Since I started working on Digital I got the habit of first taking a look at the current tools and methodologies that have been developed around the topics I’m discussing about to see if is there a better and faster way to resolve them; you have no idea about how these new ways of working could improve your projects performance and the most important fact, they keep you up to date.

The thing is that when you learn something new it’s common to stop doing it the old way (you know, from Frontpage to Dreamweaver, from Freehand to Illustrator, from PhotoPaint to Photoshop…), but it doesn’t mean it stopped being useful,  so I thought about how could you do more with these daily skills you get when working on this area.  I couldn’t ensure they will make you rich (it’s all up to you) but for sure if you keep them up there will be a reward someday.

Here they are:

Assets development

There are some details that add a big difference when developing projects and these are the assets. Sometimes they make the difference between a functional and a cool site, and that’s because these details give the user the sense of not finding “holes” in the experience (when they find nice pictures, nice iconography or a well chosen background music and sound effects.  If you have experience on this specific piece of the project you could offer your services as an Assets Developer.  Some useful tips to start your business are:

- A simple and well focused portfolio (on Flick, Deviantart or Behance) supported by periodic communications through Facebook and Twitter)

- An efficient files transfer system (Try Dropbox or WeTransfer).
- Your price table with detailed specifications and unit/pack prices.
- A Paypal account if you want to work remotely.

Batch processing

I remember a couple typical scenarios when developing Web projects where the clients give you these options: or we re-use the assets from their current site or they provide new assets.  In both cases I’ve noticed it’s  practically impossible to make the assets specs fit into the new templates so the assets need to be re-sized, retouched and re-built in some cases.  This is different from assets production because there’s no creativity involved in the process, it’s about applying some additional features to the current assets as required.  Some recommendations over here:

- Design a file naming system that lets you find your files intuitively.
- An efficient files transfer system (for this case it’s better to go with an FTP server).
- It takes less to process a batch and fix the issues than processing items one by one.
- You’ll need a Paypal account if you want to work remotely.

Remote learning

Learning languages is one o f the key skills in a world without geographical boundaries and global communication, so probably you will find a few people interested in learning your native language.  if you take a look at the Online learning websites sites you will notice that they use a very didactic set of materials to explain the basics for free and when you’re ready you purchase a membership to receive personalized lessons.  Based on this scheme you could prepare and sell your training sets about different topics depending on what you want to teach, the goal here is to prepare good topics for every session, otherwise it will become just a regular chat.  To start with this business you would need then:

- Lesson materials (PDFs explaining the terms and topics to be covered on the session)
- A Skype/Facetime/Messenger account with free streaming
- Try to make business with people you trust (your friends’ friends, verifiable contacts, etc).  It’s better if they are referred from someone you know closely.

By the way, now that I read this post again it sounds a little bit obvious, but sometimes things are too evident to make you ignore them.  For  sure there are other jobs you can do from home (I’m actually working on one project I’ll talk about later) but I wanted just to highlight these three because it’s a nice way to recycle that stuff you learned and probably does not make part of your current job functions but still are productive. Whatever, in case you need assistance just contact me.