Purpose & Pitfalls of Website Redesign

There are many reasons to redesign your website. The most common are, keeping pace with changes in web technology to meet visitor expectations, and changes in the way you wish to promote your organisation and brands. What follows are some of the common pitfalls of website redesign projects.

The Design

When using a design agency for your project, you will receive some glossy designs that look great on paper. The designer will have populated them with content that fits the design. But, how well does this work in the wild?

If you haven't briefed your agency about the plans for your website, you could face problems.

The design needs to be flexible if you intend to have different languages, or full and light versions of the website.

A common mistake is not making the design flexible enough to cope with different languages, extra content, alternative layouts and other future changes.

The solution is to create styles that can grow with the website. Implementation of a grid-based layout for web pages can help. The grid will help in organising content and future additions and updates may be easier if there are specific places for the content to go. Make background images large enough to cope with other languages and extra content. A term for this approach is 'flexibility within a framework.'

Creating a Content Plan

During the redesign you will want to reorganise and remove content. This is a major undertaking and the most important part of any redesign project.

As with any major undertaking you'll need a plan. Before you start, create a detailed content plan and work out which content (pages) you wish to keep and those you wish to move into your new taxonomy. Check your website statistics to work out which are the most popular and least popular pages. This will help you decide which pages to keep, and those to discard. If you don't use a web stats package already, try a free solution such as Google Analytics.

Keeping Valuable Traffic

If you do move or delete your content pages you risk losing valuable search engine traffic! Search engines don't know where the pages have gone, so remove them from their search indexes and soon, many fewer visitors are arriving on those pages.

Check your website statistics before removing any pages to ensure you are not losing significant amounts of valuable traffic. For every page you move or delete create a 301 redirect ¹ as part of the go-live.

Rather than removing good referring pages that don't work for you, think about changing them to better fulfil your needs. Make them more useful and more engaging for your visitors.

Improving Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Many organisations still have a long way to go when it comes to ranking well in the organic (unpaid) search engine results. There is a degree of mystery surrounding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), ² but there are plenty of simple steps you can take to improve your ranking.

Start by following three simple steps:

1. What do my Visitors Want?

Begin by understanding your visitors' needs. Try to put yourself in their shoes, what types of people are coming - are they students, job seekers, consumers, investors. Are these the people you want to attract?

Use keyword research ³ to identify your target market and work backwards from there.

The objectives of keyword research include:

•          Identifying the broadest possible set of keywords used by visitors.
•          Discovering which keywords are most popular and represent the primary targets for SEO.
•          Identifying keywords whose search engine ranking is realistically obtainable by SEO.
•          Identifying visitor language that can influence branding and messaging.
•          Developing new and adapted content based on visitor terminology.

What are your visitors trying to achieve?

•          Do they want to find information about a certain topic?
•          Do they want to buy something?
•          Do they want to compare one service provider with another?

What's on their mind?

2. Give Them What They Want

Once you understand what your visitors want, you can start providing content rich pages addressing these topics. Get the pages linked from others related to that topic and make sure it's easy to get to the banana. Banana you ask?

Marketing guru Seth Godin compares web-surfers to the monkeys in scientific experiments who need to go through certain steps to get a banana. If it isn't clear where the banana is (the website's main benefit), the monkey (consumers) won't bother to look for it.

Advertise your pages anywhere your target market goes, either by buying space on high-ranking websites or publishing your views and links on those sites.

3. SEO Factors

As I said before, there is a certain degree of mystery surrounding SEO, but there are plenty of steps you can take to increase your organic search engine traffic.

Firstly, don't spend time exploiting gaps in the search engine algorithms. Any gain from this is usually only temporary.

Start by checking the basics:

• Meta tags: does every page have a unique and well written title and description?
• Keywords: do your keywords appear on pages in the headings, body text, and link text?
• Cross-linking: do you have links to other relevant and complementary content on your website?
• Incoming links: do you have links to your pages from other websites, these count as 'popularity votes' for your site in the search engines eyes. Who do you know that might link to you?

You'll never have a better opportunity to do this. However, you won't see immediate improvements in website traffic; it can take several weeks for the changes to take effect.

Source: projectsmart.com

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Bye, Bye Waterfall: 5 Steps to Implement Responsive Web Design

Congratulations, you’ve finally convinced the powers that be that your next Web-design project needs to be responsive. It was tough work convincing them, but you can’t rest on your laurels now. The most critical decision of the project remains: how is your team going to build it?

You're probably familiar with the typical "waterfall" process: start with strategy, then onto design, followed by front- and back-end development and finally analytics implementation. The main attribute of the waterfall process is its linear nature: once a stage ends, the next one begins with a near-perfect dovetail. The progression through the stages only goes in a single direction, and unfortunately as problems accumulate, they inevitably flow downhill and changes are not handled very gracefully.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term "responsive Web design", it describes a website-building process that utilizes the same set of code to display properly on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers. Gone are the days of creating entirely separate websites in parallel desktop and mobile versions. Now you can construct an extremely flexible website to handle all environments.

So why implement responsive design over the waterfall process? One of the biggest disadvantages of the waterfall is that little thought is given to design and development for environments beyond the standard desktop browser. An agile approach with responsive design considers these issues from the start, but will require more upfront wireframing, design and testing that are omitted in the waterfall process. Once implemented, your site will render properly on desktops, mobile devices and tablets.

So how can you implement responsive Web design in your organization? Below we’ll review the steps of the typical waterfall process and explain how they can become responsive.

How to Implement Responsive Web Design

Step 1: The Plan

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, wireframes are built and consist primarily of layouts and widgets. They’re set to a specific size (usually pixel-based), and have little room for flexibility. These wires promote very specific grid/layout sizes, but when the layout changes due to different screen resolutions, things will shift in transit. The results are that navigation menus become unusable, forms become inaccessible and your interface is rendered inadequate.

Responsive Web Design

The fix for this problem isn't so difficult. You’ll need to design widgets for different views, and not think of a page as a "page." Pages are not atomic units - instead, the sliders, content, forms and other components are atomic pieces making up the whole. Wireframes must represent different screen sizes, and therefore layouts must be fluid. They can go from three columns to two, and perhaps scale down into a single column for the smallest displays (mobile smartphones).

You’ll need to change the user experience as well - a slider cannot only be controlled by a mouse, but might require a user’s finger for interaction on smaller screen sizes. Wireframes need to become prototyping tools rather than blueprints, and some development and testing is needed to ensure they’re fully functional across the display spectrum. If design commences prior to this initial testing, then unknown development issues may arise at a later point. Regardless, the ultimate vision for the project must be sustained, so keeping lines of communication open between departments is essential.

Step 2: Design Time

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, the next step would be handing off the wireframes to design, and breathing life into them via fonts, colors, spacing and other tools of the craft. Oftentimes, there is some back and forth on design direction, with updates to the design comps made as more knowledge about the brand and its design guidelines surface.

Responsive Web Design

To make better use of allotted project time and resources, design should include a few layouts and widgets at different sizes. Responsive Web design means letting go of pixel-perfect designs. Making those designs work on desktop browsers is challenging enough, but when we think in terms of flexible widgets on a flowing grid, the number of designs needed becomes manageable.

Let the medium of HTML enhance the qualities of the design using a fluid layout in all environments. Creating the states for each browser width is a huge waste of time - instead focus on the totality of the user experience. For example, ensure that the atomic components of a rotating banner are touch-sensitive on smaller mobile devices, and use an industry-recommended minimum size of 44 pixels to allot for the typical human fingertip size. The design of the experience is just as important as the look of the site on all screen sizes.

Step 3: Build It

Waterfall Process

With the waterfall approach, once the designs are approved by the client, front-end development ensues where issues regarding rendering on smaller screens could arise. Unfortunately, due to the linear nature of the waterfall, these unforeseen problems appear well into the project progression.

Responsive Web Design

In our agile and responsive process, the design must live on a flexible grid. The widgets need to be planned out and prototyped by the developers, and they need to be tested along the way. The code also needs to be optimized to ensure that the widgets are the smallest possible unit. The widgets can be easily inserted and removed from layouts that were not originally planned for, and testing these options grants peace of mind. Constant collaboration between the developer, designer and strategist circumvents issues with the inevitable changes. With the different members of the team on the same page, problems are identified and resolved earlier in the process.

Step 4: Testing Your Patience

Waterfall Process

The final stage in a standard waterfall process is to evaluate the site via unit and functional testing methods. Issues discovered at this stage may require the original vision to be tempered, and sometimes a new device that’s just hit the market can throw a wrench in the works. The strategy and design team members, who may have begun work on new projects, must be brought back in the loop to accommodate these changes, and more time must be spent on updates.

Responsive Web Design

In the responsive process, you need to test along the way on multiple browsers and screen sizes so any problems are revealed early on. Issues with the mobile environment, which don’t coincide with the wireframes, can be recognized, as well as the capabilities of the design on a number of different platforms. A working project prototype will be ready early on allowing clients to review sooner, making it a win-win for all parties.

Step 5: Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Waterfall Process

The traditional waterfall process doesn’t have a step where you iterate through the designs and the interface. Passing over minor details at certain stages of the project construction permits issues to arise and client-expectation conflicts. Despite consistent and timely communication with the client, until a presented working model is shown, the full gravity of these accumulated poor decisions is not known.

Responsive Web Design

With the responsive approach, the same amount of progress is attained and, as a bonus, there is live code for client presentation every step of the way. The discoveries made at these earlier stages will help drive subsequent stages and anticipate critical changes ahead of any deadlines.

In Summary

Adopting an agile responsive approach will free you from the constraints of the waterfall process. Your design and development will be streamlined, you’ll be more productive and efficient and your online brand presence will be maximized on all possible platforms and screens. The real challenge is breaking out of the waterfall mold and becoming a responsive organization. Follow these five steps and you might just say "bye, bye" to the waterfall and "hello" to responsive Web design.


Source: ReadWrite


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How to become a better Drupal developer in 5 steps

The purpose of this post is to provide a little bit of guidance to those Drupal developers who maybe are just beginning, or are at least still in the overwhelmed learning stages. The first thing I want to say, is that learning Drupal (at least for me) was not something that I considered to be easy. I was not at all accustomed to the idea of using hooks so it initially took me some time to learn how to develop for Drupal the right way. Let’s get started.

1. Resources are everything

Before undertaking any major journey, it is important that you have the right tools. You wouldn't try to fix a car without a set of wrenches, you wouldn't try to run a large company without advisors, and you definitely wouldn't take a canoe downstream without a paddle. The point is, you need to know what you are getting yourself into and prepare a little in advance if you want to make sure you don't spin yourselves in circles or drive yourself crazy trying to learn how to build Drupal Modules.

Here are some things that you should do before really diving in to Drupal development:

1. Make sure you have a development environment set up (LAMP/WAMP works nice, but there are other alternatives).
2. Create an account on Drupal.org
3. Determine if you want to start with Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 (this might depend on whether you are focusing on developing for existing sites, or building new sites).
4. Start looking through this - http://drupal.org/developing/modules
5. Bookmark http://api.drupal.org, you will probably need it

It is important that you also know where to go with questions. There are two places that I would recommend. The first is the #drupal or #drupal-support IRC channel (I am occasionally there as smthomas). This is probably the quickest way to get answers to your questions. However, I would recommend that you follow a few simple guidelines:

• Don't ask to ask a question, just ask
• Don't expect someone to be willing to discuss your questions for hours and then do it for you. Put in the research ahead of time and be willing to continue to do the work and research. We want to help, but not do things for you.
• Make sure to say thanks... A little thank you goes a long way
• After you become a Drupal ninja, make sure to pay it forward and help out others.

There may be more guidelines posted online somewhere but those are ones that I have heard/seen often. If you know anymore or have a link, feel free to drop it in the comments.

The other alternative for support would be the forums on Drupal.org. If you do post to the forums, make sure to follow up and let us know what solved your problem so others can benefit.

2. Finding the right balance

I find that good balance is important. I think it is a good idea to make sure you are comfortable building Drupal websites using core and contributed modules/themes from the Administration interface. This will ensure you can reuse existing modules as much as possible and don't have to rewrite the book every time you encounter a new problem. The process should almost always be to first search for an existing solution, and second to build your own. This will most likely save you the most time and make you as efficient as possible. This process also helps the quality of contributed modules get better over time.

Another important aspect to being a good developer is understanding a little about the theme layer and how theming works. This is especially important if you are building modules that themers will be using and designing websites for. This does not mean you need to be a theme designer yourself (I am far from a website designer), but it does mean you should understand the concepts. This will help you become a better overall Drupal developer.

3. Contrib is your friend

As mentioned before, use existing modules whenever possible. However, make sure to take that a step farther by actually looking through the contributed modules that you are using. This is one of the best and quickest ways to learn how to develop. Don't be afraid to modify the code of these contributed modules and see what happens on your development sites. If you can look through and understand some of what is going on with contributed modules, it will put you in a much better place to begin writing your own.

4. Drupal Core... Look but don't hack

One of the most important things you need to know when developing for Drupal is that you should not modify the core Drupal code. Drupal is designed to be very flexible and almost anything you need to do can be done through the use of module hooks or theme overrides. There are some very very very rare times when modifying the Drupal code is needed, but even then, there are usually alternatives (If you are just getting started with Drupal, you probably have not found one of those situations).

Just because you should not modify the core Drupal code, does not mean you should not look through some of it. Knowing how Drupal is structured and how certain pieces of functionality work is very important as you begin becoming a good Drupal developer. This may not be the place you start, but it is definitely something you want to consider doing as you gain more experience.

5. Get Involved

When you begin to refine your Drupal skills, you should consider contributing back. The easiest way is to help in the Drupal forums or IRC channels. You can also help with Drupal documentation or helping with developing/testing patches for contributed modules. By helping others you are not only giving back to people who are in the early stages of their learning, but you are also reinforcing your learning. I have learned a lot of things about Drupal just by helping others try to solve a problem.

Summing it up

Learning Drupal module development is a long, fun, never-ending journey that is definitely worth traveling. If you got this far, it's time to stop reading and start learning some Drupal.

Comments, suggestions, or questions? Leave a comment! If you are stuck on something and want some help, you can also use the contact form and I will see what I can do to help you out.

Source: codekarate.com

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Drupal: Advantages and Disadvantages of Choosing Drupal as Your CMS Solution

photo credit: www.volacci.com

The name Drupal was adjusted from the Dutch word ‘druppel’, or water droplet, and was named accidentally by Dutch creator Dries Buytaert when he misspelled the Dutch word for village ‘dorp’ while checking a domain name. Upon further consideration Buytaert thought his misspelling of Drupal simply sounded better, and kept it—giving us the name Drupal. Since its initial inception as a message board Drupal has come a long way as the accidentalness stopped there.

Drupal has since developed into one of the most complex open-source content management systems (CMS) on the market and is represented by an array of top notch sites, including: The Economist, Examiner.com, The White House, Popular Science, Harvard, MIT, Ubuntu, Sony Music and more. Drupal now displays contents in 182 languages by over538,813 people in 228 countries.

For those of us new to CMS tools, Drupal is essentially WordPress—on a three-day speed binge. Drupal uses a very sophisticated programming interface that has a tough learning curve and is considered more of a developing platform than simple CMS tool.  The system has in-depth reporting generating tools for advanced admins. While no programming skills are technically required for basic use, the system is generally used by more advanced developers and administrators. Basic users usually go with the more basic CMS platform WordPress, although they can create basic sites simply using Drupal.

Beginners to advanced users gather virtually in Drupal communities, increasing their commitment to the system and their knowledge base.

While Drupal is a great CMS, for some it can be too much. Consider the advantages and disadvantages to using Drupal as your CMS:

Advantages:

All the Basic Features you need:

Drupal Core is their standard release of features, which includes: user account registration and maintenance, RSS-Feeds, menu management, system administration and page layout customization. These basic features can be used to create simple sites, single or multi user blogs, brochureware, forums, community websites and more.

Great Building Tools and Templates

Drupal offers you the basic building blocks of websites in a module-styled format where content and rules can be created quickly. Through the use of templates and themes there is no need to start from scratch—no matter if you are building a simple or complex site. Pre-defined configurations of site features help users build fairly complex sites rapidly, allowing them to use their time to build in extra features.

Flexible Yet Robust Content Creation

Drupal’s bread and butter is in its content creation. Drupal allows its users the flexibility to create and manage different content types including: video, polls, user management, text, blog, podcasts, real-time stats, and revision controls.

Advanced Administrator Controls

Administrators have the options of setting up new user accounts and user permissions. These permissions can be designated per role or group and offer fine-tooth comb-style, allowing users to help create your content for you. Drupal’s new release of version 7 allows for easier administration and greater controls. 

Create Your Own Dynamic Designs

While Drupal offers themes and templates that are easily recognizable to the public many users like to use its design tools to create their own dynamic designs. The system’s presentation layers allows for easily usable and interactive experiences.

Organize Content Easily

One of the difficult parts of many CMS tools is the ability organize your content for later use and recall. Drupal allows you to categorize your content through path urls, create custom lists, associate content and create defaults. This structure helps you to organize, structure, search, find and reuse content.

More Plugins than you can Shake a Stick at

Drupal has over 7,000 plugins and extensions available to boost your building capacities. As the program is open source you can both use plugins and create your own, adding to the abilities of the Drupal platform.  

Allow your Users to Collaborate with you

Drupal is commonly mistaken for a blogging platform due to its incredible ability to publish socially. Drupal-based sites engage users to contribute while giving the administrator the ability to create, view, publish, administer and otherwise control the social content published to the site.

Tools that make it Easy to Connect with your Audience

The most important part of a site is connecting it to users, other sites, social networks, and search engines-- and Drupal makes this simple. Through increased network integration, feeds, search engine optimization tools, aggregation and other connecting tools, Drupal helps connect you to your viewers.

Disadvantages:

Usability

Drupal is not the most user-friendly platform and it has a high learning curve. Platforms like WordPress and Joomla are significantly easier to use, although they don’t offer the power and options that Drupal does. The good news though is that the new release of Drupal 7 is addressing some of the usability concerns and should be an easier adaptation for newer administrators.

Backwards Compatibility

Drupal is a relatively new system and is not backwards compatible with other software so if you have other content, systems and programs in place that you have become accustomed to then Drupal might not be the system for you.

Performance

In terms of loading and scalability Drupal is one stroke behind that of WordPress. The slow loading is simply because of the breadth of tools and capabilities. If you have a slower computer, or are simply a microwave generation kid and need things to work quickly then consider a zippier platform. Advanced users have however found ways around its problematic performance indicators, but with the big learning curve this takes a significant amount of time.

Source: http://www.socialtechnologyreview.com/

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OpenERP 6.1 Adopts Social Features, Expands Outlook Support

photo credit: www.ibscorp.com

OpenERP has released a new version of its open source enterprise management software suite, which comprises 1,800 free applications for accounting, human resources, and other organization management needs. OpenERP 6.1 was in development for more than a year and introduces 85 new applications, including social features and a kanban view for organizing activities.

OpenERP has added new social features to facilitate collaboration. Users can share documents with anyone, even those who aren't OpenERP users, and specify read-only or read-write access to those documents.

OpenERP has also added the ability to embed any OpenERP content on an organization's Web site. This feature is useful for contact forms, so online entries are automatically entered into OpenERP. It also enables organizations to easily export statistics or graphs to their Web site.

Other new social features include improved e-mail integration, which has been unified into a single and improved e-mail subsystem, and according to OpenERP, is easier to use than the old e-mail capabilities of version 6.0. Also, the main business workflows now automatically send e-mail notification upon confirmation by default.

OpenERP is also touting its new kanban view, which is a visual board that enables users to view and manage their activities on a single interface using drag-and-drop.

New features in OpenERP 6.1 include:

• Significant performance enhancements as a result of the new Web client and architecture that can support multiple servers and multi-processing;
• Drag-and-drop kanban view to reorganize records such as tasks, opportunities, and recruitment while maintaining a global view;
• Customizable dashboards for each application;
• Reusable advanced filters;
• Dynamic Gantt charts; and
• New Outlook plugin that has been completely redeveloped from scratch using Microsoft .NET so it is now compatible with all versions of Outlook.
• OpenERP 6.1 is currently available for demo, online subscription, or download. Further information is available on the OpenERP site.

Source: campustechnology.com

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Why Social Sharing Buttons are Important

photo credit: www.webdesignledger.com

If you know anything about online marketing and search engine optimization, you understand the importance of content. After all, without content, what is there to optimize and how do potential clients or customers learn anything about you? The content that you produce is what sets you apart from the rest in the online space, which is competitive no matter what industry you are in. One popular method of producing content is to create a business blog and update it regularly. Of course, your blog posts will only be worthwhile if people actually see them. One way to improve your content marketing efforts is to include social share buttons on every blog post. Here are 3 reasons why:

User Experience

Any web property that you operate should have user experience at the top of the priority list. It’s very likely that your target audience members can find the same, or very similar, service or product that you offer elsewhere. Don’t frustrate them with a poor layout or navigation. The same theory applies when it comes to your content. Any interaction with your brand should be easy. A website or blog visitor should never have to think too much because if they find themselves thinking too hard, you’ve lost them. A blog should be easy to navigate and include post categories and archives by date. Including social share buttons also makes it easy for them to share the content with their fans and followers. If these buttons aren’t included, it’s unlikely that someone is going to take the time to open up a new window, sign in to their account, and copy and paste the link. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t find your content “shareable”; it just means that they didn’t feel like spending that extra time to share it.

Improve Brand Visibility and Reach

The ultimate long term goal of any content is for it to rank organically in the search engines for targeted keywords. But this takes time. If you create quality content, don’t you want people to see it immediately? This is why it’s important to have a robust social media presence and a respectable amount of followers. A simple post or tweet will share your fresh new content with the people that care about your brand or industry the most. But you don’t want it to stop there. Hopefully, your content is good enough that they will want to share it with their own fans and followers, which will improve your brand exposure. Including social share buttons increases the likelihood that this will happen.

Social Signals

Social media is no longer just a brand building and communication tool. A social media presence, or lack thereof, now has search engine ranking implications. If a link is shared frequently in social media, the search engines determine that it is a valuable link, which can result in better search engine ranking position. Since including share buttons increases the likelihood of a blog post getting shared, it also increases the likelihood that it will improve your search engine optimization efforts. 

Source

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Juggling Between Freelance Designer and Business Owner

The world of digital design is full of both young and experienced talent. Freelancing has slowly become a more affordable career path for many web designers and developers. But it’s not enough to just create pretty websites in HTML/CSS. You also need to have some sense in marketing a business!

There is a thin line between the responsibilities of a web designer and a freelancer. Some overlapping examples between the two jobs are design skills like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and JavaScript. But you’ll also need to understand client relationships, basic time management, project organization, and a few other corporate-class ideas. It can be a tough, but I hope these tips will help you juggle the numerous tasks assigned into the freelancing world.

Never Overload Yourself

This is a big lesson which takes some practice before you can understand. Many young web designers are often eager to jump into the freelancing business and start earning money. Over time you pickup project after project, and soon you’ve got no time left for yourself. It’s a self-defeating cycle of endless stress.

You need to figure out what is realistic to accomplish in any given day/week/month. Each person’s schedule will be different depending on their obligations. But we can all find time for work, even just hours a day. So it’s only a matter of planning out a proper to-do list.

Manage what you can at first and slowly increase your workflow as time goes on. I started freelancing with 1-2 web projects per month and slowly moved up from there. This process gets easier as you meet more people and build credibility for your name. But you have to know when you’ve reached your limit and learn to say “no” – even when the additional work & money is tempting. It’s not worth the strain on your mental health and some clients will understand in waiting a few weeks for your services.

Practice New Skills

It’s important to prioritize your design skills first above all else. Working freelance is a privilege compared to the routine 9-5 lifestyle. As time pushes forward you may become complacent with such a schedule. But try to keep your passion for design in check and held at the utmost importance.

Each of us is coming into the web design field with a different skillset. Most beginners already understand HTML and even a small amount of CSS. It’s important to keep on practicing these languages even if you are well-versed.

The industry is always advancing, so there are likely new trends to pick up on. And if you grow tired of the easy stuff why not challenge yourself? Try to master a new skill such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, or even another language such as JavaScript. The HTML specs have also introduced new media elements such as native video/audio components.

Staying on top of your game will keep you ahead of the competition and surely improve the quality of your portfolio. It can become a distraction if you have too much work on your plate. So make sure between client work you take at least a few hours to brush up on some interesting topics. I prefer to spend a day or two researching into new ideas I’ve never studied before. This opens me up to a deeper understanding of web design which I can apply to future designs.

Work Out Steady Pricing

How much you charge on any given project will greatly reflect upon your experience. It’s crucial that you can pay bills at each month’s end! Managing your earnings can be an exhilarating process to some, much nicer than the cut-and-run weekly paycheck. You gain leverage and control over your financial life in areas many haven’t experienced before.

But don’t obsess over your prices and payment methods for too long. Clarify upfront with each client how much you’ll be getting paid and through which method. This pushes all the business talk out of the way so you can jump right into the design work. At the end of your day it may be wise to go over each contract again – possibly a 5-10 minute rundown on your current status.

Relationship Building

We all know how important networking can be in the business world. Ultimately it’s who you know that will help you succeed and make a name for yourself in the design industry. You must spend some time networking your brand and getting your portfolio links out there. E-mails, social networks, online forums, and job boards are just a few places you can start out.

You don’t want client work to become an annoying chore in your day. Keep a healthy relationship with all your contacts. If your work is good, they will most likely come back for any future design needs. And positive word-of-mouth references are always helpful towards gaining steady business in the future.

How people find your work will greatly impact their first impressions. Make sure you present yourself in a compassionate and professional manner. You’ll impress even the toughest clients and make a strong name for yourself.

Focus on Individual Tasks

The months may grow overwhelming as your work piles up. Don’t let your focus wane too much off course, or you’ll find it difficult to get anything done. I find it helpful to break up the day into segments of focus. You could start with design and web layouts for a few hours, then switch to coding, and finally end with e-mails and other paperwork.

This is just one loose example schedule, but you should feel out whatever works best. The ability to hold a solid focus for a few hours is crucial – even if you end up switching between different tasks over time. Ultimately you should be able to reflect on each day and feel at ease with the amount of work accomplished.

Source: www.webdesignledger.com


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