It has always been important for freelancers and small businesses to monitor there own business processes but this becomes increasingly critical during the tough times many of us are facing in the current economic downturn.

One of the more crucial business processes that should qualify for some scrutiny is the way in which new clients are found and new business is secured.

Winning new business

As potential clients look to tighten their own belts they will often reduce their budgets across the board - and certain projects, such as web based work, are easily seen as surplus to requirements and become the first lambs to the budgeting slaughter.

So what can a freelancer do to improve their chances of winning new business during tougher economical times?

Certainly a good looking portfolio is a must, as well as the willingness to be flexible about the type of work you are prepared to do (and how much you are willing to charge for it).

But what about winning new business? How can a freelancer improve their chance of meeting new clients and securing new work? One answer is to use freelance auction websites.

Freelance auction websites

The basic concept behind a freelancing auction website is that individuals or companies requiring freelance work done can post a project description on the website and then freelancers can enter their proposals along with a covering letter and project fee.

It is important to note that the cheapest bid will not always be the “winning” bid. Instead the prospective employer can choose one (or more) of the candidates who have placed a bid to undertake the work.

Not only do these auction-style websites serve as a highly accessible platform to bring employers and freelancers together, but since many have their own payment systems in place they offer a degree of protection to both the freelancer and the employer.

Freelancing websites in the UK

There are two auction websites that cater for freelance work in the UK that particularly stand out; freelancer.co.uk and peopleperhour.com.

Freelancer.co.uk offers a very simple interface with very few limitations to the freelancer. You can register a basic account for free which will give you access to all the major components of the website. You can create your own on-line portfolio, upload a CV and even have access to the live chat feature of the site.

Projects out to tender are very easy to browse and equally easy to bid on. They have their own Escrow payment system available, although you are not forced to use this to bill clients you may win through the website. Payments settled outside of this system will not qualify for client feedback; although from my experience a lack of feedback has never been a deal-breaker.

Certain projects will be restricted to bids from freelancers with a “PRO” account, and basic project are limited to 20 bids from freelancers with a free account so it is worth checking every day. Alternatively you can upgrade to a PRO account for £40/year.

Peopleperhour.com is a more complicated website to navigate but there are far more jobs available to bid on. There are also more freelancers, so the bidding process is more competitive. Basic accounts are free or you can upgrade to a “Gold” or “Platinum” level for £7.95/month or £14.95/month respectively.

Bids are restricted in a number of ways.  Depending on your account status you are limited to a certain number of bids per month and a certain number of categories in which you can bid. The amount of commissions that they will charge also changes according to the type of account you hold.

The other main restriction comes when setting your fee for a particular project. A basic account must place a minimum bid of £150, and you are also required to ask for a deposit of at least 20%. You will be able to state any alternative payment terms in your bid description however.

Which freelancing auction site is best?

This really depends upon your own position. If you are looking to use a freelance auction site as your main channel to win new business then I would recommend peopleperhour.com due to the potentially huge audience of clients you can appeal to, but if you are after a simple system that might provide a bit of extra work then freelancer.co.uk is a better option in my opinion.

There are alternatives out there, and new freelancing websites are springing up all the time – so keep looking!

Wait… fav-what?

A favicon is simply the small icon attached to most websites that shows up in your browser’s navigation bar or bookmarks list. They can really help to back up the branding of a website.

Considering favicons are so widely used it is quite surprising that top of the line graphics packages such as Photoshop do no support this format. There are patches available, but there is also a fast and free alternative to creating favicons on the web.

The “Favicon from Pics” software at HTML Kits website lets you upload any picture in a common image format such as GIF or JPG, and it will create a favicon for you based upon that image. Download the icon package from the HTML Kits website and you are ready to install the favicon on your site.

Adding the icon to a webpage is an incredibly easy task. Firstly, upload the .ico file to the root of your website and then add the following code into the HEAD section of the page you want to add the icon to:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

Et voila, your favicon will be visible to the world!

The download speed of your web pages can often be a deciding factor in trying to keep hold of people browsing your site. With an ever growing number of web sites and resources out on the net, it is crucial that you don’t make your audience wait around too long or they will simply go somewhere else.

But what makes a page download slowly? The size of your images will play a large part in download speeds, but there are a number of other factors that come into play as well – some of which you may not have considered before.

Websiteoptimization.com is a website that lets you quickly test your own web page download speeds, and points out areas of your pages that may be causing long download times. It’s easy to use and completely free, and can point you in the right direction when it comes to optimising your web pages.

The site offers tips about limiting the number of HTTP requests made by your pages, including serving images from a separate domain or sub-domain, and highlights the main areas to focus on when starting the optimisation process for your pages.

For more about website optimisation, there is a very good book from O’Reilly on the subject.

Whether it’s resizing the product thumbnails for an e-commerce project or simply changing the filenames of the photos from our digital cameras, many of us have faced the daunting task of resizing, renaming or reformatting tens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of images before.

Batch image processing software can help with this rather dull task, reducing potentially hours of work down to a few clicks of a mouse.

There are a number of programs out there that offer a variety of batch processing techniques for images, including the standard resizing, renaming and reformatting functions. One of the best pieces of software I have come across is called BIMP Lite.

BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. It can be used to create thumbnail images from your pictures, add a prefix/postfix (with meta variables), rename using a sequential number, change the case of filenames, replace/remove spaces & underscores, flip or rotate images and also apply anti-aliasing, inverse, greyscale and bevel effects.

The thumbnail resizing allows you to force a specified width or height and keep theproportions, or define fixed image dimensions. Images can have text overlayed on them at anycorner or side, as well as the center of the image. This text can include meta variables such as image height, width, number of colours etc. In addition, the program can also convert the file format to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, MIFF, TIFF, PCX or TGA. All of the actions can be performed individually, or combined. BIMP now also includes an FTP client, so you can automatically output images to a remote server via the File Transfer Protocol.

The BIMP stands for “Batch Image Processor”, and it is a piece of freeware that does exactly what it says on the tin. Not only is this free software, but it is also very light to run, and incredibly simple to use. You can find out more about BIMP, and download it from here.

I have found this piece of software to be invaluable whilst developing e-commerce shops with large volumes of product photography. It is also incredibly helpful when generating thumbnail images for photo galleries and the renaming capabilities open it up for an even wider range of uses.

I found out about BIMP Lite in a very insightful article here, from Smashing Magazine. They list 15 handy batch image processors for both Windows and Mac systems. I would definitely recommend taking a look.

It has always been one of the most painful parts of any web development project… testing on multiple browsers to make sure that your site will appear correctly to a wider audience. But there is now some relief, courtesy of a browser sandbox available on the Xenocode website.

In a nutshell, this web page will allow you to emulate any one of the most popular web browsers of the moment, including Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, as well as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome.

If you are using Firefox to launch each of your virtual browsers you will need to install an add-on before you can use the Xenocode software. Once this is done, you can launch each browser at the click of a button.

The great thing is that you no longer need to install and maintain a large number of browsers on your own machine. Each of the Xenocode emulations runs in a sandbox on your computer to avoid any conflicts with your operating system or other installed programs.