Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own… Happy New Year everyone!!! Read more

Some of the truest words I’ve heard to date are, “If you don’t plan on creating your own business, then you plan on being broke.”

While, there are many people out there who have made a nice living working for other companies, it shouldn’t be crazy to think about going into business for oneself, whether it be a full time job or a part time gig. With the changing economic climate things aren’t guaranteed and, quite frankly, the time spent helping someone else achieve their goals could be time well spent on chasing your own dreams.

As graphic designers, freelancing and creating our own small business is usually a pretty common thought; it’s almost a given. Even if we don’t market ourselves as freelancers, I’m sure some of us have gotten into doing side jobs to put some extra cash in our pockets. Some designers just like to offer design services while others have full businesses revolving around clothing design or creating products, or perhaps partnering with someone else to offer more products and services.

Regardless of what it is that you do, in order to see some growth in your business you’ve got to figure out who you are targeting. Many of us may believe that our product is for everyone, but trying to get your product in front of everyone is going to be painful and expensive. What you want to do is figure out who you are specifically targeting, figure out that niche and put your efforts into them. Finding out more about them will help your effectiveness and eventually help your reach because once you know who you’re selling to, you’ll better know how to design for them. Read more

Surprising as it may sound, colleges and universities seem to have finally figured out social media. Long berated for giving only the most modest efforts at developing an online presence, higher education is, at long last, taking the Internet seriously.

As a higher and higher percentage of high school students spend more time online (and on social media in particular), colleges have made the realization that they stand a far better chance of attracting new applicants if they come visit them on their own turf.

The big social media sites have all become darlings of academia, and students seem not to mind one bit—the most successful schools rack up thousands of Twitter followers, hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes, and millions of views on YouTube, likely in large part from current, prospective, and former students.

And though a great many academies remain dinosaurs of Web 1.0, a few prestigious institutions have truly evolved into social media mammoths.

This Infographic from Best Education Sites breaks down the academic web space with some hard numbers, calling out the schools that are doing the web better than anyone else. Read more

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot Read more

[Editor's note: This is a sponsored review for Approval Manager 2012]

Getting your designs approved by clients in a timely manner is vital to smoothly managing any project. But it’s often more than just getting approvals.

There’s often feedback, comments, notes, and other considerations you need to deal with during the process. Managing all that becomes a lot more difficult than simply getting a client to sign off.

Approval Manager 2012 can help you manage the entire process so your projects run smoothly. It offers a number of new features compared to the previous year’s version. Read more

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own… Read more

As WordPress morphs more and more into a CMS rather that just a blogging platform, there are a lot of instances where you might want to add calendar functionality to your WordPress-powered site, beyond the standard posts calendar widget.

The good news is that there are a ton of awesome calendar plugins out there that can be integrated into your site quickly and easily.

Whether you just want to display events or do something more complex (like allow visitors to book events or appointments), there are existing plugins available to help you do whatever it is you need.

Below, we’ve collected a dozen of the coolest plugins out there for adding advanced calendar functionality to WP. Check them out, and then let us know your favorites (on or off this list) in the comments! Read more

“Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.”

This quote is from William Edwards Deming, the man who almost single-handedly shaped the business and manufacturing culture of Japan into the powerhouse that it is today.

Some might argue he knows something about making profit.

When starting out it’s straight forward that the goal is to get customers, but it’s undeniable that the lifeblood of a sustainable business is return clients.

Every business has customers; they wouldn’t exist without them. Some of these customers will never return and this is why most business owners put a high emphasis on getting repeat customers. Read more