Page 30 of 33 (323 total articles)
  • May 22, 2007 in Business & Process

    Proposals Should be Short and Sweet

    I’m a reminded almost daily of how important this principle is in the New Media business. I’ve written hundreds of proposals since I started Liquid Design Media and I’ve found that big picture summary proposals are the way to go for a number of very important reasons: (1) You will save a lot of time and energy. (2) They most likely won’t understand the details so the more you put in there, the more confused they are about what they’re buying. (3) Short, sweet proposals attract the type of easy-going clients that we all love. If I’m proposing a new web site for a client, I start out with an all-inclusive design and set up quote that covers the type of design I think would work best (Straight html, ajax, flash, or hybrid) and all of the other work necessary to get it up on the web with the basic static pages. Next, I list out the other elements (blog, news, calendar, etc.) that I recommend they should have on the site. I stay away from the hows and really focus on the whys. That will do. Don’t over think it and don’t worry about it, even if it’s a big project.

  • May 21, 2007 in Business & Process

    Powerpoint is Dead! Maybe not...

    I haven�t used Powerpoint in a long time for various reasons. I usually find that it�s easier to just talk with a client about a project and click around to a few web sites as examples. It comes across more personal and it takes a lot less time to prepare. But many times I have clients that have created Powerpoints themselves that they want to post on their web site (one of my least favorite requests). Kiss the Powerpoint to web conversion fear and anxiety goodbye! Slideburner.com has created a service that will allow you to upload those unwieldy PP presentations and convert them on the fly. It�s free for up to 200MB and $3/mo. for 1GB.

  • May 20, 2007 in Product Reviews

    flickrSLiDR

    flickrSLiDR Just when I think I have found the best flickr mashup tool (see a few posts down), a newer better one shows up on digg. Nice!

  • May 18, 2007 in Mirificam Press News

    Matthew Griffin on ziki.com

    Matthew Griffin on ziki.com If you�re like me, you have a few blogs, a couple web sites, a flickr account, and a forum account or two. But if someone googles your name, not much comes up. Well, here is the answer to your personal promotion problems. Ziki.com takes all of your blogs, websites, feeds, and a bunch of other stuff and blends it all into a myspace-ish page that can be indexed by search engines. The link above is to my personal Ziki page so you can see what one looks like.

  • May 17, 2007 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Embedding a Calendar into Your Website or Blog

    I’m actually posting this to just say how impressed I am with 30boxes.com. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been searching for a good online calendar that can be embedded into a site. Google calendar is pretty good, jotlet.com is a little better, but 30boxes.com just takes the cake. It’s easy to use and extremely easy to share/embed into a blog or website. The event input is intuitive so if you put “John’s Birthday” it automatically asks you for the year he was born and keeps track of how old he is. They also have an RSS mashup feature that doesn’t even require you to sign up. You just put in an RSS address and it automatically creates a calendar mashup of the items in the feed. I did it with my family blog and it even pulled in the photos I had posted and slapped them into the day they were added to the blog. What more could you ask for. Great job guys!

  • May 16, 2007 in Business & Process

    CreativePro Office

    This is a new online project/office management site that I found while doing some research for online calendars. I like the stuff that 37signals puts out and I personally use pipelinedeals.com to manage my projects but this one seems to really complete the loop with calendars, invoicing, todo lists, etc. It�s hard to find a one stop solution for running the da-to-day tasks in a business and this is the closest I�ve seen so far.

  • May 15, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Download Movies Legally? No Way!

    I recently bought a Mac Mini on Ebay and hooked it up to my home television. Of course, after getting everything set up and networked and all that fun stuff, I started looking at options for downloading movies legally. If anyone out there is in the middle of this process now, let me save you some time. There is nothing good out there. The services that have a good selection have high prices and the ones that have reasonable prices have a poor selection. That�s the bottom line. Why would I pay $10-$25 for a download that�s not even DVD quality when I can get the same thing on DVD for much less? I know that it doesn�t cost more to facilitate a download than it does to print package and ship a DVD. So what gives? Hollywood desperately needs to rethink it�s online distribution strategy. They�ve made it difficult and expensive to do it legally so people are going to do it illegally. If you�re not convinced, check out this article on PC Magazine�s web site. It goes into more detail. PC Magazine Article

  • May 14, 2007 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Embedding Your Flickr on a Web Site

    You’d think this would be an easy task but it’s really not. Oh yeah, it’s easy to slap a slide show up there, but what if you want to post photo set up on your web site that isn’t just a slide show. Well, after a lot of searching and quite a few “That’s almost what I’m looking fors”, I found PictoBrowser. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s like the YouTube of photos. You just have to enter your user name and choose what photo set you want to embed, and out pops the embed code. It also resized very well so feel free to change the size of the Flash object once you embed it.

  • May 11, 2007 in Business & Process

    Should I Use Search Engine Marketing?

    Uhhhh…. Yes! I have found that using search engine marketing through Google Ad Words, Yahoo!, etc. and focusing on local keywords is extremely effective. It’s actually really surprised me how many web designers still don’t have faith in the medium they selling. Have faith! It works!

  • May 8, 2007 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    How to make sexy buttons with CSS

    I actually saw this link on the Style Grind blog. Great find! This article gives a very simple solution to make expanding buttons with just an "a" tag and a "span" tag.

[BEGIN] [< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 [Next>>] [END]