Blog Review: www.wakeuplater.com
Wake Up Later is one of my favourite blog sites. Given the vast amount of business and technology related blogs out there, it’s great to find one that’s accessible, entertaining and useful all the same.
Wake Up Later focuses on advice for website and blog freelancers looking to develop their business and technical skills. In particular it addresses ideas of good practice for those looking to develop a career as an individual or in a small business. While offering technical advice at times, for me the main benefit and enjoyment is the advice on things that people trying to build a freelance business may overlook or fail to emphasise. I’m constantly given motivation to analyse how to behave with clients, how to choose the best approaches for the long term development of freelancing success. As an example of some of the standard topics, and articles I’ve enjoyed particularly:
- Setting Guidelines for Turning Down Freelance Work
- Why Every Freelancer Should Have a Blog
- Refocusing Your Business With an “I Am No Good At” List
In addition to the strong writing by the creator Samuel Ryan, the site also has an excellent library of free and open source resources of use to freelancers and developers. And to avoid any reliance on a single contributor there’s also a varied selection of interviews conducted with other web workers. And I’m also a big fan of his focus on a specific category of GroupThink posts in the blog which specifically aims to develop feedback on various issues, giving a greater depth of advice.
The idea behind GroupThink is something that I think should be used far more commonly in the blogging world, and something I’m going to pursue myself in the future. While most blogs do indeed have a comments section a greater focus on specifically soliciting opinion on particular topics can bring in a lot of really useful advice. For example the additional feedback on ‘How Do Freelancers Find Business?’ was invaluable in demonstrating different methods and approaches to one of the hardest problems freelancers face, finding sources of work and therefore income.
Putting the whole package together in a solid and attractive design (if a little too “generic Web 2.0″ for my tastes), the site is well laid out and easy to navigate. I’ve rarely found a blog entry that wasn’t thought provoking or interesting, and it reamins one of my most commonly visited web business related blogs.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Thanks for the kind words Robin. I likewise have enjoyed your entries as it’s nice to read focused articles from people who are both designers and programmers. Plus, you’re .Net which seems to be a rarity amongst all these bloggers who use PHP :)
April 9th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Thanks Sam, glad you’re enjoying this blog also. I think the .Net is fluke more than anything, as it’s just a transfer of corporate developed skills to the work I do now, whereas PHP seems to be what most people kick off with (plus actually a lot of the time it’s simply cheaper to host sites without .NET activated!).
Nice to be reminded that I’m a designer as well. :) Given my day to day work is very corporate and therefore uninspiring from a purely design standpoint, I sometimes forget how much I enjoy the purely creative side and how lucky I am to have the programming skills to be able to put a lot of my ideas into practice.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I have to say that I really enjoy reading both blogs. Both have in-depth content and are friendly places. Keep up the good work!
April 10th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Thanks Mathew, glad you’re finding it enjoyable.