Adiakritos Journal



Also building websites for people sucks ass, would reccomend building your own for (attempted)profits. You're trying to start a business right, not freelance web design?f
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I want to freelance websites because I've got two years programing experience under my belt and I can use that to make money. That money is going to be turned over into testing for affiliate marketing campaigns. I don't want to be too attached to the cash I earn as I spend it on testing cause I know starting out will be hard in affiliate marketing. Then, or in the mean time, I'll start a site selling a product I create on my own. I'll keep doing that until something hits, and then just keep what works and discard the rest. I'll repeat it.

At some point I'll move into other offline types of businesses trying to fuse all kinds of organizations meant to help poor, sick, addicted people. I don't know where the money will come from but I do know that, within reason, lots of people are willing to support these kinds of causes.

The way all this will go is totally unknown. I know that even if I plan every detail chances are I'll probably end up getting to my ultimate goal some other way, if I find a better way along the way. lol

You can teach yourself Business. Computer Science is a lot harder to self teach.

If you must get a degree, get a Comp. Sci. Degree
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I figured it the other way around. That computer science would be self teachable, and business wouldn't be as easy to learn.

But I can see what you mean too. Its harder to learn techy stuff on my own. Business, as I would imagine, is largely self taught through experience and learning something new and implementing it as soon as possible.
 
adiakritos said:
I figured it the other way around. That computer science would be self teachable, and business wouldn't be as easy to learn.

But I can see what you mean too. Its harder to learn techy stuff on my own. Business, as I would imagine, is largely self taught through experience and learning something new and implementing it as soon as possible.
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Bingo. Learning business in an academic setting makes no sense. Learning accounting does, sure. Not not business, management, marketing, etc. You'll learn a lot more a lot faster by testing your own things in the wild and seeing what works.

Comp Sci. is conducive to an academic environment.

You can teach yourself a lot of Comp Sci on your own, but it helps a TON if you have mentors/teachers around you.
 
dchuk said:
You can teach yourself a lot of Comp Sci on your own, but it helps a TON if you have mentors/teachers around you.
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ie. if you're going at it alone, make sure to leverage friends like dchuk / others and the kind folks in your programming languages IRC channel.

People are always willing to help so long as you are asking for help and not asking them to do it for you.

One of my biggest issues when I set off to learn php was smacking my head against the wall on things that if I had asked for a explanation of, would have been trivial.
 
The IRC channel sounds like a great idea.


Bingo. Learning business in an academic setting makes no sense. Learning accounting does, sure. Not not business, management, marketing, etc. You'll learn a lot more a lot faster by testing your own things in the wild and seeing what works.
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Here are the courses I'm planning on grabbing for the summer:
ACG2001 Principles Of Accounting I
BUL2241 Business Law I
GEB2112 Entrepreneurinship
CIS1513C Project management
 
dchuk said:
To add on to what emp is saying, it takes a lot of skill and practice to learn how to manage clients and projects. Getting stuff built out is actually not as hard as it sounds, as long as you have a good idea of the project and relatively good knowledge of coding. My advice is start reading like a motherfucker, books, magazines, good blogs, anything.

There's a lot of monies to be made in the world of brokering, no matter what the industry is. If you can learn how to handle clients and run projects, you can find some developers to make things happen. Then just coordinate things in the middle and start throwing some d's

Finally, get EVERYTHING in writing. Get a formal proposal signed off on, lay out your milestones for the whole project, get a sign off at each one. Always get formal sign offs on everything, I can't stress this enough. It keeps everyone on the same page and keeps you from having to deal with a lot of the client bullshit
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I came back here to reread everything you guys were telling me to make sure I understood, and to see whatelse I could take from this.

So far I know I've to got to get these documents signed off on before I start with anything at all...

Project Definition
User Spec Sheet
What is being built
Who is responsible
Project Goals
Project Risks
Timeline

Technical Specification
Wireframes
Detailed Techspec

Now, you mention milestones. I'm not sure how I'd go about building this project to completion yet, but I assume that I will have a much better idea once I've written these documents out and done the necessary research.

What is there to know about milestones from your perspective?
 
adiakritos said:
What is there to know about milestones from your perspective?
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They will almost always be wrong when you're starting out. Always err on the longer/higher side, just to cover your ass.

Sit down and put together a set of milestones for internal use (development timeline, basically) and a set of milestones for use with your client (meetings, reviews, content collection dates, testing, etc.)

Each time you reach a milestone, put together a simple list of what you're going over when you meet with the client, so that the meeting stays focused and they don't go off on stupid ass tangents. It happens all the time, meetings are always long, so it's better to have an agreed upon meeting schedule that keeps things focused.

Try working in week long increments, setting milestones for each Friday. That might help you a bit when you're just starting.

Then, as you do the project, track every minute of work, so the next project you get, you'll have a better idea of how long everything will take.
 
so the internal milestones are for my team in making sure they are staying on track.

and the client milestones are for collecting the content to input within the site, showing them what is working at that point, seeing what they like and dislike thus far... ?
 
adiakritos said:
so the internal milestones are for my team in making sure they are staying on track.

and the client milestones are for collecting the content to input within the site, showing them what is working at that point, seeing what they like and dislike thus far... ?
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Yeah, things like setting up internal linking structures, planning how a page gets updated, etc. a) don't matter to the client and b) don't need to be discussed with the client.

Stick to telling them the things that involve them, and sprinkle in some of your internal stuff to fill in the gaps in that external timeline.
 
thats a good idea. thanks !

So I finally decided to decline the HUGE project I was teetering over. I realized that, not only were there legal risks involved, we wouldn't be compensated for the time spent.

We have some other jobs lined up that will be done faster, with more confidence, and together will amount to a higher return for our time and effort invested.
 
Making a site for my friends Frat. Just making the menu takes forevvvvverrr! Especially since its all static. Good learning though. I'm gonna use this project, when its done, for credibility on elance.
 
adiakritos said:
Making a site for my friends Frat. Just making the menu takes forevvvvverrr! Especially since its all static. Good learning though. I'm gonna use this project, when its done, for credibility on elance.
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Why not use a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla? That way you could spend your time designing a template and then just add your content.
 
Cause idk how to make the css for any of those cms's yet. Although I'll get there eventually. That'll probably be the next thing I do.

I think I'll start to design for joomla.
Any resources you've found that are any good?
 
Yeah, I'd stay far away from both Drupal and Joomla. I've had experience with both, and they're more trouble than they're worth. Wordpress plugins have ridiculous capabilities now, so you'll be able to do pretty much anything you want with WP for the time being.
 
Sweet. Thanks guys.

I heard somewhere else that Joomla is "the fucking DEVIL" so I'll just use wordpress
 
I'm gonna use Wordpress to make my partnership site.
Beginning to jot down ideas for how I'm gonna organize this next project since its primarily a marketing tool.
 
hav'nt gotten around to it yet... lost my momentum for now. after around the 5th I'll be able to really focus and create this kind of momentum again.. een more so, since I wont have as many distractions
 
try and spend even just 20 minutes a day working on your projects. As soon as you leave things alone for more than a few days, it will be crazy hard to build your momentum later on
 
dchuk said:
You can teach yourself Business. Computer Science is a lot harder to self teach.

If you must get a degree, get a Comp. Sci. Degree
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The best advice in this thread. I've self taught myself everything I know about programming... it wasn't pretty, but I learned. If I could turn the clock back to 4 years ago, I would have my eyes set on a PHD in computer science ^_^
 
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