Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Here are a few web development projects available for freelance web programmers. Please contact me and I’ll happily connect you to the person in charge.

• To maintain an existing match-making web site
• To develop an online job portal
• To develop a business networking web site
• To develop an online charity web site
• To develop a web site plus web application for a non-profit nationwide sports event – This is a volunteer and non-paying job. But I guess the web programmer will be given due recognition and a plus point in his or her portfolio.

As for me, I’m not a web designer and not in web development business. I developed and still maintain my own sites (yeah, I know I should not do it myself). I was a programmer and I still can program well in PHP (and that’s the only programming language I still know now!)

It’s good to have a gift in web development and programming. But it’s one thing to be a “technician” doing programming, it’s another thing to be an “entrepreneur” in business world. To turn from owning a job to a business, and from working in a business to working on a business, I just have to come out of my comfort zone called programming.

Sometimes I’m asked to develop web sites, from both commercial and not-for-profit sources. But my time commitment does not allow me to take in any of these jobs. Sacrificing precious hours for these web projects means I have to sacrifice time for other more important life goals, though sometimes these projects are good and worthy ones. In other words, doing web development projects simply drags my feet from achieving what I want!

I one unsolicited commercial email in the spam folder recently from yet another training company.  At the bottom of the email, it reads:

Anti-SPAM Policy Disclaimer:
Mail cannot be considered spam as long as we include contact information and a remove link for removal from this mailing list. If this e-mail is unsolicited, please accept our apologies. Further transmissions to you by the sender may be stopped at NO COST to you.

This spammer has a serious misunderstanding of what a spam is.  Any unsolicited commercial bulk email is spam.  But the spammer tries to justify his action by deceiving people the real meaning of spam.  Or maybe he tries to avert his own guilt by talking himself into believing this is not a spam!

Further transmissions to you maybe stopped at NO COST to you?  If you ever reply or click on the unsubscribe link hoping never to hear from the spammer again, sorry but you are wrong.  By receiving your request to unsubscribe, a spammer can verify that your email address is active and so, worth spamming to!  He may not spam to you again himself, but your email address can be used by other spammers to send you even more garbage!

It is good for businesses to use email marketing to promote products and services.  But not in this way.  Spamming is very ineffective yet it brings many negative consequences to our business.  Some of us just have to mature up and know what works and what does not.