Starting With the Basics

Your blog obviously has a width set for the content area, and for most sites, this is between 450 and 650 pixels (px) wide. This site, as it is at this moment is using a 640px content area, so I have several WordPress media settings set to create appropriate thumbnail and full-width sizes of my images based on that width. Many of us use a lightbox plugin that enlarges the image when it’s clicked, so the maximum size you want that to go is the size of a laptop screen for those on the go, limiting the largest image you need to be 900px wide or 600px high, whichever is comes first. It does you no good to have a 100px tall image that is 1800px wide on a 13″ laptop. So, what are you supposed to do if you have an image that is too big?

Enter, ImageWell

I discovered this about a week after I got my first Mac: a 6 yr-old, 12″ MacBook running OS X 10.4, rather poorly. I got it used and it clearly needed a lightweight program for image editing rather than trying to run Photoshop Elements on it. Looking at the capture above, you can see how simple the window is, and that’s about it, but it’s so powerful in little ways.

• You can open images nearly too many ways. There is the drag and drop method of dragging a file from Finder to either the ImageWell icon in the Dock or to the image area of the program itself. You can also Control-click the image area to bring up a dialog box with even more options that make Windows users jealous.
• You can change the image dimensions, compression, file name, file type, save location, watermarks, and orientation all from the main window. This makes for very rapid image processing, especially when you’re creating a gallery. The screenshot of a gallery of our vacation photos here were all later re-sized (and watermarked) using the method described below in just a couple of minutes.

Steps for Resizing

1. Get the image into ImageWell. I usually drag and drop them because I have Finder open at the bottom of my screen.
2. Enter a new height or width based on the orientation of the image. Since this is landscape, I choose 900px wide.
3. Rename the file up at the top and select a location to save it to just below the image. I chose my blog folder on Dropbox. I’ll explain how to set those up in a bit.
4. Sometimes with camera images, you need to rotate the image and re-save it, which is done on the More tab, and you can see Watermark is just to the left of that with watermark options.

5. Every now and then, you’ll want to crop an image or adjust the brightness or contrast, right? Then click Edit at the bottom left for a new screen with those abilities. See the crop tool in the upper right? Click the ImageWell icon on the far left to return to the normal view.



6. Click the Send button to save the image to the location you have selected from the pull-down list (explained below).

If you click Locations on the main screen, you can add all sorts of save-to spots for one-click saving to a folder, FTP, Flickr, ImageShack, or SmugMug, to name a few. While it can be handy to upload straight to FTP for certain blogging platforms, I choose not to for WordPress because it generates thumbnails when uploaded directly into a post, which also associates the files with the post for creating a gallery, as I’ve done with the four trashcan images in a row. You’ll notice that sometimes I create a folder just for a particular time of editing (p2-June is a folder in my blog folder for my vacation photos) because I can easily remove them with the minus button at any time the list gets too long to be easily functional. Click the plus button to create a new entry, select the location type on the right, and then the Location Properties area will take on the new format for the fields required for the location selected. If you selected Folder, click the little ellipses button to bring up a folder selector.

That’s all I can think of to get you started on the road to quicker, easier image re-sizing and saving on your Mac. If there is a better program out there for the money, or even more money, I haven’t seen it. I use ImageWell even when Photoshop Elements is already open because saving the image to one of my preset locations with an easy-access file name change field is faster than what I can do in Photoshop. Admittedly, cropping is faster in Photoshop, but if you’re combining a re-size, re-name, and a crop, go with ImageWell. You’ll be faster every time.

Pro-Service, not Pro-Bono

You know you’re in for a reverse sales pitch when a client says they “don’t expect you to work for free” and follows that by the word, “but.” There are plenty of people around who want and expect freelancers (especially designers) to trade their work for less than their services are worth, or even for free. Here are things to look out for and what is not acceptable to agree to:

• Free labor expectations from non-profits or churches. Nothing in the Bible says it’s right to pressure a professional to work for free. That is their discretion if they want to offer their services as an offering.
• Free or discounted labor because the client is an “A-lister.” You may or may not get additional work just because you did work for a major corporation or Joe Blow Blogger with 1M pageviews per day.  Feel free to offer rebates or commission if additional work does come through, but don’t get pressured into it.
• Free or discounted labor in return for referrals based on the success of the work you did for them. Once you hand the work over, everything is out of your control. Even if you have control, that’s a miserable deal because you are slave to them to ensure your paycheck and no longer working for yourself.

Tips for a Real Win-Win

I’m still learning the ins and outs, but in the last 6 months, there have been plenty of opportunities to learn lessons and improve the way things flow. Here is a small list of what has worked for me:

• Set a project price rather than hourly rates if you can. Account for the time you may spend in a 70/30 worst-case scenario. Make it more than an easy project with no problems, but less than a disaster. If you are going to succeed in the business, you’ll end up ahead 90% of the time and send you packing to get a job soon enough to not fool yourself longer than necessary.
• Set a clear cut-off point for work included in the project price or other included services. For example, my projects end after two revisions after the first draft. If there are still client issues after that, then communication is an issue and it is creating unnecessary work, which will be paid for on their dime at my hourly rate.
• It’s okay to offer a discount for publicity for your work for them, but don’t work for free, under ANY circumstances.
• If your initial call/correspondence with them annoys, bothers, or offends you, turn down the work. With very rare exceptions, this is the best indicator you have of how the work will go. I’ve returned one person’s full payment because of this coming true and brought out one potential client’s true colors with a reasonable proposal counter-offer to cement my intuition about them.

Remember, if you’re not happy running your business, you are handicapping your success. You deserve to work under the best possible conditions, so make it so.

I was fearing the worst: I totally screwed up the theme styles compatibility-wise, so I checked the theme’s demo site to be sure it displays correctly out-of-the-box. Yup, it did. So, I took the home page PHP into my fancy new (and FREE!) editor called PSPad for Windows to view it with some syntax coloring.

I started to count the number of opening <DIV> tags with the number of closing </DIV> tags in that relatively small file. It didn’t take long — 6 for 6. Since that was the easy fix shot down, I went to the stylesheet to look at my CSS. Was the image ambiguous as to its float command? Was the text also ambiguous? Nope. Had I mixed up the order of the PHP from the original? Nope. Everything was in order on the surface.

Then… WHAM! It hit me square in the eyes, like this image.

There must have been some point where I was in the file and hit Delete when I thought the cursor was somewhere else, because there is no other reason for that closing > to have been missing. I put it back in and almost yelled when everything snapped into place like it was supposed to in EVERY browser. Of course, I have such a passionate hatred for IE6, I don’t care what it looks like there. Things lining up in IE6 is just a bonus.

Now I am fully-equipped to sell my services with a completely modified home site AND portfolio site. Both were modified heavily from the same theme designer, Jason Schuller, at Press75. The main site was from Cafe Press and the portfolio site was from Photo Graphic.

If you are interested in a professional modification of a WordPress theme, please contact me here: WordPress Customization.

About a month ago, I finished a site using Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Pro theme for Inter-Disciplinary in the U.K. for Dr. Rob Fisher. The site has over 1,600 pages (that’s not a typo) and needed some server intervention to allow the WordPress pages.php to load without a white screen of death in the dashboard. Wild! We ended up using a javascript menu tree in the left sidebar, but it does tend to crap out in Internet Explorer, which he was okay with since no one should be using that stuff anyway.

Last weekend was an exciting time as I launched Phil Gerbyshak’s new site using Thesis by Chris Pearson as the framework. It was my first time using Thesis and it was like re-learning theme design all over again, but now I LOVE using it. That project stretched my CSS knowledge to the max and I often spent 4-6 hours figuring out how to implement the design in my head, but I came out on top with ridiculous skills that I can use on other sites now.

On Tuesday, after months of office and personal frustration with my church’s website theme that I installed last February, I decided it was time to pull the plug on that theme and do a quantum leap to the latest and greatest one company has to offer with Church Life and get the Oakwood Community Church site going with something kickin’, modern, and functional. They’ve started with Facebook and using video communication, so this was the perfect time to get something to allow that to happen with minimal training and (hopefully) little or no assistance from me to make them look like web pros.

After more than a month in development for content and graphics, I wrapped up FT Press’s newest division and launched FT Press Science today. I used WP Remix for this theme, which looks really good, but I do not recommend it for people who do not have patience or pretty advanced CSS skills due to the vast number of CSS and PHP template files (in the neighborhood of 100 files) that tend to override each other from time to time.

That’s what I’ve been up to, and I have about 5 sites on the calendar for the next couple of weeks, so I think that my portfolio will begin to round out nicely with a good variation of clients, themes, and content to show my design and customer service skills. Here’s to the future!

1

My first step was to get the word out to my current contacts who had projects that were going slowly due to my massively restricted work time since I was working 50 hours/week, nearly around the clock for momentary fixes. They were delighted to know I was on their projects full-time and I got their projects done rather quickly.

2

What happened next was actually concurrent with Step One: my contact form on JessePetersen.com kept people coming in with various theme issues and site projects. It was absolutely essential to create my professional site to separate my blogging from my profession, especially when I go on and on about American Idol and such here.

3

After running on all 16 cylinders for 2 1/2 weeks and trying to work out ways to generate passive income, I decided I needed to continue putting out my feelers and let people know who I am and what I do. I started hitting up Twitter and Facebook a LOT more, which led to the next step.

4

I’ve always done art – and done it well, but my graphic design seems to have lagged behind those initial art skills. In recent months I have felt that my work was inferior to other designers’ work that I have been exposed in the WordPress community. I’ve made some pretty decent strides in recent weeks, but it is time to get that monkey off my back.

To remedy that, I started spending hours looking at site designs, Photoshop tutorials, Smashing Magazine, and clicking links from successful business owners on Twitter into the wee hours of the morning on my iPhone in bed. Yesterday I made a brand identity for myself for using as an avatar, logo, and favicon. Today I incorporated it into my website header and spent hours researching and designing my Twitter profile background.

5

I’ve been a sponge soaking up as much collective information and wisdom from others’ successes and mistakes as possible. I’ve begun reading Barry Moltz’s book, Bounce! to regain my composure and grab onto some proven ideas to point my compass in the right direction with the right frame of mind.

6

Now that I’ve written this post and put it out there for Twitter viewers and on my Facebook profile, I’ve been re-branded for my new vocational purpose.

Copyright © 2007-2012 Perfectly Petersen

Amazingly, this one is completely out of the box, except for deleting the fixed height of the tags line under the posts for when it needs to wrap to two lines. It’s been a mentally and emotionally rough ride the last two weeks, but I’ve got the best wife a guy could ask for and we’re giving this self-employment shot the best shot I can.

For now, I’m booked for the next two weeks solid with quite a few sites/clients in limbo while we discuss their situation and options before they decide to go forward. It’s been strange to only “work” (by that, I mean bill my time) for 2-5 hours per day, but I can say with absolute certaintly that few things are more satisfying than wrapping up a project, getting the PayPal payment, and getting a “thank you” e-mail with a client testimonial for JessePetersen.com. THAT is what work is supposed to be like. It was, and is again.

Hallelujah for that return to normalcy, if there is such a thing.

JessePetersen.com - ready for traffic!

I’ve been working hard, too hard in some family members’ minds, on my freelance site over the last two weeks. Now that it’s done, I can relax and reap the rewards for a job very well done.

I am in a very unique position at iThemes in that I am the front line of contact with our customers, not just one of the front line. There are only so many things that we offer for support that is included in the price of our premium WordPress themes. We can’t train someone from scratch how to use WordPress or learn enough CSS and HTML code to change their site. We offer answers to specific questions, but projects need to be directed elsewhere.

For the last couple of months, I have been directing them my way for some literal moonlighting. I typically start my second work day around 9-10pm and work until midnight on projects. It’s great money, creates networking contacts, and makes iThemes to be an all-around solution, even if one has to pay for certain services.

It became rather tedious, though, to reply to someone that they can contact a moderator or myself for services and write a long e-mail about my services and fees and hope they e-mailed me back on my personal e-mail. Since I’d been holding on to JessePetersen.com for about 15 months waiting to finally develop some content, I decided to make it about promoting me and what I do rather than me forcing myself into writing or producing material. Now I can simply refer people to my namesake domain (I sure hope they spell both names right later) and they can see that I am the real deal with testimonials and links to prove it. Not to mention the theme I’m running – /horn toot!

I’m quite proud of what I did at the bottom of my home page, though I openly admit that my wife had a LOT of very constructive and helpful suggestions about certain elements of the home page and it now passes with flying colors in her very distinguishing design opinion. Please check out that little area and the hover action on the guy, especially. I’d have to say I’m more proud of the bird and my graphic and code work putting that together, but the Image is Everything ad is definitely my best marketing work to date.

Customized code turned these from text areas to this!

This is actually our latest iThemes release, and the first of 2009 for our rapidly expanding group of 2009 Theme Club customers. By purchasing the Club package, customers are entitled to every theme we produce this calendar year, so the release of this theme, called Architect (demo site here), produced a new wave of sign-ups today. My fingers were quite busy creating new member site logins for their download access since the value of receiving our premium themes at less than $35 per multi-use license them is $100 off per theme! The more themes we produce over our promised number reduces the cost per theme to the customer even more.

I feel like singing!

I just can’t say enough about the increase in entrepreneurial spirit on the Internet brought on by economic uncertainties. It would seem that a number of people are taking their incomes into their own hands and creating websites to create multiple streams of income to skim over rough times nearly unscathed.

I was one of them for quite a while, and I’m continuing today, even though I still have a job and my wife has a full-time job for the time being. It all started with my gaming site, Gitr Knows WoW back in 2005. After several months, I realized that I had a voice in the community and was getting enough traffic to monetize my site. Within a couple of months things started to happen. I slowly ramped up my Text Link Ads to the point that it was and is paying for an entire year’s hosting every month. For quite a while, I was selling enough electronic merchandise that I had to claim my site on my tax return. Not bad for writing about one’s playing, I say!

Fast forward to now… zzzzZZiiiipppp!

I wasn’t getting anywhere at work and we were in the process of purchasing a house. To say we needed to generate some cash is an understatement of epic proportions. Enter the 55 hour week and working on freelance jobs in the evening and during night classes. As time went on, we realized that it was better to sacrifice a bit of together time to get a whole day’s pay ahead.

There was seemingly no shortage of money to be made for people with my skillset. Who was I to argue with common sense? It was getting to the point that I was losing money going to the office versus staying home or getting out of there as fast as I could.

Now that I’ve left Corporate America, I’m doing the great COBRA medical payment plan: give me all of your disposable income. Not that we’re in a hard spot, but it sure would be nice to have that money going into our savings account and we’ve made some lifestyle adjustments as a result.

The nice part is that the opportunities have not stopped. I took a couple of months off to adjust to working at home, but now I’ve started working at 9:00 or 10:00pm at full-blown consulting rates to get ready for our switch to a PPO insurance plan and a planned loss of a significant portion of my income next year. Here is what I’ve done to ready ourselves with multiple streams of income:

• I’ve placed affiliate links in my forum signatures I have in various places.
• I have made my own advertisements for the services I use that match my site and attract people and don’t detract from my design — note my iThemes ad above.
• I am offering WordPress training via Skype in the evenings.
• I take on small (1-3 hour) WordPress installation and customization jobs.

Put all of those things together, and I have a constant stream of e-mails going to Gorgeous letting her know when I’ll be scheduled to be on Skype and preparing to transfer from PayPal to our bank account. All of this can be done without a college degree or any startup money aside from a hosting plan, although you could get started on a free site such as WordPress.com and convert easily later, though you’ll lose traffic for a while using that method, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

I’ll leave you with this quote from my good friend, Phil Gerbyshak:

Work hard now or work hard forever.