It’s the first day of Spring! As you look to clean up other parts of your life (e.g. your home, your refrigerator, your yard) make the cleanup of your web design business a priority as well. If you’re anything like me, you set aside time later in the week or month, promising yourself that you’ll finally take care of “business stuff”. And if you’re also like me, you often have to postpone those business maintenance tasks because new...

As a UX writer, it’s my job to know how to create web copy that convinces readers to take action. That said, it doesn’t matter how engaging of a story I craft for my clients’ web pages or blog posts. If what I’ve written looks terrible on the page, no one will bother to read it. Here’s the problem though: UX writers are not designers. No matter how many short sentences we write to succinctly communicate a point or jargon-free copy we craft...

Social media is an interesting thing. As web design professionals, it can be a great opportunity to share your work and get in front of prospects who might otherwise never find you online. But for as much good as social media can do to propel your marketing efforts, it has the potential to be just as harmful to your business. Social Media Mistakes That Can Harm Your Web Design Business CareerBuilder surveyed over 1,000 people involved in the hiring...

Contact forms are a necessity for websites. Without them, your clients would be relegated to handling website- or business-related matters over the phone or email. Worse, they’d have absolutely no context for the call or message, which would increase the amount of time they’d have to spend responding to it. Contact forms, instead, gather essential details from visitors so that your clients can go into each conversation better prepared....

I recently began reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and have been blown away by what I’ve learned so far. Regardless of what your ultimate career goal is—to actively build websites for clients or to turn your business into a thriving digital agency—there are ways in which you can work less and accomplish more. I’m about halfway through the book and I’ve already shaved an hour off of each workday just by using the tips in the book....

In January 2018 alone, consumers conducted over 1 billion voice searches. By 2020, it’s estimated that 30% of all online searches will take place without the use of a screen. Needless to say, voice search is set to make serious waves in the not-so-distant future. As more users seek out the convenience of using their voice to search online, you have to consider how this will impact mobile websites. As of now, your main concern doesn’t need...

All of the work you do to grow your web design business requires an investment of time and energy. And if you do this song-and-dance routine for long enough, you’re bound to become exhausted by it all. So, how do you stop doing so much without losing momentum? Productivity tools help quite a bit as do templates — be they for managing projects, clients, or  to streamline your design work. In other words, anything you can do to automate, delegate,...

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,...

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...

SEO is a complex matter and one that web designers and developers might feel is best left to copywriters and search professionals to handle. That makes sense since many common SEO hacks revolve around the manipulation of content and the tagging of it for search. Here’s the thing though: there are certain choices you make as a web designer that ultimately affect the search-friendliness of your website. Which means you should be involved in...

Jumpshot took a look at how online searches were most commonly conducted in 2016. What’s not surprising is that Google owned the majority of online search queries (with U.S. users, at least). What is surprising, however, is that searches through Google Images were the second most popular type of search. As such, I’d like to focus this discussion around Google Image search and how to use image SEO to boost your website’s presence there....

There’s something very special about social media marketing and how it compels consumers to engage with it. The Hootsuite 2018 Social Media Barometer says there are now over 3.2 billion global consumers who are active on social media. With such a large part of the population actively involved in social media, it’s no surprise that 67% of business executives surveyed in the report said that social media marketing improves their bottom...

In a recent post, I discussed how caution needs to be taken when designing websites for a global audience. Different cultures perceive things like color quite differently from one another. Devices that might be popular in one region of the world might not be used in another. And the customs each country has—even for something as seemingly insignificant as filling out a contact form—can vary greatly. Needless to say, global web design...

Before you ever sit down to design a website for a client, you develop user personas that are representative of their target audience. Once you’ve established an identity for the main user (or users), you can more easily shape an experience that caters to their needs and motivations. But what do you do when the target audience isn’t so clearly defined into one or two neatly packaged personas? Take a website like Zappos, for instance. Zappos...