If you're a small business owner, you scrutinize every dollar that leaves your bank account and make sure that you will have a strong return on that investment. With credit still in the dumps and margins low, you can't afford to throw away money - as if you could have just two years ago. Now that you need a website, you cringe every time you get a quote or proposal. And you do not want to risk quality or wasting money (no matter how little) by working with an overseas design chop-shop. So, what can you do to save money on your website design costs?… Read more »

If you've been doing design for a while, you probably tend to fall into a recognizable pattern. Clients generally don't like taking creative risks and usually demand a pretty average-looking design. So, ever the Customer Pleaser, you continually churn out the designs your clients expect; the solutions they want to see. While this may be a good business move, it will inevitably hold you back from making new discoveries or tapping into new markets. It will hold you back from opening new doors. Designers need to constantly learn more and grow in order to remain competitive and successful.… Read more »

This article is written expressly for small business owners. Very often, a small business owner asks me how much a website will cost. It's a funny question to be discussed in another article, but after a couple pointed questions, I toss out some numbers. His eyes inevitably bulge and he looks like I kicked him in the livers. Yea, you can get an overseas chop-shop to throw your content in a template for you for $200. But let's talk about what a website can do for your business, and what those goals are worth to you. Now decide if you want to hire someone who's capable of achieving those goals.… Read more »

I'm sure you noticed that the top of my website does not feature any sort of fancy logo mark for my brand. As a designer, my personal opinions, knowledge, ideas and creativity are what makes me unique. I am my own brand, and my name represents Me. As such, it is a valid argument to say I deserve my own logo. I agree only so far as to say, keep it a simple type treatment. An over-designed logo mark will just get in the way.

Since my name is my brand, I want it to be as clear as day. Hence, the huge serif ITC Cheltenham Handtooled. My own name is especially tricky for many people, due to the overwhelming lack of vowels (it's really not that bad, but I empathize with those who have trouble with it). As such, I want people to be very clear who they're dealing with. It's me!… Read more »

In my recent advocacy for Drupal as being perfect for small websites and designers, I have decided to start writing tutorials. These tutorials will be perfect for web designers, rather than developers, because that's the area I see myself in. Drupal has a steep learning curve, but once the concepts are tackled, I think it's accessible enough for people who don't know how to write code.… Read more »

If you're a designer, you can certainly commiserate with me on the pain of dealing with IE6, the ugly step sister of browsers. It's no joke to say that making a design work and look good for Internet Explorer 6 - with the float bugs, margin bugs, odd white-space issues, and myriad other rendering quirks and oddities - can triple a project budget and timeline. We've all been there, cranking out code in record time, only to have a client say something looks funky in IE6. And then you spend 4 more days trying to track down the problem.

So when it came time to design my own website, I decided to leave IE6 in the dust. I forgot it existed.… Read more »

CSS shorthand will let you write leaner and cleaner code, resulting in smaller file sizes, and ultimately, it will just save you time when you're writing out your page styling. Here are my top 5 shorthand properties:

1. Background… Read more »

Definition lists might one day go on a rampage. They're quiet, now, but people generally ignore them, and by and large, they're very misunderstood. I show them lots of love, though, in the hopes that when they do go on a killing spree, they'll remember that I cared about them. But besides a weird exhaustion-induced imagination about markup elements taking down the global population, definition lists really are very useful and very misunderstood. They add a lot of semantic meaning to your markup for search engines and others.… Read more »

I have a wonderful free gift to you designers! I see way too many people building their portfolio websites out of blogging platforms, and it makes me queasy. Wordpress is awesome, for sure, but it's certainly not ideal for displaying your portfolio! So, I have taken the liberty of packaging up a Drupal install which contains a fairly decent structure and layout for portfolio websites - it's what this site is using. I also created a plain vanilla black-and-white theme for you to mess with and make look beautiful!

Drupal is not just for the huge and complicated websites! Drupal is for YOU!… Read more »

There is so much war going on between the fanatics of the different open-source content management systems. I’d say it’s between Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. They each have their pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and I’ve used all of them. I have seen a ton of designers make their online portfolios based on a Wordpress installation, and it’s always bothered me. I had a lot of debate with myself which one to use for my portfolio site, or if I should even bother using one at all, and in the end, I chose Drupal. Here’s why:… Read more »