Adventures in Crap Casual Work

[Zippy]

Good attitude You're earning money, keeping the brain going and building up a new client base.

[DieScum]

Oddly enough during a short time on the bench, circa 2003 I did an ad in shop windows and one in the paper, phone never stopped. Just PC stuff even back then when compared to now there was hardly any.

Trouble is I could never charge the darling little OAP's much, even as walked past their Range Rovers and down their 400 meter drives....

Hang on....!

Yeah, pricing is an issue. Nobody wants to pay and it makes you really appreciate a 300-500 a day contract where you get paid day in day out.

I might try some traditional ads. Been doing adwords but hasn't worked so far.

Tried to sell a day long IT seminar on an area of interest of mine. Another company does something similar and they seem to sell out 30 seat auditoriums at 250 quid a seat. Didn't rustle up any interest though.

[istvan]

Yeah, pricing is an issue. Nobody wants to pay and it makes you really appreciate a 300-500 a day contract where you get paid day in day out.

I might try some traditional ads. Been doing adwords but hasn't worked so far.

Tried to sell a day long IT seminar on an area of interest of mine. Another company does something similar and they seem to sell out 30 seat auditoriums at 250 quid a seat. Didn't rustle up any interest though.

Maybe try to sell a day IT seminar on an area of interest of your target audience

[Uncle Albert]

I always use bench time for small projects like those. My favourite was a lesbian dating website. I had a lot of fun knocking up test data for that one.

[d000hg]

Good attitude You're earning money, keeping the brain going and building up a new client base.

WZS

[sasguru]

Back in the 90s I did the odd spot of dispatch-riding in the City to earn extra cash since I was putting every penny into BTL deposits and had no warchest for a while- worked a treat, quite well paid.

[BlasterBates]

I´m thinking about doing the same thing, agree...building websites is so time consuming, but fun. A friend of mine wants to do language course, so I´ve started doing it. What I´m trying to learn is how to make a nice presentation, how you get a professional looking layout, then add a database and some php scripts.

Anyway I´m impressed a few hundred quid a month is better than nowt, and I presume you´ll get more work as time goes on, and you´ll get more efficient.

[d000hg]

The only risk is you decide running a proper business is more fun than contracting and you resent having to contract to earn good money

[vetran]

I´m thinking about doing the same thing, agree...building websites is so time consuming, but fun. A friend of mine wants to do language course, so I´ve started doing it. What I´m trying to learn is how to make a nice presentation, how you get a professional looking layout, then add a database and some php scripts.

Anyway I´m impressed a few hundred quid a month is better than nowt, and I presume you´ll get more work as time goes on, and you´ll get more efficient.

take one of the pre built document management tools and put a nice template on it.

http://drupal.org/
http://www.joomla.org/
http://wordpress.org/

Many hosts support one of these.

Your value is in getting the content from the customer into it in.

You could of course roll your own with some fancy language, but whenever you want to add to it or get support you need to spend a lot of time or money getting the expertise.

There are some dedicated training apps out there.

Adapt not build IMHO. Its cheaper.

If you have to build something that isn't in open source you have to wonder why someone else hasn't done it.

[BlasterBates]

take one of the pre built document management and put a nice template on it.

Do you have an example? (not quite sure what you mean).

But yes indeed, looking. I found a few sites that allow you to down load everything and which you can reuse, I´m taking them apart so learning how to do nice menus, partition the pages how to use background gifs to give shading etc.

My feeling is once you know how it goes you can easily knock one up.

A lot to learn though