Guide to Using Social Networking to Promote Your Services
“With so many freelancers and design agencies out there, finding work can often be a major struggle, especially for those who are just getting started. A growing number of designers are using social media as a means of marketing their services, in addition to simply using it for interacting with friends. While social media marketing can be extremely effective, it can also be a big waste of time. In this post we’ll look at some tips that should help you to ensure that your time with social media is well spent.”
This is a re-post. The full article can be found here:
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/marketing/social-networking/
Things to Know Before You Start Designing
This is the first post in the Design Process series. In this series I’ll cover the methods used when developing websites, user interfaces or similar complex graphic elements. This defiantly isn’t the only way to approach a design project but it has worked well for me over the years. This Design Process is part of the broader Development Process we follow in our projects. Read more
Is your website successful?
A website needs to do 2 things to be successful:
- Obtain & maintain ‘good’ traffic
- Consistently convert traffic into something beneficial
To apply a ‘brick and mortar’ example, this is equivalent to making sure that you not only have customers in your store but that it is also easy for them to buy things they are interested in. On the web, your site needs to be easily found by people who are looking for what you offer. Once they find you, they need to like and trust what they see enough to take action.
Read more
Best Practices for Coding HTML Emails
If you are a web designer you know the pains of cross-browser coding. We currently have 3-4 popular browsers (IE6, IE7, FF, Safari) to keep in mind when creating new pages and each will interpret your code slightly different. This is the source of much hair pulling in the design community. However, shortly after delving into coding HTML emails, testing with 3-4 platforms starts looking inviting. Let me explain…
There are a wide range of tools available for viewing email; from software applications like Outlook, AOL, Lotus Notes, Eudora, etc. to web applications like Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, Hotmail and others. Each one of these has the potential of rendering your code differently and all have to be taken into account when coding your emails. So if you have any hair left, here are some ‘best practices’ you can follow to help keep your end users’ experience as uniform as possible.
The 10 Types of Bloggers
Having spent my fair share of time perusing the blogosphere I have come up with the following ‘types’ of bloggers. Every blog should be able to fit into one or more of these categories.
What kind of blogger do you want to be?
The Evolution of Web Design
The Internet and discipline of Web Design has come a long way in a very short time. Just 17 years ago the Internet was just a simple text based communication method mostly between intellectuals and technology geeks. Today it houses incomprehensible amounts of information and is an integral part of nearly all business. But whats next? Many experts believe that we will soon see another revolution in the capabilities of the web – namely new possibilities in artificial intelligence. Sounds pretty Hollywood, like something out of the Matrix or i-Robot. Is that really where we are headed?
The following is a short summary of the past, present and potential future of the web:
Comparing Google Analytics to Server Logs
In some of my redesign work I have been asked for a way to compare the traffic / performance of the old version of their site vs the new over a specific period of time. While being an understandable request, it poses some challenges specifically if the old site stats are based solely on server logs. Let me explain: