A Freelance Web Designer's Blog

Exciting stuff – the good folks over at Spicy Web Designers decided to interview me and my experience.  Feel free to check it out here. A bit about Spicy Web Designers: This website [Spicy Web Designers.com] is dedicated to answering the question “Where are all the good web designers?” and we answer this question by [...]

So I was approached by Jobtrio.com owner Josh to improve his site’s look.  In his words, turning it from a $100k site into a $1 million site with subtle design tweaks!  Thought it would be helpful to some to show how I went about improving the look. It’s a great site, and usability-wise it was/is [...]

A lot of your traffic will depend on how many other websites are linking to you.  A very simple way to compete on your chosen keywords without too much research is to copy your competitor.  It’s always been a pretty decent strategy: who’s beating me and how are they doing it, then replicate it plus [...]

Being a freelancer requires, partly, a mind-reading skill. Depending on the type of client, they’ll usually have designs in their heads and it’s your job to extract this visualisation and get it down into a workable design. It also requires translation skills, yes, I’m talking about those phrases that always tend to crop up when you get a new client, some feedback or as part of the brief. These are some of the phrases that I’ve found to be the most popular:

Before and during site launch here are a few quick on and off page SEO pointers( and beware you can over-optimise!): Do basic on-page: Keywords in domain name? Not always possible or appropriate to have your main keywords in the domain name, but does help quite a bit. Keywords in the URL somewhere? Again in [...]

CTA, or call to action in general UX and web design is crucial and sometimes overlooked.  With the birth and development of CSS, it is becoming increasingly popular to customise buttons that require action from the user.    The countless websites you’ve seen with either ‘Check out my portfolio’ or ‘Read more’ or ‘Buy now!’ [...]

If you’re using the fantastic prestashop for your online e-commerce projects, you may have run into a few snags with SSL. Depending on your hosting, you should be able to upgrade to a private/dedicated IP and SSL certificate. I personally used JustHost and had no problems doing this, had my own SSL in about 5 [...]

VistaPrint scam, which I got caught up in a while back and thought I’d warn you off them.  VistaPrint, for anyone who hasn’t heard of them, offer a printing service, so business cards, leaflets all types of printing.  Their prices are ridiculously cheap, and as with all things what you pay for is what you [...]

If you’re looking for great business cards that stand out, I’ve got to recommend  moo.com minicards.  They do regular business cards too, which are the same great quality, but the minicards come in a funky 28mm x 70mm size.  I ordered some a while back and will soon be ordering more, as the general quality [...]

There are plenty of freelance web designers out there. If you require a web designer for your new or existing business/project, then chances are you’ve filtered it down to a few. If it’s your first time, and have no idea about web design, it’s so important to get good advice about which freelancer to go [...]