Barterlancing

For almost the last year I’ve been involved in a “barterlancing” project (barterlancing is my term for freelancers who barter services). Last summer I came across the website of Patrick, a colleague who I worked with at Discovery. He has his own freelance design business, but his website is a single page with one image and an image map to define clickable links. Since I’m a Web Standards advocate and firmly believe in semantic markup this site didn’t sit well with me at all, so I decided to rebuild his site.

A couple days later I emailed Patrick the link to the site I built with a note suggesting we talk. I admit now that my motive for doing this was I wanted a website designed for me, and I was hoping to barter services by offering to build a site for Patrick. Patrick responded to my message asking exactly what I anticipated and thus this project was born.

We didn’t have a deadline set for the project other than “soon”, but as we all know this is not a real deadline. So “soon” turned out to be several months of little progress while both of our schedules were hectic. At the beginning of this year we vowed to concentrate on the project and so far we’ve been making good progress—even though the project ended up being more complicated than I had anticipated. This is because our original intent was to have me build the site and teach Patrick how to build the site, and for Patrick to design a logo and website for me. My logo is almost done but Patrick’s site changed direction when we decided to incorporate WordPress as a CMS for the site. This is a totally unfamiliar process for me, as I detail in my following post. But I’m hoping I can use the knowledge gained from this project on future (non-free) projects.