Are you looking for a great web developer in Chicago?
I've interviewed and hired a number of developers over the years. In my experience it's not that hard to find people with the proper technical skills. But, it's much more difficult to find a developer who is reliable, hits deadlines and can communicate effectively. If given the choice, I'd rather hire a reliable developer and teach him any technical skills that he may be lacking than hire someone with all of the technical skills but poor communication and follow through.
So where do you find these unicorns who have both the technical and people skills that you need in Chicago?
Posted April 10, 2013 by Jason Siffring
Since we specialize in web development, we work with many other agencies that pull us in to complete one piece of the overall project puzzle. This is great work for us but can get complicated the more layers that exist between us and the client. I recently learned some tough lessons about being too far removed from the client. It was a project with a huge company that you'd recognize but shall remain nameless.
Posted April 10, 2013 by Jason Siffring
If you use a source code repository like Git or Subversion and have to push code manually you're missing out. There are deployment tools that can save you a lot of time. You can also set up automatic deployment so that every time you push a commit to your repository the change gets automatically deployed to your server.
Posted March 12, 2013 by Jason Siffring
January was slow for us. We had some small projects to work on, but no big, meaty ones to sink our teeth into. Admitting this publically isn’t an easy thing for me.
If you freelance or run a services business you’re going to have periods of slowness. Don’t worry. It happens to everyone. It’s the nature of our business. But, there are things you can do to limit the damage or better yet, prevent them from occurring in the first place.
Posted March 7, 2013 by Jason Siffring
When we build a website for a client, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make it as simple as possible for the client to manage. Today we're releasing a free add-on for ExpressionEngine that makes the control panel even easier to use.
Posted February 12, 2013 by Jason Siffring
Raise your hand if you'd like to get paid faster. Here are some tips that have worked for us.
Posted December 5, 2012 by Jason Siffring
It's easy to password protect your development and staging sites using .htaccess. But, when you're working with multiple environments and have .htaccess in your source control repository (like Git or SVN), it's a little trickier.
I think most developers understand it's a good practice to password protect development and staging sites. It keeps the public from seeing work in progess and prevents search engines from dinging you for duplicate content. We prefer to use .htaccess for setting up the password because it's lightweight and doesn't interfere with any member logins that more...
Posted November 27, 2012 by Jason Siffring
Transitioning from freelance to a business and ignoring our own advice
Posted November 27, 2012 by Jason Siffring