Kalo

Hey guys, We put together a thorough guide on layouts and grids It's appropriate for both beginners and more advanced web designers. Check it out here and let me know if this was helpful.

Hello web designers, 2 years ago I took the path to transition from a web designer to a business owner and aspiring entrepreneur. I made **** loads mistakes along the way. It took me a lot of time to stop making some of them, others I still make. With my fist commercial project, I didn't get a single lead although my design was excellent for the time. Now I can manage to get dozens of target customer leads in a matter of days. It makes me sad seeing so many great designers that create beautiful designs but suck at business and startups. I wrote this huge article with loads of action tips for you, design entrepreneurs. I go into a lot of details and share my best knowledge Click here to read the article If you find it useful, please share with other designers in need. And of course, let me know what you think. What was your biggest mistake you made as a designer-founder?

They do believe in link-building campaigns as SEO is the most reliable and cheapest long-term marketing channel for eCommerce (and not only). They also do paid marketing as well

Another little trick to position a letter or word vertically centered is with line-height. That way you don't have to calculate margins and paddings. In that example, the code will be: .List-letter { border: 1px solid #345255; display:block; line-height:60px; width:60px; height:60px; border-radius: 40px; text-decoration:none; color:#eceff0; font-size:20px; background:#95a5a5; }

I think everyone will agree that Magento offers the most robust flexibility and scalability. But it comes at a price. As rbrtsmith mentioned, the CMS is overengineered. It is also the most expensive one to pay a dev to work on it. That's why I always go with WooCommerce for small new online stores.

Good question, Daniel! I'll try to give an objective answer, as I'm myself a web designer and front-end developer. No PHP experience at all! I've used OpenCart and WooCommerce before. Here's my brief takeaway: Opencart Not so intuitive admin interface. I still have difficulties finding out where things are in the admin. Although they improved it a lot with some of the recent new admin updates. Not very easy to change design and theme code. My experience with OpenCart theme editing is very brief. But I had difficulties editing the theme. Works better if you have lots of products WooCommerce Very intuitive and easy admin interface. No PHP skills needed to do theme editing. What I usually do is take a theme that fits well enough my design and make changes based on the theme. See what I did with the Flatsome theme. From this (the original theme) to this (my store) If you have former experience with Wordpress, choosing WooCommerce is a no-brainer in my opinion. You'd be able to modify your theme quite easily with HTML/CSS and js changes. If you need any help with WooCommerce, let me know.

That’s a great question, Micky! Doing good off-page SEO for eCommerce is a lot like doing a good off-page SEO for any other type of website. It mostly comes down to being good at link building. I’m going to share with you some great tactics that worked pretty well for my online stores and you can start applying them right now. I’ll start with the easiest ones and progress to some harder methods. As you could expect, the difficult ones are where the real SEO juice is, but it doesn’t hurt to do the quick ones, too. Start by creating an Excel or Google Spreadsheet (I prefer Google if I have to collaborate with colleagues). Name it “Link building campaign” or something similar. This spreadsheet is going to be your quant-based off-page SEO campaign overview and will aim to give you a bird view of how good you’re doing. Add the following columns in the spreadsheet: Website - the website you want to position a link on Contacted - Yes/No; if you need to contact a person to request a link position on their site Replied - Yes/No. Shows if the person has replied to your email. Linking - Yes/No. If the link has been positioned yet. Contact details - person’s details for contact if needed. Asset type - what you are going to give them in return. This is your benefit to them. Examples with online stores could be a free product, a discount code for their site readers or users, the “thought leader” tactic where the online store owner share relevant experience with the audience Article Name - your article submission for the website if applicable. Applies if you are doing guest-authoring. Audience - what’s the audience of the website. Most used keywords - what are the most used keywords on the site. A column with a keyword overview of the site. It gives you a starting point for idea generation if you are going to write an article on the site. You can use this tool to scrap most used words on a page - http://www.online-utility.org/text/frequent_words.jsp Backlinks - what other sites are linking to the site where you want your link positioned PR - page rank PA - page authority DA - domain authority. For PA and DA use MozBar free plugin. You can go even further and some marketing analytical stats like: traffic - traffic that came from that particular link conversion rate - % of successful purchases made by visitors that came for that link number of purchases that were made by a visitor who came from the link This qualitative data will be very helpful to track your off-page SEO campaign. That's how my Link Building Campaign Spreadsheet looks for one of my online stores: Now: Once you get this done, we can get to the fun stuff that is link building. You can apply some or most of the techniques I list here. Personally I had best results with guest-blogging and discount/product giveaway to bloggers. 1. Put a link to your online store in your forum profile signature to get some quick links and traffic. Check my signature here for an example. Bare in mind that most message boards use “no-follow” links that don’t bring any SEO juice, but are still worth for the traffic that comes from them. You can easily get 5-10 links that way. 2. Ask for opinion for your store on message boards. Open a new topic and asks what users honestly think of your online store in terms of design, usability, product selection, prices, etc. You don’t want to come out too promotional. That's how I got my first customer for my online store for novelty gadgets and men’s gifts. I posted a “Let me know what you think of my online store” thread in a web developers’ forum. Being targeted is important, too. 3. Submit your online store to business directories. These links don’t have the greatest SEO profile you’d like, but there’s no reason not to do them. You might try a service like RankCrew or do some manual link submissions. Be careful: Don’t submit more than three links per day! With the Penguin algorithm, you might get easily penalized for that. 4. If your store has a fancy design, don’t underestimate the web design galleries. Submit your link to a service like http://thecssgallerylist.com/ I had great results with my personal portfolio and we got more than 1700 views on our first day that mostly came from web design galleries. It can easily work with an online store if you store has some impressive design and product photography. 5. Share your link on marketplaces If you sell products on eBay, Etsy and other marketplaces you can include a link to your store in your profile or where acceptable in your product description. 6. Product and discount giveaway. With product discounts and giveaways, I had greatest results. With an online store, you have one great advantage, and that is physical products bought on the cheap. Find authoritative blogs in your niche with a big readers audience. You can track backlinks to your competitors and see what bloggers and sites link to them. To do that use a service like Ahrefs and Open Seo Stats, the former one being free. Send an email to the blog owner that you’d like to offer a discount for his/hers readers and send them a neat gift. With my geek gadgets stores, I’ve approached a number of blogs of gamers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and other nerdy folks. Here’s a template of the email I use. He got back to us very quickly. Later we sent him an awesome 8-bit glasses with a personalised geeky message: We got more than a 1000 views from his site and a link from a PR4 targeted page. Everything costing us: less than 5 quid. 7. Guest-blogging This tactic involves approaching bloggers and online magazines with some great content. An easy fit are entrepreneurial and marketing blogs. Try to find the blog owner or chief editor’s email and ask him/her that you are currently writing a very in-depth article about X, that you believe his/her readers will find very beneficial. It’s easy to write something about eCommerce - share what worked and what didn’t for your store. Again don’t be promotional. The point here is to share insightful content. In the “about the author” section you’ll share a link to your store. Hope this advice helps you get started with doing some strong off-page link building for your store. P.s. If you are using WooCommerce, at WooGuru we can help you with doing some great SEO for your online store. If you have questions just drop me a line on hi@wooguru.net

We are building a startup that helps bloggers and site owners deal with their day-to-day problems. We are having a load of trouble figuring how all the pieces of the blogging/online industry fit together and what are the major problems website owners have. As a owner of a blog/website and part of that industry you could really help us address the problems better. Can you help us by taking 2 minutes to complete this survey: http://fluidsurveys.com/s/website-owners-survey/ Your input will be of great help to us.

Usually there's a concept behind a logo. The smile that goes from A to Z which represents the completeness of the Amazon selling list or the Nike name which stands for the goddess of victory for example. Leave the graphic perspective of the logo for the latest point. Also your presentation of the logo is bad. First the image is very small, second you've put a gradient with dubious functions.

Alluziion's question +1

Depends. For me personally making a distinction between working area and resting place (home) is very rewarding. I'm much more productive and I get more work done when I'm in a working environment (office) and feel very rewarded when I come back home after work. While on the other hand mixing relaxation and work by working and resting in the same room is not as good for me personally. However I feel more creative working from home, especially in the small hours, this is when the creative magic happens for me In business terms unless you are in London or some of the other metropolitan cities, I don't think having an office will make much of a difference. From what I've seen most people in the small town are used to having non-formal meetings in a coffe shop or restaurant and rely on Skype conferences and phone talks for doing business. Apart from that, having personal meetings in excess is never good - wasting time over doing the real work. If I assume properly and you plan to rent an office in Louth, Lincolnshire I personally think this won't make much of a difference as far as exposure and new clients. Morever, I think it will be a waste of money. Unless you are relocating or renting a place in a more populated area.

Where is the FB login? Had to reset my password due to its lack now.

The first one hast the most professional forms. The curved forms (which, btw, I agree look a bit like "J") shows quite amateurish move with the pen tool in my opinion.

There isn't much to say.. templates. Sorry if it doesn't sound very constructive, but the word "template" has all the feedback in it.

Yes. Dreamweaver has a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editor. Unfortunately designing html websites with it can have detrimental final results - i.e. badly written non-semantic and unvalidated html.

Dizi, this makes sense. But technically speaking is just the contrary to what the copyrig rule states in the IPO guidelines which you linked just two lines above. " After all it's their company, it's their brand, it's their online representation of themselves, so if they want to hire another design company to do some work on the site, or feel they can do it themselves then who am I to stand in their way?" It's their company but your design. You are the owner of your design work. So I'll write it again - they can't do anything without your permission, they can't edit it themselve, neither they can hire a company to work on your design unless they have your own explicit permission. And this is what IPO says just taken straight away from the page you linked. In case you don't trust my words, as obviously some people are skiming trhoug them (unfortunately): In your case djdany, since you have created your work with your logo included, they don't really have the rights to iterate your work and remove your logo, unless they have your permission. However if they do that, just simply explain to them these plain copyright standards and I'm sure if they are normal people, they'll put your logo back. If they don't, you are working with people who don't really care about copyright ownership and might as well take them to court if you can prove you are the original creator of the work. Which of course I'm not suggesting, as would be very retarded to take someone to court for a footer logo..but that's theoritically how things work.

There is a tool - it's called communication. It's very strange that you've acomplished a complete project for them and now you are scared that they might remove your credits without notifying you and asking your permission. It sounds like they're not a client of yours but some kind of competition or fraud people you've been dealing with. Such kind of basic understandings should be covered without any contracts.

As a designer or any other type of creative person that creates, your work is automatically copyrighted. roothost, this is far from right. YOU have complete rights over your work and its complete ownership, unless you give an exclusive rights as Renaissance mentioned. By default they can't and should not itterate your work or give it to anyone else to do that. If you give an exclusive ownership this should be clearly outlined in the contract. Most designers charge a lot (3-4 or more times the regular quote) to give away exclusive ownership.

Thanks rallport, You are right, it can easily fit into that category. In fact, it works the same way and this is what I wanted to achieve - a basic professional portfolio service. What makes it specific is that you can link your work with your assesments with one click and get marked on it. These days less and less graphic work is submited physically or on a disc and most of the courses are migrating to digital submissions. However Blackboard and similar software is not built for media and design work and the submissions happen through a dull attachment function...which doesn't really correspond technologically to what you would expect when you are paying £9000/year. What I want to create is an all-in-one tool that gives design students a kick start in the creative professional world, and also build a network of design work made in universities. I agree with that. This is where I'm afraid my idea might fail. Technically I'm going to offer it as a Software as a Service with a centralised hosting on our side, so all you need to get on the system is a simple registration from a tutor, so you don't need rubbish IT support to host it neither any approval from chancellors and other high positions clerks. But this is technically speaking. Their decision depends on the strictness and openess of the university. Anyway, even if they don't approve the marking part, the platform can be still used as a tool. The other problem is that particular departments usually don't have a lot of budget to deal with, as most of the budget is arranged from a higher instance. So far I have only around 30% of the design. I want to find out what the public thinks and get straight answers from the institutions if such software could find a place on their courses or it's out of the question before I go any further.

Thank you, WebsiteWriter! That's exactly the type of feedback I've been looking for. I agree with you on mosf of the parts. The portfolios are very basics and they are not aimed to compete with other advanced portfolio solutions out there. The main idea is to offer students a basic and FREE platform for them to share their projects with other classmates and teaches and to sync their work with their assignments with ease, instead of what you typically need to do to have a portfolio of that kind: you have to upload it once to a portfolio system (which is not free) and than you have to upload it to the learning system once again, or vice versa. Also the idea of the portfolios is to build an easily maintanble network ot student work that is at the finger tips of both employers and lecturers. The lecturers can manage students' work on their panel and showcase it on a course website. I also agree with you that the selling will be the hardest part. Unfortunately to sell to university you have to go through a central procurement and decisions are made through a multiple rounds of bureucracy and decision making. Thanks again for the feedback!

http://creativeuni.co.uk/ This is a creative publishing platform/learning system for design and media students that I've been working on recently. Please take a look at the video, especially if you are a design student or graduate, would greatly appreciate your opinion not only on the design and interface but the idea as a whole.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you are looking for, you'll have to elaborate much more on the specifics and provide some examples. But for what I understand you are talking about a complex platform, which can be developed with any server side coding languange (like ruby, php, python). In terms of cost: 10+ thousand if it's made from scratch.

This is not a promotion board, but "an introduction" board. No one buys services from spam, especially one translated with google.

Or you mean childish attitute? No offence, GoldRush98, it just doesn't fit your username very well.

This won't help you at all with Email newsletter, matey Double check how to code html newsletter before starting. I coded my first newsletter in pure semantic HTML just to find it won't do sh*t.