For print designers who want to learn web design

imac

6 years ago I was typesetting company reports, trying not to look at the clock to see how soon I could go home. Now I work from home and every time I look at the clock I marvel at how quickly time passes! I have managed to cross-over from being a print designer and artworker [...]

10 things I wish I had known about web designing 10 years ago

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10 years ago I had a big problem. I was a print designer but I loved the internet and desperately wanted to work with it. I wanted a software package that would let me mess around with drag-and-drop functionality and when I was ready I could click “GO” and miraculously produce perfect code. I was [...]

Recommended VPS hosts for WordPress

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So you’re using WordPress and you are getting a nice amount of traffic, say a few hundred visitors a day. Maybe you love running many of the great plugins that add extra functionality for your visitors. There’s just one problem: your server is struggling with the load and your site isn’t just slow, it’s ssslllooowww! [...]

Design websites that the client can edit

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I got a call from a potential client the other day and he asked me a very simple question. “Once you’ve created the website for me will you charge me every time I want to edit one of the pages?” And, although this is not the first time I have heard this question, it still [...]

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 [...]

I need a website designer and developer – what do I do?

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Enter “web designer” in a search engine you will be confronted with thousands of results – how do you know which one to choose? What sort of website to you want to create? Web developers love jargon as they like to give your site a label. So is the site commercial (an e-commerce or affiliate [...]

The future of print in the age of the web

old print metal pieces spelling TYPE on a laptop screen

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 [...]

How to market yourself #4: What to write in your blog or website

writing great content on a laptop

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do? Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look [...]

Ways to beat a design and marketing slump

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Personally, I have noticed other recessions far sooner than this one. It seems like months and months of dreary economic forecasts had passed before I got an inkling that it was going on. Anyway, here’s some ways to defeat the dreaded downturn. Diversify Do something you’re not doing at the moment. Web designers should diversify [...]

Creating a country’s flag inside its map outline

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Quite often I’m looking for a simple iconic device to represent a country without having to just reproduce the flag alone. So, as you can see above, why not put the flag inside the country’s shape. Also, it’s free! It’s relatively easy to find a country’s flag and shape on the internet and tracing the [...]

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