Jeremy Girard was born with six toes on each foot. The extra toes were removed before he was a year old, robbing him of any super-powers and ending his crime-fighting career before it even began. Unable to battle the forces of evil, he instead works as the Director of Marketing and Head of Web Design/Development for the Providence, Rhode Island based Envision Technology Advisors. He also teaches website design and front-end development at the University of Rhode Island. His portfolio and blog, at Pumpkin-King.com, is where he writes about all things Web design.
Like many web professionals, my first instinct was to work longer hours – to come into the office early, stay late, and to give up some of my weekend time. While this certainly helped me get more work done, I quickly realized it was not something I could sustain without eventually burning out. I knew that if this was going to work, I had to find a way to be more productive within the hours I had available to me.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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Many of the skills Jeremy Girard honed while playing in a band have contributed to his success as a web designer — as much as, if not more than, his ability to write clean code or design an attractive web page. He learned skills critical to his success, such as the importance of tailoring your set list (or your presentation) to make an early connection with your audience, or the ability to speak clearly and confidently in public. In this article, Jeremy will describe how being in a band taught him to be a better web designer.
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Sometimes, despite your careful planning and best efforts, a project will fail. And preparing to deal with failure is as important as planning for success. The important thing to do when a project goes bad is learn from it. Once the dust has settled, sit down with your team and take an honest look at what went wrong. Own up to your own failings, and do what you can to make sure they do not arise again. Articles and tips on how to kick off a project right and build a long-term client relationship are helpful in this industry, but if you only focus on what to do when things go right, then you will be ill-prepared for when things get so off track that you are unable to complete a project.
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“What is the best career advice you’ve ever received?”. Throughout his career, Jeremy Girard has received plenty of advice. But after thinking about that question (from one of his students) for a week or so, Jeremy Girard came up with four pieces of advice that he received early in his career and that were invaluable to him as he was getting started in this industry but that are just as relevant and useful to him today.
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While many Web professionals work hard to make work-related relationships as strong as possible, they often neglect their non-professional relationships. Web professionals, and IT workers in general, often struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance, and their relationships often suffer because of that struggle. In this article, Jeremy Girard will offer some of the ways that he has found helpful in his own life and career to foster healthy non-professional relationships and personal well-being.
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One of the ways we can continue learning in the Web industry, is by attending professional Web conferences. But how do you decide which is right for you? In this article, Jeremy Girard will answer this question by shareing the methods that he has found helpful in choosing high-quality conferences, as well as some tips to help you get the most out of the events you decide to attend!
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Jeremy Girard took a part-time position teaching website design and front-end development at the University of Rhode Island. In this article, he will look at some of the challenges to prepare for if you are considering taking on a teaching position. He will also present some of my personal experiences and insights, to help you consider such a move for your own career.
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Veterans in this industry should mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that they know they will need to succeed. This article is a follow-up “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” This one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that Jeremy Girard has found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.
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As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support.
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Jeremy Girard has had the opportunity to lead various Web design and development teams, including a number of professionals fresh out of school. Along the way, he learned some valuable lessons. So, he decided to make a list of some of those lessons, as a way to remind himself of what he needed to do to make sure his designers had the resources needed to succeed. Many of these lessons were actually common sense, and these common-sense lessons are exactly the ones that are easy to neglect and that we often need to be reminded of.
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We all make mistakes. Whether in our design and development work or just in life in general, we all do it. Thankfully, even the biggest mistakes carry valuable lessons. In this article, Jeremy Girard will share stories of some of the missteps he had made in the course of his career and the lessons he’d learned in the process.
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In this article, Jeremy Girard will detail the process he and his team took when they were redesigning their company’s website. including some of the changes they made along the way, as they worked to build a better responsive website.
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In this article, Jeremy Girard looks at some ways in which you can end projects on the right note. 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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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.
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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.
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There comes a point in the career of many Web designers where the logical progression in that career is to take on a leadership position. A logical step or not, when a designer “assumes” this type of a position, there is often another “assumption” happening at the same — that wizard-like proficiency with HTML and CSS, coupled with a number of years in the industry, equips someone to take on a leadership role. This is, of course, not always the case.
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Websites are designed to be used by people of varying backgrounds, educations and technical levels. One of the challenges we face when designing for the Web is finding a way to create sites and applications that can be accessed by a widely disparate audience while avoiding the pitfall of sacrificing the quality of our work to cater to the dreaded ‘lowest common denominator.’
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Websites are designed to be used by people of varying backgrounds, educations and technical levels. One of the challenges we face when designing for the Web is finding a way to create sites and applications that can be accessed by a widely disparate audience while avoiding the pitfall of sacrificing the quality of our work to cater to the dreaded ‘lowest common denominator.’
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