Becoming a freelance web designer is a common dream among many designers, although it takes quite a bit of talent, business savvy, committment, and time. With all there is to consider when becoming self-employed, one can become overwhelmed — enough to deter themselves from trying at all.
Realizing many Smashing readers probably already have a head-start into the world of professional and freelance web design, this post is meant to act as not only a step-by-step guide, but also as a checklist for those who have already started their career. Hopefully this guide can cover all aspects of becoming a professional and freelance web designer, from business aspect and working with clients, to creating an effective portfolio and advertising one's work.
Also consider our previous articles:
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Google AdSense is the easiest and quickest way to make your website, of any size, profitable. Sign-up, generate your ads and copy & paste the code into your web page, and...well, that’s it really. You are earning money. It works by by reading keywords from your content, and then displays content related text and image ads, thus enabling ads specifically targeted to your site and readers.
Of course, there is a lot more to Adsense, but in a nutshell that covers it. This post is not about Adsense and its simplicity, though. It’s about understanding Adsense and all its rules, optimisation and ad placement, but mainly it’s about maximising your sites potential earnings using the different types of ads that Google offers. You could use text, image or video ads, or you could display ads within your RSS feed, search, mobile content or applications. Yes, there is a lot to cover. I'll try not to bore you.
Please notice that we published the first part of the Google AdSense round-up a couple of months ago (100% Google AdSense); this post presents further useful resources that can help you maximize your ads revenue.
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Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play. The goal of web form validation is to ensure that the user provided necessary and properly formatted information needed to successfully complete an operation. In this article we will go beyond the validation itself and explore different validation and error feedback techniques, methods and approaches.
User's input can be validated on the server and on the client (web browser). Thus we have server-side and client-side validation. We'll discuss pros and cons of each. In the server-side validation, information is being sent to the server and validated using one of server-side languages. If the validation fails, the response is then sent back to the client, page that contains the web form is refreshed and a feedback is shown.
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XHTML 2 is dead, long live HTML 5! According to W3C News Archive, XHTML 2 working group is expected to stop work end of 2009 and W3C is planning to increase resources on HTML 5 instead. And even although HTML 5 won’t be completely supported until 2022 (yes, 2022), it doesn't mean that it won't be widely adopted within the foreseeable future.
So in the spirit of the upcoming change we decided to release a handy printable HTML 5 Cheat Sheet that lists all currently supported tags, their descriptions, their attributes and their support in HTML 4. The cheat sheet was created by our friends from Veign and released exclusively for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
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There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap. For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and open source mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer. We're covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on what's important: create.
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Vexel art is a digital art that is an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the vector graphics technique, but is distinguished from normal vector graphics or raster images. "Vexel" itself is a mixture of two words ‘Vector’ and ‘Pixel’. Vexel designs are composed by using multiple layered shapes. It can be done in Photoshop, but vexel designs are not limited to only Photoshop; essentially, it can be done with any image editing software that has a good Pen Tool.
Below are some truly amazing examples of vexel artwork and also some outstanding tutorials that will help you to master the technique or at least get some understanding of how this technique can be used. Feel free to explore further works of the artists presented below. Enjoy and be inspired.
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When people talk about image optimization, they consider only the limited parameters offered by popular image editors, like the "Quality" slider, the number of colors in the palette, dithering and so on. Also, a few utilities, such as OptiPNG and jpegtran, manage to squeeze extra bytes out of image files. All of these are pretty well-known tools that provide Web developers and designers with straightforward techniques of image optimization.
In this article, we'll show you a different approach to image optimization, based on how image data is stored in different formats. Let's start with the JPEG format and a simple technique called the eight-pixel grid.
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The "about me"-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites. In a world that's becoming increasingly connected through the Web, it's important that you engage your audience in a personal and friendly way, otherwise you risk just being another faceless web designer among a sea of websites.
We had to go through hundreds of sites to come up with the following list. It seems most designers and developers run out of steam by the time they got around to developing their about pages. Most designers we came across simply threw up a few hastily written words about themselves instead of treating the page as an important asset. Others, however, have truly taken the time to treat their about page as if it were important as the home page. In fact, some went as far as using their about pages as their home page.
We present 60 beautiful and effective about pages that engage users and neatly present their designers. We also examine the growing trend of Business Card Websites (BCW's).
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