Daily Resources for Web Designers & Developers by Andy Sowards » Tutorials

Here There Be Dragons! Dealing with Nightmare Clients & Challenges As A Freelance Designer

Michael Dambold — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:25:23 +0000

In the great fantastic world of design, professionals are like knights, claiming prizes and rewards while fighting fierce dragons and vanquishing evil foes.

At least, we think ourselves kin to the great knights of old. In many ways, we may be correct.

While we may not be Knights of the Round Table or regularly hold Court with King Arthur, we deal with many challenges as they would. The difference is our enemies are time and budget, and our dragons are challenges we face. The challenges are not only with producing an excellent product, but producing any product within the time allotted.

Most specifically though, many of our battles are fought with clients who hold little or no knowledge of what they want, or how to communicate it.

Many times we deal with clients who are ignorant of the way web or print works, and say so outright, negating the need for designers to find out the hard way.

However, there is always that small element that believes they know everything about design and web. These are the clients we fear to deal with, and the ones we avoid if we can.

Unfortunately we sometimes find ourselves caught in a web of deception and miscommunication, and it makes any project or assignment nearly impossible to either navigate or accomplish. There are five things we can use to keep from the webs and shed light upon any possible problems we might encounter with a client.

1. Explain in writing to any potential client how much you charge, and how you work.

If you charge hourly or by project element, make sure it’s easy to understand before any contract is made. It’s never recommended to begin hourly negotiations at this stage but to explain how you work in terms of available hours, and your current workload.

Being this translucent up front tends to intimidate those who are used to taking advantage of designers and by making a professional declarative stance on your work ethic and available hours. By doing this the tone for negotiations of the contract is set.

2. Don’t forsake your principles, and don’t compromise your basics.

Every once in a while a client will come along who is convinced they have the business market cornered, and will try to convince you that no matter how much time you’ve been in the business or who your clients have been, they are the most important thing that will ever happen to you.

They’ll explain that you can’t possibly see the scope of the project and will most likely try to either bully you into a lower rate or some sort of impossible concession that you cannot make. Don’t let it happen. There are concessions that can be made in any project, but working until 3am when you have a young child or are sick, working for a significant decrease in pay, or some other concession that will hurt you is never worth it, unless your client is a major corporation like Disney. Even in that case, they will understand your boundaries and won’t violate them.

In that case, the reference will outweigh any concession that needs to be made. But chances are, many small business owners will not carry such weight. But whether or not they have a significant advantage such as a reference can become clear in negotiations.

3. Make the contract yourself.

Never allow the client to make the contract unless it’s from a large corporation and you feel comfortable with the contract after reading every word. Every contract is a legal binding agreement, and if you don’t know what’s inside, you could be in for a world of misery.

4. Become best friends with other professionals, and a lawyer.

Other professionals are a wonderful way of gaging your experiences with clients and sharing them with others. So much can be learned from their good and bad experiences. Becoming friends with a lawyer is also helpful. Whether you hire one or have one as a friend, legal counsel is invaluable to navigate the potential problems with contracts and legal problems.

5. If 1-4 are violated, drop it like its hot.

If you’ve followed 1-4, and the professionals or lawyer gives you a warning about the client, they refuse to allow you to give any input on the contract, attempt to make you concede in ways you aren’t comfortable with and do not care for your work times or demand you violate your standards, it’s a given that you will leave the project with less sleep, more stress, and less money.

Those clients are usually not worth dealing with, and though they are a minute percentage of the clients we face, we owe it to ourselves to work with people in mutual respect and professional courtesy. Any business used to dealing with freelance designers is also used to dealing with the above 4 steps. Any business that sees fit to violate them is usually used to ripping off other people, and you aren’t the first and probably won’t be the last. Working with professional businesses who are respectful and deal with projects in a professional manner are the highest prize of all, and those are the battles against time and budget that are always worth fighting for.

Stick with the battles worth fighting, and the challenges worth facing. We have a great world out there to conquer, and many dragons to fight!

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Seven Amazing Ways To Obtain Passive Income Online

NTHEMES — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:17:14 +0000

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Last year, the owner of a Word Press site made a record sale, he received more than $50,000 by selling the respective masterwork on market websites. It’s true, it’s a record and it’s an exception, but a lot of money may be gained from selling website templates. It’s awesome not only because the amount of money is respectable, but also because it’s catalogued as passive income.

You don’t have to be an expert accountant to know that all income may be “brutally” divided into two main categories:

Active income, is in fact the payment received for the work you have done- i.e., the .ai file of a logo or of a vectorial drawing, the coding of a website etc. Unfortunately the money received are usually dependent on the number of hours worked or on the number of projects finished.
Passive income is the kind of the income that isn’t regularly realized. This income is formed by selling templates, drafts, usually products that may be sold multiple times and each buyer is customizing the purchased product.

Definitely, the active types of income are safer but it is work that takes up your time and while the days are still 24 hours long, it’s more than obvious that your time is limited. The passive incomes are unsure, nobody may rely solely on these kinds of earnings to pay the monthly bills but is very advantageous because it’s the result of a single item created. Designers work to have an active income but, superficially thinking, they ignore the “passive” possibilities. In order to highlight some possibilities of making money while sleeping, (this is not necessary!) we have created this post for you. We hope this will help anyone who wants to gain more money passively and wish you good luck in yours attempts!

1. Sell stock photos

This is a very nice activity and some people really make some good amounts of money from. It’s simply: you buy a good photo camera, enjoy nature with your family and friends and of course, the best landscapes are immortalized. The best shoots are uploaded on various online photos markets and over time, the interested people will turn into buyers. Depending on the inspiration of the photographer and the quality of the images, this can became a reliable source of extra money.

The benefit of this is obvious, you enjoy some amazing moments and your happiness brings money once it is well photographed. The happier you are, then the more creative you can be with your Photography and capture your images from an interesting perspective that can capture the interest of viewers and turn even more into fans & buyers.

2. Create Amazing WordPress Themes & Sell Them

Making $50,000 from a single theme is fantastic but, once again, it’s a record and not always typical. In spite of that, creating amazing Word Press themes that are very customizable and easy to use for the less code savvy expert is a good plan. Apparently, this kind of job seems to be more and more profitable because people really like the beauty and the potential of Word Press but can’t always afford the custom CMS experience, and that is what is affordably brought to them by Templates and Themes.

Selling website templates will be always a profitable affair, there is a human trait that is common, and that is not to be patient, and these are the solutions that require the least amount of time to setup and create an online presence. It’s smart decision to profit from this!

3. Sell articles

There are some signs that show us that in 2012 and the next years, the role of writers will became more and more important. The algorithms of the search engines will base more on the power of text content and the blog owners know this intention. Anyway, on the Internet are presented many market places where articles may be uploaded and sold. A problem related to selling articles is the price, these are very low comparing to the work done but there are places where a 1000+ words length article can be sold for around $30-40 (obviously, the quality is high, well-written and containing precious information).

4. Sell graphic files

Every day lots of Designers start many personal projects and some of these get finished while others are still in progress. Surely, each designer has some abandoned files that need very few improvements or changes to be polished, and these could become nice products to sell. A pragmatic guy will collect these unused files and upload them to a websites that sell graphic files and some people may be interested and buy these. An abandoned model of business card, an unfinished logo or a cool favicon are potential items that may be sold and bring some money to the original creator.

5.Sell “how to” e-books

Another solution for passive income is the creation of “how to” e-books. These are usually .pdf format and the length varies, from few pages to max 50 (even more but it’s not recommended). The great advantage of these books is the fact that don’t require very much time to be written (comparing to printed books); these are created by experts and are summaries of more complicated topics & tasks. The mechanism behind this is very simple: someone who is at a pro level writes a .pdf explaining a situation or how to resolve a problem or teach them a subject, and an individual who is interested in the Topic buys it. It’s beneficial for both sides, isn’t it?

6.Write a book

For those that want more, writing a book is the next logical step. This is a more complicated activity but it’s globally known what kind of benefits writing a good book can bring, if it’s interesting and useful, the author will bring in a good profit from it. Unfortunately, the creation of a good book isn’t a job for amateurs; it’s a very difficult and time consuming activity that can take months or years.

7. Create T-shirts designs

Inspired designers who have enough time may create T-shirts concepts that can be sold. It’s cool to play with your imagination, create something cool then sell it. T-shirts are very popular and if you think up enough good ideas this practice can result in a very fun income stream for you.

As you can see, anyone can add some extra bucks to their budget, but this is nothing more than paying attention to these different techniques of making money. Clearly there are a ton more ways to make extra money, but these are the most effective and common at the moment. Our Final Advice: don’t expect fast results, this is more about patience and quality! Things that are gained easily, are often not worth having

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10 Simple & Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Your Blog

Leif — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:21:50 +0000

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Trying to find a Word Press plugin that best suited for your needs can be a bit of a hassle sometimes. Having a contact form is very important for your blog, which allows your visitors or advertisers to get in touch with you. But it’s very important to keep it simple and user friendly along with creative look involved.

WordPress is one such great platform that will allow you use simple plugins and get the contact form in minutes. We tried to list 10 best of those plugins here to save you time and frustration!

1. Contact Form 7

2. Contact Form By Contact Me.com

3. Fast Secure Contact Form

4. Simple Model Contact Form

5. A Capture Contact Form

6. 123 Contact Form For WordPress

7. Cool Contact Form

8. Tiny Contact Form

9. Slick Contact Form

10. Visitors Contact Form

Do you have a favorite Contact Form Plugin that we missed? Share it below in the comments and help the community!!

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6 Ways To Drive Traffic to Your Website with Youtube

Andy Sowards — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:12:56 +0000

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Youtube is a famous video search engine, recently purchased by famous search engine Google. There are lot of advantages associated with Youtube and one of them is that you can promote your business online via video. If you are offering any services, or a product or you are just willing to spread the word about your identity, then I can say that youtube can be the perfect platform to market yourself.

There are many ways you can drive traffic to your website – like famous webmaster forums, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. I can understand you are using all above mentioned platforms to market your business, but if you are missing Youtube then you are missing a great opportunity to market your business.

Every thing in this universe is systematic; The creator of this universe has systemized every thing in this universe. God has created Clouds, then it rains water from rains flows in the streams and that water is used for cultivation which is later used by each and every living creature. In the same passion, if we want to be successful then we need to be systematic.

If you are planning on promoting your business online with Youtube, I can surely say that you need to follow some systematic methods to promote your video in Youtube, the video search engine:

1) Comment Videos

Youtube is now a huge community of people who place their videos in the giant database of Youtube on a daily basis. You need to appear among them by leaving a comment or no one would know you were there and would miss out on your voice and in turn, they could miss out on your brand! Visit your favorite videos and comment on them, it will automatically spread a word about your identity. Meaningful and insightful comments, especially on videos related to your niche, are invaluable in positioning yourself as an expert in your field to anyone who reads your comment and clicks through to your profile – and ultimately your website and brand!

2) Right Time to Post Your Video

You have just posted your video and you think you are failing to attain valuable visitors. It is best to do a little research and pinpoint the best time to post so that your video is in front of the most people and reach the people interested in your niche. Lets say you are posting a video regarding famous beaches of world, then you should make sure that when you post that video, the people who love travel and beaches can see it and have the time to visit these kind of videos. Everyones audience has different peak social network usage times, so the key is finding those opportune moments and using them to your marketing advantage.

3) Video Responses

Even Old Spice utilized video responses in their most recent campaign!

Personally I can say that video responses are one of the perfect ways to attain a lot of visitors to your video. If you are good in capturing natural videos; you should search the videos in your niche, and you should post meaningful and insightful video responses to those videos in your niche. Again this will help position yourself as an expert in your field if your video adds value to the original or to your audience in that niche.

4) Videos in Series

A single video can be beneficial to attain lot of traffic to your video, but it is even better if you keep your visitors happy with a series of videos. If you are posting a series of videos, I can surely say that you will have many marketing benefits and constant viewers of your videos. If you stay consistent and post regularly then people will consistently come back for more of your information and even make a routine out of looking forward to it.

5) Search Engine Friendly Videos

If you are SEO Expert offering affordable SEO services then you can understand what I mean. You need to follow some guidelines provided by search engines to have better ranking. I have already told you that Youtube is recently purchased by Google, so you can visit Google guidelines for successful marketing of your videos. Building organic search is probably the best thing you can do for any site to build the brand and traffic over time. Invest your time in learning the guidelines so that you build a great base to build upon, it will pay off in the long run.

6) Keep Length of Your Videos Short

Don’t post lengthy videos, but try to keep your videos short. This is the golden video rule as most people these days cannot find enough time to stick their eyes on a single video that is super long. The ideal time for a video is between 3-5 minutes. It will also help the youtube search engine to rank your video higher than some videos that are longer.

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How To Lower The Impact of Google Panda – 5 Tips For Search Traffic Recovery

HTMLFirm — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:43:48 +0000

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When it comes to the online world and the norms attached to it, Google Panda penalty is one of the most talked about things. In fact, the recent few months have shown a lot of iteration in Panda. Panda was released in Feb 2011 and ever since then many websites have experienced a slowdown in the traffic volume. Most of the websites ignored Panda considering it just another new thing. But that is exactly what made the situation complex for them. But websites can not really afford to lose traffic.

Panda Image via Shutterstock

What needs to be realized by website owners is that if they want to recover from Panda penalty, it is imperative to put plans on hold and start taking action right away. What needs to be done first is to figure out why Google panda updates are affecting your website. And in what way it is affecting your website? If you find out that your website traffic is going down after every update then you should plan a good SEO strategy without any delay.

Before proceeding any further, let us see what exactly Google Panda penalty is. Google Panda actually is a big tweak in the search engine algorithm. The main purpose of this penalty is to push up the standard and good quality websites and lower down the bad quality site content. Very different from other updates, Google Panda is actually a domain level penalty. What this means is that even if a website has 10 good quality pages then too its ranking can get hurt. However, fortunately there is a way out. In order to check Google Panda penalty, it is always best to check Google Analytics for the dates for any traffic rise or drop.

There is a drop in traffic in some cases while in other cases there is an increase. If your website has experienced a drop in traffic, then your website certainly lacks in something. Another possibility is that you might be having certain aspects that made Google push you site down in terms of quality and reliability. Now what you need to do here is- find out what exactly the reason is. The problem could be anything like poor quality content, improper SEO, load time or even the design as well. Read further and you will find out on what major aspects should you focus in order to lower down the impact of Google panda penalty on your website.

Site indexed pages

Index Image via Shutterstock

You need to have a clear idea about how Google indexes your website pages. You can go to Google.com and look for the site- domain.com. Now replace domain with your domain address. On doing this you will find all the pages of your site that are indexed in Google. Now you need to analyze which pages are indexed. Moreover, you must ensure that none of your tags, labels, categories or any other part which does not hold any value is indexed. You should then go to the last page. If it says ‘show omitted results’ then click on it and check if your website’s pages are indexed with parameters like replytocom or iSalt etc.

Now if you are fed up of URL parameters and other useless link which is getting indexed in Google because of non-canonical tag, then you should use .htaccess code for clean WordPress URL.

User behavior

Behavior Image via Shutterstock

You must remember that user behavior is one of the most important factors for search engine ranking. Everything from bounce rate to time on site play an important role. One of the reasons for bounce rate could be the too cluttered look of your website. And if page views/visit is low then you need to work hard on your site’s content and design. Visitors might be abandoning your website because of poor or irrelevant information, too many ads, slow load time etc. Your aim should be to improve the bounce rate and increase the number of page views/visits.

Poor quality content

Quality Image via Shutterstock

Most of the times, website owners add posts and content without giving a thought to its relevancy. This certainly invites trouble and can bring Google panda penalty. To get an idea about the quality of content you should have, go to Google.com and search for ‘SEO optimized content’. Now go through the first five results. Analyze them and rate all the pages on the scale of ten. Then try to figure out why you rated a page higher than the other. Although all five pages have the quality content but there will be certain aspects in each of them that would make you rate them all differently. If you are able to find an answer to this, you are going in the right direction. When you find out the thin content on your site then you should re-edit the posts, now index them and then remove them from Google search.

Too many advertisements

Tokyo Image via Shutterstock

It is not possible to operate a website without any advertisements. Even Google never asks you to have no ads. But problem occurs when a site has too many ads. Moreover, what complicates the matter even more is the addition of ads in a manner that give a cluttered look to the site. This will certainly bring trouble for your website. You are even more prone to inviting panda penalty if you add ads in between the posts. Hence you should avoid doing this. Do not include too many ads and do not keep them around your content.

Site SEO

SEO Image via Shutterstock

Many people think that panda means death of SEO. However, this is not true. Fact is that Panda enhances the algorithm and makes Google search even better. You should only make use of safe SEO practices. Make use of Sitemap, backlink building, Canonical URLs etc. also pay attention to your on page SEO. If you have not done the SEO of your website, then you are missing out on too much like quality traffic and better rankings. You also need to pay attention to factors like Page speed, poor backlinks etc. to get a perfect idea about your website’s weaknesses, let a layman browse your site and ask for the opinion. If the person faces any problem, you will be able to find out the specific area your website lacks on.

Besides this, you should always search in Google for the topic you are writing on. You should properly analyze the content of first 5-6 results. This will give you a clear idea about what all you need to focus on while writing. In a nutshell, you should write quality and detailed posts, regularly update your site, do social bookmarking, have a clutter free layout, use Breadcrumbs and make use of sites like YouTube to drive more traffic.
By doing all the above mentioned things, you can certainly recover from the panda penalty and can once again start receiving better and targeted traffic. Just make sure that you do the right things in a right manner.