Today, Seattle Central Creative Academy alums Barry and Andrew from Camp Doug | A Seattle based Design and WordPress Development shop came back to Erik Fadiman’s class to give us a peek into their workflow. They shared the tools and tips they use to maintain their Web Design business.

Camp Doug’s advice to Web Design Entrepreneurs

• First: get clients that have projects that have a good fit for your skills.
• After the Site is Up: have an established retainer or hourly rate for website maintenance
• Pricing: bulk it all together in a package so you can get back some money for the time you spend in management mode and so that your client gets a full website instead of piecemealing it because of budget restraints.
• Half-payment up front.
• Demand good content/ Offer to make some with a skilled photographer. “If they are serious about their business, they are going to invest in content.”

Camp Doug’s toolkit

• their toolkit evolves when they encounter plug-ins they like
• Adobe – Creative Suite
• Dropbox – Simplify your life.
• Web hosting services and website domains – Media Temple. (great customer service and fast subdomain creation)
• being organized: having a standard set of folders for each client– having a system is important.

WordPress Tools

• MAMP: Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
  
• Storing wordpress files in dropbox for versioning
• Sublime Blog » Sublime Text 2.0 Released.
• Transmit for FTP
• BackupBuddy – the premiere WordPress backup plugin to backup, restore and move WordPress | iThemes. (indispensable tool for migrating sites)
• Typekit.
• Google Web Fonts.
• Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses. | Font Squirrel.
• SiteMonitor | Monitor/Ping your websites & hosts. (find one you like, they send you a message “hey site’s down” or something like that when your site goes offline.)
• WordPress › Advanced Custom Fields « WordPress Plugins.
• ACF { Repeater Field. (a premium add-on. costs a little money but very helpful in making a series of custom fields.)

Advice to Students

• Learning web is like learning any language. Don’t just copy/paste. It’s important to write stuff out, type it yourself if you have code you didn’t write, start from scratch. The more you write out commands and code, things start to click in your head slowly.
• When you are using some plug-ins or themes, it comes with extra stuff and after removing that you’ll sometimes find trails of code from that. Just so you know.
• Read the WordPress Codex.

Sites to check out

• CSSRemix.
  
• siteInspire – Web Design Inspiration.
• PHP Scripts, WordPress Plugins, HTML5, jQuery, and CSS | CodeCanyon.
• Sparkbox. (most amazing footer)

At the end of the presentation, Andrew and Barry trolololed us. And here’s the commemoration photograph of our experience together. That’s Andrew from Camp Doug in the middle there on the floor, next to our fearless leader, Erik Fadiman.