that is completely foolish on our part. However, we also wouldn’t have been able to try and fail as much if all we did was focus on the bottomline. I’m not saying it’s the best approach in the world to business, but it was our approach.

Do we have our new approach nailed down now that we have been through the trial and error stage? We sure think so.

If You’re Selling What They’re Buying, The Packaging Has Already Sold The Product

In the end, if people really want what you have to offer, you can only screw it up if you make egregious and unforced design errors. That’s the bottom line right there.

As a designer, I’ve always thought about the success of MySpace and how design had nothing to do with its success. People want what MySpace was offering, so they could only do wrong if their design was so horrible that it hindered the abilities of the site. It doesn’t. It’s good enough. If people can hop in and accomplish tasks, use the site, create what they want to create, then the design has succeeded.

Design isn’t what something looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

People who have seen the new 9rules design (launching this Wednesday) have said that it’s the best 9rules yet, far surpassing the previous iterations. This conclusion is probably a function of the following variables:

1. It fulfills their 9rules need, the need to easily find great member content.
2. It doesn’t get in the way of fulfilling need #1.
3. It’s nicely designed, but not overkill.

These seem like stupid easy things to accomplish with a site, but when you’re deep in the site and have been running & using the site for many years (like we have) then you lose sight of what really matters. Previous iterations had more content on them, more types of content, so the various pages were more like a jump-off to guide you to the pages you really wanted to view. That technique is not the way to go, and it only took me 3 years to realize it:

People don’t want to click, they want to see.

The new 9rules is all about seeing, right off the bat. Get on the site, see what you want. Reddit does this very well — they know what users want and they drop it all in your lap right on the homepage.

Give people want they want as soon as they see your site. Don’t give them a tidbit and hope they click to see “the full list” because it doesn’t happen. Give them what they want. Figure out what the user is buying and sell it to them. Don’t mess around.

Business vs Personal

When you work with a group of people for an extended period of time relationships start to form. These could be simple friendships, romantic interests or just developing a group of people to go out with on the weekends. These relationships can conflict with your work though, but as humans we are inclined to social behavior so they are almost impossible to prevent. With our small group here these conflicts can reach an even grander scale because there is no where to hide.

I am great friends with Mike and Tyme and I like to believe I know them very well. Because of this I know what approaches work with them with regards to asking questions and assigning tasks and I know what will easily piss them off. The issue I use to have was always concerning myself whether our friendships would deterioriate because of how I treated them from a business standpoint.

Now we have had our rough patches, probably more than usual for a small company, but take into consideration we don’t get to see each other face to face so misunderstandings happen a lot and we sometimes deciphering sarcasm from brutal honesty can be difficult.

What I’ve come to realize that as much as we like to pretend that business and personal should be separated most of the time they just aren’t. If one of us is having a bad day then it is almost unfair to think that you should treat them as you have any other day because you are part of a business. If a person wants to take the time to tell me about the weekend they had between the hours of 9-5 who am I to complain about it? Really what is the difference?

I don’t think I am going out on a limb by saying that because of our business ties our friendships have been saved more times than not. I can name a number of occasions where if we were simply friends we would have all walked away from each other because as they say “who needs friends like these?” So while you may be sitting there cursing the gods for making Patty the hot girl in accounting work for the same company as you, I thank the gods daily for keeping Tyme and Mike in business with me otherwise they would have left me stranded with nothing but my 9rules pillow to call friend.

I fuck up a lot when it comes to communicating. It’s my selfish nature to cut people off, tease them or simply inquire why they are talking to me about a certain subject. Too often I separate the business with the friend and don’t realize that when we talk we are talking as friends who just happen to be in business together. It’s really the best of both worlds once you realize and get used to it.

When I started working for myself I always said the only aspect of company work that I missed was the ability to interact with others daily. Now I have that on an almost 24/7 basis and sometimes I find myself complaining about it. I just can’t seem to win with myself, but that is no surprise since idiots always lose.

So instead of thinking of it as business vs personal, maybe there should be a greater synergy between the two than you think. Besides, listening to Tyme talk about her WoW adventures or Mike tell a story of the dog making a mess of things will always be more entertaining than trying to figure out RSS aggregator issues.

Want to improve? Admit you suck.

It’s not a secret I play World of Warcraft. I look at a lot of PVP movies because I want to improve in that area. There is a PVP movie that is perfect to explain the point of this article. A guy makes a video series called I Suck at PVP. He plays a Mage and he shows how he loses a fight (approximately 5:30 into the video), explains what he did wrong, then does the fight again (fixing what he did wrong) and shows a successful fight (against opponents he shouldn’t be able to win against). Evertras has this basic approach when he starts a fight:

• You can win every fight.
• If you lose it’s your fault, not the game.
• Don’t beat yourself up over losing.
• Look back at the fight that was just lost. What could you have done differently.

Can he really win every fight? No, but he has an optimistic (and realistic) attitude. If he is up against an opponent that is better geared than he is, odds are he will lose but the reality: he could have had equal gear. Who’s fault is it that he doesn’t? Instead of beating himself up over it, he’ll grind to get better gear (if he is under geared), see what else he could improve from the mistakes he made, and try again.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do that with life? When something doesn’t work, see why it failed, then do it again? We can…

Of course, it means learning from our experiences and other people’s experiences.

You can’t go back and redo the past (that’s important to note - what’s done is done) but it is possible to make sure the mistakes from the past don’t re-appear in the future. I don’t play a Mage in WoW but I suck at PVP. Yeah I said it, I suck at PVP. Admitting it is one of the first things I need to do to correct the situation.

Instead of whining like a little bitch that my character won’t do what I want it to do.

The other (harder) part is putting in the time and effort needed to correct the situation. Hahaha it means losing for a while to win the bigger battles later. I can’t put into words how much I hate to lose but a girl has to do what a girl has to do. Tyme wants to be a PVP Queen so I have work to do.

What Does This Mean to You?

No one is perfect, there is always room for improvement. Many times the opportunity is there to avoid a situation from happening if one would open their eyes to what happened previously (or to others) and correct the situation. If you have a blog on technology, you’ve had it for over a year, you submit your entries to Digg, Reddit, etc. and your articles never make it to the front page is it because the Digg community is “mean” or your articles aren’t as good as the others submitted that day?

If you want to start a business and your main competition admitted that although successful, they would have went in a different direction, why would you start a business following the same path the competition took without safe-guarding against those hurdles?

If you know people are getting fired for the things they put online for public consumption, why would you put yourself (potentially) in the same position?

Just like in PVP, the people who win the fight think smarter (and yes, take advantage of their opponent’s weakness). In life those who succeed think smarter (and don’t repeat mistakes they are already aware of).

Six Apart Drinks Your Milkshake

Six Apart has announced that they have acquired Apperceptive, a design and development firm focused on social-media sites and blogs, and that Apperceptive is now part of the new Six Apart Services segment of their company. Now, Six Apart isn’t just producing social software, they’re working with companies to plug it in. (Think: IBM selling WebSphere Portal to companies via IBM Global Services.)

I think it was a great move to acquire Apperceptive since they’re such a talented team, but I think this is bad news for many independent blog design and development firms. Anil Dash doesn’t think so and he said the following in an interview:

“We’re not aiming to compete with the amazing community of consultants we have today — we want to grow the entire market for consulting around our platforms. One way that can work is, for example, our team might join a third-party consultant on a pitch or proposal to a key client that they want to work with.”

How can Six Apart say that they’re not “aiming to compete” with current Movable Type consultants when they bought one of the largest MT-centric consulting firms out there, and are now offering their services under a branded Six Apart banner? Isn’t that the definition of “aiming to compete”?

In July 2002, Apple acquired Emagic, makers of Logic pro-audio software and then immediately discontinued the Windows version of the application. For two years Apple worked on creating Logic Pro which was a combination of many Emagic applications, and now Logic Pro is one of the best pro-audio software suites out for the Mac. Smaller audio software makers that competed with Emagic in the early 2000s were pushed out of the Mac market after the acquisition, since Logic Pro had a lot more money and engineers behind it, not to mention it was created by makers of the hardware is was to run on which is an obvious advantage (compare iPhone software slickness with the garbage that other cellphones have.) Now, Logic Pro is one of the few games in town for serious audio professionals using Mac OS X.

Apperceptive has put together some very solid social websites for a number of large clients, spearheaded by David Jacobs who has been a leader in the Movable Type consulting industry for many years. With the acquisition by Six Apart, all his large clients will now be Six Apart’s large clients, and there’s really no way to know how “small” of a company 6A will target since they now have a dedicated services arm. Six Apart is a company and companies need to make money, so if there’s an MT-focused project up for bidding, you know that they’ll be all over it.

When Anil Dash says that this acquisition will grow the market for Movable Type consulting, I believe him. However the acquisition of Apperceptive lets Six Apart reel in a larger part of those consulting projects, leaving less fish for everyone else to eat. Six Apart has been working hard on building their developer community up to match the one surrounding WordPress, and I really can’t see this as a something that developers would appreciate.

Anil, since you’re great at finding entries I write about MT, I’d appreciate if you could shed some light on what size projects Six Apart Services will be going after following this acquisition. Is it only major companies or will it drop down to medium-sized blogs that were within the realm of designers/developers like myself?

(Note: I designed and developed MT-powered websites from 2004-2007 for various sized clients, and have always preferred Movable Type to WordPress.)

3 Brands vs. 1 Puppet: Guess Who Wins

It is only Wednesday and this might be the most exciting week in our geeky blogosphere yet. Why? We have Shel Israel vs. Loren Feldman and if you don’t know about this one there really is too much to link to so might I suggest a quick Google search. The big deal about this one isn’t that you have two grown men over the age of 300 fighting it out, but you have two grown men over the age of 300 fighting it out and it involves a personal brand and a large company brand.

If you don’t know about Loren Feldman let me give you a quick lesson on him. He doesn’t really do original material. Okay it’s original in that he says it, but his thing is waiting for someone to do something on the web and then bash them. His nice videos don’t get the pageviews. His nice videos don’t get him the recognition. It’s the videos of him bashing another company or individual that gets him the views. We all love controversy, that is no secret. With that in mind think about how you would react if someone who is already known to attack people decides to attack you.

Well he did that with Shel Israel. A quick background on Shel Israel lets you know that he is partnered with Robert Scoble with FastCompany.tv and they also wrote a book together called Naked Conversations. So Shel makes a video and it wasn’t the greatest of quality, but if you could ignore all that and just listen to the audio it was typical FastCompany.tv fare (take that however you want). Loren gets a hold of it and bashes him to pieces. Then Loren registers ShelIsrael.com and creates videos with puppets based around him. It is almost like Loren is saying “I can do this better than you with puppets, suck on it” and in response…well how can I say this…Shel went apeshit.

Now keep in mind, not only is someone attacking Shel, but they are attacking his personal brand. You only have one personal brand in life and over the past 300 years Shel has built his up it is being destroyed in a quick week by someone who is lesser known. The sad part about this is…let me start this sentence again because there is more than one sad part. In fact, now that I have taken five seconds to think about it there are multiple sad parts about this saga.

1. The way Shel has reacted almost leaves him in a dead end situation. No matter what he does people will laugh at him, ridicule him and think of him as the guy who wasn’t as entertaining as a puppet. Now I say almost because there is a way out, but I don’t get paid to consult for such things so I am not going to say how to get out of it, but it isn’t that hard.
2. The second sad part involves his friend and partner Robert Scoble. I’ll get to this one below.
3. The third sad part is Fast Company. Man, oh, man, oh, man, oh, man did they totally screw up 2008 so far. I think Tyme might address this in the future, but let me say fellas, you need to open your eyes and catch on to what is unfolding because FastCompany.tv isn’t going to save anything.

Alright, time for the Scoble part of this entry. Arrington breaks a story that the puppet show gets a sponsor when Shel’s show can’t. That’s a blow no matter how you want to look at it if you are Shel, Scoble or FastCompany. In fact, that is just plain insulting. So what do you do if you are Scoble and you run this ship? Well you tell the world how much you love the puppets of course. Wait, what?

That’s funny! I love the puppets and am glad they will have food to eat. Make sure mine gets caviar, OK?

Yeah I thought the same thing and figured I have thrown enough jabs at Scoble over the years so let me lend the good natured fellow a hand.

I’m not saying you should be irate or go apenuts, but please man, get some sense into your head. Your man got clowned and will apparently now get repeatedly clowned and this adds no respect for you or whatever other shows you have coming up.
Paul Scrivens

I hope that makes sense to everyone reading it because it makes sense to me. Your partner and your foundation just got stomped on. I did my good deed and figured all was good. I thought Scoble would revere me and tell me that I am a genius for helping him remember that testosterone pumps through his veins and that he is a man who does have a sense of honor, integrity and pride in the things he backs.

If you have read me over the years though you know how often I am wrong (please don’t give me a count). Scoble returned to point out that he does support Shel. Just in different ways.

I love Shel dearly and am supporting him in tons of ways. But I’ve already learned from his own response that supporting him by doing anything other than laughing along at the joke at this point won’t be productive. The puppets are funny. Fast Company.tv isn’t funny and isn’t meant to be. It’s a show/network about innovative business people.

I’m sure you can understand my frustration now. It is one thing to sit down with Shel and laugh with him, calm him down or do whatever at the puppets, but publicly saying what he said makes no sense. It makes no business sense. It makes no man sense. It makes no woman sense. It makes no child sense.

I figured I didn’t do a good job of explaining myself the first time so I came back for Round 2.

You don’t want to hook your brand to attacking people and that’s great, but guess what? Now your brand is being hooked to boring and being clowned by the puppet master. That is your brand. Hey you heard about FastCompany.tv? Oh yeah, those are the guys who get clowned.

Now I understand how it is when someone tells you how they feel about your company. I know how it is when someone tells you that this is how many people see your company. You don’t want to believe them. You don’t want to listen to them. You know why I listen to Tyme when she gives her opinion followed by “someone told me”? Because that is what the people who use our sites tell her and I’ve learned that I can be defensive and not believe that someone would say such things. I’ve learned that my first reaction sometimes is that the person is an idiot. It can be hard stepping outside of yourself and seeing your company how others see it so I tried my best to convey that to Scoble.

He didn’t bite. Not one bit.

Listen, if everyone is laughing at you, the only correct response is to laugh with them.

That is when I gave up. Three strong brands in less than one week were destroyed by some puppets. They can recover, but not if this show goes on. Shel’s brand is gone. I’m more aware of the puppet Shel now than I am of the real Shel. FastCompany.tv? Please, I can go watch puppets because at least there is a chance I will be entertained. FastCompany? Yeah, again I’ll let Tyme handle you guys.

I liked that Shel grew angry and that he wanted to fire back. Shame he did it the wrong way. You can’t fire back the way he did when everyone agrees with the person that made fun of you in the first place. It’s tough to go against someone like Loren because he knows how to play to the crowd and when you are in that type of battle you have to know the rules of the game. Unfortunately, Shel and Scoble aren’t the confrontational types so they weren’t prepared for what was coming. A damn shame.

Oh and I forgot to mention that Scoble leaves with this question for me.

But, would love to know what you all will do when the puppet comes after you?

It’s a damn puppet. I will handle it in my own way and you should be smart enough to know how to handle it. If Loren went after Mike or Tyme? That is another story. I sure as hell wouldn’t laugh with everyone else at them. I have too much respect and love for my people to sellout like that and I thought Scoble would too for both his friend and the people paying the bills.

(I told you after last week’s craptastic entry I would bring the good. I could’ve continued on because this is some good material, but I know I’m not entertaining after 10,000 words let alone 100 so I leave you with this.)

Birds of a feather flock together

I cannot remember who told me this but I was told (in school) for every positive (pro) there is a negative (con). The pro of the internet being cheap is that everyone (just about) can get on the internet. A con is that people think they have business skills they don’t have and start projects they normally wouldn’t start if a substantial financial investment was required.

Another pro for the internet is that it can be relatively easy to have a presence online. A con is that most people do not realize the impact of the decisions they make.

On Saturday night I went out with my friends and we decided to chill out after. One of the conversations led to ex-boyfriends/girlfriends and someone wanted to show us their ex. He pulled up his Facebook profile and the look on his face was priceless, I wish I had the camera ready to take a picture. Then he said, “HELL NAW!!!” and he started taking deep breaths. When he logged on he was presented with pictures his friend uploaded. Normally that is a good thing.

His friend was pictured with someone he couldn’t stand and to make it worse, a link to the both of their profiles so anyone looking at his profile could jump to the profile of the person he didn’t like. Yes, I know the guy could have micro-managed what was displayed on his profile but he didn’t want to deal with that. The better solution, for him, was to un-friend and that was the default reaction of the group (and that is what they said their friends did as well) for consistency. On Twitter the ability to micro-manage is not available.

I’m not going to bring up the thought of having to maintain friends like this across multiple sites.

That is a very interesting situation. His friend had every right to take and upload pictures to his account. The guy with us had every right to not want someone he didn’t like on his front page. I can see both sides of this issue. The guy with us thought about it for a minute and made the statement he was going to un-friend the guy. I understood that too.

This started a separate discussion about friends online and the difference between true friends and connections. An interesting point came up that I honestly did not think about (but I understand the logic). Let’s say someone comes across one of your profiles where your friends are visible. The person is considering being your “friend” and looks through your current friends. Unfortunately, the person finds someone he or she doesn’t like. The trend I realized last night: if the dislike is stronger than the positive feeling he or she has for you, the person will not be your friend online. Essentially, by subscribing to people you don’t really care about one way or the other could be prohibiting people from interacting with you because, in this wave of public interaction, they would see interaction with people they don’t like showing up on their profiles. With Twitter it would be @ responses. Facebook, it could be pictures.

I know I do this offline. I will not associate closely with someone who is too closely attached to someone I dislike. I dislike people for reasons like inability to trust, no ethics, lack of honesty, manipulator, etc. meaning, anyone that would want to associate with someone like that isn’t someone I want to be around. As long as I’ve been online I rarely cross paths with people I prefer not to interact with. I realize that is because I do most of my interaction via IM, email and my blog. I’m not the norm, most people do the opposite of what I do.

I realized that the implications of what one does online can be have more impact that expected. And of course, as per usual, the response to this will be: “That will never happen to me, I don’t have to worry about that.”

Until it does…

There Are 100 Million Web Designers

I’m a veteran in the web design industry, which is ridiculous to say at my ripe old age of 25 (just turned 2 weeks ago) except that it’s true.

I started blogging in July 2003, back when only a few companies used CSS and people like Jeffrey Zeldman were on the frontlines of the standards brigade. I remember the days when putting together a navigation element on a page didn’t automatically mean use an unordered list, which people didn’t really use until Fall/Winter of 2002 which was when the previously-linked A List Apart article was penned. I remember when CSS Zen Garden went live in May 2003 and how excited everyone was to put together a theme (I never did, but I sure did start-and-stop a half dozen). I remember the days when Doug Bowman was the design blog king, before he took his hiatus and returned only to go to Google. I was around when Dan Cederholm redesigned FastCompany’s website (their current design looks like ass, Dan’s was far superior and also 5 years older…) which put him on the path to design stardom. I distinctly remember how popular Movable Type was and how it dominated the blog world before WordPress made a run on them.

Do you remember any of these events?

The reason I’m taking a trip down memory lane is because I’ve been thinking recently just how many web designers there are now and how much the industry has grown in the past 3-5 years. When we launched Business Logs in early Summer 2004 the concept of a design firm that focused on blogs was unheard of. There were some other blog consulting sites out there, but none that really provided high-fidelity visual design. We were the first. Now I probably have 2 dozen blog design firms in my bookmarks folder alone, and could easily name another dozen individual designers who have put together some amazing blog-based website designs. In 2004, the playing field was so small that everything was new….

….but now in 2008, you hardly see anything completely brand new in the web design industry. My partner Paul Scrivens started the very first web design gallery at CSS Vault and now there are probably over 100. Every month I probably come across a half-dozen portfolio sites that I’d consider some of the best design sites I’ve ever seen, and this happens every month! The abundance of design talent in the world right now is unbelievable, but I see the following as some consequences of this abundance:

1. It’s unbelievably hard to go from 0-60mph as a new designer just starting out. When I started I put together a blog and some great articles and I was well on my way. Now if you don’t have a blog and you don’t have a couple unbelievable articles (with equally unbelievable pageviews and linkbacks) then you’re already behind everyone else.
2. Your portfolio has to be unreal to even get noticed. I can name a half-dozen designers right now that launched their careers with a homely portfolio but still took-off in the industry. Over time they honed their skills and are now putting out fantastic work, but when they started they were still in the learning stages so to speak. If you’re a new designer about to embark in the web design industry and you launch with a decent-but-not-amazing portfolio or blog, you’re already 5 steps behind.
3. Competition for client work drives pricing down across the industry. When I designed blogs for medium-to-large sized clients in my past life, prices started at a couple thousand dollars and worked their way up. Now that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of free WordPress themes available — and everybody uses WP now instead of Movable Type, sorry Anil — clients see that as the bargain basement and when looking for a “custom theme” (I fucking hate that term, it should die) designers have to prove their worth beyond a shadow of a doubt because at all stages of the process a client could pick a freebie design and tweak it up. I’ve been part of many threads in Notes where people ask for bids on a nice blog design and people start throwing out 3-digit quotes. Well, shit, good luck with that.

So what do you do?

You separate yourself from the pack.

Put together a nice portfolio and blog, but don’t get caught up with the one-upsmanship that all the CSS galleries perpetuate. Read more than you write (I suggest this entry to start) and absorb more than you spew out. Twitter and all the microblogging platforms give you the means to produce verbal meta-diarrhea at all times of the day but resist the urge. Pick a niche and put together a small web-based “product” that targets that niche… it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It could be as simple as a small utility that does to-do tracking in a new way, or a nice iPhone Summerboard theme, but design the hell out of it and then blog about it. Put it in your portfolio, and then tuck it away and put together the next little product site. The successful designers I see out there now are the ones that experiment with these little types of sites, and building a site like this teaches you a lot more than you think it will.

There aren’t really 100 million web designers out there right now, but there are enough so that you’ll get drowned out unless you pick reachable goals and then execute the hell out of ‘em. Don’t try to be the next Smashing Magazine or Freelance Switch, carve out your own area and own it.