Christian Vasile
Christian Vasile is an enthuziastic Romanian web designer currently living in Denmark. He is passionate for the industry and writes about design, usability, coding and freelancing and is a regular publisher here at 1WD. You can follow him on Twitter at @christianvasile or visit his web portfolio by clicking on the link above.
How to Use Twitter Effectively to Experience its Full Potential
Some time ago I wrote an etiquette guide for Facebook. Because the article made a lot of buzz in social media, I thought I should write an etiquette guide on how to use Twitter effectively, the other major player in social networking.
The microblogging service was launched in 2006 and employs almost 1,000 people all over the world. It has a database of 140 million active users and, in competition with Facebook, represents the most valuable place to share information on the web. Tweeting constantly and being active all the time is very important, as followers can lose interest quite fast. Although a tweet can be a maximum 140 characters, the information you can share within these boundaries can be incredibly useful. Many people in our industry share interesting links to tutorials, posts and product reviews – although written with less than 140 characters, the information can spread very fast and is very useful.
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Facebook Guidelines for a Socially Cleaner Profile
Recently, I wrote an article about how Facebook is dominant on the internet. It is quite clear that Facebook is right now the most important social media tool and knowing how to properly conduct yourself, as an individual or a business, on Facebook, is crucial. Sure, it is much more important for companies to make sure they represent themselves properly, but you’d be surprised how many individuals actually care about their Facebook profile and follow some rules and guidelines too.
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The Rise Of Facebook: Path to World Domination
Facebook. The social media masterpiece all of us, more or less, use for personal or business reasons. Facebook is considered to, again, more or less rule the internet. This social media monster bringing in clients and prospects to companies, it’s a great tool for businesses and freelancers alike. Facebook will attract one seventh of the World’s population by the end 2012. Everything you would like to have in social media featured by one single company, on a single web page, having a single descriptive word to be assigned yet: dominant.
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Great Examples of Interactive Architecture for Your Inspiration
While you need a lot of creativity to create a website or an advertising campaign, design can also be combined with something else: architecture. If you thought following a grid system is difficult, imagine interactive architects prototyping large buildings or interior designs in order for them to interact with people. It is definitely not an easy task.
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How Colors Help Make Websites Successful
You might not realize how important colours are in web design. If a website is green, it might as well be blue; it doesn’t matter. And while I thought this myself for a long time, I recently came to the conclusion that the color is actually going to make a huge difference and express something different to your audience. There are psychological effects behind each color and tone, therefore I decided to tell you more about them today.
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Why Does Google+ Bring More Business To People Than Facebook?
Google+, sometimes abbreviated as Google Plus or G+, is a social network developed and maintained by the tech giant Google. The network was released in beta to the public 9 months ago, by the end of June 2011. The full release came in September. While the network was supposed to be a strong opponent for Facebook, it was never even close to it. The fact that many people use it today is entirely based on curiosity and mostly on Google’s name and powerful brand and not because it brings something new to the business. Or is it…?
Google estimates the social network will have around 400 million users by the end of this year, while Facebook approaches a billion. Twitter only has around 100 million users while LinkedIn with 30 million users more than the micro-blogging platform.
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7 Webmaster Tools That Will Make Your Job Easier
After we deliver a complete web design solution to clients, they might ask us to continue working for them for a few hours a week as a webmaster. While this job can be quite bumpy at times, its difficulty can be minimized with the help of different webmaster tools available on the Internet. If you are involved with such a client, this article is out here to help you speed up your workflow.
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Beginner’s Guide to Wireframes and Tools to Create Them
Wireframing, or prototyping, while designing, costs almost nothing, but can give back so much. While many designers start with a sketch in their mind and then just put it into Photoshop or even code it right away, some others start on paper. Yes, paper, that (most of the time) white thing we write on with our hands. Sounds very 2000-ish, but even today the best designers out there use this technique to their advantage. Web prototyping saves lots of frustrations later on during the project development phase, as it makes sure there are no things to undo or redesign. If you prototype correctly, you can be sure about the fact that redesigning will never be something you will have to think of.
What wireframing basically means is putting your design ideas on paper – for each of the multiple pages of a website. All pages will probably share some elements, therefore the first one will be a bit more challenging to do, whereas the rest of them will be a bit less difficult as you already have a basic idea over the general design patterns.
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Tips to Find Balance Between Personal and Paid Work Before Life Rips You Apart
I am sure all of us have a lot of work to do during our freelance workday or even during the full-time agency job. But I am also sure that most of us have side projects as well. While some can be beneficial for your pocket and experience, sometimes you just want to develop your own tool, write a blog post or design something for friends or do some pro bono work. After eight hours of work, it is highly unlikely that you want to continue doing the same thing at home, so the question is how to manage doing both while still remaining motivated and focused on the goals. Moreover, if talking about what catches our attention all the time – money – personal projects are not usually the ones that put cash in our pockets.
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Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Successful Blog
We are all aware of just how fast the Internet grows. The American search engine giant, Google, reports that more than 1 trillion websites were indexed in 2008. Twenty years ago Google only indexed 15,000 new URLs per year. In a stunning report from Mashable last summer we found out that 150,000 new URLs are created daily. While it is nearly impossible to figure out the exact number of web pages out there, it is clear that mammoth is the right word to use to describe the internet in 2012.
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