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The life of a Northampton web designer

Working from home as a web developer has it’s perks - no rush hour traffic, low fuel bills, and no fixed working hours. On the other side of the coin freelancers often work longer hours than most, 12 hour days are not uncommon, but then again they can (and do) work in their pyjamas!

First job of the day - check email

It’s what most of us do first and I’m no different. I read my new mail throughout the day and prioritise anything that needs my attention into 5 groups:

1. Urgent - requires immediate attention
2. Today - things to be done before I go to bed!
3. Current projects - things relating to sites I’m working on
4. To do - things to do as time permits
5. Everything else

Urgent jobs

Anything that requires immediate attention always gets done straight away. This could be anything from urgent site updates, an email problem, or an issue with a web site. Most days there aren’t any problems to deal with (thankfully!), but on occasion they seem to all come at once - that’s just “sods law” I reckon!

Must be done today

This could be anything from making a site live, answering general enquiries, installing some software, to doing a quick update to a page. Normally most of these tend to be quick jobs so they don’t take long to get through.

Current projects

As a busy web designer I’ve always got various projects on the go at any one time, either full builds or modifications to an existing site. Often I’m working to a deadline so I’ll spend as much time as I can on my current proects and always aim to complete the work ahead of time. It’s not all HTML though, some of the time may be spent on research or meeting with clients.

The “to do” list

Not all tasks are urgent, or time critical and can be done as and when time permits. Fortunately a lot of customers are happy for jobs to be done “as and when” within reason, and that takes the pressure off of me knowing that if I’m busy then next week is OK.

Everything else

I always set aside some time each day to catch up with the latest web design news, improving my own design skills by playing and experimenting, answering personal email, and just generally keeping up to date! There’s also a bit of “me” time to get me away from the computer screen and to counter “creative block”, if it’s a nice day I’ll pop out for a bit to get some fresh air, or just do something different for a while - it works wonders!