For my own reference and yours, here are my notes from the short talk I gave on the “How to Grow Your Business (With or Without Employees)” panel at the Creative Freelancer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco held June 22-23, 2013.

I love the new year. It’s a great time to take stock of what’s important and set intentions. Here are some ideas I keep in mind to help craft my resolutions (or goals, or intentions, or tasks, or whatever) so they are meaningful and can make it out of January.

Let’s say someone asks you to build them a website (or you want to build one yourself). Here are some questions that can help you figure out what they (or you) really want and need.

I don’t usually post more than once a month or so, but here is a hopefully worthy exception.

This parable helps keep me from overreacting — negatively or positively — when “big” news happens. Of course, it also applies to news of all sizes.

It just takes a few smart clicks to create ready-to-use images of any website in a range of popular mobile device "frames."

A check-in to say how it’s going with the new business and to announce my revamped website.

Forget convoluted sequences of seemingly random characters. Instead, go long. Even better, let software handle it for you.

Procrastination makes the whole world dimmer. For posterity, here are the tricks I know of to get the ball rolling.

Website projects of many different shapes and sizes can often benefit greatly from a “ready, fire, aim” approach of rapid launch and iteration rather than a traditional print-based process.