Grow Your Design Business with Lead Magnets

Welcome back, WDD Readers. It’s January 2019, and we’re all coming back to work bleary-eyed and bushy-tailed. Why don’t you take a moment to put off wor… I mean get inspired by these new portfolios? We’ve got a fair bit of variety in aesthetics and strategies this month. Enjoy. Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes,...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

GitHub has made its first really big change since Microsoft acquired it a while back, and it’s a good one for small-to-medium sized design studios, freelancers, and anyone who writes front-end code for fun and profit: Free users now get unlimited private repositories. For free. No money. GitHub has always offered free public repositories, but you had to pay for the private ones; a move which encouraged the flourishing of open source software....

Oftentimes, no matter how you handle a project, the client is an *** and you’ve no choice but to walk away. JW Waste Management [not its real name] is that kind of client. If we’d paid attention to our collective gut, spotted the obvious warning signs, then we wouldn’t have been caught out. Hopefully some of the lessons we learned will help you avoid the same problems. The Kickoff Meeting JW Waste Management is a trash disposal business,...

I’m a big fan of templates. They’re an essential part of any productive designer’s workflow and they can also be really helpful in boosting your brand’s identity through greater consistency and professionalism. Project management templates are one such example of templates that definitely belong in the workflow of a web designer. They free you from having to handle tedious project and time management tasks and, consequently,...

Every human being needs, rather desperately, to feel accepted. They don’t necessarily need to feel accepted by everyone, but they do need to feel accepted by someone. It’s a part of our nature, and nature in general. Even as I type this, my cat Cleocatra is demanding that I give her attention, and if I don’t, she’ll leave my room in a huff. [A few minutes later:] She didn’t leave. She stuck her claws into me. Users can have very similar...

New year, new design trends! While everyone is talking about big-picture trends such as designing for voice and virtual reality, there are more immediate design elements that you can see (and deploy) right now for a more on-trend website. From websites without images above the scroll, to ecommerce that disguises itself as content, to bright blue everything, here’s a look at what’s trending this month. 1. No “Art” Above the Scroll...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Web designers have typically always been big-picture people, in that they like having really big screens in front of them. It’s convenient, and it makes you feel very professional. At this point in my life, I don’t think I could go back to having just one monitor, either. And yet, I find that many websites don’t live up to the potential promised by big darned screens, or even that presented by phones with HD resolutions. This is because we...

It’s going to happen at some point this year; you will face designer burnout. One of the reasons that burnout is so common for creatives is that it’s a never-ending process. (You can’t just stop having ideas because you are off the clock.) But there are things you can do to help make the burnout less bad and stay energized and focused more of the time. Here’s your checklist for the new year. (Seems like a great resolution, right?) 1. Get Away...

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space. It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life....

Happy New Year to one and all! At this time every year we like to publish our predictions of what the web industry will be up to over the coming twelve months. It also serves as a chance to reflect on where we’ve been. This year, I’ve decided to be a little more ambitious and come up with the click-baitey total of 19 predictions for 2019 (that’s 13 more than last year). Consequently, some of the predictions may be less likely than others, but I...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Everyone needs time off, and this is especially true for creative professions. The brain is like any other organ in your body: when it gets tired, it doesn’t work nearly as well. Keep going when your brain is tired, and it’ll start thinking daft thoughts like, “Maybe if I put some cocaine in my Adderall CoffeeTM, I can invent the next great framework after I finish up this site for my uncle’s business.” Very rarely is anything of worth...

After many weeks and months of preparations, you are ready to go; you’ve done everything that you needed to do to make sure that the design and development of the new site has been put together perfectly and you are happy to move forward. So you press the launch button (because that’s how it works, right?), you sit back and congratulate yourself and your colleagues on relaunching the new website successfully… …only to see the organic...

According to a recent QuickBooks survey, the #1 reason freelancers go into business for themselves is because it lends them the freedom to shape their own career path. Whether you’ve done freelance web design work for a few months or a few years, there may come a time when you feel bored, unchallenged, or limited by it. When that happens, do you keep charging along because it’s what you originally set out to do? Or do you work on turning your...

Hey there, WDD Readers. Once more, I have spent a whole lot of my life online. My New Year’s resolution is to stay inside and keep doing that. I feel I shall probably succeed. I have lived and breathed Internet stuff all year, and once again, I don’t even know how much I don’t know. The Internet holds untold numbers of secrets, most of them fairly dull, some of them delightful, and some of them are disgusting enough to inspire a certain awe and...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Running low on content ideas? User-generated content (UGC) is becoming a more and more popular means of filling company websites. When used correctly, it can actually end up adding a near endless, high-quality stream of relevant content for your business to use. Of course, figuring out the right way to incorporate user-generated content into your site or blog can be a real challenge. It has to be done in a way that engages your audience while...

COBOL is a programming language that was originally designed in 1959, an era that many people might think of as being “before computers”. That’s not true, of course; they just didn’t have computers at home. The language is still being used by some businesses on giant mainframe computers. It’s a bit like Linux: people interact with it every day, they just don’t know it. The point here is simple: the world more or less runs on old code,...

If you’re familiar with Visual Composer, you may have witnessed a few big changes going on. First, we changed the name of our Visual Composer Page Builder to WP Bakery. Then we launched a new product that’s called Visual Composer Website Builder. And you’re probably wondering… “What is going on? Which one is which?” Is the Visual Composer Website Builder the same as the old Visual Composer? Is it a 2.0? Is WP Bakery a new product?...

Happy holidays! This collection of new tools and resources is our gift to you this season. And there are plenty of holiday-themed elements sprinkled in. Enjoy! If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered! Humaaans Humaaans is a design kit packed with illustrations of people...