People often ask me how I manage to run my own company. I have been operating under the same principals since the beginning of my professional career (many years ago). Time and time again, I have seen “design” companies (small and large) struggle to keep their clients happy. What I realized is that the most important principals of good business are the reason that so many other companies round on failure; because they do not operate in that way.

The most important principal is communication. Communication with your client is the only way that you can have success with them. When you fail to let them know what you are doing with their investment, they will quickly believe the absolute worst in the situation. If you do not have an answer to a question, be honest with them. If you are struggling with a problem and find that you do not know how to solve it, tell them about it. Don’t pretend to know everything or have all of the answers, because that is just silly and unrealistic. Wouldn’t you rather work with someone who was completely honest with you than someone who was “taking you for a ride?”

The second rule of good business is to follow through with what you say you are going to do. If you make a promise that you will fulfill whatever need is being asked of you, make sure that you do exactly that. Don’t say you are going to do something, and then leave it to be forgotten, or try to wrangle your way out of it through ‘technicalities.’ Help your clients to understand exactly what it is you will do for them, and let them question everything, so that you are both on the exact same page moving forward.

The third main principal of good business is to maintain the highest quality service and production that you can. The more time and energy that you put forth in your projects for clients, the more you will be rewarded in the end. Its not just about making good money, although that can be a great motivator. It should not matter whether a project is a huge whale or a tiny fish, the quality needs to stay on point. You will not only gain a great portfolio piece for your collection, but you will gain a fan of you and your work, which leads to referrals, more business and more money.

If you can stick with these simple rules, you will find so much more success with your professional career – whether you work for yourself or for a large company.

It is exciting how easy it can be to develop a fully functioning website with high quality standards, without big budget dollars! I am a designer, who has dabbled with the various and ever-changing technologies that encircle “web development” for the last 6 years. Now that the internet is pretty much at the tip of everybody’s fingers, it has become more of a necessity to have a website that is operational on a multitude of platforms. People have very high expectations about the speed, beauty and content-quality of the websites that they visit. It is important to understand, and keep up with, the standards. This can be a challenge for those of us who are not technically “website developers”.

The beauty of the content management system has made website development a much more attainable goal. Individuals can have little to no technical understanding of the web-programming-language, yet can still create, modify and manage their own website. WordPress and Drupal have become pretty standard CMS solutions because they have been tested in an open-source environment by millions of people around the world. WordPress is pretty easy to install, and there are several hundred different visual themes that can serve as a base structure for you, especially if you are lacking the technical understanding of developing a website. From there you can modify the way your site looks and even functions with handy tools like plugins and widgets.

When I started developing websites, I learned the old-fashioned “table and frame” method with some HTML and help from a little program called Dreamweaver. As I advanced in my career, I learned about CSS and how to have more control over all of the visual elements that I wanted to incorporate into a web design. I dabbled in things like ASP, JAVA, JQUERY, and PHP, but really didn’t grasp all the nitty-gritty details to be able to create a site in any one of these languages, without some help. WordPress offers a very quick and easy means to take web code and manipulate it to do what you want. With a little experimentation, you will find that you can create fully customized websites, with much more functionality than you would ever need to implement (but you could if you wanted to!). Truly these spaces have opened the doors to what is capable on the web, and showing me that there is still so much more that can be accomplished.