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Creative Bookmarks: Best of August 2010

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:45:50 +0000

August was another awesome month with great tutorials and articles oozing from everywhere. Here’s Creative Bookmarks August!

Quick Nav: Photoshop Tutorials Illustrator Tutorials Web/Blogging Tutorials Freebies, Inspiration, & Resources

Photoshop Tutorials

How To Create The Expendables Winged Skull Poster Art

In this tutorial, by Chris Spooner, you’ll learn how to re-create the sinister and gun-crazy poster for the new movie The Expendables.

Create a Cosmic-Inspired Dreamy Scene in Photoshop

In this great tutorial, from PsdTuts+, you’ll learn how to use a combination of photos, 3d elements, and other tricks and techniques to make a cosmic scene.

Save The Date! Real Estate Bar Camp NH is October 20, 2010

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:50:32 +0000

What are you doing on Wednesday October 20, 2010?

We highly recommend you come to Real Estate Bar Camp New Hampshire at the Mount Washington Hotel. As with the dozens of Real Estate Bar Camps that have been organized by real estate and technology industry leaders across the country over the past three years, it’s FREE to attend! The event is conveniently held the day after the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS fall convention.

What is REBarCamp?

REBarCamp is a nation wide network of mini-conferences that find their strength from participants expertize. Anyone can present at this “unconference” which creates an awesome atmosphere of crowd-sourced mind-sharing amongst all participants. When you arrive at BarCamp, you’ll see a giant white board, with rooms across the top and times down the side. If you want to talk about something or want to see if anyone else knows about something you are interested in, you write it on the board and start the conversation.

WordPress Ecommerce: 30+ Resources

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:50:38 +0000

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Shopp ($55)

15 Proven Ways to Gain Exposure for Your Design Portfolio

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:46:32 +0000

With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.

For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.

1. Have a High-Quality Design for Your Portfolio Site

Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.

When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.

Tutorial9 Fan Showcase #1

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:00:15 +0000

Welcome to the first Tutorial9 Fan Showcase! This week, we got our fans to share what they’ve been working on in a “Show & Tell” fashion. Check out some of the submissions below!

Thanks for participating folks! It’s pretty clear that this is an event the Tutorial9 community enjoys. Sorry if we missed you this time—please come again next week to share anything new you have!

Fan Submissions

Callum Chapman: I’m working on my new site that I opened up with @BenjaminReid. It’s called The Inspiration Blog, and can be found at http://theinspirationblog.net/.

Oihana: We have just finished our own website. Hope you like it!

Client Retention: A Key Ingredient for Freelancing Success

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:22:09 +0000

Working as a freelance designer is a challenging job. Not only do you have to be a skilled designer, but you also need to be able to find work and run a profitable business. Landing new clients can be a lot of work and can require a considerable amount of time on your part. Once you have the client, retaining that client can be highly beneficial for your business.

A long-term or repeat client could be any number of things. Maybe you’ve designed a website for a client a few years ago and they just came back to you because it’s time to update their site with a fresh design. Or maybe the client needs on-going work each month and they’re hiring you to provide that work in addition to your one-time services of designing their site.

With content management systems most clients no longer have to hire a designer to make basic updates and additions to their sites, but many clients still have a need for a designer to perform various services on an on-going basis or at some point in the future. Hopefully the information presented in this article will reveal the potential that this presents and will help you to land a few on-going clients of your own.

Why is Client Retention Important?

Before we look at the different ways you can work to retain more of your clients, let’s first look at the issue of why you would want to do so.

Earning web traffic the old fashioned way

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:12:59 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

For many businesses, launching a website feels like the finish line. You’ve worked hard to have a final product and you’re excited to move on to other things. Unfortunately, there is no simple finish line for web success. It’s important to celebrate a website launch, but the true test of your website is how well it works for you in the long run (how many new customers, donors, or volunteers it brings in, how much you grow your email list, how many new leads you’ve gotten). Having a site that works for you and makes you money doesn’t just happen on its own. What was true for Smith Barney in 1986 in the above video (go to the 20 second mark) is true for keeping your website up to date now. Old fashioned hard work pays off, even if the tools and strategies you must learn to use in the cutting edge of the web are far from old-fashioned.

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know that our motto is often “if you just build it, they won’t come”. It’s the same principle as “making money the old fashioned way.” By continuing to invest time and energy into your website, you will continue to see dividends. If you stand back and let the rest of your competition innovate around you, you’ll very likely be stung, instead of getting a taste of the honey.

The three main areas in which you will want to invest your time wisely into your site and EARN good traffic are:

Win a Free eCommerce and Discussion Forums License Package from concrete5!

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:03:32 +0000

concrete5, an up-and-coming open-source content management system, has offered to give a lucky blog reader an eCommerce and discussion forums license package! The total value of these two licenses is $145.

I first came across concrete5 in last year while researching a post on content management systems, and I was very impressed considering it was a CMS that I was not familiar with. concrete5 is free and open source, but if you don’t want to download it and set it up on your own server you can also host it with them. Hosting plans start at less than $8 per month and go up to a dedicated server for $250 per month (free trials available). Their hosting accounts come with support, which may be helpful especially when using a CMS for the first time.

One of the main features of concrete5 is in-context editing, meaning you don’t have to go to a dashboard or admin panel to edit the text and images on the site. For working with non-tech-savvy clients, this can be a great feature.

Create an Advanced Contact Form for Client Inquiries

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:02:07 +0000

Most web designers rely on inquiries from their portfolio website to produce a decent portion of their business. Contact forms can be very simple, collecting a name and contact information, or they can be much more detailed, providing enough information to get an estimate. While the primary purpose of the contact form on our website has always been to make it easy for potential clients to contact us about web design projects, there are also a number of other reasons that visitors use the contact form and a one-size-fits-all approach has its drawbacks. We recently changed the contact form to include some conditional fields that make the form more customized according to the reason the visitor is contacting us, and in this post we’ll go through the process of creating this type of form.

The form we’ll be creating will contain some basic fields (name, email, phone, website, and message) that are shown to all visitors who are filling out the form, but based on the reason they are contacting us they will also see a few other more specific fields. If the visitor selects “Web Design Services” as their reason for contacting us they will be prompted to tell us if it is a new website or a re-design, enter a budget, and tell us how they found us. If they select “Content Development Services” they will also be prompted to enter a budget, but with different options than the budget for web design services, and so on.

In the past our contact form has included a field to allow visitors to select a budget, but that was based on the assumption that they were contacting us regarding web design services. Since the budget field isn’t applicable for someone who is filling out the contact form just to say hi, this “advanced” form will only show what is relevant based on user input.

Conditional logic open up a lot of possibilities with contact forms, especially for designers and agencies that offer a variety of different services. The user has a better experience because they are not confused by fields that are not relevant to them, and more detailed data is possible because not every field will be shown to every user. This tutorial will show just one example of how this type of form can be used, most likely you can come up with some ways to put it into practice on your own site.

Mega Collection Of Cheatsheets for Designers & Developers

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:36:21 +0000

Cheat sheets and various quick reference guides are available for almost any type of software and language these days.

Unfortunately they’re not always easy to find when you actually need them. This is why I decided to take some time to gather up as many as possible and share them with you here!

Hopefully this can be a timesaver for you, along with teaching you a new trick or two. The resources have been divided into various categories to make them easier to find. Below are more than 100 cheat sheets and reference cards for the following topics: