If you are serious about creating a web presence that can be found by users and promotes your business there are endless reasons not to take this route, here’s a few…

• Will the site be downloaded from a gallery of sites that look just like every other pet store (for example) on the web? Or will it be custom designed to represent your company and it’s values?
• Will it render correctly in all modern browsers? Or will everybody (regardless of browser) see a fully functioning, aesthetically pleasing site.
• Will it have any SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) worth it’s crust? Or will it be optimised to rank highly on Google for its major key words?
• WIll the sites users know exactly what the sites main function is and be coming back again?

So let me get back to my point, Why choose a freelance web designer? Well, firstly, as freelancers have less overheads than web design agencies, they can potentially be cheaper.  This doesn’t mean that the work will be of less quality or “cheap”, it just means that freelancers have less costs to meet which reflects the price of projects.

Freelance web designers generally work on their own, which means they can give each project their full attention from the consultation phase right through to the design and development stages.  This keeps a great consistency to the project throughout it’s various phases.

How to choose your freelance web designer?

Here are some pointers to choosing your freelance web designer…

1. Identify your needs, once you know exactly what you want, you can share those ideas with potential freelance web designers and make a decision based on their response.
2. The portfolio.  Every freelance web designer worth his crust should have a portfolio.  This is where you can look at their past work and decide if the freelancer is capable of meeting your requirements.
3. Testimonials.  The finished product is very important obviously.  But so is a good working relationship throughout the project, the more information you can get on their past client relationships the better.
4. Word of mouth.  If you’ve heard good things about a freelance web designer then get in touch, and complete steps 1, 2 and 3!

I recently read a great article over at FreelanceSwitch about the myths that surround freelancers. They went something like this…

• Freelancers spend the day on non-work related activities. I don’t think they do any work.
• Freelancers don’t have the resources of large companies. I’m afraid I won’t get quality work.
• Freelancers don’t have the leverage of a large company. It is easy to drive down their fees.
• Freelancers are unsupervised. I’m afraid they won’t finish the work on time.
• Freelancers are financially insecure. I’m afraid this guy won’t be around when I need him in the future.
• I could never be a freelancer. It takes too much initial investment.
• Freelancing is too risky. It’s all or nothing.
• I’m not a salesman. If I started freelancing I’d never be able to get clients.
• Freelancers spend all day on their own. They don’t have a social life.
• Freelancers are always under pressure. They never have a day off.

To put all these myths to rest, why don’t you go on over the FreelanceSwitch and read the full article.

Firebug 1.3.3

This is probably my most used and most usefull add-on.  Firebug adds a wealth of web development tools to your browser.  You can edit, debug and monitro CSS, HTML, and javascript live in any web page.  You can access the features via a small discrete button at the bottom right of your browser, so it doesn’t interupt your browsing experience unless you need it.  Once you click the firebog icon, you are welcomed by some really helpful tools that can do the following for the page you are on:

• Inspect and edit HTML
• Tweak CSS to perfection
• Visualise CSS metrics
• Monitor network activity
• Debug and profile Javascript
• Quickly find errors
• Explore the DOM
• Execute javascript on the fly
• Logging for Javascript

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ColorZilla 2.0.2

This next add-on gets used occasionally, ever seen a colour 0n the internet and thought it could be useful for a project? With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

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MeasureIt 0.3.8

This is quite a basic add-on, you draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.  This can be handy for a few things.  If you are having some cross browser issues with elements on your page (Probably with IE6) then you can measure them with this tool to make sure they aren’t been proccessed incorrectly.  Maybe you come accross a site with a nice container width, you can quickly check to see how wide it is in pixels.

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Screengrab 0.96.1

This is a nice little add-on that allows you to capture whatever is on your screen. “This can be done without an add-on” I hear you say, well yes, that is true.  But there are some extra little features with this one.  The option to capture the complete page/frame,  the visible portion, a selection of your choice or the window you are in. For all of those options you can either save to disc or copy to the clipboard.  Very handy indeed.

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TwitterFox 1.7.7.1

Use Twitter much? This is a must for twitter users. The extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their status. Also it has a small text input field to update your status.

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Foxy URL

This is another good add-on for twitter users and still handy for none twitter users alike.  You can use Foxy URL as a tool to ease your daily URL sharing routines. Sending Foxy URLs to your friends instead of the regular long addresses aids your email’s readability, looks better in chat windows and helps boosting up your techie image.

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That conclude my list of add-ons.  I hope that you were either using these already or are now on the download to pimp your firefox.  I’d love to hear about the add-ons that you use and couldn’t live without.  Web designers out there, am I missing any add-ons that you think I should have in my arsenal?