A lot of countries have legislation which requires certain types of websites to comply with minimum accessibility standards in order to be open to the largest possible audience. Building accessible websites is a relatively new technique, but it can be very advantageous in terms of visitors, search engine optimization and website maintenance costs.

According to the stats, millions of people are considered someway disabled and are not able to use websites in traditional way, creating accessible websites you may increase your audience significantly. Taking into consideration all the users browsing websites from their cell phones, Web TV and PDAs, by making an accessible website you can increase the number of visitors at least by 1/3.

As for the SEO, search engine bots are the most disabled visitors, not able to read anything but your code. Making your websites understandable for the disabled you simultaneously increase your chances to appear in search engine result pages.

The hardest web accessibility task is to make your website understandable to visually impaired and blind people. Because blind people are using special screen readers and other text-to-voice software, you need to make sure the source code it reads is comprehensible. First, you need to take care of the images on your website, providing Alt text to describe these images. It’s also necessary to arrange the structure of your content so it had a clear hierarchy of importance. Provide your texts with semantic h1 — h3 headers as well as other meaningful HTML tags.

Visually impaired group of visitors includes color blind people, who sometimes have difficulties in distinguishing the texts and other elements on the web because they are not sufficiently different from the colors surrounding them, as well as the background color. In order to make your website accessible for the color blind people take care of the colors and try to use other types of accentuating, rather than color — bold type and underlining, especially for the links. Pay attention to the combinations of colors you’re using on your web pages — most color blind people are unable to tell apart red and green, so try not to mix them.

Another group of people might have eyesight difficulties and in order to increase web design accessibility for them, you need to make all your design elements, especially fonts and images, enlargeable.

As for people with hearing problems, it’s rather easy to make your website more accessible to them — instead of providing only audio information, suggest alternative text version of the audio.

People with physical disabilities are usually unable to use mouth or touch pad, this is why it is highly recommended that you made your website navigation as simple as possible. Make the clickable area around the links much bigger for people who find it hard to
There is a common misconception that accessible websites look uglier than others. Although not many web designers have learned this technique, those of them who did are already creating web design masterpieces.

And you may wrongly thinks, that creating an accessible website is a lot more expensive, than a usual one. Even if it costs you slightly more, there are many benefits that will help you receive a great return on your investment. Except for all the stuff I said before, creating an accessible website design is a step forward into the future, when large proportion of people will be using small display devices to browse web sites. And because only people with good income can afford such devices, you’ll have access to a large and lucrative audience, that none of your competitors do.

If you want to create an accessible web design, remember to test it in text-only browsers and with screen reading software, as well as services transforming your site into its wap version and other web accessibility evaluation tools.

Related posts

• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to break bad designer habits?
• How to design customer-oriented websites?

But there is a serious drawback — all freelancers have to look for clients themselves and this task requires some knowledge and skills. A lot of experienced and professional designers start freelance careers having talent and abilities in web design but not knowing thing about marketing, and this is one of the most serious problems, because absence of marketing strategy will definitely result in lack of clients, lack of work and, consequently, lack of profits.

What you need to understand now is that you’re selling yourself and your web design services, you are a brand and your activity has a lot to do with branding. This is why whether you are an experienced freelance web designer or just starting your career, it’s time for you to work out a marketing plan that will help you not only develop your web design skills, but also build your brand and a strong client network.

For some web designers freelance is just a temporary job, necessary only to fill a portfolio, in this case your marketing strategy should include creating new samples for your portfolio. This means that being a freelance web designer you need to take up as many projects as you can do, sometimes even at low prices, if you are sure that the project will be a good addition to your collection of works.

Some other freelance web designers have huge plans to start their own business, like a web design agency or studio. Therefore, what they need to take care about is a network of clients that will apply to their studio. Third type of freelancers wants to stay this way in ten years or more, because they are satisfied with the way things are. Their marketing strategy should cover the issues of preparing a basis for future price increases and skill development, as well as name recognition.

Whatever the reason why you are working as a freelance web designer, and whatever you plans for future, you need to stick to your strategy and differentiate approach according to the goals.

Branding is another thing you need to consider in freelance marketing. Although branding tactics is something we would expect from a large company, it can be equally efficient for an individual freelancer. Branding approach should considerably rely on the marketing goal of a freelance web designer. What you need to achieve, is your brand name recognition. Name recognition most usable techniques include taking part in different designer or web designer competitions and contests, blogging, publishing your works in offline magazines and web resources, various galleries and web design reviews.

Sometimes it makes sense to target on a specific market; the narrower it is the better. You can narrow it by geographical territory, budget, CMS system, type of business you want to work with etc. It’s also a good ideal to narrow your specialization that will help you to get more targeted clients.

Now that you’ve determined your strategy, you need to allocate some amount of money for advertising your freelance web designer services. Such an investment will help you maintain a consistent work load, in case if you lose some of your clients or decide to expand. There’s a large variety of ways you can advertise yourself, most beneficial ones can be targeted PPC campaigns, banner ads or paid links. There’s no big point in marketing yourself offline, because chances are people looking for web design services will mostly search online.

Remember, you need to keep the advertising even if you are working and have arrangements with clients for the nearest future. This is necessary to eliminate work downtimes, and if you can’t possibly have them, new potential clients will be a good basis for your web design service expansion. Always remember to track the results of your advertising campaign to learn which marketing methods are bringing the results and which aren’t.

The last piece of advice I’m gonna give you is to take care of your portfolio. When all your marketing strategies succeed and potential customers do come to see your works in order to make the final decision about cooperation, make sure you have good things to show them, because portfolio is meant for evaluation of your professionalism and creativity.

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to break bad designer habits?
• How to design customer-oriented websites?

The first thing that influences positively the overall productivity of a freelance web designer is a quiet and comfortable workplace. Ideally this should be a separate room, designated only for work. Try to eliminate all distractions that can keep you from working and take much time. Switch off all internet messengers and email notifications, your cell phone and the TV. Keep your desktop clean and orderly.

Find the most productive part of the day and try to optimize your schedule to fit into this part, this way you’ll have better chances to achieve desired results.

Remember you shouldn’t jump to work right away after waking up. Except for doing all the usual stuff like taking shower and having breakfast, you need to think about the ways how to manage doing more things during the day and consider what you should do to achieve this. If you’re working as a freelance web designer, start your working day from reading a to-do list you’ve prepared yesterday. Such a list will help you not to waste time on thinking how to arrange the working process in order to do more. A to-do list is a must when you’re working on large web design projects with a deadline.

When you finally get down to business, try to do the hardest tasks at the beginning. It will make your day more productive as other things you’ll do will seem much easier.

While working on a computer, take a 15-minute break after every hour of activity. Don’t use this break to look at your social media account, watch a video or read someone’s blog. Try to get up from the computer; this break is necessary for your eyesight.

Another way to increase your web design productivity is to work out every day. I noticed that physical exercises brace up, and after a small training people usually feel a surge of energy and work better and faster.

Use timers for every task you accomplish. There are special online services or small computer applications that time your work and leisure. After timing your results analyze why it took you so long to perform certain activity, or what helped you do it so quickly.

At the end of the day do all the accounting work, record all income and expenses during the day. It is much easier to do the bookkeeping everyday while you still remember things, than calculating all your operations once a month.

Actually, there are many things that should better be done in the evening, after finishing all your work. As it was mentioned, a list of things to do is better prepared in the evening to shorten the time for considerations in the morning. Check also all your e-mails and internet messengers that you weren’t using during the day. Take time to answer all important messages and letters, they might bring you new clients and projects in the future.

Back up all the information after you finished your work. You need to have an external HDD or use special online services which provide server space for backups. Try to automate this process, because backing up all your web design works is a must, in case if you don’t want to lose some important files and your portfolio.
At the end of the day evaluate all the web design work you have completed during the day. If the results were less than you’ve expected, analyze the reasons. This way in some period of time you’ll learn to notice the things that distract you and eliminate them to increase your productivity.

Here’s a list of things hat will just help you to save time during custom web designing in case if your productivity depends largely on it:

• Pay all your bills from home;
• Learn a speed typing technique;
• Learn to read fast (there are numerous guides on the internet about the speed reading)
• Learn keyboard shortcuts for all of the programs you’re using while working;
• Do all possible shopping online.

And always remember to reward yourself with the things you want for all accomplished tasks, this way you’ll be more motivated to work faster.

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to break bad designer habits?
• How to design customer-oriented websites?

Serious Blogger is 2 columns light, widget ready wordpress theme. For serious bloggers ;) This theme entirely compatible with wordpress version 2.8 and it cut out under GPL license.

If you need a unique WordPress theme or a custom design, you can fill in the form on the right or contact me through contact form and I’ll contact you in the shortest possible time to discuss the details of your project.

Theme features

• 2-column design
• Modern, simple design
• Widget support
• WordPress 2.8 support

If you need services of wordpress designer feel free to contact me

Demo and download:

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• Corporate Life free wordpress theme (*.psd included)

Moreover, the bigger the number of people responsible for the company’s website, the more controversial recommendations designers tend to get. No wonder, every person has his or her unique taste and preferences in terms of colors, style, font writing, pictures and so on. Very often the process of creation a website is like a battle between those controversial opinions and general rules of a good custom web design.

Although my clients usually take part in every stage of the custom web design building process, still they somehow remain unaware of other substantial parts of the design, like elaborating the functionality, accessibility and usability, compliance with the standards and company goals. This is why the clients usually focus mainly on the looks of their web resource.

I believe, that there’s more to a good custom web design than just preferences in colors and fonts. The quality of the design should be evaluated in terms of several important factors I outlined in this article.

Factor 1. Target audience. One of the aims of a high quality web design is to communicate the message of the company to its potential customers.

Factor 2. The look itself. Evaluation of the aesthetical feeling, the appropriateness of the styles, fonts and colors. The design layout being developed should reflect the company’s activity, and set the right priorities.

Factor 3. Website content. It is important to develop a custom web design taking into consideration the location of the content and how it should accentuate the strong points of the company. A lot of attention should be paid to the areas with the content.

Factor 4. Website usability. Evaluating the web design in terms of its usability the designer should give answers to the following questions:
Is the site usable for its visitors? Is it convenient to find something on it? Are the priorities set in the right way? Are there any other factors that hurdle the high level of usability of the website?

Factor 5. Level of functionality. Roughly saying, the designer should determine whether all the features and options on the website give visitors an opportunity to use the website more efficiently.

The factors described above should be discussed with your client even before you start considering the type of design you want to develop. The answers to the given questions will help you get a larger insight into how the visually aesthetic look of the web resource should be built and they always help me in my work.

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to break bad designer habits?
• How to design customer-oriented websites?

First, let’s talk about some ways I’ve worked out to teach myself how to look out of the box that might be useful for other designers. The thing is, a lot of professional web designers, especially those having a lot of years of experience, have developed their design handwriting — they’re constantly using the same design elements they are used to, like gradients or permanent sets of icons, or web 2.0-style mirroring images and so on. After you use these things so much it’s hard to switch to another thinking and bring some creativity into the process, however, I’ll give you some tips on how to transform your traditional web design into a creative web design.

Your task now is to start thinking differently and forget about the things you used before, I’ll offer you a couple of exercises to train your creativity and generate new design ideas. They are quite challenging but also fun.

The first exercise is to create a web design, where your list favorite color dominates. It’s gonna be hard, but this task will help you think about other ways, except for the color, to bring in some aesthetics onto the site and forget about all those fashionable light blue, green and grey colors.

Second task that will help you improve your potential in creative web design is to make an image-free website. You’ll use only one color for the background, text and space will be your only decorations. By doing this exercise you’ll look at content structure in the new light, learning how to accentuate the importance of elements using size and spacing.

Third exercise is called Anti Web 2.0. design. This time you’ll have to forget about all those annoying features of web 2.0. style, like mirroring objects and light colors, use pixel fonts and dark palette. As for the result, you’ll be surprised how rather old-fashioned elements will obtain a new look in the modern web design you’ve created.

And the last exercise I used is low resolution design. Your task is to forget about spacious screens and develop a layout for a PDA or a cellphone. Structuring elements into a special orderly hierarchy, leaving some unessential things behind and intelligent data grouping might be a hard task to complete, however this challenge will help you push yourself a bit and develop non-standard thinking.

Second part of my message is general bad habits freelancer designers have in relation to their work and clients, getting rid of them you’ll be able to increase your productivity and technically even improve your life. I even developed a list of those habits to work on:

• Not responding to clients’ e-mails — it’s easy to fix this problem by allocating all your mail in one mail client, this way you’ll see what’s what and it’ll be easier to answer all the letters
• Working without a contract, or violating it — having a contract will save your time and health in case if there are some troubles or arguments with your client
• Underpricing your services, not asking for prepayments, not charging for additional services you provide — some freelance designers cut down prices thinking this way they’ll get more projects, but agreeing to work for less money you’ll actually make the same amount of them, just for a longer time. Except for that, many of your potential customers might thing that your prices reflect the quality of your services and will go looking for someone else to do their website’s design.
• Bad schedule — being unable to organize your working day you’ll lose more time on unnecessary things and never manage to do everything on time, be careful, this way you might have problems with your project deadlines!
• Overworking — no comments needed, it’s just not right in terms of health and well-being.

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to design customer-oriented websites?

It is clear that communication of the content to visitors should be the primary objective of the layout, but very often designers forget about this aspect or sacrifice it believing that aesthetics is the most important factor, influencing visitor’s experience with the website. However, it happens that users have lousy experience because the website they are visiting is image- or sales-oriented and not intended for the customers.

Another reason, why online customers might have troubles with your website, is because the custom design layout follows different modern trends which contradict to its content, or have nothing to do with the topic. The only reason that can justify the usage of popular grunge or retro site design trends is a personal blog, where you can use an original custom design to reflect your style and accentuate identity.

Knowing the needs of your customers is the key to building a long-lasting relationship through your website. Your primary goal, as that of a designer, should be to individualize users’ experience with your website with the help of custom design solutions. But what does it mean «to individualize experience»? This issue mostly deals with buying habits, knowing which you can adjust the site’s design to satisfy your clients more. A good way to understand what your clients would like to see on your website and what thing they value most of all is to ask them directly with the help of a survey.

The majority of your users would speak about the usability of your website and the readability of its content. They want to know as much about your company and its services, as possible plus this information should be well-structured and found intuitively. It’s a good idea to enrich your content with regularly updated specials and news, detailed product catalog, user manuals and recommendations, useful links and personalized information. Another good example if individualization is a lot of good websites that remember the things you recently watched or bought and build your taste based on this data. This way, entering a website you see the list of things you might wanna see, as you do on Youtube or Amazon sites.

Smart custom designs focused on the needs of your customers and providing a satisfying experience tend to make people come back and tell their friends about the site. Such word of mouth advertising is the best way for your website to gain huge number of new customers and retain the old ones creating a lifetime clientele and resulting in long period of permanent revenues.

Being a web designer you should remember about several important aspects that will help you to build a customer-oriented website: usability (implemented in the control users have over the content of your website), performance (to meet customers’ expectations), high quality content and value of the brand.

It’s very essential to try to imagine the whole picture of the project on the pre-development stage and ask yourself, what the custom design you are creating is intended for and what its major functions are. If you don’t focus on the intent, chances are your custom design won’t satisfy the needs of its visitors no matter how well it is illustrated and whatever its level of aesthetics.

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to break bad designer habits?

Personal blogs are becoming more and more popular and millions of people chose to have their own web pages with topics they are concerned about. Even though a personal blog is something private, it still needs design to look good, and usability to fulfill the simple content publishing tasks quickly and smoothly.

FabricPress is a newly developed WordPress theme created for personal blogging. This theme is quite simple and easily customizable to the needs of your personal blog. It features a clean stylish two-column design that will perfectly reflect the identity and personality of its owner and high functionality to help bloggers easily arrange their content publishing in a proper and aesthetical way without spending much time and effort.

FabricPress possesses all qualities necessary to arrange your personal blog, supports WordPress 2.8. version and features a user-friendly interface, simplifying all personal blogging tasks as much as possible.

Another important quality of the FabricPress theme is w3c valid source code, which determines its high accessibility and compatibility with all internet browsers, as well as creates a good basis for blog’s SEO optimization.

If you want hire me as designer, you can fill in the form on the right or contact me through contact form and I’ll contact you in the shortest possible time to discuss the details of your project.

Theme features

• 3 color schemes for your blog to make it match your taste to the maximum
• 2-column design
• Simple, textured design
• Widget support
• W3c valid code
• WordPress 2.8 support

If you need some kind of changes in this theme, we can discuss the cost of this service.

If you need a unique WordPress theme or a custom design, you can fill in the form on the right and I’ll contact you in the shortest possible time to discuss the details of your project.

Fabricpress

Classic edition

Demo and download:

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Fabricpress

Green edition

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Fabricpress

Purple edition

Demo and download:

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Installation and Customization:

1. Unzip the theme into /wp-content/themes/ folder on your server.

2. Login to WordPress control panel and activate the theme in Appearance/Themes menu section.

3. After that go to section Appearance > Widgets in the menu and drag widgets to sidebar 1 and then configure the settings.

4. Drag the Text widget to the sidebar 2, this will change the text in the header. DON’T FILL TITLE in the widget configurations.

5. Enjoy you new FabricPress theme.

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Considering this, once going to hire a designer you are expecting him to possess at least basic web designing and programming skills. But the quality of your website is depending not only on a web designer. Notice that the communication is the most significant factor to rely upon. The designer’s professional skills don’t really matter when you cannot convey your ideas to him. Of course he will end up with a good looking website but will it fit your business requirements?

There are millions of companies offering their services on the market. Traditionally, professional web design agencies are so popular due to their experience, extensive skills and the quality of provided services. Hiring a self-employed designer is an alternative way of a website creation, and while you might be thinking that there is no difference between them it does really matter whether you are going to hire a designer or a design agency. In both cases you will expect them to create an incomparable presence for your website, to make it looking good and to provide you with assistance. So, what are the benefits of hiring a freelance web designer?

Usually, big studios are categorizing the projects in order to fit the current budgets of the clients. Being a small reasonably priced project your website is probably going to be done by junior designers. Although a junior designer not necessarily means a bad designer it is much better to hire a freelancer in order to complete the job. Moreover, an experienced web designer possesses some extra knowledge like Search Engine Optimization, Content Management Solutions and other website development technologies.

Notice, that small agencies usually have a list of freelancers that can be outsourced to for completing some development work. Technically, the designing process is going to be done by a freelance workforce anyway, so it is a cost-saving decision to hire a freelance web designer from the very beginning. Besides, due to overhead costs and support staff work a web design agency is unlikely to provide cheap services, while having no staff and work space to rent gives freelancer an opportunity to keep the hourly rate low.

Also, freelance vouches you for having better budgeting and cost control when you are to hire a designer. Big companies are interested in big projects due to their less scalable services, that’s why they consider small projects unprofitable. On the contrary, a freelance web designer is ready to complete all size projects and is providing custom services. He or she will not only suit the individual client’s needs and ideas but will help with the project costs management, suggesting possible ways of costs cutting.

Flexibility is the most important freelancer’s asset. In contrast to various web design companies and agencies a freelance web designer offers their clients flexible services to suit their needs perfectly. Also, they are able to work out of a norm hours if required and are making their schedules in a way to finish the work as quick as possible. If you are still not sure about what to do — to hire a freelance web designer or a web design agency — here are some ultimate arguments:

• Freelance web designers are self-employed staff charged with the results of their work and realize the responsibility to deliver the work before the dead line.
• Freelance web designers are likely to return your calls and treat you with respect attempting to leave a good impression.
• Eventually, freelance web designers are interested in doing their best to keep your business running well because it is you who put food on their tables and pay their bills

Related posts

• Easy steps to web design accessibility
• Marketing yourself as a freelance web designer
• How to make your day productive, if you’re a freelance designer
• How to focus client’s attention on the aesthetics of their site?
• How to break bad designer habits?

First of all, browse other websites and try to notice whether their web page design looks more stylish than yours. Aesthetics is a very important aspect of the web design, so if you understand that your website looks outdated and unattractive to the target audience, you need to take some measures, because chances are you’re losing customers every day. Remember, that in order to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals, you need to look for a high quality custom web design that will create a positive and modern image of your company, help to build brand awareness, increase customer loyalty and convey the message of your company the way you want it.

Another important reason why you should consider redesigning your website is the increase of usability. Every year web standards change radically and web building techniques become more advanced in order to comply with these standards. If your site was developed several years ago, it probably has heavy graphics or a lot of unnecessary html code, not letting your web pages load fast. Get a custom web design to increase the usability of your interface and this way attract more visitors.

Today thousands of people, especially young people are surfing the internet using their cell phones and PDAs. Old websites with fixed pages and coding have no chances to display correctly even in modern versions of web browsers, it goes without saying they look all messed up on PDA screens. Modern techniques of CSS coding allow to make web pages as flexible as possible, so getting yourself a new custom web design might be a good idea if you want to increase the availability of your site.

If you want to increase sales generated by your website, you might consider applying modern SEO techniques to rank your site higher in the search engine result pages. As a rule, professional designers of today know how to optimize your site to make it more relevant to the necessary key terms, as well as to make it easier for the search bots to index web pages.

Content Management is another reason to justify the creation of a new custom web design for your website. If several years ago website content was static and unchangeable, unless you knew HTML to change it, nowadays you don’t need all that knowledge and so much effort, as you used to — modern content management systems make content management easy as it has never been before. Knowing the simplest text editor is the only skill you need to change texts, images and other media files, add new pages and sections to your web site. As a rule, if you order a custom web design, you’ll receive a CMS integration as well, so if you want to update not only the looks, but the information on your site, redesign is just what you need.

Now that you’ve determined whether your site needs a new custom web design, you might wanna know some of the DOs before contacting a reputable designer.

First of all, consider adding some special features to your website that will make your customers want to return again and again. These features include forums with engaging conversations, blogs with up-to-date information or interesting article base.

Before applying to a web designer make sure you’ve backed up your old site, because things happen and you need to be sure your site will be able to work anyway.

In the process of redesigning your website ask your designer to minimize the old URL changes, because, for all this time your site has been functioning, it has probably received a lot of organic links over the internet, that benefit not only your traffic, but also the search engine rankings of your site.

If you are afraid to put a lot of money into your new website design, think about all the returns on your investment. If your site brings you some yield now, a smart custom design solution will only increase your profits.

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