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.
Imagine you are in a classroom. Let's say a high school classroom. You're sitting at your desk, listening to your favorite teacher—the one who inspired you, the one who got you excited about that thing you love for the first time.
You've stopped taking notes because your body just can't quite function normally when your mind is being blown. You don't feel the pen in your hand, or the surface of the desk under your arms. You're somewhere in between your body and the blackboard. That's the magic of learning; it's transportational.
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Whoever works with analytics on a day-to-to-day basis knows how important it is to have a continuity with the data. Any slip might be fatal: data can disappear, trends misunderstood and jobs lost. Losing data can have long-lasting consequences, as very often it isn't possible to reprocess the data—so what is lost cannot be recovered.
For this reason, it is essential to have a place where you can test changes to your settings and configurations. It is also important to keep track of changes in a way that they can be used to provide a context for analysts, so that when you are looking at incomprehensible spikes in past data, you can check whether any changes were made to the data collection methods (or if an offline campaign was in place during the period analyzed). Having such a process in place will help to keep data safe from loss and clean from inaccuracies.
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There's a realization that every freelance designer must go through at some point: client work isn't enough to ensure your long-term financial security. What if you get sick? What if you can't find clients? What if you want to take a vacation?
One possible answer to this problem is earning passive income — i.e. selling products or services instead of selling your own time. A common way to do this is to sell digital goods such as eBooks, PSD templates, WordPress themes, icons, and so on. But how exactly should you sell them?
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Effective content marketing holds people’s attention. It gives you a distinctive brand, loyal fans and increased sales. You don’t need a big budget to succeed, which is why good content marketing is the single best way to beat bigger competitors online.
Content marketing used to be about customer magazines and mailed newsletters. Now it covers blogs, email newsletters, eBooks, white papers, articles, videos and more. In this article, you will learn about content marketing techniques that you can apply to your business.
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There's no comprehensive solution to getting productivity from your design team, but certain techniques will benefit managers and designers during the course of a day. Managing a team at all can be tricky. Managing a team of designers can be even more challenging because designers have different strengths, weaknesses and creative eccentricities that often require a unique approach.
Planning is important, and your time is valuable, so it stands to reason that time management is paramount. Forgetting just how much time you should be spending on a current project is all too easy, because working hours can slip down the drain if not properly allocated at the beginning of the design process and enforced throughout. The better you plan—and often the further in advance you plan—the better equipped you will be to deal with obstacles. Do tomorrow's planning today. Don't wait until the middle of the day to figure out what you need to accomplish.
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After several grueling days I had finally finished the proposal. I sent it off and waited for a response. Nothing. After a few weeks, I discovered that they were “just looking”. Despite the urgency and aggressive timeline for the RFP (Request For Proposal) plus the fact that we had done business with this organization before, the project was a no-go. My days of effort were wasted. Not entirely, though, because the pain of that loss was enough to drive me to decide that it wouldn’t happen again.
I work at a Web development company and we’ve experimented with proposal writing a lot over the years. We’ve seen the good and the bad, and we have found something better. In this article I will share the pains that we have experienced in the proposal writing process, the solution we adopted, and our process for carrying out that solution. I’ll also give you guidelines to help you know when this solution is and isn’t appropriate.
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We’re well into 2012, and many designers and developers around the world are planning their travels for the year, which may include attending one of the many Web design and development conferences that will be held in the upcoming months.
To help you out with your plans, we’ve once again put together a list of conferences and events that you might want to consider. As always, this post covers events taking place in about a seven month timeframe that ends in early September.
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We often hear companies, including Web agencies, boast about how they provide exceptional client service. But how do they define exceptional? Consider this scenario. You are hired to design and develop a new website for a retail client. The client loves the design, and the pages you develop use the latest in HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design, resulting in a website that works wonderfully across browsers and devices.
The e-commerce features of the new website help the client significantly increase their online sales, and the entire project is delivered on time and on budget. Now, is this “exceptional” client service? I don’t think it is. When the client hired you, they expected that you would design and develop a great website. They also expected it would be done according to the timeline and budget set during the planning stages of the project. As successful as this project may have been for both you and the client, in the end, you did exactly what you were hired to do. You did your job.
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From one artist to another, I know how satisfying it can be to achieve the perfect shade of a color or squeeze the most difficult font into the funkiest space. Having spent some time experimenting with these and other aspects of design, I also know how time-consuming and downright maddening it can be to do these things without enough know-how. Fortunately, there’s an easier way to solve design problems, and I wish I discovered it much earlier.
You can outsource practically anything. (Image: re-ality)
Outsourcing, sub-contracting, hiring it out: whatever you want to call it, it’s a designer’s best friend and a dirty little secret at the same time. Outsourcing not only solves design problems, it solves them cheaply, while you go off to do the things that you really want to do. Here’s how to do just that.
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