After many months of development, I am glad to say that www.asht.info has finally launched.

Who are ASHT?

The Anglo Sikh Heritage Trail is a project of the Maharajah Duleep Singh Centenary Trust. The Trust was first established in 1993, the centenary year of the death of Maharajah Duleep Singh, with the primary objective of highlighting and promoting Anglo Sikh heritage. Since then it has engaged in a series of initiatives, including the Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms exhibition in collaboration with the V&A, the annual Portrait of Courage lecture at the Imperial War Museum and the Jawans to Generals exhibition in collaboration with English Heritage. Other projects have included the commissioning of a bronze statue of Maharajah Duleep Singh at Thetford; the first major piece of Sikh art outside India, as well as two highly successful festivals of Anglo Sikh heritage.

The site has a user friendly CMS, newsletter system as well as various ways for the community to contribute. The site was built using PHP/Codeigniter framework with a MySQL database. Client side development resulted in clean CSS/HTML markup as well as the creation of database driven flash elements. Site wide search makes use of Google’s Custom Search.

Visit ASHT

My Blog has been quiet, OK… very quiet. I have tried my darndest to find time (and energy) to write BUT I have failed. I have happy reasons for that. I have been amazingly busy trying to juggle work and all round general company growth. So much so that I am now recruiting permanent staff and looking for offices.

Its time to move on from my home office, I need to feel like I am progressing. Getting ever nearer to whatever it is we all work towards… which to this day I still don’t know what that is.

If you have any of the following skills and are based in Leicester then get in touch.

• Print / Web Design
• Marketing / Strategic planning / Sales
• SEO
• Web Development (esp. ASP.Net/C# and PHP)

Looking for freelancers, local companies and job hunters. (no agencies)

In an attempt to run my entire life from Netvibes, I created a Freelancers.net projects rss feed. This is a site scrape-parse-rss script so if the html changes within the page then it is likely that the feed will stop working, let me know if it does as I will probably have not noticed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/freelancersnet

I hope this will reduce the number of daily bookmark mouse clicks by one. :D

Enquiries for work come in several times a week. The source of which can range from large companies to individual start-ups and charities.

A large chunk of my time is spent sifting through them picking out ones that are serious from the ones that aren’t. Having done this for many years I now have learnt to trust my instincts. If it doesn’t feel right, walk away.

How can you tell good from bad?
The first part is approach and that initial introduction. Is it a polite, well laid out email with full contact details and a very top-line description of the project? If so, then it is something I would pursue since the person took the time to give me enough information to act upon. Enquiries which end up in my trash can are ones that took next to no time to write, didn’t bother passing on details other than a hotmail like address, no hello or introduction, just a few lines on what they want and how much they think it will cost… typically a www.enter_popular_domain_here.com clone.

Why am I telling you this?
There is the perception that developers and designers, or anyone involved in internet development generally are hard up for work. So much so that prospective clients think they can wave the “do it cheap, and be grateful” stick and we will come running. This simply has to stop. Case and point, a recent enquiry came in which prompted me to write this. Amongst its world domination by developing the next best Web 2.0 thingy was the following:

“I am looking for a reliable, hard working developer to submit a competitively priced quote immediately. The chosen one will need to produce high quality work and be polite, on-time and obedient!!! Details of the second part of the project will be sent when we feel you are good enough to complete the first phase!!!”

What is this person implying? That all developers are expensive, rubbish at what they do, stay in bed all day and are rude?

I went to a restaurant recently and the meat was tough, the main dish was cold and was just generally all-round not nice. Does that mean that I now have the right to enter restaurants and say:

“I am looking for hot, freshly cooked meat and for the main dish to also be hot and taste exactly the way I want it!!!!”

I don’t. To assume that all restaurants are the same would be unfair and outright rude.

Freelancers aren’t desperate for work to the point that you can sacrifice manners and etiquette. So don’t.

How do we decide on which developers/designers to use?
This is difficult to answer. 3 years ago we had our back garden completely landscaped. We went through a procedure which we thought would help us find a reliable, honest, hard working individual who knew his stuff. Cor blimey, we were wrong! But that’s a story for another day.

Start with portfolio, then make polite contact via email passing on your full contact details and a brief outline of the project. Follow that with a chat, either a face to face meeting or an on-line video conferencing call. Get a feel for whether the freelancer knows where you are coming from and understands where you are heading with the project. Not only do you need someone on board that can carry out the work, but can also contribute by being the resident “expert” throwing in additional ideas and alternative ways of looking at the problem.

I am happy to say that the vast majority of enquiries are polite and detailed, this is aimed at the few that aren’t. You know who you are. :D

I am drowning in a sea of paperwork. Quote requests, to do lists, project related paraphernalia, emails. The list is endless. Up until now I had a process. It involved coloured plastic folders from Asda. The shelf where these folders lie is now beginning to creak under the strain.

I need a new process. One that can handle live projects, projects awaiting sign off, postponed projects, archived projects as well as my to do list and invoicing.

A shiny new filing cabinet later and I am ready to get myself organised.

The structure:
I have broken down work into the following top level categories:

• Clients
• Individual projects per client
• Invoices
• Unpaid
• Paid
• Awaiting client feedback
• Archived projects
• To do

Clients - Within which will sit all projects for that client.
Invoices - a way to have printouts ready for my accountant (the missus).
Awaiting client feedback – Holding area for projects that are awaiting input from the client
Archived - Will contain projects that were one-offs and don’t warrant a client folder of their own. More than one project and they are allowed their own folder. Helps keep the number of folders down.
To do - Will hold all tasks that need immediate attention. The aim of which will be to empty the folder.

Surprisingly (or maybe not) nearly half of the paperwork has ended up getting recycled. Its amazing what you think you need therefore print, then never look at again.

In addition to my file structure, I also purchased a dry wipe board and placed it above my monitor. This will be where I will note down the next days list of tasks, again with the aim for it to be blank by the end of the day in preparation for the next days set of tasks.

Let’s see how this pans out. :)