Matt Blancarte dot Com Design – Business – Two Cents

Imagine yourself shuffling through a filing cabinet looking for your birth certificate. You open the drawer and to your dismay, none of the *MANY* documents inside this filing cabinet have been put into folders. Instead, all of the documents are shuffled into a mind-numbing clutter that will take turn your expectedly short task into a tedious, exhausting experience. You proceed to smash your head into the nearest solid object, most likely the filing cabinet itself. Oh, the joys of clutter!

If you work in photoshop at all, you’re more than likely familiar with “layers.” Designs can sometimes consist of 100+ layers, all of which contain different elements.

More often than not, other people’s .psd files that I work on haven’t been organized in the slightest. This often leads me to a sharp pain in my forehead and several profane verbs and nouns.

“But wait!”, you say. “You can control+click on anything and…

Although I am still a newbie among most web developers, I have many basic skills in designing and coding websites. Many of my skills can be attributed to the intuitiveness of the software I use. At this point, I am much stronger when I use a WYSIWYG editor than if I am writing plain css code.

Why am I even writing this article? To motivate you to make some money online, of course! I have written a few articles covering two small streams of income I generate, and a common response is “it’s not detailed enough.”

Well, I am not going to hold your hand through the developer’s learning curve, I’m sorry. I don’t know people that have progressed in their skill-sets by just reading step-by-step articles. The best I am willing to offer here are some ideas that will motivate, maybe even enlighten, you to give some of these ideas a…

I figured you all might want to see what our bootstrapped business is looking like right now. ^_^ If you walked into the room, you would see this on your left:

We are truly bootstrapping this business as of right now. When you are in this situation, cramming yourself into a room with a bunch of equipment is the best option… at least if you want the best possible margins. Pain before pleasure can sum up the idea behind this setup. Right across the room, you can see a familiar character…

We have four computers in the room, three of which (the macbook pros and macbook) run constantly. The only time I turn on my windows xp machine is when we are testing code in internet explorer… which is no fun.

Although offices aren’t too expensive around here, we see no need to add such a cost.

Aside from showing you our bootstrapped apartment…