Category: Business
Business tips, ideas and techniques for a professional and efficient workflow as well as round-ups, tutorials and articles that will help you improve your personal daily routine in the web design world.
Popular tags in this category: Freelance, Tutorials, Tools, CMS.
Do you own a website? Do you want to be number one on Google? Whatever you do, don’t spend money on aggressive search engine optimization (SEO). I know that sounds like an extreme position to take. However, a lot of website owners see search engine optimization as the answer to their search ranking woes, when things are considerably more complex.
The inconvenient truth is that the best person to improve your ranking is you. Unfortunately, that is going to take time and commitment on your part. The answer doesn’t lie in hiring a SEO company to boost your website ranking for Google.
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Advertising has always had an uneasy relationship with the media because of ethical considerations on both sides of the printing press. On the one hand, journalists are reluctant, quite rightly, to be seen as under the thumb of an advertiser, and on the other side, advertisers don’t want to be seen to be enforcing their views on the free press.
The relationship between the media and marketeers is the greatest sham marriage of all time: convenience, rarely love. We need each other. Writers need to be paid, and people making products need to be paid too. That being said, the journalism profession has been somewhat eager to hand a lot of control of their content to advertisers for some time now.
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Everyone loves a happy ending: the hero slays the dragon, true love conquers all, the Death Star is destroyed, the new website is launched and both client and users alike are thrilled. While this last example may not have the Hollywood ending that the first few examples do, for those of us in the Web design industry, it is the story ending we want for all our project.
Much attention is given to how you kickoff projects, or how best to design and develop websites. But the final stages of the Web design process are never discussed as much as those early and middle stages are. How you wrap up a project, as well as what you do after the project is completed, is critical when it comes to building long-term relationships that will lead to future business.
In this article we will look at some ways in which you can end projects on the right note, and also what you can do after they are launched to help your project stories have happy endings (and many successful sequels).
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Which category does your organization’s Web presence fall into? Over- or under-managed? When it comes to the Web, few organizations have found the Goldilocks zone. Their online activities are either under-managed with minimal policies and procedures, or dogged by bureaucracy and internal politics.
Those that fall into the former category are vulnerable to legal threats, internal disputes and knee-jerk management where the website lurches from one crisis to the next. Those in the latter are crippled by indecision and fail to respond to the fast-changing nature of the Web.
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In Web design, as one of the seemingly few markets that is actually growing, job opening postings are common. They're not all equally convincing, though. In fact, most of them are unpleasant, uninviting and sometimes bordering on hostile. Some, however, are great, and give you an honest and pleasant sense of what it's like to work at the studio in question, and, in the best cases, what makes a good designer.
By looking at some good and some bad lists of job requirements, I'll explore some of their strengths and weaknesses and try to pinpoint what makes the best lists inviting and honest introductions.
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Finding ways to earn passive income is a growing concern among many freelance designers. I’ve always loved client work, but I have to admit that the pressure of juggling multiple bosses and constant deadlines eventually started to wear me down.
In a previous article for Smashing Magazine, I compared various ways to sell software products online. What I’ll do in this article is not just compare ways in which freelance designers can earn passive income, but speak about my own experience in exploring these avenues.
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Poor communication is a surefire way to damage any project or relationship, but when I dug deeper into this particular case, I realized that lack of communication was not the issue; the company provided regular updates on projects and milestones and so on. Rather, it was the words they used when giving those updates and answering questions. The problem was that the provider spoke “Web speak” and nothing else.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this complaint from someone when discussing their Web team. While they appreciate the provider’s knowledge of the profession and industry, they bemoan the reality that they cannot translate that knowledge into language that someone who is not a fellow Web professional would understand. While the updates may be plentiful, the communication is still poor.
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Working as a Web designer can suck sometimes. This is especially true when you don’t get to work alongside the client. Unfortunately this scenario is more common than you would think. Many organizations have been carefully structured to keep the Web designer and the client apart. But is that really sensible? Would projects run much smoother without your account manager or boss acting as the middleman?
This issue came to my attention following the release of my latest book “Client Centric Web Design.” In this book I provide advice about how to work more effectively with clients. However, I had made an assumption in the approach I presented, an assumption which turned out not always to be true. It assumed that the Web designer and client can work collaboratively together. Following the book's release I realized that for many Web designers that this is not the case.
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Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.
The goal of a "regular" text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.
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