deanloh.org

Back in 2004, shortly before I started my freelance journey, I was at the lowest point of my life (and I bet it was!) I had to throw in the white towel for what I was doing at that moment, and decided to “get a job”.
I saw the hiring ad in the classified, a 2-month [...]

I should update the status of my hiring.
Because I got so little responses from my ad in Facebook (see
Web Designers, Where Art Thou?) I turned to Monster.com.sg and JobsDB.com for help.
Within a week, I received like dozens of job applications, one of them happened to be my first customer for hosting service 3 years ago! [...]

I was back in Ngee Ann as guest speaker for the second time (the last time I spoke there was December last year.) This time I was speaking to about 60 students; some are in second year, some are in final year. What puzzles me is they are actually engineering students, but they are also [...]

I put up advertisements on Facebook, looking to hire someone who is good in HTML/CSS, who can help share my workload, so that I can have more time for sleep.
In two weeks, the banner showed up 171,487 times, in which, got 42 clickthroughs (i.e. the banner was clicked 42 times, possibly by 42 different individuals.) [...]

As a freelance web designer, I receive average of 5 to 20 emails/calls each week with inquiry on web design for small to big companies. While most of the calls were genuine, occasionally I would still receive amusing requests like the following:
Hi i would like to have a website like e-bay. Could you quote me [...]

Jasmine, who is one of my longest hosting customers, asked if her team could interview me for their school project, which they were supposed to pick and interview an industry entrepreneur, on things related to, well, entrepreneurship. While I did not quite like being associated with this over-rated term “entrepreneurship”, I at the same time [...]

I had to blog about this as note to self.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of sharing my knowledge in web design business with about two dozens of lecturers in Ngee Ann Poly. I have covered topics of “Building a useful (successful) website”, “E-Commerce & Security”, “Marketing aspect of website”.
Those who know me well, know that [...]

Ok, the latest news is: I’m not leaving for China, so I’m staying. Not only I’m staying, I’m expanding too. I hired my first staff, and got myself an office too! I will write more about this later, but in the mean time, you can take a peek at my new office :)

It’s not like I had to brag, but I have to say that I can really understand why am I facing so little competition in the web design business. I was at a networking event today, I met several other web designers — of the five name cards I collected: one doesn’t have a website, [...]

I know, that’s quite a big statement (the title), but they say it is better to aim for the sky, and when you fall, you will fall on the stars. So, I hope to be the Ogilvy in Web Design. Not to be as creative as him, but to build up the agency as big [...]