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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[Establish trust on the vast internet]

A very cool new site for freelance professionals is called Anthillz.

The site, founded by Blake Janelle, lets an individual create a free account, give a short description (very short) of what they do or who they are and then let's clients and colleagues write longer descriptions of their experiences with the individual.

If you go to my Anthillz profile, you will see the 3 client reviews I have as of today. The clients can give you a grade and each grade contributes to an individuals average score shown on the profile page.

You can also add keywords to aid in a site users search for people that have the skill sets they are looking for to work on a project.

The whole concept is pretty simple. I use it to send to prospective clients so they can see what other clients have said about the experience working with me.

Another use for the site is that you can add a link to your profile on LinkedIn on your profile page.

I really like this site as a resource for freelancers (any type of freelancer can add a profile) and have added it to my list of "check em out" sites.

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This is my first post about my web design freelance experience.

I have seen over the last week an increase in potential. I kept getting these little feelers that a number of little jobs were about to start and today I find myself somewhat employed again.

Last week a referral from my sister Myra Moskowitz landed me a small job for the Dallas Jewish Community Foundation working on their web site fixing code and some design issues. I put in an afternoon there on Thursday with the promise of more later in the month after the busy/crazy period is over for them.

Last week there was another referral from my mom working for a friend on 3 small sites. I have done bit of preliminary work on that, but am waiting for the client to get me more material.

Last week I did a short software lesson with a guy I met at the Dallas eBaybes & eMales Meetup.com group I belong to. It was on a Mac shareware program called Garage Sale that I use for listing auctions on eBay. If you have a Mac and do eBay, check out the program as it has a number of excellent features. He gave my business card to a friend and tomorrow I am meeting with the friend to start a small site for an antiques business in Jefferson, TX.

And today my many emails to postings on Craigslist finally paid off. I am starting with a company in Euless, TX called TowerOS tomorrow for a 20-30 hour a week gig designing and coding ecommerce stores. The stores are ProStores, which is an eBay company.

I am also awaiting more work from a client, Joie De Deux, that I have been working for since I was still a student a few years back.

See, when it rains, it pours.

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