Business & Tech articles

Someone defaced your website, posted a rude or lewd image, and called you the adult equivalent of a doodyhead? Ah well, time to grab the backups, and maybe switch hosts. You can’t really be faulted for thinking that. In popular culture, hackers are either nefarious, villainous, and often very good-looking nerds, or else they’re helpful nerds of varying appearance who are there to provide comic relief, and tell the world what a horrible...

For most designers – freelance or in-house – generating new business can be a dreaded part of the job. But it necessary to maintain and sustain growth and find new clients. When it comes to finding design work, is there a best way to find jobs? Do you pitch for new business or rely on other methods to find work? Reasons to Pitch for New Business There are so many places that freelance designers can pitch for new business, including job boards,...

When companies become misaligned, different departments may be working toward entirely different goals – in some cases, these goals may be at odds with each other. This is a challenge for the best companies out there, not to mention a startup in the midst of rapid growth. The result is a lack of collaboration as well as a lack of a shared vision and internal conflict. In some cases, misalignment can even be fatal. More than 90 percent of startups...

Hubspot estimates that a 400-person conference on the level of something like Hustle Con could realistically cost around $20,000 to host, not to mention all the time and coordination that goes into running an event that size. As you can imagine, conference organizers have to charge outlandish registration fees in order to make an event of that size profitable. What’s more, many of them gate off the most valuable parts of the events (namely,...

Which Roles Do You Need to Fill? This really depends on why you’re hiring someone as well as the direction you see your business going. Consider the following: Your client base is growing and you’re tired of turning down work. In that case, you’d likely want to hire designers and developers to share your workload with. You spend more time responding to emails and managing finances than actually building websites. If you’re passionate...

When you design a website for a client, you’re in charge for the most part. You’re the one that’s mastered the art of web design, who understands search engine optimization strategies, and so on. However, there may be cases where the decisions your clients make before hiring you end up adversely affecting how you design their website. Web hosting is a critical part of every website, whether you’re building on a self-hosted platform...

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the best ways to get new business — and high-quality business at that. But unless you’re focused on a very small space where everyone knows each other, it can be hard to get your clients to refer you to others on their own. That’s why you need to be willing to ask clients for testimonials and online reviews. Look, consumers are smart. They know that anyone can build a website for their business and claim that...

Within hours of the recent mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque by a far-right terrorist, the country’s authorities were scrambling to ensure a sickening video the murderer streamed on Facebook was barred from the nation’s screens. Due to the nature of the Internet, the task of removal proved very difficult. But eventually, the government succeeded — using controversial tactics usually associated with Internet censorship by authoritarian...

How long ago did you start your design business or side gig? Three months? Three years? And how long has it been since you evaluated your business since then? As a web designer, your job is to think critically and creatively for your clients, which is why you ask them probing questions like: How old is your business? What’s its mission? Who’s your target audience? What’s the personality of your brand? Where do you see your business in five...

I really don’t need to explain how important your reputation is, do I? Short version: if people think you suck, either as a person or as a designer, they won’t hire you. It’s not a difficult concept, all things considered. Figuring out what other people think of us is much harder. Controlling what they think about you is next to impossible, as any attempt to “change your image” will probably backfire, unless you’re a consummate actor....

Design work is very time consuming. But it’s not just the labor you put into building websites that takes time and concentration. Because the projects you work on typically have a short shelf life, you’re constantly having to find new gigs, woo potential clients, and sign them onto your service — which is like another job in and of itself. So, when do you find time to look for more work when you're so busy actually doing it? You could set aside...

The Internet as a concept, and as a community, is much like a teenager: it’s struggling to establish its identity, everyone is trying to tell it what to do, and it tends to lash out at both people who deserve it as well as those who don’t. It does so at random, and you’re not its real dad, anyway. The practice of designing websites, however, has gone right past the teenage years and blown past the whole human-life-span metaphor entirely. Web...

Every day, people are asking themselves things like, “React or Vue?” “VR or no VR?” “CSS Grid or Flexbox?” These are the wrong questions entirely, because the technology you focus on or use next should always be matched to both the job and the people at hand. Besides, here are the answers: Personal preference. Not yet, wait ‘til the market starts to truly expand again. CSS Grid for known quantities, Flexbox for unknown quantities....

It’s becoming easier to design websites, what with Wix, Squarespace, and even now WordPress providing DIY site builder tools. On the flipside of that, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to convince even the least technically-savvy business owner that they shouldn’t try to build their own website. Sadly, the rise of the site builder isn’t the only excuse prospects have for not wanting to work with web designers. In this post,...