Stay Organized and Stay Ahead of Your Competition
The web is a super highway of information! With the phenomenal growth of the network, and the advancement of technologies, the growing number of netizens are left with a bombardment of choices online, be it spending time on their favorite social networking site, browsing through the ocean of links, or be it just idling around, between tweets born every milliseconds.
As design professionals, the most vital resource that we all have to manage well is just one single thing – TIME! Yes, time forms the basic unit of all our efforts and the productivity and the efficiency of a design professional is directly proportional to the time he spends on useful and productive things. Nowadays, with plenty of distractions available online, it has become really hard to get some quality time to be productive. With your FB page and a Twitter client opened in a browser tab, and mail coming every now and then to your inbox, it’s a challenge to get work done. Now is the time to keep all those distractions at bay and find out what part of the day you’re the most productive and capitalize on those times to get work done.
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A Simple Guide to Improving Web Typography
With the advent of much improved browsers, text rendering and high-resolution screens, technology is no longer an excuse for poor typography. In many ways typography can be elegant and an expression of the designer’s ideas when chosen wisely.
Today I will not only present you with guidelines to consider in mastering typography for the web, but give you the useful tools, techniques and resources to help you achieve effective designs.
Feel free to suggest any other tools or resources in the comments section.
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9 Tips on How To Improve Yourself as a Web Designer
There are times in life where everything goes well, people like your work and you get more and more clients. But sometimes the “business” stops, work flow decreases, you get bored and uninspired, and you stagnate. The reasons behind this can vary, but mostly it’s just because you’re feeling uninspired and have lost your drive. It’s very easy to lose inspiration, when we are not surrounded by a learning and inspirational community.
You know you love what you do, so don’t quit. In order to counteract the situation, you need to go further, learn new things, and adopt new work methods. You will find out that maybe you just need a push or build your own motivation and energy to go forward, or that maybe you are just afraid to step up.
So grab a pen and get ready for new resolutions.
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10 Tips to Boost Your HTML Forms Performance
Sometimes we get so used to doing things one way that we forget a little and important thing: to improve. We get so involved with all this CTA stuff that we forget other important things, like the contact form that comes after the pretty button.
Our task today is to improve our form, to get better conversion rates, and maybe learn something from it.
We will be talking about conversion, code, and design, in an easy and practical way.
So, let’s stop talking and rock some forms.
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Tips and Considerations for Self-Promotion
The number of freelancers is rising at a really fast pace, and like everything else you need to stand out in order to stay competitive. Standing out is no easy task, your work needs to be attractive to a lot of people, but especially to your clients. Unfortunately, being good is not enough in today’s world, you also need to tell the world you are here and you are capable of good design.
The best designers and developers are the ones we don’t know about, the only difference is that they don’t need, don’t know or don’t care about self-promotion, or promotion at all. But if you value your work, you should value the way you are presenting it to the world. So before you sell a product, you need to sell yourself. Tell them why you deserve to be chosen, why you.
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Brick and Mortar or Online Business?
Are you the type of person who hates the grueling 8 hour daily grind that comes with becoming employed? You are probably one of the millions of people dreaming of having their own business. Now you may have saved enough money to get out of the 9 to 5 grind and invest in your own business.
You should by now have been educated that there are several business formats available for today’s entrepreneur. Should you launch an online business or go with the traditional brick and mortar setup? The decision is yours to make alone, but this article will help guide you through a wiser and more profitable decision.
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5 Tips to Improve Your Home Office Setup
Your workstation allows you to work freely and think creatively while saying much about your personality in the process. Each setup has its own story and plays an important role in helping a graphic or web designer finish their work successfully.Since we spend a lot of time in front of the computer, it’s important to consider your working environment and how it affects both your mood and productivity.
While there are countless ways to organize your workspace, and no hard and fast rules for doing so, it is still worthwhile to explore ways to construct your office setup to maximize productivity. Through this article I will present 5 ways to do just that!
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6 Tips For Designing an SEO Friendly Website
It’s not enough these days to design a beautiful, functional website that addresses your clients needs. If you truly want your client to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO is a necessity. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the visibility of a website in search engines through organic search results, and is now a viable online marketing tool for a lot of businesses.
Through the following design practices you can improve a website’s SEO and ultimately their visibility. With these foundations in place, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing the website you spent hours designing (and developing) is now a top contender for search engine visibility. You may also find some of these tactics also go far in improving user experience as well.
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A New and Growing Freelance Industry: Wedding Videographer
You may have had an experience with videography or two, albeit non-professionally. Maybe you have a friend or relative who asked you to shoot their wedding. You did well, and now more friends are asking you to shoot theirs as well. You find that there’s actually a big market for you in the industry. In the photography industry where it’s already full of competition, going into the new and growing freelance wedding videography industry might be a good idea.
Yes, venturing into wedding videography is a smart choice for enterprising creative people. But there are several things you need to research before you put a price for your services. You need to invest in a lot of time for research, preparation and experience. Obviously, you need a few things to get you started.
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Two HUGE Myths of Setting Cheap Prices
Going into business as a web designer is tough. You may often see people glorify the life of a freelancer as a utopian life of beach trips, Apple products and lots of money. The truth is, when starting out, it isn’t anything like that and takes years to accomplish that kind of success. I’ve been freelancing for about five years now and have gotten really serious about it in the past couple months and the part that I find the MOST challenging is the pricing.
How do you know what to charge? Hourly or flat rate? What are the market prices? Once you find the answers to these questions, many things will begin to fall into place. I have noticed, however, there are two HUGE myths floating around the design business in regards to setting prices. The two myths are essentially the same, just with two different view points and arguments. What are they you ask?
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