I found this job offer online today:

Urgent need for CSS designer to convert a PSD to CSS. Need it done in 1 hour. Pay: $10

That's barely enough to cover the two lattes I would need to get it done that fast! I hope whoever took the job has a real job. Job bidding sites are just a bad way to find work, as are these other payment schemes.

Update: today's crappy offer was an SEO writing job - 300 words for $2! And they retain all rights. At least there was no time limit!

Video is getting more and more common on Web pages, but it still is a pain in the neck to add to them. I have tried various methods - straight video, Flash, and embedding YouTube. And none of them are easy to build the video. It's frustrating. It seems like something that should just be simple, but even when you get it working, your code doesn't validate if you use <embed> and doesn't work in many browsers if you use just <object>. But even with all the problems, I still enjoy watching videos on websites. They seem less annoying than automatic sound. How to Add Video to a Web Page

But sometimes it can be hard to do if you're a solo Web designer working from your home office. Whenever I get stuck for ideas I make a change of scenery. I will go and work outside or just take a walk. If I need a new perspective, I start with my local resources - ie, my husband. Then if that's not satisfactory, I'll post ideas online to show friends or go over to someone's place to work with them on new ideas. How do you find inspiration? (NOTE Comments are turned off on this post. If you'd like to participate in the discussion, please use this form.) Thanks to Keith for the suggestion for this discussion.

When your client asks you to create an HTML email newsletter for them, do you just jump right to it? There are some definite pros and cons to HTML email. And then there's the fact that sending HTML email can be difficult. I love the quick rules provided by Assault Blog. If you start there when working with clients who want HTML emails, you'll have fewer problems.

Working for free is a controversial topic for freelance Web designers. Personally, while I can imagine some extreme situations where it makes sense to work for free most of the time (like 99.9% of the time) I think it's a bad idea. But that doesn't mean I've never done it. In fact, I've done it fairly recently, and for none of the reasons I listed in my article. Yes, it's just as hard for me to refuse a favor for a friend as it is for nearly anyone else. The only excuse I give is that I knew it was a bad idea even as I was doing it. Share Your Story why have you worked for free?

Most hosting companies will always tell you they can scale, but you never really know until the news hits and your site stays up or crashes. In this time of uncertainty, bad news can send people flocking to your site. If your site is down when they get there it sends a bad message. If your company is public it could affect your stock price. Or investors might hesitate to invest. Or your employees could panic and start an exodus. Don't let a simple site outage cause more problems than you started with.

One of the things I hate with my designs is how the fonts look. It can be really frustrating to spend a lot of time on a design only to realize that the typography just wasn't cutting it in the website. Using the Typetester.org tool, you can test the colors, fonts, leading, tracking, and much more to see how it will look as blocks of text.

Ecommerce is really complicated. What with the store itself, usually with a database backend, the merchant accounts and payment gateways, building an ecommerce site can be overwhelming. In fact, most of the time, I advise people to look into turnkey solutions like Yahoo! Stores or EBay. But this week I started writing some tutorials on osCommerce to help people learn how to put a storefront on your website. Have you already built one?

When you're building a website, whether it's for yourself or for a business, do you think about the favicons? I must admit that I tend to forget them. But as DirJournal points out, they are a great way to brand the website. The benefit of favicons is that they are subtle. A good favicon takes the elements of the site brand and logo and incorporates them in a small icon. Favicons display in the bookmarks and in the URL bar and in a few other areas on different browsers. They remind your readers where they are without being annoying or obtrusive. And you don't need to worry about security with favicons. The biggest issue is for users of Opera 7.5 and below, and very few people use that browser. So, if you're building a new site or updating an old site, be sure to add or update the favicon.

I've been writing about the values of using CSS for layout and CSS for design for many years. And every time I write about it, a flurry of people chime in to tell me why CSS sucks. Well, now's your chance to tell us all why you hate CSS. Maybe you don't hate everything about CSS, but you can't stand the lack of consistent browser support. Or maybe you hate using hacks to get it to work in older browsers. Or maybe you just hate CSS positioning. Whatever it is, let us know. (Note: comments are turned off for this post, please use this form to provide feedback. Thanks!)