I do a lot of my freelance work in an industry where time is usually of the essence. This makes for incredibly tight deadlines but also creates a lot of leeway on issues of billing. If you want something don’t quickly, but correctly, sometimes you just need to pay for it. When a client and I are working against the clock on a site it’s not uncommon for us to outsource the work of converting a design into markup for us.

That’s where services like the ones provided by Choppr come into play. They offer table-less html/css development at a very reasonable rate. For only $200, they will take your design in the form of any standard image file and in three days convert it into standards compliant, hand coded HTML & CSS markup with optimized images and cross-browser compatibility. The quality of their code (which is incredibly important to someone like me who needs to wrap PHP around it) can be seen on their site.

A nice part of the service Choppr provides is their willingness to convert a psd/png/ai layout to html. That gives your on-staff designer a lot of options and the opportunity to work in their graphic design program of choice. This again lends a helping end to web developers on strict timelines.

The idea of outsourcing markup work like this might be something new to a lot of you. I think it’s something you should strongly consider especially if converting layouts into markup is just not something you enjoy. It’s also a fantastic option for those of us who might be incredibly strong at programming but fail a bit when it comes to design. You could save a huge amount of time and stress by even outsourcing the design first and then hiring Choppr to take that layout and convert it for you.

As my freelance career has progressed I’ve had some experience with outsourcing these kinds of projects. A lot of layout converting companies promise you the world for pennies and end up delivering terrible markup that doesn’t run in a variety of browsers and ends up costing you more time and money to fix than you would’ve spent just doing it yourself.

If you’re looking for a quality group to code up a layout for you check out Choppr. They believe in web standards and clean code for a fair price and that’s pretty rare these days.

I’m always on the look out for decent golf sites to buy. At the start of this year I went on a massive hunt to find some good quality golf sites to add to my network and came away with absolutely nothing. I eventually broke down and started several from scratch and within the last few weeks that strategy is finally starting to pay off.

Even though I gave up in January, I’ve still had my eyes open for any interesting golfing sites on the various auction forums since then. Finally, earlier this week, the waiting paid off.

The Key Is The Content

A golf blog at golfing-galaxy.com came up for sale at Digital Point. The site was running on WordPress and had 13 posts with unique content that added up to about 8,000 words. I ended up paying $65 for the site which averaged out to be just under one cent a word.

I already have a golf blog that’s doing quite well so the idea of starting another one wasn’t really that appealing to me. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to really get my hands dirty with the new eBay affiliate program.

phpBay Pro To The Rescue

My post on phpBay Pro as an alternative to BANS is probably one of the most popular on this blog. I thought buying and expanding Golfing Galaxy would be a great opportunity to really see what I could do with phpBay Pro and a really lightweight template/framework I’ve been developing for eBay affiliate sites.

You can see by visiting Golfing Galaxy what my template and framework does. The template is actually an open source one I discovered a commentator using on my original phpbayPro post. I took that template and built a site that is entirely powered by a simple menu file and some .htaccess tricks. Adding new manufacturers to the site is as trivial as adding one line of code.

Now The Fun Begins

With the site now updated and expanded it’s time to start building backlinks and getting some traffic. Hopefully this is where my current network of golf sites I’ve built from the ground up can really come into play. I’ll keep everyone posted in the future as to how things are going.