a1digitalmedia

DreamWeaver has never ever failed me and is the industry leading standard as a text editor.

Looks like Hover Intent JQuery Plugin.

On a web design forum I'm glad I see lots of Firefox. I cannot see why you would need to use another browser for anything design related with Firefox. Apart from browser testing I ALWAYS use Firefox.

Tend to get paid a lot of cheques as i work my clients directly usually. Whenever I work with someone who cannt reach our offices we just send them invoices with Kashflow.

Really does depend on who your working with and how good they are to work with. Once a client has signed the contract I usually ask them to draw up some sort of Menu Structure for the site. It shows them that you are actively doing the work and gives them something to do which makes them feel a lot more involved. It also leaves the 'ball in their court' so they must keep in touch to continue with the project.

It's not too bad. Not long till they change it again I bet though!

I would recommend KashFlow. It literally does everything I possibly need and I run my own Web Design Agency. The online software allows you to add products, add purchases and keeps track of all the data for you. Then when you want it all in a nice Excel Spreadsheet you can just export all the info to a CSV and everything is taken care of. Hope this helps.

I've personally had good experience with Freshbooks. However I don't use it anymore and use KashFlow. It allows me to do all of my invoicing as well as accounting in one online software. You can also do PayPal buttons etc so has the same good features from FreshBooks. It's just down to preference.

Thanks for that list, very useful stuff. WordPress does it for me and I do have experience in Joomla, Drupal and similar but I am very interested in seeing what else is available.

Yeah, totally agree with that. Net Tuts is great!

Usually design Photoshop files to show designs to client. Test and tweak from untill there happy. Then once finally agreed and we have a signed copy of the design we will go ahead with creating the XHTML and Stylesheets etc.

Try and keep in better contact with your customers and create a friendly relationship. All of our clients visit our offices, have a cup of tea, sit down relax and discuss website requirements. For those which are further away we keep in close telephone contact and try to build a personal relationship. Once you have established yourself as an expert in your area, customers will only be too happy to recommend your work to others.

When building links for your website you want them coming from relevant sources related to your niche with the keywords in the anchor text of your link. If you just have lots and lots of links coming from random places, Google doesn't understand anymore about what your website is about. Say all your links were coming from Gardening websites, Google is going to assume your website is about gardening. Your right to start writing articles but always make sure they are relevant to your targeted website and include keywords you are optimising for in the text with a ratio of around 3-5%.

WordPress is generally very good for SEO. If you set-up a custom permalink structure such as '/%category%/%postname%/' you can make your site even friendlier. I wouldn't worry too much about how high your HTML tags etc are, I would concentrate on creating good quality content for your website, generating a targeted following and create a strategic and scalable link building campaign.

Really nice looking site and would say for the design alone your looking in between the regions of £200-£300. However this could greatly increase if the website attracts a lot of visitors. You will always be able to increase the value of the site if you develop it further.