[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

Life as a web designer can be insanely busy. We have multiple clients, each making numerous demands on our time. We work in a fast-moving sector in which we have to constantly relearn our skills. We also read endless posts that encourage us to network and develop our “personal brand.”

With so many demands on our time, and things set to only get worse, all we can do is put in more and more hours to get things done. Unfortunately, there are still only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. If things continue at this pace, most of us will simply run out of time or collapse from exhaustion.

If we want to be successful in this highly competitive world, we will have to work smarter rather than longer. This is a lesson I have had to learn from experience since starting as a web designer back in 1994. As I got older, pulling the all-nighters that defined my early career became impossible. Eventually, the pressure overwhelmed me and led to sickness and depression.

This forced me to reconsider the way I work and helped me discover five secrets that enable me to get as much done as possible without burning out. My hope is that by sharing them here, I can help the next generation of web designers avoid the fate that befell me and many of my peers. Unsurprisingly, the secret to getting more done in less time begins with being organized. Read more

How much time do you waste on the average day looking for things buried somewhere on your desk? Or getting up to get something on the other side of your office? Or otherwise retrieving the things you need to do your job?

If you added up all those wasted seconds and minutes, you might be surprised at the percentage of your day that it takes up.

Taking the time to set up an optimal workspace can save you hours or even days over the course of a year.

It’s worth taking a day or two to set up your desk and work area to better suit the way you work to save time later on. And the process isn’t difficult.

It just takes a lot of planning and delving into how you work best, and then setting up both your physical and virtual workspaces to better cater to your work methods. Read more

Accounting for every aspect of a new website isn’t easy, especially at the last minute.

The problems aren’t the details themselves, but rather the process of making sure that seemingly minor details don’t add up to sloppy work.

The best solution is to write it all down.

The worst solution is to not take a pre-launch checklist as seriously as the planning stage itself.

With the hundreds of details that go into building or redesigning a website, overlooking minor points is easy, especially as deadlines loom—or pass. But missing details detract from the quality of a website.

Read more

Two characteristics that represent most web designers are a need for productivity and a love for technology.

This desire for increased efficiency and productivity leads many designers to look to technology for methods that will improve their work flow.

One common approach for designers (and others who want to improve productivity) is to use multiple monitors. Using two or more monitors can bring a number of significant advantages to designers.

In this article we’ll present some basic pros and cons of using multiple monitors, general instructions for setting them up, as well as a showcase of workstations that feature multiple monitors. Read more