Public speaking, bad projects, accounting and side projects – for Web designers

If there’s one great thing for a skillful web developer to contribute, it’s to share his knowledge to other aspiring web designers. But going up front and opening your mouth is a totally different story when you have to do it in front of a crowd. So brace up and go through these tips.

15+ Step-By-Step Public Speaking Tips for Web Designers and Freelancers

You may think that as a freelance web designer you don’t need to worry about public speaking. What you don’t know is that there are plenty of speaking opportunities for web designers. Here are just a few of them:

• Meetups

• Professional organizations

• Client presentations

With all of these opportunities, public speaking is great addition to your marketing arsenal. It’s also a good way to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

More on Public Speaking tips for web designers here. 

10 Ways to Say “No” to Bad Clients (How to Refuse Bad Projects)

We freelancers are well aware that there are bad clients out there. There have been plenty of posts describing how to identify a bad web design client or a bad web design project. We’ve even mentioned bad projects on this blog in this post for new freelancers. There are also plenty of posts encouraging freelancers to say “no” to bad clients.

However, there aren’t too many posts that explain how to turn bad work offers down. And turning work down is harder than you might think (as any freelancer who has ever accepted a bad project will tell you).

Learn how to say no to bad clients here.

Basic Accounting Tips for Freelance Web Designers

How do you feel about accounting? How much do you even know about what kind of accounting records you need to keep?

If you’re like most web designers, Bookkeeping isn’t your favorite part of freelancing. But keeping accurate records is an important part of running a business.

It’s so important, in fact, that keeping good accounting records sometimes means the difference between freelancing success and freelancing failure.

Click here for more on accounting for web designers.

13 Side Projects for Fun and Profit

As web designer, you already work hard. You may feel that you’re doing all that you can possibly do. And that’s perfectly all right.

But many freelancers are taking on side projects–sometimes for fun, and sometimes for money.

Continue reading ’13 side projects for fun and profit’ here.

In my case, I take side projects to break monotony. When things get tedious, it’s a sign for me that everything’s gone extremely routine and it just zaps out the very essence of the craft, if you get what I mean. What about you? Why do you take side projects?

Mobile Apps and Business Cards

I’m dressing down this week and just offer you no more than these helpful sites that I hope serve to inspire you to create or to think which I think are crucial for any web designer. So here goes:

13 Beautiful Mobile App Websites

Mobile app websites, when properly designed, are a great source of design inspiration. From beautiful images to excellent use of white space, typography, and colors, it seems that designers will go the extra mile to create something nice and unique to promote their app. So for this post, we’ve gathered some beautiful examples of mobile app sites that will certainly give you some ideas for your next project. Enjoy.

Cinch

Whether you’re redecorating your home, gardening, furniture shopping, parenting or raising pets — Cinch has the people with great advice to make every decision easier. Just tap in a question, and we’ll connect you to people with the best advice.

Click here to see `13 beautiful mobile app websites.’

25 Tutorials for Business Card Design

For those who primarily focus on web design, designing for print can be a little bit intimidating at first. If you’ve been wanting to design your own business cards but have been hesitant to make the jump to designing for print, you may find it to be helpful to follow a tutorial.

There are a lot of tutorials available that will lead you through the process of designing a print-ready business cards. Following a few tutorials will teach you the basics, and then of course you can use that knowledge to create a more personalized design of your own.

For more on ’25 tutorials for business card design’, click here.

Lyza Danger Gardner on Building the Web Everywhere: Never Heard of It

About a year ago, I was on a conference call. The customer was a Fortune 500 company with a correspondingly enormous web presence, and they wanted some help validating that their new Sass architecture would result in CSS that would perform well across devices.

One of their developers was giving an informal presentation about their progress. He said something to me that I can paraphrase as: “Sass’s new placeholder syntax is pretty great, isn’t it?”

There was a stutter and a pause, that sound of windy emptiness on the call, while I gathered my wits.

Curious to know the rest? Go here.

Build your biz the best website!

Having a great website will help you make the best of the opportunities you have online. Now that everything is on the web, having a website is a must for every budding or booming business.

But it can’t be just any website, it has to be the best one for you. To achieve this, you need to partner with a team who, not only knows how to build great, functionable websites, but a team who knows how the web works and how to make your business function well on the web.

Here’s more on how to build the best website for your biz.

So there you go. Like I said, I’m keeping it simple this week and cutting down on my yak. Know that my fingers are forming a salute as I bid you a great week ahead!

(via Choc Chip Digital)

 

Beautiful designs

For this week, let me just share with you some really great samples of infographics and website pages that hit quite a mark with me.

10 Humorous Infographics Beautifully Designed

Like many web surfers, I could waste a lot of time browsing through infographics, especially if they are insightful or funny. In fact, infographics are becoming a popular way of providing information, creating awareness, or simply attracting attention with some humor. As such, infographics are a design speciality that should be added to any designer’s list of skills. The benefit? You will always find businesses needing an infographic for their blog. The drawback? Infographics can take a long time to create.

However, just as with any other design skill, becoming faster and better at creating infographics is as simple as researching and practicing. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a little fun along the way. So, here for both your entertainment and education are 10 humorous infographics that are quite beautifully designed. Some are thigh-smacking hilarious, a few clever, and others a little odd in a funny way. Take a look, enjoy, and be sure to let us know which of these are your favorite.

More on ‘humorous infographics’ here.

Use infographics to win your target market

Infographics are effective because most people are visual learners.

Aside from being colourful and interesting to look at, people in general tend to remember pictures better than they remember groups of words.

In the last two years, infographic searches have increased by 800% and publishers have increased their website traffic by at least 12%.

More on the effectiveness of infographics here.

Designing the Very Best “About” Page Possible

Ahhhh, the old “about” page. It’s been around since the very beginning of the mainstream Internet, offering site visitors all sorts of useful information and pointless tidbits alike! Whether you have an eCommerce site, a news site or just run a personal site simply for kicks, you’ll have an “about” page, for sure. It’s as commonplace as a site map or social-media buttons.

For something that’s as typical as this, you’d be surprised at how horrendously bad some companies’ and people’s “about” pages actually are! We’ve seen everything from lifeless, boring biographies to cases of too much information being present! That naturally means that there’s an actual science to creating an “about” page that doesn’t stink. Not everything you think is interesting about you will be interesting to your site visitors – that’s the truth.

Learn to ‘make the best about page’ here.

40 Amazing Shopify Themes for E-Commerce Websites

If you’re looking for an e-commerce platform to use for an upcoming website, Shopify is an excellent choice. Shopify is a hosted system that makes it easy to get your online shop up and running very quickly. Part of the appeal of Shopify is the selection of beautifully-designed themes that are available. Although custom design is always an option, it’s not a necessity with the quality templates that are available for reasonable prices.

Shopify includes a wide variety of features, including a powerful content management system, blogging engine, integration with more than 70 payment gateways, unlimited hosting, coupon codes, and more. They also offer 24/7 support and since they provide the hosting you won’t have to worry about things like security and PCI compliance.

Check out the ‘shopify themes for e-commerce websites’ here.

First impressions last on the web especially if that first impression is a great visual experience. So keep these samples on your list and check them out when inspiration needs to hit.

(via Vandelay Design)

 

A little web design education

So you’re a web designer who needs a more stable income. What do you do? Where do you start? Surely there are ways…and there are! Here’s something that can help you and some other blogs that may help renew your perspective.

A Guide to Passive and Recurring Income for Designers

There are a number of different ways to earn a living as a designer or developer. Of course, you could work as an employee for a design studio, you could work as an in-house designer for a company, you could freelance, or you could start your own studio or agency. While those are the most common approaches, they are not the only options. With loads of competition for client work, a growing number of designers are actually using a combination of a few different sources of income in order to earn a living.

You may have heard or read about earn passive income as a designer. In this article we’ll take a detailed look at the opportunities to use your design skills for passive or recurring income.

Continue reading this ‘Guide to passive and recurring income for designers’ here.

Learning Web Design: Self Taught vs. a Formal Education

f you’re looking to get into the web design/development industry there are loads of resources and courses to help with your education, but deciding which route to pursue is not easy. There are two basic approaches: going to a university for a formal education, or taking a self-taught approach and learning on your own. In recent years a growing number of colleges and universities have added degrees specifically for web design and development, and of course a graphic design/arts degree is also an option.

In this article we’ll take a look at the arguments for both approaches, and we’ll also provide information on plenty of resources to help you get started with learning on your own if that is the route that you choose. If you’re considering a career as a web designer/developer, you’ll want to take some time to educate yourself on the options that are available and see what is the best fit for you personally. There is no right or wrong 

Learn more about ‘self taught and formal education in web design’ here.

Udemy Online Courses: Effective Online Training

Udemy offers the best in online education for creative professionals. Whether you want to get promoted, break into a new industry, start a company, further a passion, or just accelerate your life, Udemy helps you learn from the amazing instructors around the world, enabling you to get there faster.

Udemy’s team recruits the world’s top experts, including New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, celebrities, and Ivy League professors. These instructors have taught over 500,000 students on Udemy, helping them learn everything from programming to photography to design to yoga and more. Founded in 2010, Udemy is funded by Insight Venture Partners, Lightbank, MHS Capital, 500 Startups and other investors who previously foresaw the internet giants YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Groupon and Yelp. Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

See ‘Udemy Online Courses’ here.

Don’t Ignore the Tablet Users

When you design a website it is more important than ever to ensure you’re reaching your audience. Many website owners are neglecting the needs of tablet owners which is a costly mistake.

Tablets are selling in huge numbers. Over half the homes in America own a tablet according to research conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates.

In the UK tablets are forecast to overtake desktop PC’s by the end of 2013 and in Ireland more than 1.2million homes will own a tablet. The figures speak for themselves. With so many people now using tablets to browse online, make purchases and research all websites need to be tablet friendly.

Know ‘why you shouldn’t ignore tablet users’. Click here.

If tablet is a trend, it’s a long lingering trend. It gives you great advantage as a web designer if you know your way around it. The opportunities are everywhere. Keep you mind, ears and eyes open.