The industry term is "scope creep." The everyday human term is "a bunch of extra crap." One of the first few questions you answer when starting a web project is what are the core features. What's our site going to do for people? The simple answer you start with usually grows into a rambling monster of: instant personal messaging, event auto-recommendations, mobile video chat, holograms and real life status pokes.

Drupal is great for adding features via modules. Inside of a few days you can have a pretty sweet site prototyped. But without a good looking wrapper your candy will look stale. There are lots of great themes out there ready to drop in with just a few minutes work. Without a little sweat on your part the site will lack flavor, and give off the appearance of just another Drupal site.

Yesterday I took on teaching my friend Matthew about Drupal. We're helping with a project that, while there will only be a few users, seemed like a good fit for the platform. Normally my rule is that if you'll have a small team adding content then you should defer to a smaller CMS like WordPress, but this project will have a few more features just beyond what I think it reasonable for only WP plug-ins. It's not a tech project so I hesitate to think about custom development options.

We offer our talent a few tools to pool info about projects; this way we save time and work more cohesively. One of our first "Cheat Sheets" was about SEO (search engine optimization.) Since the purpose of our TalentEd blog is to present such knowledge, here are some of the greatest hits for SEO.

The main goal is to let the engine know when you should be displayed. It has to guess about your purpose. Provide goods hints.

KEYWORDS

Many of the websites we help create include an element of so-called "rich media," in this case audio or video. Most people with this type of content can envision how they want it presented to users but the back-end how-to options are still a little fuzzy. Let's clear up our choices for cost, work flow, and distribution. These factors overlap, and remind us that we can't have our cake and eat it too... unless of course you want to pay for two cakes.

Work Flow

I starting making a list of freelance rules (lessons) a while ago and now it's big enough to warrant sharing them with friend and community.

Pass work along

When you honestly don't have time, pass the work to a friend... or even a "competitor." You'll be able to focus on the projects in front of you. It's a healthier lifestyle to maintain the quality of what you produce and your client connections rather than bite off more than you can chew.

Take Five