Note: A few times a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from throughout the history of FreelanceSwitch. This article by Skellie was first published December 13th, 2007, yet is just as relevant and full of useful information today.

Every freelancer should have an online portfolio. You’ve got one, right? If not, skip to the last paragraph of this post. It’s written for you.

If you do have one, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You’re halfway there.

Building your portfolio is easy. The hard part is making it good. A killer portfolio does more than just showcase your work. It transforms visitors into clients. Best of all, it’s an automatic work generator.

In this post, I want to show you how to take your online portfolio to the next level. Continue Reading

A few times a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from throughout the history of FreelanceSwitch. This article by Skellie was first published July 9th, 2008, yet is just as relevant and full of interesting information today.

Freelancers are more likely than most people to love Moleskine notebooks. We need to keep and manage our own schedules and to-dos. We’re creative, so we need a place to store and expand ideas. We need to take notes at meetings with clients–or at least look like we are. We need to appear productive and busy in coffee-shops–even when we aren’t.

Moleskine notebooks rank alongside the MacBook Pro, money and caffiene on our fictional list of ‘Most Beloved Freelancing Tools’. It’s a shame, then, that many Moleskine owners don’t realize the full potential of their little black book… much like many brain-owners don’t realize the full potential of their squishy salmon-colored companion.

Don’t be one of those people!

Inside this post you’ll find a goldmine of mini-hacks, recommendations, visual modifications, organizational systems, uncommon uses and creative tomfoolery, all for your Moleskine(s)! Continue Reading

Editor’s Note: Skellie is the director for the Envato Tuts+ network and drives the social media promotion for nine brands with over 100,000 Facebook fans. This article is an excerpt from her newest book, Successful Facebook Marketing, sold by Rockable Press.

Your goals with Facebook should not only be to get more Likes and more traffic. One of the first things people learn at Business School is that it costs much more time, energy, and often money to add a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Keeping your fans loyal and happy is just as important, if not more important, than finding new fans. For this reason, it’s important to use your Facebook Page to build more loyalty among your existing fans, and to gain a better understanding of them.

As I mentioned earlier, comments are one of the most useful ways fans can interact with your Facebook posts. Every time a fan leaves a comment it is shared on their profile and in their friends’ News Feeds. While you’re building brand loyalty and interacting directly with your audience, you’re also creating pathways for new fans to find your Page. For this reason, content that encourages discussion will be one of the best possible additions to your Facebook Page. Continue Reading

We were so excited to see the number of great entries we received in our ‘Redesign an Outdated 90s Website‘ challenge. To everyone who participated, well done! Each of you greatly improved the original design and brought our fictional friend Mario into the 21st century!

We hope you had fun honing your skills on this project and if you’re proud of your design, we encourage you to add it to your portfolio.

Of the 24 eligible entries, we asked the Design and Marketing team (Jackson, Christine and Larz) at Business Catalyst to select a shortlist of their 5 favorite designs. The same team voted on the shortlist, and were joined by Joel, Skellie and Amanda from FreelanceSwitch – six panelists in total. Each of us gave 5 points to our favorite design, down to 1 point for our least favorite on the shortlist.

To remind you, here is the original Mario’s Catering design. It’s a fictional business, but it wouldn’t be hard to find other businesses still stuck with designs from the 90s. It was up to our readers to bring the design into the present day. Continue Reading

Update: entries are now closed and we’re in the process of deciding on a winner! We’ll let you know who the lucky person is here on FreelanceSwitch shortly.

In partnership with Adobe Business Catalyst, FreelanceSwitch is launching a fun design competition with a humongous prize! The best redesign of a fictitious outdated 90s website, Mario’s Catering, will win a copy of Adobe CS5 Web Premium – valued at US $1,799 and available for your OS of choice.

Adobe CS5 Web Premium is a software bundle containing the newest versions of Adobe’s world famous design and media software. Hit the jump to learn more!

Up For Grabs

• Dreamweaver CS5
• Photoshop CS5
• Illustrator CS5
• Flash Professional CS5
• Fireworks CS5
• Flash Builder 4 Standard
• Flash Catalyst CS5
• Contribute CS5
• Acrobat 9 Pro

To win, you must submit the best redesign of the Mario’s Catering homepage (no sub-pages) before the 17th of November – that’s 2 weeks from today. While you don’t need to keep any visual elements from the design (photos, branding), you must use all the copy and links on the existing website.

Download website source files

The website hasn’t been redesigned since 1999 – and was probably not an example of good design or development even then! To win, you need to breathe new life into this outdated business with a complete redesign and rebranding of the homepage to bring it up to present day standards. Entries will be judged by the design team at Business Catalyst and several key members of the FSw team.

Our friends at Business Catalyst provide a web service that helps you build powerful Online Businesses for your clients. Because their #1 users are designers, they know a lot about what goes into good design!

To enter the competition, submit your full-resolution homepage redesign as a JPG screenshot to the FreelanceSwitch Flickr group and make sure to tag it ’90sredesign’ or we will not be able to find your entry. Remember, entries must be submitted before the 17th of November. Entries are open world-wide, except to Envato staff and Adobe employees.

Editor’s Note: This is a fictitious website that you’re redesigning purely for the fun of the competition. The winning redesign will not be used commercially and this competition does not, in any way, constitute spec work.

About Business Catalyst

Adobe Business Catalyst is a new hosted service that replaces 5 or more separate tools with one integrated solution. Incorporating web hosting, content management, eCommerce features, email marketing and built in customer management tools, Business Catalyst can help you accelerate your projects and increase your profit margins. Try it out for free at businesscatalyst.com.

Happy Birthday to us! It’s Envato’s 4th Birthday, and to celebrate, we’re giving away a Birthday Bundle packed with $400 worth of files for only $20.

The bundle includes four Tuts+ Premium tutorials, a $50 MediaTemple hosting voucher, five blog and website themes, five Flash and Unity3D files, six code packages for CSS, JavaScript, WordPress and PHP, seven motion graphics projects, sixteen PSDs and vector files, three CG models and textures, six royalty-free audio files and a $10 voucher for Rockable Press. When you buy the bundle and open it up for the first time, you’ll be amazed at the value inside.

The bundle is on sale for 5 days, starting now. This is a limited time offer that ends on Tuesday, August 24 at 12:00pm Melbourne, Australia time (check the current time at Envato HQ!). Visit the Birthday Bundle website, purchase the bundle now, or learn more after the jump! Continue Reading

We’re very passionate about teaching creative skills here at Tuts+, so over the last year we’ve been planning a new stream of educational content focused on the "Why?" instead of the "How". Today we’re unveiling the newest addition to the Tuts+ family: Creative Sessions.

Every month we’ll be running a two week ‘Session’ on a creative topic. Our first Session, beginning today, is on Character Illustration, and future Sessions will be on varied topics like interface design, illustrative typography and creative freelancing. Unlike regular Tuts+ content, Sessions content is more theoretical, opinion based and will often cross many disciplines.

Depending on the Session, each specific article will fit into one of our ten educational sites (including FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome). So they will be published on the appropriate site, while our central site Sessions.tutsplus.com/Creative will provide the hub for each Session. There you will be able to track each Session, grab the monthly wallpaper, participate in a community project, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow CS on Twitter and give feedback (or praise!) for the Session.

Continue Reading

This post is an excerpt from my eBook, The Blog Business Funnel. It teaches freelancers how to run a profitable freelance business, fed entirely by a healthy and thriving blog. This excerpt is from Chapter 7: Scaling Up. FreelanceSwitch readers can claim a special discount at the end of this post.

One of the nicest things about freelancing is that you decide when to give yourself a raise. If you feel like you’re doing a great job, developing experience and becoming hotter property, you don’t need to wait for your boss to notice. You can give yourself a raise, and if your clients agree with your assessment, you’ll get it.

As a freelancer, you can give yourself a raise by increasing your hourly or per-project rates. This part is simple, but setting up the right preconditions for the change is a trickier process. How can you raise your rates while making sure you still get plenty of work?

Continue Reading

I receive all kinds of suggestions for new Tuts+ sites, but none have been quite so numerous as the requests for us to launch a Flash tutorials site. And with good reason: we cover Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and web development, so why not Adobe Flash?

Today we’re pleased to introduce the newest member of the Tuts+ family: Flashtuts+

Go on, open a new tab, check it out, leave a comment, then keep reading to learn more about our plans for the site.

Continue Reading

Photo by Incase Designs.

Freelance Switch has a new editor to get things started in 2009!

Joel has studied journalism, has years of experience as an editor and freelance writer, has been contributing editor at Lifehack.org, manages two Envato websites (AUDIOTUTS and AudioJungle) and has some kick-butt plans for Freelance Switch. He’s written a few awesome articles for us too, and has always been a popular writer for the site.

Some of the things he plans to introduce include:

• More content tailored to specific types of freelancing (i.e. Web Design, Development)
• Regular themed columns
• Fresh new writers (and all your favorites)
• Less general advice, more specifics
• Guest articles from your favorite bloggers

Behind the scenes Collis is also working on an updated look for the site and a host of new features requested by FSw users. In short, Freelance Switch is going to be awesome this year

Thank you to Glen Stansberry for shepherding the site through much of 2008. We wish him the best of luck with the wonderful projects he’s working on!

As Collis likes to say these days — awesome is spreading .

If you’ve ever wanted to see your writing on Freelance Switch, and get paid a cool $60 USD to do it, read the guidelines and send us your brilliant article pitch or a completed article for consideration. To get started, visit this page.

Keep in mind that when we open the contribute form we get a lot of submissions, so bear with Glen as he sorts through them. It may take a little while but we’ll get back to everyone eventually.

Good luck!