Essentials of great blog post design

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Blogs are, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to get stuff on the web. With a blog you can publish constantly updated information about yourself, your company or your interests to the world. And what makes it even better is that this information is chronologically ordered and categorized for search engines almost automatically. [...]

Why web designers should learn code

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Back in the olden days just after Al Gore invented the internet, designers designed and programmers programmed. The web was full of slow good-looking sites that didn’t do much and useful busy sites that, frankly, looked like a dog’s dinner. But every year since then more and more fantastically usable sites that also look great [...]

How to create a simple flat web button

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Here is an in depth tutorial explaining how to create the flat web button below in Photoshop and introducing the concept of the web designers’ secret penultimate pixels! Go cmd/cntl-N or File > New… to create a new Photoshop document of the size of your button. This one has a width of 175 pixels and [...]

Free stock photography for a graphic designer

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All graphic designers and people trying to create eye-catching imagery for print or web with have at some point used stock photography. Stock photography negates the need for hiring expensive photographers can license individual photos for specific uses. The two largest traditional stock photography agencies are Getty Images and Corbis. They offer mostly photographs that [...]

How to market yourself #8: How to offer RSS feed and email subscriptions

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So you’ve got your self-hosted WordPress blog set up, optimized and have already published a few great posts and you want to offer an RSS feed and email subscription to your posts. What is RSS? RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from the web on [...]

The future of print in the age of the web

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How long has it been since you first used the internet? How much have your habits of information gathering changed since then? If you’re anything like me a myriad of different interests discovered on the internet crowd your mind as well as the exciting new ways you find out about them. The future is on [...]

Web design using JavaScript

Sarah Youren Planning Solicitors website

I’ve talked many times about the limitations of Flash. It’s issues with accessibility and SEO are two of the main ones. So if you want something to look a bit “flashy” on your website, always see if you can do it with JavaScript first. Simple and interactive image slideshow fader with JavaScript I got this [...]

What rates should a graphic designer charge?

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One of the questions I get asked the most by clients and other designers alike is about (surprise, surprise) money. So what is the hourly rate for a graphic designer? Ahh, there’s the question. If you’re fresh out of college, I would say (and don’t blame me if you can’t pay off your loans) around [...]

How to design a color page magazine advertisement

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H’mm, well, I’m not going to explain everything about print advertising in one little blog post. However, having just supplied a page ad for a magazine I thought I’d explain a bit about the process I went through from the initial ideas to supplying the final artwork. Supplying initial ideas Some designers will tell you [...]

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Discover the secrets behind building a better web presence

Everything you will need to know about self-marketing on the web, including:

  • Creating websites
  • Setting up WordPress
  • Writing blog posts
  • Getting links
  • Driving traffic to your site
  • Using social media
  • Offering RSS feeds and subscriptions
  • Getting found on Google
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