After seeing Rescue Time I had to give it a go and see what came out of it. The web app allows you to track your time spent across various applications and sites etc. and gives you your productivity and efficiency scores based on that activity.

You set productivity on a scale of +2 to -2 in terms of points for each website and application you’re using. You can also group activity by tags and groups under groups that are pre-set or that you create yourself. Textmate for example is automatically under ‘Dev Tools’, as is Transmit. As I’m a developer I marked Dev Tools as +2, and Adium (instant messaging) as -2. Campfire would be -1, NewsFire -2 etc. etc. until you have a good overview of everything.

It doesn’t require this kind of extensive set-up, but it only makes it a better tool spending this much time with it. The personal account is free, though your data isn’t kept forever like the paid packages and they have both Mac and PC applications to support its use.

I found overall that Rescue Time helped me enormously with monitoring, and subsequently increasing my efficiency and productivity. I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted to find out just how effective they are in their work without much of set-up.

If you have any results of your own you would like to share feel free to talk about them in the comments. I’d be delighted to see how others are doing with any trials they’re running with Rescue Time.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

1. Nobody pays attention to their fonts. A CV is potentially 100% text in its standard format, yet hardly anyone strays from the standard set of 5-6 fonts.
2. It’s obvious when you use a template. Some may think it’s not, but it is.
3. Ever thought of laying it out? Why not use a two or three column table for that list of skills you’re outlining? How about removing some of the babble and spacing it out a little?
4. Personality is a dying art. Despite me declaring I wanted to see some personality from applications when they sent in their e-mail I saw very little.
5. Nobody catered their CV to the role. Everyone sent in a standard CV. Nobody put in some text about why they’d want the role, or why they would be a good fit for it.

Learn from their mistakes and adapt to them next time you send in a CV for a job you want to apply to. Make it interesting for the person on the other end.

Have any opinions on the subject? Or advice for others? Bad mistakes you’ve made with your own CV? Feel free to leave a comment below, I’d love to hear them.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Here’s a few tips as to things you can do to get this experience to enhance the theory behind your degree in the real world:

1. Do your own projects, set your own goals. This is a basic one but something that a lot of students don’t do. You need to set out what you want to learn by the end of the year and break it down into deadlines for when you’re going to learn it. Follow that plan as a base before any of the other things in the post and stick to it.
2. Approach local companies involved in your area of desired service. It’s something that most students are afraid to do but it’s potentially a big opportunity to learn a lot about the role you want to work within later on. Observing the way people communicate, joining in on office banter and simply becoming comfortable in an office environment lends a big help towards how easy it will be to hire you. Most importantly here: work for free. Company’s don’t want to pay, but they will throw you the odd project if you work for free to gain you extremely valuable experience. If there’s an extra desk in the corner, why the heck not let you sit there and learn?
3. Search out online teams There are plenty of online teams for areas like 3D, illustration, Flash and others that are dedicated to learning as a group and growing as a talent. I find myself lucky to have found myself within a team like Pixel2life early on and it gave me an extremely good base of talents to move on forwards from after I left.
4. Approach local charities/business. Focus on people that wouldn’t be able to afford the services you provide if they wanted to. (But of course would find it of benefit to have those services in the first place). You offering to give them your services for free in aid of some experience and a reference may just get you another project in your portfolio/CV come interview day.
5. Read a lot of blogs. It sounds basic, but you need to get yourself an RSS feed reader and add an RSS feed from every site you can find of reasonable quality into it. Read the articles that come through and study the latest trends and issues in your field. It makes you a more valuable candidate and cements your role within the team should you get a job.

What’s most important here is for you not to sit and take your college or university course as gospel. Yes there are people who get jobs straight out of their course with little help and there are courses that obviously don’t need this post. But you only increase your chance by getting up and doing something outside of your usual routine. It doesn’t have to be a full-time 40 hour workweek for free, do it a couple nights a week. Even a few hours a week is going to improve upon what you’re doing already.

If you’re a student yourself and have any comments about how you’ve prepared yourself for the outside world upon leaving your course or if you have any more advice for the students out there, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear it.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Virgin, please read the following and adapt your advertising appropriately:

• You don’t own the box: Virgin don’t sell you a box, they let you rent it. Which means free repairs, free replacements and no extra £10-15 a month for a support plan just to get someone out to your house when your Sky box is dead. Virgin also offer remote support on the box where by they can fix some problems over the phone. Sky doesn’t offer this, unless you’re paying extra. Another benefit to this for Virgin’s customers is that your box also gets upgraded for free too.
• Record two, watch one: With Virgin this literally means watch one program whilst recording two others. With Sky, this means record two programs and one watch of them. This is annoying as you more often than not end up watching parts of one of the programs you’ve got set to record. Another annoyance attached to this is that Sky disables all other features when two programs are recording, no information, no guide, nothing unless you cancel a recording.
• Information button? Well… not really. With Virgin, you browse to a program or channel and press the information button and it gives you information on the program you currently have selected. With Sky, it simply returns information on the program you’re currently watching. That is, unless you’re looking through the guide.
• Elevator music: Sky’s guide is boring. You press it and it removes all trace of the program you’re watching. You browse through the channels and everything else whilst listening to elevator music and are stuck staring at text. Virgin on the other hand: you have a small picture of what you were watching and can continue to hear the channel as well as watching it whilst browsing the guide.
• Television, that isn’t on: anywhere. Sky has ‘catch up TV’ where by you have a selection of 15-20 great programs over the past week to watch through. The problem is, you require a subscription to the channels to watch them. With Virgin there’s this and a massive back catalogue including the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4-on-Demand and hundreds of other series for you to watch through. A massive, massive plus on Virgin’s side.

Feel free to share your annoyances with Sky or Virgin in the comments below. I’d love to hear your opinions.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Here’s a sample structure of a re-direct line:

Redirect 301 /about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about

/about.php here is the local URL relative to the core domain you’re redirecting from. If you’re redirecting from http://www.sample.com/directory/about.php then this will be /directory/about.php and if you are redirecting from http://www.sample.com/about.php then it is simply /about.php.

The second part of this statement is the complete URL you are forwarding to.

The beauty of a 301 redirect with .htaccess is that if you have one big set of URL’s that have changed from one place to another with the filename/end URL staying the same it is still the same statement. For example:

Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/

This redirects /test/about.php to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/about.php - anything after /test/ will be redirected to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/ and placed at the end of the URL. The same applies for all query URLs (i.e. about.php?variable=1&this=that).

Tip: Always priority order your redirects. The redirects you want done first should go up top. But you should also be careful not to place inherent statements above specific ones.

This won’t work:

Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/
Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.php

This will result in the first statement being processed and the second statement meaning nothing. The correct order is:

Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.php
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/

This means the specific statement is applied first, and then the inherent statement is ran afterwards.

Here’s a sample of our extensive re-directs for Sausage Roll to Rolled:

Redirect 301 /general-posts/ http://www.rolled.at/general-news/
Redirect 301 /wp-content/uploads/11/ http://www.rolled.at/wp-content/uploads/

Here is what they do:

• Moves all posts in the /general-posts/ slugged category to show at /general-news/ on the new site. For example /general-posts/testing-post is now /general-news/testing-post on the new site as we changed the category.
• All uploads from /wp-content/uploads/11/ are now linked to in /wp-content/uploads/. For examples /wp-content/uploads/11/test.jpg is now /wp-content/uploads/test.jpg on the new server.

All of these lines can be applied to 302 (temporary) redirects too. Just switch the number 301 with 302 to achieve the result you need. 302 redirects should be used where the file is only moving there for a short while but will be put back eventually and 301 redirects are used to transfer the URL to the new URL permanently and work great for a site move or a URL restructuring.

I used these to transfer Twod.co.uk to JHuskisson.com and several other transfers and they have all retained by page rank and search engine strength from domain to domain with ease.

Have any other htaccess redirect tips or things to discuss? Feel free to leave a comment using the form below.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

1. Posting the wrong job application text up in the first place/wanting something you can’t get
   Most people just post up a big long list of what they want and accept nothing else. To get the right result post up the bare minimum that you’re looking for and add ‘traits that would be ideal, but not required are:’ to the bottom.
2. Grabbing the first person that comes along.
   Sometimes it’s genius but the majority of time it’s just lack of patience. The first person in your inbox isn’t always the best. If you can’t find anyone and are desperate, then you need to start thinking about how you’re posting and where you’re posting.
3. Posting in the wrong places
   Do your research first and take a look around at the other job listings being posted up in the same place you’re putting yours. If you find jobs that aren’t similar in the majority, then it’s the wrong place. If the others look completely different to yours (less detailed, much more detailed, including images, not including images) then adapt your posting.
4. Trying to fit the wrong person into the wrong position
   Don’t hire an Expression Engine developer to be a Wordpress developer if they don’t already have experience. Don’t hire someone who specialises in non-framework based development to work on a Code Igniter powered site. Get someone who already has the experience otherwise you either get: a) more expense for nothing, or b) a completely poor result. Sometimes it’s both.
5. Make sure you know their hours
   When, in their timezone, are they online? It should be one of the first questions you ask and you should know when each of your outsourced team will be online or offline.
6. Know how to get in touch
   Do they want to Skype? Do they want to be contacted by phone? By AIM? MSN? GTalk/Jabber? ICQ? Know that they fit what you want and don’t have their own standards. I once worked with a developer who decided to let me know that he only wanted to be contacted when he decided to come online, on MSN. No phone calls, no Skype, nothing. When he was called, he pulled out of the project. Clearly a bad choice.

I will follow this in a series of other articles about outsourcing. If you have any other mistakes or experiences to share, feel free to leave a comment on this article as it would be fascinating to read.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

We work with Linux, Apache, PHP 5 and mySQL 5 technologies; deploying Wordpress, Expression Engine, Magento or Code Igniter applications where necessary to meet our client’s needs and we’re looking for someone to join our team as a developer. Note: you don’t have to know all of these to apply, so don’t be shy.

Qualities we’re looking for:

• Good sense of humour
• Good English, at the very least
• Good work ethic
• Ability to handle multiple jobs at the same time
• Able to work to tight deadlines, and deliver on those they themselves set out
• Ability to work within a development structure that is set out for each type of job

Requirements of the positions(s):

• Take part in our daily banter in our staff campfire
• Ability to use Basecamp, for project management
• Specialist experience with Magento, Expression Engine, Wordpress or Code Igniter
• Available part-time, or full-time

If you’re interested send an e-mail with your rates (hourly, or monthly), location, availability, why you want to work for us and experience to jay@junomedia.co.uk. Make sure the subject contains the words ‘Job opening’ in it somewhere in there.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

It’s an opportunity to join an established company in the area with a good solid set of existing clients and revenue. Carers Federation and The Coffee Fairy are the two favourites that I’ve worked on so far, being the social entrepreneurs that they are.

There’s also a big opportunity to change the company from the inside into taking on board blogs, RSS feeds, open source, “web 2.0″, web apps, social entrepreneurialism and all those other “modern” things we’ve been doing at Rolled in the past. Myself and Dave (owner/director of Juno Media) have sat down and formulated a plan of attack for this and have already started applying it to new clients.

It also means you should see me at conferences from now on, which I was unable to do at Rolled due to lack of excess funds. We’ve already started by attending the fantastic SHINE unConference on the 9th of May.

Of course, a regular wage and lack of business-induced stress is also a big plus. With weekends off and work ending at 5:30pm everyday - it’s going to be completely different from the twelve hour work days and seven day workweeks I worked at Rolled as Managing Director.

Here’s to, yet again, a new stage in my life.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

I stumbled upon Kongregate today and after looking around at the place I’ve decided to try it out. If you’re gaming on there or just have a profile you visit once every five months, add me to your friends list: http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/jhuskisson.

I think the achievements being built into the Flash games combined with upcoming card game based on challenges that happen now and again ultimately sold me on this site. Combined with a fantastic catalogue of games it’s unique, it’s taking an existing tired old idea that has been done over and over again and advancing on that using a complete integration of the games on the site with social profiles. It’s a great idea with an excellent execution and I hope to be seeing further advancements in the future to build what they’ve already got.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

I had David over at Rolled put together this design about a month ago based on one of Nofie Iman’s free Wordpress themes that I ran into when looking for a temporary refresh. The design will change over time, and it is planned that it will be added to as time progresses but for the moment this is the clean slate that I am to start again with.

Some interesting numbers that I’ve noticed whilst paying attention to the site properly over the past week or so. I’ve just hit 1,100 comments on posts from users and over 28,000 have been blocked via Akismet in comparison. I’ve also seen my subscribers number hit above 150, and hope to see this rise further the more I post up.

Things are moving forward on a significant amount of things in the background that I’ll be posting up about, but in short it mostly means I should be able to post much more freely in the future without worrying too much. I hope to be able to talk about the changes from freelancing to small business, how I coped with it and how I should have done it differently so that people doing the same may benefit.

I’m going to release this design as a free Wordpress theme in a few weeks, along with a Wordpress plug-in or two that I’ve put together. I also have some Code Igniter helpers/libraries and Expression Engine modules/plug-ins that I hope to be documenting online. So lots of releases all round.

For now, enjoy poking around the new layout and feel free to follow me to Twitter or any other social networking app you may be using. I’ve taken the time to list a few of my profiles I have around the net on my contact page.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Decisions need to be made well in advance when it comes to launching a site, and this article covers just some of the most important things to consider when it comes to getting your new site online. These aren’t things to leave until the last possible minute, and should all be dealt with well in advance to launch.

Content

Are you going to re-write it? Are you going to use the same stuff with some problems? Are you wanting us to arrange a content writer for you?

Audio

Have you got all your audio files ready in the correct format to be put into the CMS? Are they on the online web service you’re going to be using to host them ready?

Video

Do you know how to get video off your CD’s and DVD’s stored? Or anywhere else for that matter? Do you know what format they need to be in? What codec to use? Do you know how to convert this format into the one you need everything to be in?

Images

Are you going to be using a web service such as Flickr? Or the CMS provided? What size do they need to be in? Do they need resizing? Or are you going to use the originals? Do they need watermarking?

Training

When will you be trained? What on? For how long? Who needs to be there? Do the people doing the training really need to be coming back several times? Or can you get all done at once? Will it cost you less if this is the case?

Contacts

If there’s more than one source for the requirements going into a project, then there needs to be a sharing of all these sources between the companies involved.

These can include, but are not limited to: accounting, hosting contacts, IT contacts, domain name registrars, designers, developers and directors.

The timeline

Make sure your timeline includes strictly set deadlines that aren’t slipped. When will you have your contacts ready? When will you have a training deadline set? Your images ready? Videos? Audio? Content for this section? That section? The other section?

Make sure they are realistic and not rushed, when deadlines are rushed they are often missed. If the staff are managing other things at the same time then they need the time to do that, not be forced to make decisions about other things too.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

If anyone wants to get in touch, my character’s name is Twodder (what else would it be?) and I’m on the Darkspear European server. I’m already up to Darkshore, heading into Ashenvale.

Feel free to post anti-WoW comments if necessary.

Update: Gave up after a month, it required far too much time.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

I find it odd that a company would opt for a computer system over a person, and was happy to realise that you could say ‘agent’ any time after the first three questions on PayPal’s customer service line and speak to a real person.

People complain about customer service being based in India, but it’s nothing compared with no human interaction at all.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

This appeared upon me entering my rolled.at e-mail address in on a site, despite me also entering my UK address and UK post code, and UK phone numbers.

Darn that Austrian domain name for uncovering my true foreign identity.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

The video messes up around eight minutes in, but is a fantastic listen in the background. If you haven’t read or don’t own a book by Seth Godin and are serious about business, I suggest you go about buying Purple Cow and giving it a read.

Update: Seth has taken the video down due to it stopping itself eight minutes in, but has placed up a PDF transcript of the talk online which is well worth a read.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Why not have a de-centralised rental system that competes directly with these libraries? Even if you go to your university library, city library and local library - there’s still not enough to go through everyone. Put it online and deliver books straight to those student’s homes for a fee, it doesn’t even have to be directly to a student’s home: just deliver it to the university and have them pick it up there.

It could easily be per book, per month or per student term. Better yet, don’t aim directly at student’s and just have a student plan that student’s can actually afford.

I’m not talking eBooks, but the real thing you hold in your hand and can scan copies of for references. You’re solving the national university problem based around the lack of books, and you’re going to have casual readers that want a book or two a month as well. The market would be completely begging for this solution.

The option to buy could be implemented if needed and you could even let people send in their own books to increase your library, giving them credit or money for doing so. Especially when we’re talking old educational books some students don’t need to own after leaving university.

Get it done Amazon.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Why do certain sites suggest you sign up to learn more about the service? In an age of open information and tour’s to anything that’s worth signing up for, it’s time all sites adapted these techniques to give power to their statements.

I want an extreme ironing forum and you say your forum is the best, give me five reasons why to back up your statement and you’ve probably sold me. Tell me to sign up to learn why, and I’ve gone onto the next forum in the search results list.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

I don’t want to get into a rant, but in my opinion BT Business represents one of the worst organised companies I’ve ever come across. To back this opinion up, here’s only a select few of the problems I’ve encountered so far in my 7-8 months with them:

• Four times larger bills than normal broadband users
• The only apparent reason for this being English speaking customer service representatives who answer within ten minutes and not Indian speaking customer service representatives who answer with two hours (both on 0845 numbers)
• Having to be forwarded to a different department at least once every time I ring up because there are only 2-3 numbers listed on the back of each bill, and the website is utterly useless at suggesting what number to call
• Being forwarded to the wrong department 50% of the time
• Despite originally ordering from one sales guy, I have two separate accounts: one for phone and one for broadband
• They both have different people to ring up separately to change any details
• For each there’s a department that will change your address, a department to change your card details, and a department to change your company name. Not to mention the sales, faults, technical and other useless departments for each of these accounts
• Engineers that come out to install the broadband are from a different company altogether, Open Reach
• They have to deal with Indian call centres
• They can’t directly ring up BT and put in an order for anything, but they can ring up and say they’ve completed a job

Back when I was much younger, BT used to be a company I looked at in awe. Now days it seems they’ve done everything they can to ruin what was a fantastic customer experience ten years ago.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.

Changes are on going at Rolled and we have several great announcements over the next 1-3 months as we develop into a tighter team, establish our new brand and client services. Don’t hesistate to subscribe to the Sausage Roll RSS feed to get instant updates, or subscribe via e-mail for a morning e-mail after we post anything up.

Sponsored By: Freelance PHP Develoment and other work such as illustration, 3d visualisation and web design are offered by my company.

• If it says full-time please for the love of god don’t apply thinking it’s a freelance position. It just isn’t, ‘full-time’ and ‘freelance’ are two entirely different job types.
• No, you can’t apply for the full-time position, waste an hour of my time talking to me and then say “so here’s the thing… I work with three others guys in…” - stop - your a company already. Next.
• The same goes for ‘White Label’ services. Go away.
• Applying because you like Rolled’s (or my) sense of humour? Show some of your own, it knocks you up the queue significantly. If you are going to talk like a robot, attach a video of you dancing like one to up the comedy level and recover that dreaded generic application from the dead pile.
• Adding to the point above, show some personality. It’s very clear when you are using a template you’ve pre-prepared or slightly editing one.
• Address the actual job, If I say I want x and x from a Wordpress Developer, please tell me if you can do any of those x’s. It’s almost the point of the e-mail, the introduction and background paragraph’s are meaningless unless a paragraph addressing the job and your talent to do x and x appears. If you can do x and x extra that’s brilliant, but address the original issues.
• “I’d like £65 an hour and I can work 9-5, I’m just out of University and have done some work for a company in London”. Use some common sense with your rates, especially if you are straight out of University or College with little experience.

Sponsored By: Freelance PHP Develoment and other work such as illustration, 3d visualisation and web design are offered by my company.

Before frustrated subscribers ask - yes, they’ll be a dedicated Rolled.at blog for this stuff eventually. I figured I’d post it up here as I’ve always received replies and better people as a result of posting here rather than on job boards.

I’m looking to bring a Wordpress developer and a Front-end developer for the team. We have a constant stream of Wordpress development and are looking to work with someone based in the UK. He or she must have:

• A sense of humour, and a love for Wordpress
• A love for a good sausage roll (the food - someone explained to me the other day it’s a very bizarre sexual position, but let’s not get into that now)
• Inside and out knowledge of the Wordpress template system
• A knowledge of too many plug-ins to count
• Ability to search or even build a plug-in to suit a specific need
• Ability to solve problems rather than create them
• Set pricing on a job-by-job basis, or a monthly fee to keep you on full-time
• Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.

For the front-end developer position I’m looking for:

• A sense of humour, and a love for CSS/XHTML
• Ability to create XHTML Strict code in any situation, without falling back to Transitional
• Ability to produce hack-less CSS compatible with IE6, FireFox 1-2, Safari and Opera
• Ability to go further back in the browser time-machine if neccesary
• Ability to re-write existing terrible ‘want to slap the person who did it, table based’ code into ‘nice and pretty’ mark-up
• Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.

If I fail to receive a application by Monday-Wednesday (depending on when I have time), I will post it around several job boards instead. Applicants should format their e-mails to me as such:

• Hi, I’m -x- from -x- and I love Sausage Rolls.
• Here is why you should hire me: -bullet pointed list-
• Here is my rough set per-job pricing and/or my monthly/weekly hiring fee should you want to choose between the two
• Here’s what I can bring to Rolled which no-one else can
• I love you man! -x- (Ok this one is optional)

Looking forward to seeing what I get in my inbox Monday morning.

Sponsored By: Freelance PHP Develoment and other work such as illustration, 3d visualisation and web design are offered by my company.

It didn’t contain: his education background as far back as when he attended Nursery, his grades breakdown and ten pages of reading material padded out with lots of stretched truth to do with what they did at their last job. Example:

McDonalds - Senior Beef technician
Lead a team of three people processing and preparing beef for use in gourmet food ate by thousands daily. Designed a unique technique of packaging that is used for top customers to this day.

Translation
Was in a team of four saying nothing, doing nothing but unpacking pre-shaped burger meat and passing it down the queue. Figured that spitting just underneath the cheese in annoying customers burgers before packing them could never be found, and that tip is now passed down through remaining staff to new staff to this day.

Essentially:
Stop blabbing on, don’t send 100 URL’s with no explanation but send four or five latest pieces of work with explanations for each. Realistically I don’t have ten minutes for each applicant, so if your e-mail or application contains more than a minute or two of reading then it’s not going to get read.

Sponsored By: Freelance PHP Develoment and other work such as illustration, 3d visualisation and web design are offered by my company.

I (and Rolled) are looking to bring in a designer we can use on all our design work, from designing the Rolled site and internal client management system to working directly with our extensive client portfolio, with some household names awaiting us appointing someone for the position.

We need someone in the UK or Europe, possibly willing to communicate with clients directly over the phone, input ideas, deliver wireframes and initial rough ideas quickly and provide us with a range of design styles from ‘web 2.0′ to clean and minimalist. We also need someone who can take an existing brand and create a site using that brand’s logo and colour scheme easily over an existing base.

The role involves a huge workload and will be more than likely heading towards a full-time position in the future. If you currently run your own design company or work as a freelancer we are happy to take on board any existing clients and have them deal directly with you. There is also a possibility that clients will want a designer present at meetings - in which case Rolled will cover all expenses involved. We don’t wish to ‘partner’ with any company or group of individuals - we strictly want this to remain within Rolled.

The role is urgent and needs to be filled with a week or two at most. So send any examples of your work, why you would like to work for Rolled and why you think you’d be a good fit - and some rough pricing information to jay@rolled.at if you are interested.

Sponsored By: Freelance PHP Develoment and other work such as illustration, 3d visualisation and web design are offered by my company.

With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have

With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.

You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?

If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves - why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?

Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money

There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?

If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach

I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.

At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it - just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.

Presenting

I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why - I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.

The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.

It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another - and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.

In conclusion

Stop whinging - stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?

At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.

Sponsored By: Rolled Limited : My web design, development and strategy company based in Nottingham, UK.