Much like how freelancing isn’t for everyone, the idea of working from home is not really everyone’s cup of tea either. Sure, you get to work in your bunny slippers, no one steals your lunch from the fridge and if you hate office politics and traffic jams, it’s actually a godsend to be able to work from home. But that doesn’t mean that life’s going to be a bed of roses.

For starters, if you were to choose to work from home, most bosses would ask that you take a paycut (in lieu of not having to turn up at the office). Plus, you can absolutely expect your friends and family to take advantage of your newfound ‘freedom’. The working hours will become a blur, and sometimes if you are not careful, you’ll find yourself working 7 days a week just to catch up with all the time you’ve lost! But if you have decided that working from home is your only option, here are a few tips that may help you make the best of it.

Recommended Reading: 9 Things You Should Consider Before Freelancing Full-time

1. An Understanding Family

One of the hardest thing about working from home is setting boundaries with the people you share ‘home’ with. It’s definitely easier to understand that you are not to be disturbed when you are at the office than when you are in the back room.

Start setting boundaries from the first day you start work. Granted it will get some getting used to (about 66 days in fact) but your children, flat mates, siblings or parents must learn to give you your 8 hours (or more) a day so you can get things donchildren, you will need to get help. A 3-year-old would consider having to go poo an emergency and they expect you to treat ite.

2. Get Help

If you have very young like one (drop everything and get me to the loo quick!). In this case, it would be helpful to have another adult in the house, or to drop your children off at daycare, or a babysitter’s to get a few uninterrupted hours to yourself.

(Image Source: Camilo Jimenez)

During busy periods, you can always get a cleaning lady to help straighten up the mess you call home. Give yourself the peace of mind required to get your work done.

3. Get Your Own No-Fly Zone

It will help to have a room, a workstation or at the very least a desk in a quiet area in your home. Here is where you keep your laptop or PC, fax machine or phone, work documents like reports and invoices, your stationery etc. And it would be good to ensure that no one but you are to use your equipment.

In case this is not possible, stock up on your essentials (e.g. always keep some ink stored away for emergencies).

(Image Source: apartment therapy)

For some inspiration, check out the Modern Office Designs from Around the World

4. I’m Working, Honey!

Within these four invisible walls, you are working and you are to treat it like how you would treat your old office. Coming to work is merely a hop into your ‘cubicle’ and going home is ‘hopping out’. Everything else should remain as it was – keep problems, issues and matters that have to do with home outside of your no-fly zone. If you can convince yourself to compartmentalize like this, it will be easier to convince everyone else.

5. Deliver the hours

Depending on what has been ironed out in the clauses of your contract (or discussed over two cups of coffee) you will be expected to deliver certain working hours for your work-from-home job. The good news with working from home is that nobody is keeping track; the bad news is nobody is keeping track (let that sink in for a bit).

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Don’t think that you can prop up your feet and catch a whole season of your sitcoms in one afternoon and try to work it back during the weekends.

Do it often enough and it will turn into a habit in the long run. Have some self-restraint and keep the entertainment to after hours or the weekends.

Read also: Time-tracking App for Freelancers [Mac]

6. Have a Routine (and Breaks)

Apart from the reason that we are just tired of commuting, another reason to work from home is because of other responsibilities you have that require you to be home. It could be because of your children, your old nana or your spouse who had suffered a broken leg from an accident. In this case, you will need to set a routine that will ensure that you can be there for them and for your company.

For the rest of us, the routine will help with keeping up with house chores – and the breaks you schedule in will help you keep your sanity. It’s also great to help you recharge for the next project or refuel your inspiration. If you get breaks while you’re in the office, there is no reason you can’t take breaks when you are at home.

7. Open Up, Be Reachable

The problem most managers have with their employees working from home is that they can’t keep an eye on them. Make it easier for your boss by being reachable whenever possible. Let them know when you are not around like when you are heading out to the bank or post office, and when you will be back.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Keep yourself in check at all times so your boss doesn’t have to. After a while once a routine is set in, the reins will loosen and you will have the freedom to roam about freely… which could lead to another problem.

8. Deliver the goods

One thing that should always be at the back of your head is that your productivity should not diminish when you work from home. If it is counterproductive for you to be working from home, what’s to stop them from making you brave traffic and parking wardens to turn up at the office again?

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Set quotas for yourself and discuss roadblocks or problems that you have with your colleagues or managers while working on a project. Consider joining in brainstorming sessions via conferencing tools, but stay away from the office politics or gossip.

Read also: Best of Online Meeting and Web Conferencing Tools

9. Get out of the house

Moderation is key. Working in solitude has its disadvantages but only because humans are social creatures. Hence, getting out of the house is very important. If you don’t have to go back to the office to have meetings or deliver progress reports, you can bring your laptop and work at a coffee shop or meet a friend during lunch.

The idea is to break the monotony of working with your shadow and your reflection.

10. Stay healthy

Get plenty of fluids and eat healthy, and if you aren’t a fan of exercise, just try to move around whenever you can. This gets oxygen into your blood circulation which can be the cure to that dullness you’ve been feeling after looking at the same project day in, day out for months! Relax with music, some light reading or make lunch for yourself.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Also you should pamper yourself for being able to keep away from online distractions and for getting the job done with minimal (or no) supervision. Not everyone can do it, so when you do, reward yourself for it!

Related posts:

1. 8 Tips to Simplify Your Work life
2. Freelancers: How to Work Better with Your Clients
3. Freelance Designers: How to Balance Your Work Life
4. Roadmap to Freelancing: Doing the Job (Part 3)

We have covered much of the basics for LESS in our previous posts. If you have been following our LESS series, we believe that at this point you already have a good idea about how to use the Variables, Mixins and Operation in LESS.

We have also mentioned how to convert LESS into regular CSS, with an app or with a compiler. But, how do we do the opposite; to convert CSS into LESS? Well, this tip is for you.

Using a Tool

With increasing popularity of CSS preprocessor, some new tools and apps that essentially aim to makea web designer’s or developer’s life easier, such as this tool: CSS2Less.

This tool allows us to convert regular CSS into LESS. So, let’s give it a try. I have the following CSS rules from my old file to be converted.

  nav {  	height: 40px;  	width: 100%;  	background: #000;  	border-bottom: 2px solid #fff;  }  nav ul {  	padding: 0;  	margin: 0 auto;  }  nav li {  	display: inline;  	float: left;  }  nav a {  	color: #fff;  	display: inline-block;  	width: 100px;  	text-shadow: 1px 1px 0px #000;  }  nav li a {  	border-right: 1px solid #fff;  	box-sizing:border-box;  }  nav li:last-child a {  	border-right: 0;  }  nav a:hover, nav a:active {  	background-color: #fff;  }  

Here is the result.

  nav a:hover, nav a:active {      background-color: #fff;  }  nav {      height: 40px;      width: 100%;      background: #000;      border-bottom: 2px solid #fff;      a {          color: #fff;          display: inline-block;          width: 100px;          text-shadow: 1px 1px 0px #000;      }      ul {          padding: 0;          margin: 0 auto;      }      li:last-child {          a {              border-right: 0;          }      }      li {          display: inline;          float: left;          a {              border-right: 1px solid #fff;              box-sizing:border-box;          }      }  }  

As we can see above, our old CSS is now nested like in LESS.

Limitation

However we can also see some limitations in the results of the conversion. In the old CSS, we have several same colors, such as in these two declarations border-bottom: 2px solid #fff; and border-right: 1px solid #fff; we have both borders in white. In LESS we can actually store this constant value in a Variable.

It also does not nest and separate the pseudo-* with an ampersand (&) symbol, such as in the following rules li:last-child and nav a:hover, nav a:active. They just remain as they are, where we can actually simplify the rulesets this way;

  li {  	&:first-child {    	}  	a {  		&:hover {    		}  		&:active {    		}  	}  }  

Conclusion

Despite the limitations it currently still has, this tool can quite helpful in saving our time for nesting CSS rulesets. We only need to do the rest manually; possibly until the the limitations above are resolved.

Related posts:

1. A Look Into: CSS3 Box-sizing
2. A Look Into: CSS3 :First-Of-Type Structural Selector
3. How to: Customizing and Theming jQuery UI Datepicker
4. LESS CSS Tutorial: Designing A Slick Menu Navigation bar

Editor’s note: This is a contributed article by Lisa Pluth, PhD holder and a researcher for Brandme.com.au, Australia’s leading producer of promotional items and business gifts.

Back in 2010, site speed and page loading times have been added into Google’s algorithms. While not a headline grabber in comparison to the latest news about iPhones and social media, site speed issues are a thing of concern to web designers and it is also one of the best promotional tools around for growing a design business.

Google has a tendency to change their algorithms (up to 600 times per year) so it can be a source of headache to keep up with these changes.Thus, it’s probably a good thing that Google offers the PageSpeed Service, an optimization service that will "automatically speed up the loading of your web pages".

(Image Source: Fotolia)

The idea behind the service is that you hand your web page and its contents over to Google and they "optimize" it with changes that will speed the site up then distribute it to their servers around the world. Technically, this puts them in charge of the end product, a product of your making. And eventually they are going to charge us for that service. If any of that that makes you feel uncomfortable, chances are, many other site owners feel the same way. But all is not lost, and in fact, there is a lot of money to be made and lost depending on how the page site service shakes out.

Recommended Reading: How To Measure Front-End Website Performance

Optimizing for Speed

Page speed and load times are impacted by many factors but image usage and design play a prominent role in speed, particularly in extending loading times for web pages. Moreover, speed is a metric every web user over the age of three understands. It’s also beautifully quantifiable. Here’s a collection of tools you can use to check your site speed, previously published on the site.

Designers are spoilt for choice with the many optimization guides out there on how to make a page perform better for their site visitors. Here’s an Ultimate Guide to Web Optimization (Tips & Best Practices) to get you started. But getting clients to put their faith in you to help them speed up their sites for them, that’s a different story, and one that speed tools can help you tell.

Use Speed Tools to Get New Clients

Speed tools are great for demonstrating a designer’s value and worth to current and potential customers. Let’s assume that you have several product web designs in your portfolio. By simply cross-referencing keywords, results from web site rankings and speed tools, you can identify clients with websites that need your help.

What we are looking for are sites that rank (and are doing) well despite having horrendous site design or load speed. These are sites that have the money but need the know-how.

The Approach

Once identified send the speed tests with a claim that you can easily speed up their entire site. It’s usually possible to gain several seconds, but under-promise and over-deliver. Also, give them links so that they can compare themselves with competing websites.

Speeding up a site is often simple potatoes for a good designer. In any case, there are plenty of pointers on how to do so effectively everywhere on the Web. In addition, there plenty of image customization tools on the web that can make your first job for them a piece of cake.

Further Reading: Jpeg Customization For the Web – Ultimate Guide

The point is to start a relationship with a potential client and give them a tangible benefit for your services that they and their customers can easily see and appreciate. Speed tests are exactly this type of tool. After the job is done there is concrete proof that your services are valuable. In the current economy you might not get requests for the entire site to be redesigned immediately. However when they are ready to do so, the likelihood is that they will get you to do it.

Improve Existing Client Relationships

Let’s say you are an experienced designer with a wide range of clients. You can use speed tools in the same way to demonstrate your value to your current clients and remind them that you are there when they need something more. Keeping up a dialog with your customers is vital to long-term success.

You can do this by preparing speed testing and ranking graphs in their industries and comparing these with both the competition and their numbers from the year before. Include Webmaster tools analytics and prepare a beautiful printed report for your clients about their website.

Get Help from Print

"Old-fashion" follow-ups in printed graphics is something that is often overlooked in the web design industry but one you can fall back on any time for branding exercise. Presentation reports are valuable because they provide clients with tangible proof that they can touch. This is something they can show off to their decision-makers or clients. The report can sit on their coffee tables for years displaying your logo and promoting your design services. Done correctly this can be one of the best branding tools any designer can use for their business.

Conclusion

In conclusion, to date developments in Google’s attempt to dominate the web is watched closely by web designers. Our generation is one that is obsessed with speed, making it, in today’s marketplace, one of the best ways to sell a designer’s talents, generate new businesses and recruit new potential clients. Speed is a great tool when used properly and branded correctly. Put speed on your side and watch your design business flourish.

Related posts:

1. 7 Rules To Creating A Professional Portfolio Site
2. A Look Into: Popular (Public) Site Ranking Services
3. [Freebie] “ThinkJuice” Product Site PSD Template Set
4. Installing Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) on WordPress Site