Treat People nicely, you need them
We leave in a social world, no Man is an island as they say, as humans we need one another to survive. One reoccurring phenomenon with most of the developers/designers I’ve met is the ego problem, most developers treat their client and colleagues ( web workers: web developers and designer) as ignorant, this does not produce any kind of positive result.
As a web worker, you learn from both your clients and other developers. On the client side, I learnt a lot about online marketing from a client, a medical doctor for that matter! At first it was intimidating when I didn’t have a clue of what she was saying, she introduced me to services like aweber and mailchimp. Through her I found out of their free packages and free HTML email templates that come with them, I walked out of her office that day with more knowledge of email marketing and free HTML email templates.
You also need to treat other web workers well too, make friends where possible, like the saying goes, iron sharpens iron. Relating and Sharing ideas with other web workers makes you a better web worker, it keeps you more informed and more connected.
I remember meeting and becoming friends with Ebiwuari Williams in 2007, I learnt web design in Photoshop and slicing for design through him, without meeting him, it may have taken me more time to discover such a technique. One year later, we were both learning CSS together. He went on to become a java programmer working for Tenecee, while I majored on php and asp.net. I can recall meeting romeo who introduced me to joomla, reading smashingmagazine which introduced me to WordPress, I also got to know about smashing magazine from another developer I met onetime, too bad I can’t recall her name.
Apart from the many benefits ive had from physical relationships with other web workers, I’ve also benefited immersely from online forums and blogs of ther web workers like css-tricks.com, noupe.com, designm.ag, sixrevisions.com, hongkiat.com etc, I’ve Discovered lots of stuff from these blogs and their authors, in my opinion, making and keeping friends in web workers is important!
See yourself as ignorant
Yes, ignorant, and I mean it, ignorant. As soon as you start getting comfortable with what you think you know, you’d probably reduce your desire for more knowledge and possible stop learning altogether forgetting the fact that the web is never and would never be stagnant. There are new discoveries and new trends everyday and by that it’s an understatement. If you work on Or in the web, you could very easily get outdated in just one year, and as soon as you get outdated, you stop getting new clients and possible start loosing old ones.
I still remember learning web designing in early 2002, I remember the guys I was with, we learnt to use tables for our site layout, a couple of years later, we heard of divs and CSS, we all didn’t like it at first because it was different and so it seemed hard, but some of us worked towards knowing the concept and quickly adapted it, others never did, today, 95% of all those who never wanted to learn the new stuff are out of business while most of the remaining 5% just buy themes online which they use for their clients.
You didn’t develop the web, you’re not the one maintaining it’s standards, you don’t know everything about it, admit it!
Work on your public persona
Have you ever googled your name or your email address? Do it, you’d be surprised how much of yourself you’ll find! These days when I meet people for the first time, I google them immediately, if someone emails me for a project or anything else, I also Google their email address, I visit their Facebook, twitter, Pintrest etc profiles, to see what they’ve been up to! Don’t ask me what I find! The result of such a research helps me decide if I want to work with you or be your friend, it determines our relationship. With this knowledge, I advise you do research on your online persona, modify or delete past post, comments where necessary and possible, where it’s not possible, contact the admin of such a forum or website to do it for you.
You also need to work on your physical persona, pick your calls, reply mails, SMS, tweets, pings etc where necessary. When you meet people, clients or not, leave theme with a positive impression about you, this will at least give you one big thing you will forever keep needing, REFFERALs!
You need to become a business person/Entrepreneur
Three things about entrepreneurship, the product you have to sell has to be fantastic, it has to have fantastic marketing and you have to have fantastic financial management skill and guess what, there is no one person in all the world who can do these three things excellently well. The best of people have two of those three characteristics, there is no one person who can make it, sell it and manage the money, and this is another reason why you need people, why you must treat people well, why you should have some kind of outsourcing or partnership.
“You’ve got to be a good seller to be able to convince a company/individual to build a website. It’s not an easy job at all. The easiest way to go is to sell them the benefits they’ll derive and not the Jquery or animations you can do for them. This was part of the initial challenge for us as we quickly noticed that we needed to transition from web developers to business men. No one wants to know how good you are until you can prove how your offering can benefit their business” -CEO Unotech Media.