Not a designer? Here’s how to make your web apps look awesome

Published by Tom on 12/05/2011

As mentioned before, I am not a natural designer, and my previous design attempts resulted in physical illness for anyone unfortunate enough to view them. This is not an ideal state of affairs when one wants to sell to the general public.

Luckily, there are a few methods you can use to stop yourself from visually poisoning potential customers. By far the easiest is to outright cheap and buy a theme. Still, one can’t help but worry: what will I get after handing over my money?

I contacted the authors of the two themes (from ThemeForest) that I use in TweetingMachine, and they agreed to me showing you their themes’ details.

Continue reading Not a designer? Here’s how to make your web apps look awesome

Winning your first freelance job on vWorker: how I got started

Published by Tom on 03/05/2011

Update June 2015: I now strongly recommend using Gun.io instead of vWorker.

When I have mentioned in passing that I used to earn a decent living from freelancing on vWorker (formerly RentACoder), I’m often asked two questions: how did you get started; and how much did you earn? Let me begin with the first question: Continue reading Winning your first freelance job on vWorker: how I got started

Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

Published by Tom on 27/04/2011

A quick recap from where I left off in Part I: starting with all of the business ability of a dried plum, I developed an unpopular Twitter tool called TweetingMachine; after nine months, I was ready to scrap in its entirety and mark the whole sorry app as a failed experiment; just before I gave up, a friend pointed me towards ThemeForest, and suggested a couple of themes. Continue reading Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

Published by Tom on 21/04/2011

This is the first part (Part II here) in a series of posts about the first web app I wrote for myself, TweetingMachine. I’ll cover every aspect of its creation and development, starting at how the idea came to me, the many, many mistakes I made, and how eventually I improved the tool so much that it now brings in $500 a month, a figure that increases with each month. I realise that this isn’t a huge amount of money, but it’s a nice present.

Continue reading Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I