38 posts written by Rochester Oliveira
A web designer and entrepreneur from Itajubá (MG), Brasil. Just loves writing about obscure topics and doing some cool stuff.
Get in touch at rochesterj -at- gmail.com or @roch_br
12 Things I Have Learned After 7 Years of Freelancing
Rochester OliveiraAt the age of 15 I started with this web design stuff. Here I am, almost 7 years later and I wish I knew a lot more about this field rather than learning just by my own mistakes. But you don’t have to pass through all of this, dear Padawan. There are a few particularities in our field that unless you have a geek dad you would never think about… So if you are aware about what you need to do you can have a much simpler, more productive, and happier freelance life. The crazy thing is that success is not (just) about coding skills alone. You have to build a whole environment to compensate the instability that you probably won’t face in a regular job. Finally, here we’ll see a few tips for novice and experienced freelancers, ranging from controlling your finances to networking. And I really want to hear your advice and tips after reading this, because we always have something to share, right? So, let’s rock!
Put Your Website on a Diet with Minifiers
Did you know that every second delay on page loading results in a 7% reduction of conversion rate? Actually you lose 7% (maybe even more!) of sales without even noticing... Sounds bad, huh? I mean, you work carefully to put things in the right place, good call-to-actions, nice design, spend a few bucks with ads.. And then you lose 7% of sales just because you forgot to minify your CSS. We'll, this is not going to happen again. We'll put every future project that you work on a diet. And this one, won't wait for next monday, or next january :) Here we'll see amazing tips to reduce your files size and increase your site performance without affecting important things like image quality or a files readability for future edits. Grab your meter and let's rock!
1stWebDesigner’s Life #4 – This Big & Developer Client
And here we are again, trying to bring you a couple of laughs. Our superhero Webster continues his pursuit for the best client, and we all know that he's quite far from it yet, right? :) We have two more short stories of Webster's life (which is kind of similar to ours, huh?) brought to life by Jamie Sale! We'll be talking about crazy measurement units and clients who want to be web designers. So, Let's rock!
jQuery Mobile – What You Need to Know
jQuery Mobile version 1.0 finally launched this past November. Don't know if you heard about it, but if you are planning to do any mobile app or website development, it's better to get started with it right now. I'm sure you've heard about jQuery. So, its mobile version is pretty close to what you already are used to, but with a lot of enhancements for mobile screen events (like touching instead of click, and there is no hover) and browsers (this one is tricky since there are plenty of browsers and devices out there) and capabilities (pluggable components). The crazy thing is how simple it is to initiate and build a fully working mobile site. Actually, we'll be talking about concepts, tips, codes, and in the meantime you can build your own app, in no more than one hour. Yeah, noob to ninja in one hour, this is what you'll get here :) So, let's rock!
5 Must-Know Tips for Better WordPress User Management
WordPress is a great tool to use for managing content. It's really simple for developers, for managers and for users to use, especially when using a great theme. But if there is one thing that I think that needs to improve yet is its user management settings. I mean, even basic functions need to be coded, like editing a user's profile fields, add roles, edit capabilities, export user data. All of those need plugins or a little coding to get working. Here we'll see 5 amazing and simple tips that you can use right now and greatly improve your user management and you can use all this additional data to serve your loyal readers better and provide more focused content. We'll cover custom user fields to history functionality, and while we're at it you'll learn a lot about WordPress user management functions. So, let's rock!
1stWebDesigner’s Life #3 – Mind Reading & Doing The Whole Site
It's time to get back to our funny project, 1stWebdesigner's Life. We've received such great feedback from our first and second web comic that we've decided to make it a really cool bi-monthly series to brighten your Sundays. We're back with Webster brought live by Jamie Sale! Today we'll talk about clients that think we can read their minds, and misunderstandings about what your job is and what it isn't but your client may think it is. So let’s go through them.
How To Create An Effective FAQ For Your Website
Frequently Asked Questions is a good section to have in your website. They give users a chance to figure out things by themselves instead of wasting resources (both yours and theirs) with a 1-to-1 conversation (chat, Skype, messenger and so on). But FAQ's are a different type of content. Just like search and sitemap, it has its own particularities and things that you can do to improve user experience. You have to keep in mind, for instance, that users don't go to FAQ pages, you have to lead them there. Here we'll see a couple of thoughts about it, good practices, inspiration and tools. So, let's rock!
7 New Year’s Resolutions To Help Improve Your Personal And Work Life
So are you ready for doing awesome things (remember, this year can be the last one)? And which things do you want to do? When are you doing them? How will you know by the end of 2012 that you've done all that you wanted to? There is a simple tool to help you keeping tracks of you accomplishments: write down your new year's resolutions. I see a lot of people talking about nerdy things, like "learn a new programming language" or "write more about what you know" but the truth is if you aren't satisfied with your personal life you won't get better results at work. You need to improve yourself in both sides so you'll be a better you. Well, what we'll see here is a kind of "new year's resolutions template," with a lot of ideas that you can steal and we'll see how to keep track of them. Don't forget to check 20 New Year’s Resolution Ideas to Become Better at Your Career!
Creative Christmas Gift For Geek Lovers – Web & Mobile App
Oh, Christmas. The magic time when you spend all the money you've been saving the whole year. Oh, and we have all that Christmas Spirit, of course. Now, you probably want to spend a lot on your soul mate's gift, to show her how deep is your love. Yeah, money can buy cool things, but guess what: almost every year I make my own gifts for my girlfriend (but I always have to buy something else anyway). And I feel that she just loves when I do something by myself instead of just buying it (unless shoes, she wouldn't like if I made her a shoe). So I'll show you, dear Padawan, how to make a cool one-page-gift for anybody that you like. Our goal here is to do a simple "slider", where a lot of messages and pictures that you like are shown. In the meantime you'll learn a little bit about design, jQuery and CSS3. So, let's rock!
Customize WordPress With Four Easy-To-Add Scripts
Probably at some point you wanted to customize things in WordPress instead of using the "default" for every page. Like a pretty image gallery in a few posts, a syntax highlighter for your tutorial category or a demo page for your tutorials. Well all those things break the standard, so people will see it as "impossible" to change. Should you put the following scripts on every page? No. That would be a waste of resources, since you'll load a lot of useful things many times. Should you put them directly in your content (dear lord, please, don't ever do this)? This would be really hard to maintain, since every simple change would be a big waste of time because you would have to make those changes post by post. Let's see a couple of ways to get this easily working.
