Contribute Fridays: What’s Your Next Thing?
We’ve been talking a lot about the next steps I’m wanting to take in my business. What are yours?
What’s the next thing you want to learn or do?
image by Dawn Endico
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
The biggest thing I’ve been debating over the past year is whether or not to hire my first full-time employee. Work overload has been a growing problem, especially as of late.
Contractors on a per project basis works most of the time, but that approach isn’t always reliable.
Really, I’d just like to clone myself and double the hours the in day!
Oh I know how you feel! I’ve been slammed non-stop this entire year, but I don’t want to lose $$ by contracting it out
As a virtual assistant, I find that my clients feel most comfortable with hiring me before a full time employee. They can start small and add more and more work on as they become more comfortable with my performance. It’s more flexible than a full-time employee, since if you don’t need me, you don’t pay me and also allows for more of a getting used to the water of hiring other people than just cannon balling in.
Between now and the end of this year I want to completely master WordPress, and not just be able to make little changes, I mean go crazy with it. Also want to master Zend Framework which I’m actually not having as much of a hard time as I thought I would have. And finish a web based CRM I’m building on my free time.
Ah yes, the elusive WordPress
If you just start coding every one of your site’s in it, you could probably call yourself a master in a matter of a few months. It’s so simple to learn and that’s what I love about it!
I’ve never used it up until now
. I’m willing to learn WP, but there’s always something more important.
The good thing about this – I’m always building my own custom engines. More work, but more experience and practice.
I recently bought Envato’s “How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer”, so maybe I finally will dig more into it.
I’d like to finish my own, standalone JavaScript library, hopefully by the end of the year. That’s the main thing I’m focusing on right now.
Wow that’s quite a feat, good luck!
Hi Amber. I love your site
super clean, super sharp and super slick.
Per you blog topic my next step is approaching Mid size companies and government projects for branding in South and West Africa. Should be fun.
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Thanks Yetunde!
My next big thing is creating my own web app directory. Most of them just seem to be useless and hard to navigate, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
i’m really still thinking of my decision regarding which platform to learn next…zend or code igniter or cakephp or wordpress…..while i’ll have to learn wordpress, i really cant figure out which one to go first with regarding the first three…
I’d appreciate it if Amber or anyone else commenting on this blog could help me figure out which one to go for…i want the shortest learning curve…
WordPress will be the easiest to learn, then you can go into
Codeigniter which is the easiest MVC framework to learn.
thank you
I am going to work on bringing in some passive income. I host quite a few clients but that in itself is becoming a full time job so I am looking at some other options.
@bharat you might look at CodeIgniter. They have excellent documentation, a helpful, active forum and screencasts.
@Bill Chambers
Thank you
Just visited your website…must say its awesome…super clean.
Thanks! I got your email also! Thanks! I will be sending you a reply!
Master HTML5, dig a little deeper into css3, and finish my project that I have been working on for since February ’09.
I have three projects of my own I’d like to finish up and hopefully get some revenue out of them, as for the business, I’m working on a couple of proposals that should keep me busy for the next few months.
@bharat +1 for CodeIgniter, it’s a fantastic framework. Make sure you’re proficient in plain vanilla PHP first or you’ll be short changing yourself.
thanks, i’m good enough with php + mysql but i’m looking for a framework that’d allow me to deliver faster….RAD sort of…What i hate about frameworks is that they keep changing and i find upgrading to new versions painstaking…theres really a lot to keep up with these days…i’ll check out code igniter ..