This is my 1st real test of working freelance remotely (on a trip out of town) with just my Apple Powerbook G4 laptop and a wifi connection.

I am in College Station, TX with my wife, a co-worker of hers and my brother-in-law. They all came for a continuing education 2 day workshop for engineers. I came along just cuz I could and wanted to keep ruthie company. We like to travel together.

Now I have worked remotely before from a hotel room in San Antonio, TX while Ruthie was at a conference there, but I was working full time as an employee of Hitchfinder.com and I pretty much had to be connected to the office so they would see I was actually "on the clock".

This time I am working for myself, so it will be interesting to see how I fare at self control in keeping myself "on target" in getting some actual work done here on this trip.

I will finish this post tomorrow night and fill you in on how I did over the course of the day.

...

Well, I was pretty productive. I finished a comp of a 10-page site for a client for his massage business. It is a re-do of an old site.

I did also play a bit though. I dropped Ruthie and crew back off after lunch at Fatburger (big juicy 2/3 burger) and went to 3 pawn shops looking for items to sell on eBay, but did not find anything.

So I am declaring the day a success.

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So why do I use this shareware program called skEdit instead of Adobe Dreamweaver for my freelance web design?

This all goes back to about 3 months after I started at Hitchfinder.com. The other designers were using Dreamweaver as a text editor for HTML and CSS and I was too. In college I had 2 semesters on how to use Dreamweaver.

It's a great program, but at a certain point I got to the skill level that I no longer needed all the extra help Dreamweaver throws at you (most without your asking) like the design view, flash text, integration with Fireworks and so on.

So I decided to check out this little shareware program called skEdit, by stki Software. The programmer, Sean Kelly, is a young software engineer working at Apple, Inc. I guess that's where the "sk" in the name came from.

This program is made and designed for Mac ONLY. I use Macs, so I thought it would be a perfect fit.

Well, I really love this program. I have only opened and used Dreamweaver a few times in the past 2 years. I have not needed it. The only times I have used it has been when I had 2 clients that used Dreamweaver and I needed to use it in their office because they were familiar with that program.

So what does this program do that Dreamweaver does not? Wrong question.

It simplifies the design process by letting you focus more on the code. It actually does a number of the same things like code completion, auto closing brackets, snippets, design view (previews in browser, not in skEdit), search, syntax aware indenting, find and replace and autosave.

There are features I don't even use like edit files on remote server, HTML tidy, subversion integration and user scripts.

What I think are killer features are projects and the code navigator.

The projects let you tie a project to a local folder and you can have a number of different projects or sites open at the same time. That way you can copy and paste code from one site to another quickly and easily. Try having 2 index.html files from different sites open in Dreamweaver at the same time and feeling real confident you are copying and pasting the right pages. In skEdit you are sure because the files are open in different windows at the same time.

The code navigator is a pull down menu the CSS related codes on the page. If you open your CSS file, in one quick place you can quickly see all the rules by name that you have created. It makes jumping down to that CSS ID "center_column ul li" a very painless task.

This program just does what it needs to effectively and quickly and it is not a ram hog like Dreamweaver.

You have to try it to really get the feel of how it works and what it can do. There is a free 25 day demo, full online documentation and it's only $34.95 to purchase.

Sean is very good at getting back to you with requests and problem resolution and is a nice guy.

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My freelance web design business, GushinDesigns, has started to become a thriving business. I am starting to get many good referrals from family, friends and past clients.

I am almost finished with a new photography site I am designing for a client that does all types of photography, plus I will soon re-design this client's massage web site when we finish with this project.

I have been doing work on the Dallas Jewish Community Foundation's site. They need some fixes and I am mostly doing maintenance work on their site.

I am working for another client on 2 small sites in the building/real estate industry.

For about a month I have been designing for a company called TowerOS. This is a contract type position and I have been working on and off on about 4 projects for them.

There is another client that is in the works for a re-do of his company's site. The company is Ed Brown Distributors and they sell commercial laundry equipment.

I also have another pending client for an antiques business in Jefferson, Texas that will be a new site I will create. It is creeping along and so far we have only met once and secured the hosting for the site.

The important thing is that my invoices are starting to be paid and money is starting to come into the business accounts!

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Back a number of months ago I started using this online invoicing and time tracking program from a company in Toronto, Canada called FreshBooks.

As a new user they offer you the use of the program for FREE and the only limitation on the free account is that it is limited to 3 clients.

This is perfect for me, as a freelance web designer, as I can now track the time I spend on each client and their project and the program automatically inserts that time into an invoice for the client.

You can choose to have the invoice emailed to the client or have it sent via snail mail. It is very customizable for each client, project, billing rate and you can even add your logos to the online program (as I have) to let your client log-in and view their invoices online in a custom site that you can design to have it look like it is your own online invoicing application.

It is pretty easy to set up, but if you want to customize the look it might take you a few hours to fully set up the site. The help section is easy to use and does actually help.

You can have it send late notices and create reports. It is a serious time saving application for the freelance professional.

Since I now have more clients I happily needed more than the 3 free clients and upgraded to the $14/month plan, which lets me control up to 25 clients at a time, all with unlimited number of invoices you can send, full customer support (M-F 9-6 EST), data backups, unbranded emails and more.

There also is a very cool Mac OS X widget that allows me to have the small widget open in Dashboard and log time for any client and project I want, then submit those hours to the online program, all without having to be logged into the online web site of FreshBooks. And you can start and stop this timer many times before submitting the hours worked.

I urge you to go to FreshBooks and test drive the program yourself. Yes, my links to it are affiliate links (I try to be up front about this), but this only costs them a portion of the signup cost (nothing if you are just trying out the free version).

I stumbled across a discount of 30% for the service by signing up for a membership at a freelance help site called Freelancer's Union. They have health insurance, a job board, events, freelancing advocacy and a directory of freelancers. You should join this just for these benefits alone. The discounts are a bonus to membership. So if you want to get 30% off any level of service you buy with this great freelancing invoicing and time tracking tool, go there and sign up first.

Note: I did wind up having to call to get them to give me a code to get the 30% off, but the customer service people at FreshBooks were so nice and helpful, it only took a couple of minutes for me to save about $50 a year off the service.

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