Photo from iStockphoto
Like I said before, if you want to win the good projects on Elance and make some real money (not just for peanuts), the first thing you need to know is how to choose your battles. Just bid on projects worth bidding on, or at least can turn into a project worth bidding on (some buyers don’t know how to come up with a useful brief, but sometimes you can help).
That being said, below are some types o projects you DON’T want to bid on. In fact, you should run like crazy when you see posts similar to these.
I made some comments too, so if you are a client looking to hire me, you might want to read this posts first. Don’ take it personally… it’s for your own good. 
- “I have many projects for you, so bid accordingly” - What does “bid accordingly mean”? I know what it means… means you want me to work for peanuts, don’t you? In this case, let’s not hide behind fancy words and false promises. Just say “I’m looking for cheap work and don’t care about image, so if you do this one for a nickel, there’s more where that came from”. I think I’ll say pass!
- “I need a clone of the following website” - You also don’t care a lot about image and I have a feeling you expect this to cost you close to nothing. After all, you provided all the “creative input”, right? I just “did some HTML”. No, I don’t think I want to be associated with plagiarism and cheap work. No thanks!
- “I want blue rounded corners with a 2px white border” - Wow, I’m amazed! You seem to know so much about web graphics. I’m sure we’ll get along great and you will be able to help me with a thing or two. I always love to hear a good Photoshop tip from one of my clients. NOT!!! Sorry, my friend, but this is not the kind of brief I expect from clients. I expect the kind of “tell me your needs, your goals, your expectations” kind of brief. Throw in a site structure, the website content and maybe some style preferences and we’re good to go. Give me too much design related details and I know for sure that you’ll make my life miserable in the next couple of weeks.
- “I need a website for my company” - That’s good to know. I was afraid you’re gonna need me to build you a space shuttle or something. Duuhh! Of course you need a website! After all, your project is listed under Website Design & Development. To such a project description, my estimate can only be this: it will cost between $500 and $50000 and it will take between 3 and 365 days to complete. Come on! Give me something to work with. This is the exact opposite of point 3.
- “We had a good designer who designed themes in WordPress for $150 each. That is a comfortable price point for us” - Can I have his number? I have a job for him! Now seriously… even free themes are worth more than that. But I guess it’s true what they say: you get what you pay for. Sorry, but I’m more “comfortable” with clients who appreciate my work.
And a little bonus: 2 more quotes, with no comment. I think they fall into the funny / weird category:
- A client’s idea for a blog header: “Animation of a mechanic opening the hood of a car to check out the engine”
- A client’s request: “I am looking for someone that would be prepared to come to my home for a few hours - to go through the basics of Wordpress with me”
Take care and bid wisely!
Looks like my tutorial on how to customize Wordpress widgets with CSS was quite popular. One of my readers asked me if there’s a way to add round corners to Wordpress widgets. The answer is: of course! 
There are many ways to implement rounded corners using CSS and images. In this tutorial, I won’t be using the best or the most flexible one. I’ll be using a technique that allows people to add rounded corners to widgets without the use of Photoshop or any other graphics program. While this method won’t produce spectacular results, I think it’s the easiest way to add rounded corners, even if you are a Wordpress newbie.
Create the round corner images
Like I said, we won’t need Photoshop or similar. Instead, we will use this web based rounded corner generator to generate the top and bottom images for your rounded corner box.
Scroll to the bottom of the screen, where it says Single RoundedCornr Image. Use the following settings to generate the top image:
- Height: 10
- Width: Put your sidebar width here. If you can’t find that in your theme CSS, try to approximate. You can recreate the image until you have a match.
- Bottom Corners: Square
- Corner Radius: 10
- Solid Color: To help you with this, you can use the ColorSchemer Online Tool. Copy / paste the HEX value when you found the right color.
Leave the rest as it is and hit Generate RoundedCornr. If you like what you see, download the image, rename it to rounded_top.gif and place it in your theme’s images folder.
Hit your browser’s Back button and repeat the same process, but using Top Corners: Square. Save the file as rounded_bottom.gif.
Adding the CSS
Go to Presentation > Theme Editor and paste the following in your styles.css:
-
.widget {
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background: #FF9900 url(images/rounded_bottom.gif) no-repeat bottom left;
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padding-bottom: 10px;
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}
-
-
.widgettitle {
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background: url(images/rounded_top.gif) no-repeat top left;
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padding: 10px 10px 0 10px;
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}
-
-
.widget ul {
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margin: 0 10px;
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list-style: none;
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}
Use your chosen background color instead of #CCCCCC.
Last comments
- In case you chose a different corner radius, you must also change this in CSS. So for a corner radius of 5, you should change 10px to 5px everywhere.
- This works out of the box with bulleted list type of widgets, like Latest Posts, Latest Comments, etc. For other widgets (like a text widget) you might need to add some more CSS, for proper alignment.
- For the top image you can even use a gradient. Just be careful to choose two similar colors, otherwise it will look to flashy.
That’s it! Now go and practice. Feel free to comment if you run into trouble and I’ll do my best to help.
I wanted to reorder the links from my blogroll widget, but it looks as though the theme doesn’t take into account the settings I made under Blogroll > Manage Blogroll. Since I don’t have time to mess with the Wordpress theme right now, I wanted a quick and easy solution.
I did a little research and found the My Link Order Plugin. It’s just what the doctor ordered: it has AJAX powered drag and drop features that allow you to sort the order of both links and categories from your blogroll.
After you define the link order, all you have to do is get rid of the default Links widget and use the My Link Order widget instead. Doesn’t get any easier than this.
Photo by Petrick2008
There’s a very interesting article about freelance bidding sites over at Freelance Switch. There are some very good comments too and a couple of links to similar articles on other blogs. This shows people are interested about this subject. That’s why I thought it might be helpful for some of my readers if I shared my point of view.
For me, Elance (probably the best bidding site out there) was a great source for generating new leads. I also tried a couple of other sites, but after registering, there wasn’t much for me to bid on. Working on $5/h projects is not really my thing. And since most of the projects were like that, I stopped using those sites a long time ago. Elance on the other hand is a bit different. While Elance has its share of crappy projects, once in a while you do find some solid leads.
Here’s my point of view: using freelance bidding sites is not a bad or shameful thing to do. These sites are not evil. As long as you don’t lower your standards just for the sake of winning a project, these sites are just as good as any other source for generating new leads and finding more work. You can make good money on bidding sites.
Sure, if you have a lot of work on your hands, coming from other sources, there’s no point in wasting time filtering through all the bad projects. You can go straight to the source. But if you browse such a site and stumble across a well documented, well budgeted kind of project that you think is worth a shot, I see no harm in that.
Photo by James Cridland
As you probably know, FeedBurner allows you to display the FeedCount, a small widget (chicklet as they call it) that shows the number of people who subscribed to your blog. It’s a known fact that bloggers (and people in general) tend to follow a crowd, so having a significant FeedCount can determine a snowball effect on your subscriber number. On the other hand, choosing to show a small FeedCount can drive people away. That’s why it’s better to show the FeedCount when your blog has a consistent number of readers.
I used to have a plugin installed, that allowed me to display the subscriber count as plain HTML text, instead of the FeedBurner chicklet (for design reasons). I deleted that a couple of days ago, because someone on a forum told me people could be thinking that I’m faking my subscriber number. That would have been hard to believe, since that number is 17. But I removed it anyway.
What determined me to write this post? Well… I was browsing one of the blogs that I subscribed to, when I noticed the content is not all that great, yet the chicklet showed about 150 subscribers. Sorry, but that’s the truth. So I right clicked and noticed the guy was using the RSS feed from another blog. Needless to say I’m no longer subscribed to that blog.
So I’m asking you: is faking subscriber count worth it? Is there something to gain? If people do subscribe because you seem popular, won’t they unsubscribe when they will realize your content sucks? And another thing: if you are using someone else’s RSS feed (and not a static image) to fake subscriber count, why not use Problogger? I mean… if you’re faking it, why not aim high?
Don’t know about you, but I would rather have my 17 loyal subscribers, rather than faking a crowd.
