Perfectly Petersen

by Jesse Petersen on August 28, 2009

Getting a General Feel for Things

Life is really busy right now. Wait. That’s an understatement. Life is about 2 notches above “I’m getting married tomorrow” busy. I’ve been there – freaked out over last-minute details like getting flowers for when we got home that night, etc. – and this is definitely busier than that.

I’m Guilty, your Honor.

All of that busy-ness due to business and school and marital harmony has my feeling slightly guilty about all of you out there who never see an update from me here. For that, I’m sorry, and I hope you understand. These pages would be full of overflowing ideas, rants, information, photos, musings, and resources if I could capture what my mind thinks and what my eyes see in a given day or week – just doing my work.

What You Can Do About That

Follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/petersen.jesse

Follow me on Twitter (best news/updates): http://twitter.com/jpetersen

What I May Do About That

I’m kicking around the idea of writing about my living with cystic fibrosis. I do not like the idea of being thought of a “CF person” or a posterboy or being debilitated or handicapped… you get the idea. I HATE what that brings. I am a firm believer that there is a time and a place for people to find out something like that, and it’s not during first impressions. I have that ability and I have that right, so long as I’m not on oxygen at some point or in the middle of a coughing spasm in a store. If that’s the case, well, my cover is blown. As an alternative to writing that here, I may do it for my up-and-coming friend, Ronnie Sharpe in Arizona. You can find him at Run Sickboy, Run. We’ll be talking soon about me doing some guest posts there.

I am also considering changing my theme to reflect my updates on those social sites as well as my posts – and anything else I write – all in one place. That’d be cool, and I just might be able to make some time for that. Someday.

Filed Under: Personal, Writing

by Jesse Petersen on August 22, 2009

Here’s What Happened

Right now, I’m sitting in the shade under a huge oak tree on campus waiting for my Spanish I orientation to begin, or at least open the door to the lecture hall. As Monk would say, “here’s what happened.”

I got to campus an hour early because I knew it was going to be a large class because the roster online showed more than 150 people and outlets for laptops are scarce. Of course, being Saturday, the door to the lecture hall was locked so I looked for a bench and found one in the shade about 100 feet from the door.

Ten minutes later, a couple of people (based on age and behavior comparison of the two, I’d say a mother and daughter) came up the walk, looped around in front of the door a couple of times, tried the door, and then kept walking. One would assume that any normal person (like said person on the bench in the shade) would find a bench in the shade and wait for the door to open since they were 50 minutes early.

Not these two. In an act of brilliance, they decided that they would do an entire lap around the building and try to go into Burger King (closed at 9am on Saturday) to look for a rear entrance to the hall. They returned with a campus map open like tourists and I could hear them say, “ULH 101. This is the building and room. Why isn’t it open?” I’ll give them one guess, but I think they need more than that.

Around they go for another lap and stop a woman with her iPod on her arm clearly on a fast stroll to burn calories to ask her why the building isn’t open. As exercise woman passed me, she gave me a morning greeting and told me they were looking for another entrance to the building. I told her that they were 40 minutes early for a Saturday orientation; she laughed and kept walking.

On their next lap and attempt to open a locked door, I shouted over to them that was indeed the entrance and that it was still locked because they were 40 minutes early for the first class of the day on a Saturday. I should have kept my mouth shut, because they walked over to me to sit on a nearby bench and ask if I was a part of the orientation. Then if I was Wesley or someone like that. Immediately telling them I wasn’t but wondering why they assumed I was Wesley, I figured he was a T.A. for the course and resorted to putting in my headphones to stop the insanity.

By the way, according to the roll call, they are mother/daughter. Freaky. I guess age didn’t give Mom an advantage and chronological proximity to high school life didn’t give the daughter an advantage.

Life lesson: a college degree doesn’t mean that much for reasoning or practical functioning.

Filed Under: College, Common Sense

by Jesse Petersen on August 3, 2009

Freelance or Free Work?

One of the biggest learning curves I’ve encountered with my services-based business is how to get paid for a reasonable about of work performed. It’s very easy to go in polar opposite ends of the spectrum: charge for every little thing, including e-mails and brainstorming; and charging for 1/4 of the actual time spent on a project. Neither way will work for long and will have disastrous results for the business.

Pro-Service, not Pro-Bono

You know you’re in for a reverse sales pitch when a client says they “don’t expect you to work for free” and follows that by the word, “but.” There are plenty of people around who want and expect freelancers (especially designers) to trade their work for less than their services are worth, or even for free. Here are things to look out for and what is not acceptable to agree to:

Free labor expectations from non-profits or churches. Nothing in the Bible says it’s right to pressure a professional to work for free. That is their discretion if they want to offer their services as an offering.
Free or discounted labor because the client is an “A-lister.” You may or may not get additional work just because you did work for a major corporation or Joe Blow Blogger with 1M pageviews per day. Feel free to offer rebates or commission if additional work does come through, but don’t get pressured into it.
Free or discounted labor in return for referrals based on the success of the work you did for them. Once you hand the work over, everything is out of your control. Even if you have control, that’s a miserable deal because you are slave to them to ensure your paycheck and no longer working for yourself.

Tips for a Real Win-Win

I’m still learning the ins and outs, but in the last 6 months, there have been plenty of opportunities to learn lessons and improve the way things flow. Here is a small list of what has worked for me:

Set a project price rather than hourly rates if you can. Account for the time you may spend in a 70/30 worst-case scenario. Make it more than an easy project with no problems, but less than a disaster. If you are going to succeed in the business, you’ll end up ahead 90% of the time and send you packing to get a job soon enough to not fool yourself longer than necessary.
Set a clear cut-off point for work included in the project price or other included services. For example, my projects end after two revisions after the first draft. If there are still client issues after that, then communication is an issue and it is creating unnecessary work, which will be paid for on their dime at my hourly rate.
It’s okay to offer a discount for publicity for your work for them, but don’t work for free, under ANY circumstances.
If your initial call/correspondence with them annoys, bothers, or offends you, turn down the work. With very rare exceptions, this is the best indicator you have of how the work will go. I’ve returned one person’s full payment because of this coming true and brought out one potential client’s true colors with a reasonable proposal counter-offer to cement my intuition about them.

Remember, if you’re not happy running your business, you are handicapping your success. You deserve to work under the best possible conditions, so make it so.

Filed Under: Business, Design

by Jesse Petersen on July 26, 2009

Check Your Browser Compatibility THEN Freak Out

Tonight I decided to check my professional sites in the “other” browsers; those being IE6/7/8. I was pretty sure Chrome was okay, but I checked it anyway. I was aghast when I saw nearly every version of them going wonkers with a web-based browser compatibility site. Not believing their stuff, I came upstairs to my PC and checked IE8 and Chrome. Sure enough! I had a crappy site. The image was on the wrong side of the text, the text was white on white, and the footer was pushed over. What the heck!?

I was fearing the worst: I totally screwed up the theme styles compatibility-wise, so I checked the theme’s demo site to be sure it displays correctly out-of-the-box. Yup, it did. So, I took the home page PHP into my fancy new (and FREE!) editor called PSPad for Windows to view it with some syntax coloring.

I started to count the number of opening <DIV> tags with the number of closing </DIV> tags in that relatively small file. It didn’t take long — 6 for 6. Since that was the easy fix shot down, I went to the stylesheet to look at my CSS. Was the image ambiguous as to its float command? Was the text also ambiguous? Nope. Had I mixed up the order of the PHP from the original? Nope. Everything was in order on the surface.

Then… WHAM! It hit me square in the eyes, like this image.

There must have been some point where I was in the file and hit Delete when I thought the cursor was somewhere else, because there is no other reason for that closing > to have been missing. I put it back in and almost yelled when everything snapped into place like it was supposed to in EVERY browser. Of course, I have such a passionate hatred for IE6, I don’t care what it looks like there. Things lining up in IE6 is just a bonus.

Now I am fully-equipped to sell my services with a completely modified home site AND portfolio site. Both were modified heavily from the same theme designer, Jason Schuller, at Press75. The main site was from Cafe Press and the portfolio site was from Photo Graphic.

If you are interested in a professional modification of a WordPress theme, please contact me here: WordPress Customization.

Filed Under: Design