Originally, my freelance career was built around the concept of design site services for local and regional small businesses. As the years have gone by and my client list has matured and grown the transition from 100% devotion to design has started to decrease.

I find myself relying more and more, as the demand for my development services increases, on finding an outside website design company to help me with the graphical front end to my own personal, side projects. This has proven especially true with the growth in my web development career where I’m more interested in getting side projects done quickly and efficiently so that I can get back to focusing on client work.

The vast improvement in free web design templates has also helped me out a lot lately. Again, for personal projects, a free or low-cost design template is a great way to get an alpha or beta version of a site idea out and into the wild quickly. I find myself prototyping layouts and admin panels for my projects using free templates more and more. When the project hits a certain point where I’m happy with the behind-the-scenes action I can then go back in and worry about improving the look and feel of the site for visitors.

Here’s a quick hit set of MySQL command-line instructions that will take create a new table in your database with the structure of an existing table and then duplicate the content as well:

CREATE TABLE new_stuff LIKE old_stuff;
INSERT new_stuff SELECT * FROM old_stuff;

This is a great and quick way to make dummy tables of data for testing purposes or for making regular table backups inside your own database for easy comparison or a million other uses that come up every day when working with databases.