It’s not often you get recognized for what you do on the internet, so when you finally do, you’re allowed to brag about it right? Of course you are!

Freelance Folder is a very popular blog about freelancing, which I’ve followed for a long time, even before going freelance. They have now written an article on 12 awesome businesses started by freelancers, where WooThemes (me, Mark and Adii) are mentioned. Many on this list are people I’ve always looked up to in the freelance world, and it still feels a bit weird knowing that we’ve managed to propell WooThemes to online startup stardom.

Now that we have built such a great platform as WooThemes for ourselves, I think that it will be easier for me or us to go into other markets or businesses in 2009. Not many freelancers get the oportunity to theoreically do whatever they want, so I feel like I have to use my time wisely to further build my freelance career to something that will last well into my thirties (and beyond).

My desk

I’ve been working almost 5 months as a freelancer, and although it gives me much greater freedom than I had when I was in my day job, I still have to put in a normal 8-hour (or so) work day. What I find hard is actually separating between work and private life, although I’m not sure if it is actually a problem, but it is still not easy to distinguish between “working” and “surfing for leisure”. It gets dark and cold in the winter in Norway, and personally I’d rather sit in front of my PC and do something productive than watch TV.

So here is what a typical day looks like for me in case you ever wondered what us freelancers do:

6.00 – Get woken up by girlfriend. Try to fall asleep again.

7.30 – Stumble out of bed, and get the coffee machine fired up.

8-9.30 – Check my email and answer or attend to any new e-mail. Log into WooThemes admin and check the e-mail to see if there are any problems, then answer all the new forum posts. Check how our sales are going (this is addictive so I usually do this 5-20 times a day).

9.30-10.00 – Check my stock to see how low it has dropped since I bought it. Check my Google Reader for the latest news around the interweb. This would be seen as slacking in  my old job… now it is necessary

10-11.00 – Usually have my daily skype chat with Adii and sometimes Mark if he manages to get out of bed. These chats are vital to running WooThemes and also really helpful at motivating me to get things done.

11-16.00 – Do some bug / feature coding on our themes. Working on implementing threaded comments at the moment. Otherwise I spend most my time on theme development or general admin work on WooThemes.

16-17.00 – Usually get bored of working if there isn’t a specific design I’m working on. Jam a bit on my guitar until my gf comes home and I need turn it down.

17-20.00 – Random checks on WooThemes e-mail/forum and Google Reader. Remember it’s dark outside so only thing I can do is go to the gym or go for a walk

20-24.00 – Dedicated to laying on the couch watching TV and winding down from thinking on business stuff. I’ve noticed it is harder to get to sleep if I stay up late and design/program because I can’t stop thinking about it when I go to bed.

So is my typical day anything like yours?

Here are some of my personal achievements for 2008 (and late 2007 to tie the knots):

November 2007

Made a couple of free WordPress themes after checking out WordPress for the first time. Thought it would be a good exercise since I wasn’t exactly pulling web design work. Saw that the free themes became very popular and were downloaded a lot. Decided to try and make a “premium” theme (or commercial/paid), after seeing that there was a market for this.

Sent an e-mail to Adii, who had a very popular commercial theme called “Premium News Theme”, about a possible collaboration on a theme. This would turn out to be quite a important e-mail that would change my path in life. NewsPress was released as the second theme in the PNT series.

January

Started my second collab with Adii, and came up with a smoother looking concept called Flash News, which was released soon thereafter on PNT website.

April

Learning from my first two collaborations with Adii, I stepped up my game and created what turned out to be our most popular WordPress theme by far, maybe even THE single most popular theme ever: FRESH NEWS

May

After working as a programmer at EM Software for just over 7 years, and after much thinking and soul searching, I finally took the plunge and handed in my letter of resignation. This was a step I was able to make because of my increased involvement with Adii and increased work flow from custom design projects.

July

After months of planning, coding and designing, we rebranded Premium News Theme to WooThemes. Me, Adii and Mark Forrester became equal partners, when the initial 4th partner, start designer Elliot Jay Stocks, decided to focus on his own work.

August

15th of August was my last day at work, and the first day of my freelancing career.

September

Released my first theme to the WooThemes gallery called Fresh Folio. This was meant as a personal portfolio redesign, but decided it would make a good addition to our only other portfolio theme on Woo.

October

Quickly followed up with another very popular theme on WooThemes, my first business theme called Over Easy.

November

Finally redesigned my old portfolio by using Over Easy as the foundation.

December

Released my 6th theme named Busy Bee (code named Fresh-News-Killer) on WooThemes, and after posting a few previews on my blog and Flickr, it smashed our previous first day record for amount of downloads, and is already heading towards becoming one of our most popular themes.

So that is me blowing my own trumpet on the important happenings in 2008. I’d like to thank Adii and Mark Forrester for getting me where I am today (gotta love freelancing), everyone who has backed me on my decisions (girlfriend, family and friends), and last but not least, all of those who follow and appreciate my work; Your emails and comments have really been heart warming to say the least.

I wish everybody a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Estimate and give a proper quote before project starts

At the start I took everything I could get my hands on, and I had incredibly low prices, because at that time I was just so thrilled at getting work that I didn’t think of it as salary. I made one website for $300 and used between 30-40 hours getting that site done.

The design didn’t take long, it was the fact that I hadn’t estimated the project before I started. The project specification was pretty vague, and I only calculated how long it would take me to design and code it. Even then it was quoted too low, but they had a budget, and I didn’t want to lose any work. It was the aftermath of tweaks and layout changes that came after I had finished my part that blew the project out of proportion. Today I think of this project as a great learning experience.

Get paid before you start working on small jobs

I also did many modifications to existing sites, and quickly learned that I needed to give a list of every modification the client would want, and estimate a total for ONLY those changes. If they client then wanted more on top of that I told them that we could do that in round two. I always take 100% payment upfront for jobs that only take a few hours, and usually 50% upfront and 50% before the project is finished on bigger projects.

Don’t get ripped off

When I got requests for work, I usually gave a quick quote and and if the client thought that was reasonable, I usually got the job. But I forgot about payment schedules, which is just as important as the quote itself. I had to much faith in clients, and thought they would all pay me once the work was done. It didn’t take long before I got burned, and learned a valuable but costly lesson.

My client was making a web site for a company, and the mistake was made after I had finished and the client asked to get the theme files so they could test it on their side. They managed to get their site up and running, and I was promised payments about a dozen times. I was so patient with this client that from the first request for payment until the last, 3 months had passed. The client even wanted me to design some more web sites, one of which I started on, but said that I needed payment for the last project before I started coding.

I’ve emailed both the company and my client without response several times. It’s been over six months since I was supposed to get paid. So for me this is a lost project but another valuable lesson was learned. Update: This issue has been resolved thanks to one of my readers who finally managed to established contact with the company, and I have been paid for my work.

Do you have any similar stories or experiences? Am I wrong for hanging out the client who never paid?