I'm off to San Diego for a week of sun and fun...I wish. The truth is my brother is getting married next weekend, and I'm heading out to assist, since I am the best man!
I'd hope to come back to a cacophony of posts on the accessibility windfall, but it doesn't seem to be making as big a splash as I thought it would...hmmm.
Back with pics and maybe an illicit story in a week. Till then...
It pisses me off to no end when I see people offering web design services for obscenely cheap prices.
The other day I got a mail from an old web host announcing:
"For $15 you can get your own customized web site. They will do everything for you from scratch, from layout, to concept, to logo design and 3d artwork."
WTF! How in the hell can you seriously provide a customized website from scratch for $15! How can anyone make any money with this business model! ARGH! Even if the website only took 3 hours to make, the company only makes $5 an hour. That's not even minimum wage.
Need to take a few deep breaths, let reality come back into focus. And the reality is this company is a farce. It won't survive simply because there isn't any way to make money in low-balling hard work. However, the real danger is how this type of advertisement continues to reinforce the belief that web design is cheap.
When I first started writing HTML years ago, this thought was always in the back of my mind that I would one day go into business for myself. I've watched my parents successfully run their own company since I was living with them in high school. I've seen the ups and downs, the long crazy hours, the infighting, the life of owning your own business (or it owning you). Despite all of that, I still want my own.
I've been incredibly fortunate to work inside big corporate America for the last 5 years while I learned (and continue to learn) the many technologies, processes, and skills that have helped me become a pretty damned good web professional. Its been a nice, safe environment to grow and sharpen my skills, and learn the intricacies of client and management interaction, and how to organize myself and my projects. I feel I've accomplished most everything I want to with in my current path and its time to take the next step. And that next step is inevitably outside my comfy confines, and into the reality TV show of the small web firm.
Here's where I kinda screwed myself. I have zero idea on where to start with an actual business. Not the running of the firm itself, but the actual business end of it as in accounting, pricing, billing, etc.
Last week I needed to put together a set of overlapping tabs for a project I'm currently working on. It has slanted tabs that overlap one another on both sides (see below).
As I researched the latest in standards-based CSS tabs I realized that I would need to create a hybrid of Douglas Bowmman's Sliding Doors so I could put images at both ends, and Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Slants to accommodate resizing of the text.
