Business & Tech articles

As a web designer, you’re constantly being bombarded with messages that tell you to acquire new skills, try new tools, and keep on hustling. But if you’re constantly changing things up, does it do the opposite of what you originally set out to do? In other words, if you always have to start over, is it possible to ever really achieve anything? I think it ultimately depends on why you’re making the change. When Change Is the Right Move for Web...

We are gathered here today…. Today I write in memory of Adobe Flash (née Macromedia), something that a bunch of people are actually too young to remember. I write this with love, longing, and a palpable sense of relief that it’s all over. I have come to praise Flash, to curse it, and finally to bury it. We’ve been hearing about the death of Flash for a long time. We know it’s coming. December 2020 has been announced as the official timeframe...

When it comes to creating and launching a website, it’s important to deliver realistic time expectations to the client, and establish the different stages you can bill them for. After all, creating a site is about so much more than putting some code together. From the initial brief to the launch of the site there are numerous stages in between. It can be natural to quote a lump price and charge it all at the end, or 50% upfront and 50% on completion....

For many professionals looking for new work opportunities, they know that prospective employers are going to ask for proof of their credentials; where they went to school; how long they worked in the field; who they worked for; a résumé communicates these details nicely. For web designers, though, a list of jobs and accolades isn’t sufficient. Imagine if you created a resume that listed off your skills and experience as a designer: I have...

For those of you working from home right now (willingly or unwillingly), you can’t allow your surroundings to have an effect on your work and, more importantly, your client relationships. Clients don’t care where you are. They just want you to get the job done, and get it done it well. By that same token, you can’t allow your interactions with clients to have a trickle-down effect on your home life. There needs to be a clear separation between...

In today’s roundup of the latest research for web designers, we’re going to look at a variety of topics, from 2020 holiday shopping predictions to missed opportunities in SEO. Retail Experts Predict Huge Uptick in E-commerce Holiday Sales Shelley E. Kohan wrote a piece for Forbes entitled, “Coronavirus Fears May Drive U.S. E-Commerce Sales Beyond 2020 Projections—And Change How People Shop In The Future”. While all we have at...

I know this might seem like an odd question to ask. After all, it’s not like we’re living in a villain-filled Gotham City in need of saving. When it comes to asking the question, “Can web designers save the world?”, I look at it like this: Superheroes don’t exist in real life, so there’s no way that one single person on this planet is going to “save” the world — web designer or otherwise. But heroes that fight small battles that...

Have you ever heard of disaster recovery and business continuity? Basically, they’re processes that enable businesses to survive a crisis — no matter what it’s caused by: a natural disaster, economic downturn, personal emergency, or something else. There’s a lot involved, but one of the most important parts of recovery is how the company manages their finances before and during a crisis. This isn’t just for large corporations,...

As a designer, you’ve probably wished you could know exactly what your clients were thinking at one point or another. Maybe it was when they were vaguely describing how they wanted their design to “pop”. Or maybe when they were trying to express exactly why the fifteenth revision still wasn’t quite right. Or maybe it was after they refused to do a customer testimonial despite insisting they loved everything about the final product....

Whenever a company posts a job opening for a web design employee or freelancer, they typically include a set of hard and soft skills they’re looking for. Hard skills are design skills that are measurable and well-documented. For instance: A degree in a web design-related field; Aptitude with Sketch or Photoshop; Training in color theory and responsive design. Your portfolio and résumé serve as proof of hard skills. Soft skills, on the...

Sadly, some clients can be just as sensitive, and triggered as online trolls; You recommend an update to a logo they designed themselves (even though you didn’t know that at the time); You disagree with their suggestion that paying for backlinks is a legit marketing strategy; You ask them to clarify what “I don’t like it” means in response to the mockups you delivered. Before you know it, they’re providing irrelevant feedback, slinging...

If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all! We all have personal tragedies. Sometimes those tragedies are more than anyone could handle, and that’s when you encounter some very basic, intense emotions. For some it’s the fiercely stark task of overcoming, shutting out all else; for others, it’s thoughts of helplessness. Unfortunately, most people will run the gamut of these polar emotions. I’ve been through all this and...

One of the problems with coining a term like “user experience” or its acronym counterpart “UX” is that it opens up the floodgates for other trendy experience-related acronyms to enter the web design lexicon. CX, DX, EX, HX, JX, PX, UX, (U)XD... Is all of this really necessary though? While I don’t think you need to go adding EX or JX to your vocabulary anytime soon, it’s still a good idea to educate yourself on what these X acronyms...

Are you experiencing full wanderlust with a side order of burnout in the first week of the new year? Has the post-holiday gloom got you down? Are you starting a new decade in your office, wondering if you’ll make it to the next? Would you love to see a bit of the world before you’re too old to enjoy it? Here’s the good (great) news: one of the best things about being a web professional is that we can pretty much work from anywhere — as long as there...