Most of the time I don’t consider myself a freelancer; I don’t really seek out jobs with that intent; I like to build relationships with clients that last and that turn into other relationships with other businesses. I fancy that Parallax will become a small studio one day and not just a one-person entity.

But sometimes freelancing can be fun. I start my first temp position with The Creative Group, a staffing company for marketing and advertising companies, tomorrow, working for a web company in Boulder for a week. If we get along, I might have a steady 15 hours per week from them for awhile, plus I get the benefit of working with a known entity in TCG. I’m not quite sure what my duties will be or how this will go, but I’m kind of excited about being in a real design office (I’ve only done this on my own so far) and seeing how it functions.

I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for awhile but hadn’t actually been using it. When I migrated this blog over to Wordpress last week, I went back to the affiliates site and build a few product links to show some of my favorite web/SEO/CSS books. That’s when I saw the Amazon aStores link and I had to check it out.

Wow - this is a really cool idea. You can create your own store using Amazon’s products (anything you want) and customize it to look the way you want, and then you get a referral fee based on the number or type of items purchased. I put about 30 books in my store and had the whole thing up and running on the blog within a half hour.

I don’t know if it might make any money for me, but it’s a great way for me to share all my favorite books in my web design library in any event. This is a really cool thing.

Have you other bloggers put an aStore on your site? Has it done anything for you if so?

I know it’s been a few weeks since I’ve written. Sorry about that, it’s been so busy…

I had a strange experience tonight. I belong to a large networking group and tonight was an event I’d been looking forward to - I had a table for presenting my business to about 60 other businesspeople.

I spent a LOT of time preparing for this. I had a nice presentation of portfolio shots mixed with relevant testimonials. I had fresh color copies of my newsletter, printouts of my ‘design process in a nutshell’ handout, business cards, cool Parallax pens, and special discount coupons I’d designed, one for SEO and another just for a general site review. I spent a lot of time, and I came up with a good-looking, coordinated set of materials that reflected the effort I put into graphic design.

I must say I was quite disappointed that no one seemed interested.

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