Understanding Web Design Pricing

Web design pricing can be quite complex due to the numerous variables involved. The cost of hiring a freelance web designer can range from as low as $500 to as high as $5000 or more depending on several factors such as project complexity, designer’s experience level, and geographical location.

1. Project Complexity
   The complexity of your project plays a significant role in determining the cost of web design services. A simple website with basic functionality will naturally cost less than an intricate e-commerce site with multiple pages and advanced features. The more complex your website needs to be, the more time it will take to build, hence increasing the overall cost.
2. Designer’s Experience Level
   Another factor that influences web design pricing is the experience level of the freelancer. A novice designer who’s just starting might charge less than an experienced professional who has honed their skills over many years and projects. It’s important to remember that while hiring a less experienced designer might save you money upfront, it could end up costing more in the long run if they lack the expertise needed to deliver high-quality work.
3. Geographical Location
   When searching for a “freelance web designer near me,” keep in mind that location can significantly impact pricing. Freelancers based in countries with lower living costs may charge less than those living in high-cost areas like North America or Western Europe.

Pricing Models Used by Freelance Web Designers

Freelance web designers typically use one of three pricing models: hourly rate, fixed price, or per project.

1. Hourly Rate
   In the hourly rate model, freelancers charge for each hour they spend working on your project. This is a common pricing model for freelancers and can range from $20 to $200 per hour depending on the factors mentioned above.
2. Fixed Price
   Some freelancers prefer to charge a fixed price for their services. This means they estimate the total hours it will take to complete your project and multiply that by their hourly rate. This model provides more predictability in terms of cost but may not account for any changes or additions you might want to make during the design process.
3. Per Project
   The per-project pricing model is similar to the fixed price model, but instead of estimating hours, the freelancer estimates the overall value of the project and charges accordingly. This model is often used for larger projects with clearly defined scopes.

Finding a Freelance Web Designer Near Me

When searching for a “freelance web designer near me,” it’s crucial to consider not just cost but also value. While hiring a cheaper freelancer might seem like a good idea initially, it could end up costing more if they lack the necessary skills or experience.

Remember that a well-designed website can significantly boost your business’s online presence and lead to increased sales and customer engagement. Therefore, investing in quality web design services can provide excellent returns in the long run.

In conclusion, while there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how much freelancers charge for web design, understanding these factors can help you make an informed decision when hiring a freelance web designer near you.

The post How Much Do Freelancers Charge for Web Design? appeared first on Boshanka.

#1: Create Your Facebook Business Store

For starters, you will need to create a Facebook business store. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to turn your personal account into a page regardless of the number of friends you have.  Creating a business page on Facebook is quite simple.

Let’s go through how to setup your Facebook business page:

Step 1:  Enter Your Business Info

• Click on the following link to get started https://www.facebook.com/pages/creation/ or better even, click on the drop-down on the upper right section of your Facebook dashboard then click on “Create Page”
• Select “Business or Brand” from the two options you are given on the page.
• Fill out the details required that is, things like your business page name, the business niche, your business address, your contact info

Step 2: Add Your Business Photos

The next step is to add some photos which are more or less the face of your business on Facebook. This includes a business logo and the cover photo which should ideally be 170 x 170 pixels and 820 x 462 pixels in dimensions respectively.

Tips:

• Square images tend to look better than rounded options particularly along with posts and Facebook ads
• You don’t have to be a pro to create amazing images. You can use free photo editing tools like Canva to create and edit your images but if you want professional grade results then you will have to hire a designer for the job
• You can choose to use a cover video or slideshow in place of a cover image if you want to be a bit creative on your outlook.

Step 3: Complete & Customize Your Page Business Page

Facebook’s page setup wizard will guide you to fill the important details you need to complete setting up the business page. You could also click on “Settings” and “Page Info” to fill out details like your business location, the category, the hours of operation and much more. They will appear on the about section of your page and you can always add as much info as you can.

You can even customize the page further by adding tabs. If you don’t know what page tabs are for then they are simply used to split different parts of the business page like photos, posts, reviews, etc.

Step 4: Add collaborators to your Business Page

If you will be running the business page along with a team of other members, you will certainly need to split the roles and assign privileges depending on the user roles.

There are a number of roles you can assign to your team members:

• Admin – Just like you, an admin is the super user and has a complete read and write rights on the page
• Editor – Can make changes on the page. He or she can also send messages, create posts and ads, review insights, view posts by admin etc.
• Moderator – Can check and handle comments to the business, send out messages, see admin posts, create ads, and view insights.
• Advertiser – Can create Facebook ads, see what admins posts, and review insights.
• Analyst – Can see admin posts and look at the insights.

To assign these roles, go to settings and click on the “Page Roles” section. Key in the Facebook name or the associated email of the person you wish to assign the role. Proceed to assign the desired role.

Step 5: You are ready!

Once you have finished setting up your setup, you are ready to start selling on the Facebook store!

#2: Extend Facebook Business to an Ecommerce Store

You can use Facebook as the primary shop for your business but this will only work if you don’t handle lots of products. It’s definitely a great place when starting out but once you are up and running, you will need to scale up the tech stack as well. You don’t want to spend a lot of time managing tons of orders and having to add products to your Facebook store manually, right? Thankfully, there is a nice solution to this.

You could setup an ecommerce store then link it to your Facebook business store. The beauty is that top ecommerce solutions like Shopify integrate seamlessly to Facebook’s shop. With Shopify’s Facebook Store app installed, for example, you will get a tab added to your page with the products you want to sell via Facebook.

There are a number of advantages that come with linking your Facebook store to an ecommerce platform. Think of as a having a proper backend powering up your site and your FB store plus you can sell your products through other channels on the web.

#3: Grow Your Business

It isn’t enough to setup a store via Facebook or an ecommerce platform. You will need to do some work to grow it if you are to get the right conversion rates. To grow your business you need to a bit of marketing or rather, “the 4Ps of marketing” i.e. Product, Price, Place & Promotion.

Here are a few tips to growth hack your Facebook business:

• Set the right price for your products
• Craft marketing and communication strategies to market your business and products. This comes in the form of clever digital ad campaigns, sales promotions, giving out special offers on products, using PR strategies among others.
• Work on a product delivery approach that works for both you and the consumer

Wrap Up:

That’s pretty much the quickest way to start working towards a profitable business on Facebook. Remember, it is a competitive business world. So once your store is up and running, it is time to turn your attention to marketing your brand and products.

The post How to Start & Grow a Business on Facebook appeared first on Boshanka.

With over 41% of all online stores running WooCommerce, it’s not surprising that there are plugins available to add seasonal products and pricing to your shop. This is the complete guide to creating a WooCommerce seasonal store. You’ll learn how to show and hide specific products – or even your entire shop – at different times of year. And all without writing a single line of code.

Who Needs a Seasonal WooCommerce Store?

There are lots of reasons why you might need WooCommerce seasonable products. These case studies illustrate some different types of seasonal store.

Wholesale Store with WooCommerce Seasonal Products

A B2B wholesale store might sell the majority of their products year-round, while having a category of Summer-related products which is only available to distributors in Spring and Summer. It’s not cost-effective to stock these items in other seasons, and you sell the same Summer products each year.

You obviously don’t want to waste time adding the seasonal products to WooCommerce each Spring and deleting them again in Autumn. Instead, you can use a WooCommerce seasonal products plugin to show and hide the entire ‘Summer’ category at the click of a button.

WooCommerce Christmas Store

Some businesses are entirely seasonal, with products that are only available at specific times of year. Christmas shops are the best example of a completely seasonal WooCommerce store. They come into existence each year as Christmas approaches, and completely close down when the season ends.

For SEO reasons, a WooCommerce seasonal store shouldn’t go completely offline once the Christmas season is over. The best way to maintain your search engine ranking is to keep your website permanently online – ideally with details of when your Christmas store will open again.

However, you want to prevent people from making purchases out of season. A WooCommerce seasonal store plugin provides a quick way to publish your store each year before Christmas, and instantly hide it afterwards. The rest of your website remains public all the time.

WooCommerce Seasonal Sale

Some websites sell the same products year-round, but have seasonal pricing and sales. For example, a WooCommerce clothing website might sell products at full-price for most of the year, with seasonal sales in January and August.

Instead of manually changing your pricing 4 times a year, a WooCommerce seasonal pricing plugin lets you switch between different versions of your products – one at full-price, the other at sale price.

Here are some tips on setting up a WooCommerce seasonal products and pricing, whatever type of store you’re creating.

2 Plugins to Create WooCommerce Seasonal Products

Next, I’ll tell you about two 2 WordPress plugins that can be used to create a seasonal WooCommerce store. Which plugin to choose depends on whether you need to create a completely seasonal store, or seasonal products within a permanent shop.

• WooCommerce Private Store – Use this plugin if your entire eCommerce store will be seasonal. You can quickly show and hide your WooCommerce store depending on the season, while leaving the rest of your website public.
• WooCommerce Protected Categories– Choose this plugin to create WooCommerce seasonal products within a wider online shop. You can instantly show and hide the seasonal products, while leaving your other products available all the time. You’ll also need this plugin to change your product pricing at different times of year.

Read on to discover how to use each plugin to sell seasonal products in WooCommerce. Before you start, I’m assuming that you already have a WordPress website with WooCommerce set up and some products added. (If not, WPBeginner have an excellent tutorial about setting up WordPress and WooCommerce.)

Option 1 – Create a Seasonal WooCommerce Store

WooCommerce Private Store is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that lets you show and hide your WooCommerce store at the click of a button. It’s perfect for eCommerce stores that are completely seasonal and only available at certain times of year.

The plugin publishes and unpublishes your online store whenever you need to. The rest of your website (e.g. Home, About, Contact, Blog, etc.) remains available year-round, so you’ll always have an online presence even when your store is closed.

1. Buy WooCommerce Private Store. Install and activate the plugin by following the instructions in your confirmation email.
2. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Private Store. Add your license key and click Save.
3. Navigate to Appearance > Menus and add links to your store to your website menu. For example, you might want to add links to the main WooCommerce Shop page, product categories, or individual products. You can add these links even when the seasonal store is offline. The plugin will automatically hide these links from the menu.

Once you’ve done this, you can show and hide your WooCommerce seasonal store whenever you like. Deactivate WooCommerce Private Store any time you want to make your store available to the public (e.g. in the run-up to Christmas). Activate the plugin whenever you want to hide your store.

Will it Really Hide my Entire ECommerce Store?

Simply activating the Private Store plugin will hide every part of your store, so no one will be able to find it. This includes hiding your main shop page, products, product categories, cart, checkout, and any other WooCommerce content.

The plugin automatically hides any store-related menu items and widgets. This means that you don’t have to add these links manually each season. While the plugin is inactive, the menu links to your store will be hidden so that no one can find it. When you deactivate the plugin, the menu links to your store will instantly appear so that people can start shopping.

Of course, there’s always a chance that someone will accidentally find a link to your seasonal store while it’s offline. If this happens, WooCommerce Private Store will prevent them from viewing any products or make purchases. A password login form will appear, preventing people from accessing the store content. You can customize the text for this page on the plugin setting page. For example, you could change the wording to “Sorry, our seasonal store is currently closed. It will re-open on 1st December”.

Option 2 – Create Seasonal Areas Within Your Store

WooCommerce Protected Categories is a WordPress plugin that lets you show and hide specific categories within an eCommerce store. It’s a good option for creating seasonal areas within a wider store. You can publish seasonal products at certain times of year, and quickly hide them when the season ends. The rest of your website remains public all the time.

1. Buy WooCommerce Protected Categories. Install it using the instructions provided with the plugin.
2. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Protected Categories and enter your license key. DO NOT tick the ‘Category Visibility’ options. Your protected seasonal categories and their products need to be hidden from the public parts of your store.
3. Next, go to Products > Categories and create your permanent and seasonal categories. You can create as many categories as you like, both for the permanent and seasonal parts of the store.
4. On the main Products list in WooCommerce, use ‘Quick Edit’ to easily categorise your products.
5. Go to Appearance > Menus and add links to the navigation menu. For example, a lot of WooCommerce online stores have a ‘Categories’ menu dropdown with links to all the product categories. Add links for your seasonal products, as the plugin will hide them automatically when it’s out of season.

How your WooCommerce seasonal product categories work

At this point, all your categories and their products will be visible on your website. When it’s time to hide your seasonal products, go back to Products > Categories and select the ‘Password Protected’ option for each of your seasonal categories. This will instantly hide the categories and all their products from your WooCommerce store. The seasonal products will be automatically hidden from your main shop page, menu links, and widgets.

When it’s time to publish your seasonal products, simply return to Products > Categories and change your seasonal categories to ‘Public’. The categories and their products will immediately appear on your website. It’s as simple as that!

Create WooCommerce Seasonal Sale Pricing

You can also use the plugin to create a WooCommerce seasonal sale. The instructions for doing this are exactly the same as for selling seasonal products. However, instead of creating a category of seasonal products, you need to create a category of ‘Sale’ products. This will contain duplicates of your main products, but with the reduced sale pricing. (Use the Duplicate Post plugin to quickly clone WooCommerce products.)

Whenever you want to activate the seasonal sale pricing, hide your full-priced categories and set the sale categories to ‘Public’. When it’s time to switch back to standard pricing, switch your full-priced categories back to ‘Public’ and hide the sale categories.

Bonus Tip – Early Access for your Top Customers

As an added bonus, you can give a select few customers early access to your store. They can start shopping before it officially opens for the season! For example, if you have a WooCommerce wholesale store then perhaps your most valued distributors want to stock up early for Christmas.

To do this, simply give them the secret password to unlock the store. Leave WooCommerce Private Store active so that no one else can access it.

Conclusion

There are lots of reasons why an eCommerce store might want to create seasonal products. If you’re using WooCommerce, there are fantastic plugins available that let you achieve this quickly and easily.

Once your chosen WooCommerce seasonal store plugin is set up, you can show and hide products at the click of a button. This is much quicker than manually adding and removing products every time the season changes. Ultimately, it helps to free up your time to focus on more important tasks such as building your business.

How does your business use seasonal products or pricing? Let me know in the comments!

The post How to Create (& Hide!) WooCommerce Seasonal Products & Pricing appeared first on Boshanka.

It empowers non-tech users by giving them the tools to build their own websites, and it gives Web Designers and Developers a head start in creating complex database driven websites for their clients.

Of course it’s no secret that WordPress doesn’t work alone. Coupled with the right Plugins it’s possible to build amazing websites with some really cool features.

This article focuses on the WordPress search feature. Out of the box, the WordPress search is pretty basic. Offering a basic in-title or in-content search for content. This works well enough for small sites without custom post types or taxonomies, but it falls short when used with larger content rich sites, especially if the site makes use of custom fields or custom post types and taxonomies.

Below I’ve listed the 8 best plugins to help you enhance your WordPress search function.

1. Relevanssi

Price: Free

Available from: WordPress.org

The name is taken from the Finnish language, which means Relevant in English.

Relevanssi is a simple, robust and highly customizable search plugin for WordPress that lets you improve the default search function of your WP site in minutes. The plugin comes packaged with a ton of advanced features and showcases search results in the more convenient way.

The best thing about this plugin is that it also supports ill-defined matching as well, to help you identify partial words. Those familiar with Google’s search (and who isnt?!) will find it’s ‘Did you mean…’ suggestions infinitely helpful.

It’s a snip to install and doesn’t require any registration.

Relevanssi extends the default search by allowing the user to search across multiple categories as well as comments, custom fields, and tags. All of which can be defined by the administrator via the Plugin’s admin panel.

There’s a premium version of the plugin available here which comes with extra support. Premium users also benefit from new features as they become available, with free users having an extended wait.

2. Search WP

Price: $49

Available from: Searchwp.com

SearchWP is the Lewis Hamilton of Search plugins. In other words… it’s fast.

Stated as being a ‘turnkey solution that transforms search into something valuable’ Search WP is easy to install, and has been designed specifically with developers in mind. It comes packed with hooks allowing for even further customisation.

A best seller, it allows site administrators to pick and choose which content users can search. It also allows site admins to set up multiple search engines, ideal for those who want to allow users to search specific areas of a site as well as having a global search option. It also works with WooCommerce!

There’s a helpful video direct from the authors which you should check out.

3. WPCS (WordPress Custom Search)

Price: Free

Available from: WordPress.org

As a free alternative to SearchWP, WPCS does a pretty good job of extending the WordPress search functionality. Buyer beware, at the time of writing it’s been over a year since it was last updated on the WordPress.org repo, which is a shame because it has the makings of a great search plugin.

Still, if used carefully and with caution, it could offer a great free alternative.  Its super simple to set up and supports multiple languages.

Styling the search box is made simple and it comes with some helpful widgets for use around your site.

One of the more basic plugins on our list, but still worth a look.

4. Profi Search Form

Price: $21

Available from: Codecanyon.net

Profi Search Form is a premium Search Plugin for WordPress that offers the complete search package. It’s really aimed at eCommerce websites.

Profi aids your visitors by giving instant search results, helping them find products on your site in seconds.

It’s key features include a Fulltext search with options to highlight matches on a page, and it also adds extra functionality WooCommerce users will find helpful like being able to search for numeric values such as prices, measurements or SKU numbers. The plugin also supports conditional fields, useful if you want to show or hide options based on the users initial selections.

The coolest feature of Profi, in this humble web designers opinion, is it’s Area Search. Realised with Google Maps, users can select an area and see results updated for the area they’re in. Awesome for companies who want to offer a ‘find your local branch’ style search, or a property / estate agents website.

Like most other search plugins it supports custom post types and taxonomies, so it’s not just for WooCommerce users!

Out of the box it’s pretty ugly to look at, so you’re going to need some CSS knowledge to make it look the part. See the screenshot below… ewwww!

If you can get past the grumpy looking UI, Profi offers a really solid search solution. And with a rating of 4.83 based on the reviews of 78 people on the envato market place (at the time of writing) we think it’s well worth a look.
Here’s the demo!

5. Dave’s WordPress Live Search

Price: Free

Available from: WordPress.org

Built by (you guessed it!) a bloke named Dave, Daves WordPress Live Search has earned kudos from the likes of WPMUDev, WinningWP and ManageWP.

It’s one of the better Free options out there and ticks all of the usual search boxes but with an extra focus on bringing your visitors live search results. It’s all in the title really.

The Live Search (or more commonly known as AutoComplete) updates the results on the fly as your users type their query. On larger sites with lots of content, this can become pretty slow, so you’re going to need a fast server. Especially if you expect to have lots of visitors using the search at the same time.

The plugin uses Ajax to update the results in real time, so your users are going to need to have Javascript enabled, which in todays modern web, isn’t such a big deal. But just incase, the plugin will fall back to a normal search if Javascript isn’t available.

Dave has helpfully put together a video, demoing the Plugin’s features.

What a guy.

6. Ajax Search Pro for WordPress

Price: $26

Available from: Codecanyon.net

Ajax Search Pro is a premium alternative to Dave’s Live Search. Like Dave’s plugin, it runs on Ajax.

As a premium solution from an Envato Elite Author, this might be preferable for non-tech users, as it comes with the option of Envato’s extended support. It’s well rated by the Envato community too.

It works on mobiles out of the box, with a fully responsive layout, and it’ll look great on your mobiles, retina and 4k devices thanks to it’s use of SVG graphics.

The back end is a bit of a gift, featuring a full drag and drop interface, making it simple to build up complex search forms with just a few clicks.

The autocomplete works really well, and you have the added option to include images in your results, which will massively improve clicks and ultimately, conversions. As one would expect, it supports custom taxonomies and post types too.

The plugin is also built to work with qTranslate and WPML, offering a segmented search of just the users chosen language. As of version 4.0 the plugin now officially supports Visual Composer, so those of you with off the shelf themes using the Visual Composer plugin, you’re quids in!

It’s built for users with out technical know-how, but it also has plenty of action and filter hooks for web developers to get their teeth into.

Check out the demo here.

7. Search Everything

Price: Free

Available from: WordPress.org

A well maintained free option on our list. It’s still actively maintained on the WordPress repo, so it’s a better option for those concerned about the potential security risks of other free plugins which don’t get much TLC. It’s very well rated by it’s users and can be set up and installed in just a couple of clicks.

Like you might expect, this plugin lets your users Search Everything. Pages, tags, custom taxonomies, categories, comments, attachments, custom fields… the list goes on.

More than that, Search Everything also lets users search for really granular stuff, like posts in Draft, excerpts or approved comments. The plugin also comes with a cool featured called Research Everything.

Research Everything is a writing helper that lets you search your posts and link to them while you’re writing. With the power Search you can also expand your search results to include posts from around the web. Cool eh!

8. Search & Filter Pro – The Ultimate WordPress Filter Plugin

Price: $20 (Single Site License) / $75 (Developer License)

Available from: Designs & Code

Search and Filter pro is an excellent choice for those looking to create a really sexy Ajax search page. Via the simple drag and drop interface, you can add in your own custom post types and taxonomies which your users can then live-filter search results with.

Optionally, it’s possible to hide filters based on whether or not there is content available, meaning it’s possible to stop your users ever seeing a ‘no results found’ page.

It’s lightening fast and is truly a complete faceted search option.

The plugin lacks the ability to set up multiple search inputs on a page, annoying if you want to split your search navigation, tho according to the plugin developers, this is a feature which will be included in the next release, which based on their past release schedule would probably come in early 2017.

Check out the standard demo here, or the WooCommerce demo here.

Alternatively there’s a handy demo video below!

Conclusion

For large sites with lots of content, it’s important to offer users a solid search engine and for me, WordPress’s own search engine just doesn’t quite cut it. Selecting one of the search plugins above, and spending a little bit of time tailoring it your site will dramatically improve the experience of your site’s users by helping them get to the information they need, faster.

And that’s good for everyone

The post 8 Plugins to Improve WordPress Search appeared first on Boshanka.

If you’re using Google Workspace , and have tried to set up your Google Workspace email account inside of a second personal Gmail account, you may have run into an error similar to this one:

Support for this issue is poorly documented by google, and like many before, you’ve probably been pulling your hair out trying to find a solution.

Fear not. There is an answer!

How to fix the “Gmail Authentication failed. Please check your username/password” Error. Also known as the “Server response: 534-5.7.14 Error”

Step 1.

Sign into https://workspace.google.com/ with your Google Workspace Administrator domain, username and password.

Step 2.

Once you’re in. Click ‘Security’. If you can’t see it, type Security into the search field at the top of the Admin Console.

Step 3.

Click to expand the ‘Basic Settings’ Section

Step 4.

Click the “Go to settings for less secure apps ››” link next to Less Secure Apps‘

Step 5.

If it’s not set already. change the setting on this page to “Allow users to manage their access to less secure apps“. If this is already set, don’t worry, there’s another change we need to make before everything will start to work :-). Once you’re done. Press ‘SAVE‘ in the bottom right.

Step 6.

Next we need to access the ‘My Account’ page for the Google Workspace user you’re trying to add to your personal gmail account. So if you’re trying to add ‘ben@mydomain.com’ to ben@gmail.com, you need to be signed into ben@mydomain.com. This may well be your Google Workspace Administrator account too, In which case, you’re already signed in.

If it is the same account, and you’re already signed in, you can access the my account page by clicking the icon in the top right hand corner of the screen you’re on, then clicking the blue ‘My Account’ button. If it’s a different account, you simply need to sign in via https://myaccount.google.com/.

Step 7.

From the My Account dashboard of your Google Workspace user account, click the ‘Sign In & Security’ link.

Step 8.

From the left hand menu on the Sign In and Security Page, click ‘Connected Apps & Sites’

Step 9.

Scroll down on the Connected Apps and Sites section and in the last box you’ll see the title ‘Allow less secure apps: on/off’ – press the switch to the right to make it go blue. So the title Reads ‘Allow Less Secure Apps: ON’

Step 10.

Log out of your Google Workspace user account and visit www.gmail.com. Enter your personal gmail username and password to login. Once you’re in, press the cog in the top right hand corner. Then click on the ‘Accounts and Import’ tab. Inside the ‘Send Mail As’ section click on ‘Add another email address that you own’.

Step 11.

In the pop up window that appears, enter your name and the email address, then click on ‘Next Step’.

Step 12.

In the next window, enter ‘smtp.gmail.com’ as the SMTP server. Then enter the email address and password of the google Workspace user account you’re trying to add. Then press ‘Add Account’.

Step 13.

On the next screen, if the account has been successfully added you’ll be asked to enter a verification code. This code will have been emailed to the Google Workspace user email account you’ve just added. Log in to that account and grab the code, then enter it in the box. Or alternatively, click the link included in the email to verify your account. And that’s it. Job done Make yourself a brew.

Step by step video tutorial.

Below you’ll find a full video which takes you through the entire process of adding a Google Workspace email address to a personal Gmail account.

The post ‘Send Mail As’ with Gmail – Fixing the Authentication Failed Error (UPDATED March 2021) appeared first on Boshanka.

To be honest, as long as you have the knowledge and the expertise, you can start building a creative freelance business with a fairly sparse set of tools. You probably own most of them already, in fact…

A desk that feels good to be working at

Sounds obvious, right? I’ve touched on this before, but having a dedicated ‘workstation’ which is free of distractions (rather than plonking your laptop down on the coffee table in front of the TV) can help you stay focused and productive. Every time you sit down at your desk, you’re telling your brain you’re in work mode.

Ensure your workstation is healthy – it should be well lit, well ventilated and laid out to avoid bad posture.

Your desk doesn’t need to be at home. If you have the income, why not rent a desk in an office? You’ll be in an environment built for efficient working, and you’ll sidestep the usual solitary isolation of freelancing by interacting with the office’s team every day.

A fast, reliable, sexy computer

Again, it sounds obvious, but even if you’re not producing digital work, a computer is still pretty essential for coordinating projects and communicating with clients.

But when is a computer not a computer? When it’s a tablet. Depending on the kinds of projects you’re taking on, a tablet might be a better option for you than a laptop or desktop, offering better portability and a more versatile touch interface.

Most tablets don’t have the horsepower or the software library to handle professional work, but there are some which can hold their own. The iPad, for example, has a fantastic selection of powerful apps, built for everything from graphic design to web and app development. It’s also home to fully-fledged tools from the likes of Adobe, WordPress, Dropbox and Google, to name just a few.

There’s also the Surface Pro, which offers roughly the same kind of usability, performance and software compatibility as a PC. If your computer at home can run it, there’s a good chance the Surface Pro can run it too. There’s even USB connectivity, allowing you to plug in external hardware without fancy peripherals.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. Unless you plan on working next to a power socket or lugging an external battery pack around with you (both of which negate the portability aspect somewhat), you might find yourself running out of juice before you’ve finished your work – or before you’ve remembered to save it!

There’s also the price aspect. Tablets are generally quite expensive, whereas laptops are becoming cheaper – and if you already have a computer in your home, can you really afford to buy a tablet?

Whatever you choose as your main work computer, make sure it’s affordable and it meets the needs of your projects. You don’t want to discover, midway through a project, that you’ve bitten off more than it can chew.

A planner

As a freelancer, you’re not just the creative mind behind your work; you’re the project manager as well. That means keeping track of things like milestones, deadlines, invoicing and all the other boring admin bits – which is why you need a dedicated planner.

Your planner could be an online calendar – I use Google Apps, a daily chart on your wall, a to-do list in an Excel spreadsheet, a tiny pocket diary, a Basecamp account, or even an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine which sends you flavoured smoke signals when a deadline is approaching – whatever’s convenient and efficient for you.

With a dedicated project management client, there’s more opportunities to automate things so you’ve got less to think about. For example, you can track the amount of time you’re spending, set scheduled reminders, and create tickable workflows which can let you see what stage you’re at without necessarily having to go into the project to find out.

There’s also more options for checking your progress online from different devices, so you don’t need to be at your desk to find out where you are on a particular project.

However, if you find you work better with old-fashioned pen-and-paper planning, there’s no shame in that either. Just make sure you’ve organised your plans in a way which is intuitive and makes accessing old information quick and easy – even if you think you’ll never need it after the project has wrapped.

A go-to application (or a set of them)

Which software apps are essential for your freelance business? That depends entirely on the industry you’re working in – and if you’ve already committed to a freelance career in that industry, you probably already know which software you’re most comfortable with.

Note that it doesn’t have to be the industry-standard, as long as it provides all the functionality you need to produce great work for your clients. If you’re a graphic designer, you’re probably using Photoshop, but perhaps you’re using GIMP, Affinity Photo or one of the many alternatives out there.

If you work requires you to wear many different hats (such as web development or video production), you’ll need a set of software apps to handle each step of the project; and the more applications you’re using, the more likely you’ll run into compatibility issues. Make sure your apps play nice with your operating system, control interface, presentational medium (browsers and online video player clients, for example) and with each other.

A printer, scanner, camera or any other external hardware

Like software, the hardware tools you’ll need depends entirely on the kind of work you’re doing. Generally speaking, it’s good to have a printer and a scanner; anything which exists in digital form can be committed to paper and vice versa, which is handy for things like contracts and invoices. A USB hub will pay dividends when you run out of ports, and a portable solid state drive will provide plenty of storage and speedy retrieval for all your project files.

Any hardware you buy should be fit for purpose and should work for you. Fancy gadgets like drawing tablets are all well and good, but the aim of buying them should be to make your work process more efficient and/or more creatively fertile.

They shouldn’t spend their life being used for tasks that a keyboard and mouse can do to the same standard in the same amount of time – and they certainly shouldn’t spend their life gathering dust on a shelf because you haven’t learned how to use them.

A phone and an email client

So, you’ve got everything you need to produce work for your clients, but how will you stay in touch with them?

For the vast majority of businesses – even with the huge range of digital communication methods available in 2015 – the answer is email. You’ll probably end up having most of your discussions with clients via the medium of email; and if you’re not careful, that inbox will grow out of control.

Email clients are few and far between, with Mozilla’s Thunderbird often touted as the best for its versatility (thanks in part to its support for plugins). However, a simple Gmail account will probably provide all the functionality you’ll need within your browser, with plenty of features for categorising and searching through your mail.

Of course, when it comes to discussing more serious topics or getting an answer quickly, phone conversations knock email out of the park. Either set up a phone on your desk, or get Skype and have it running in the background all day.

What’s in your freelance toolkit that you can’t live without? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Your Freelance Toolkit – Essential Tools For Project Work appeared first on Boshanka.

First off, it’s all relative. There’s no magic formula, no silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all offering of services which will see your business instantly rise to the top. It’s different for every freelance business, every client and every industry, but mainly it’s dependant on two primary factors – what your clients are looking for, and what you can personally deliver.

What do your clients need?

Now, I’m going to assume you’ve already chosen the industry/discipline you’ll be working in as a freelancer (or perhaps you’re already working freelance, but you’re considering a shake-up of the services you offer). It’s important to realise that your industry exists because there are people out there willing to pay for your expertise – therefore, the services you provide should be primarily based on their needs.

Research what your competitors are offering

No client is looking for exactly the same thing as everyone else, but one clear indicator of the kinds of services many of them are willing to pay for is the list of services on your biggest competitor’s website.

Pay attention to which pages are prioritised in the site navigation. Take a look at the kinds of landing pages they have listed in the sitemap – even if they’re not in the navigation, the fact that they’ve taken the effort to produce a landing page for a particular service often shows that there may be a market for that particular service.

Define your ‘ideal client’

Every freelance business needs an ‘ideal client profile’ – a descriptive account of a hypothetical customer which is the best fit for your business. Your skills are the perfect solution to their problems, they’re passionately loyal to you and they help you generate new business through referrals.

The more detailed and specific your ICP is, the better. You should know how old they are, where they live, what kind of life they have, what motivates them, what worries them, what barriers stand in the way of you helping them…

Where do you get all these details about this mysterious hypothetical customer? Talk to potential customers about what they’re looking for – what problems do they need to solve? If you have current or previous clients, interview them about their hopes and fears. You might be surprised by the answers you get. Not only this, but this sort of interaction will likely have a positive impact on your working relationship. It may prompt them to ask you more about your expanding services, and may even lead to further work. At the very least it’ll re-inforce in your client, the values that you hold dear. You’re the kind of service provider who is prepared to take time out to really listen to and understand the needs of your clients. That’s the type of offering that’ll set you apart from the big guys.

The advantages of building an ideal client profile go well beyond simply picking the right services to offer – you’ll also know how to make your business more attractive to potential clients in your advertising, how to address them in communication, how to maintain close ongoing relationships with them etc.

Prioritise profitability

When you’re putting together your ICP, one of your questions should be ‘How much are they willing to spend for my services?’

Offering services which are in high demand will obviously bring in more leads – but on the other hand, offering services which are in lower demand may attract higher-paying clients. It’s certainly a juggling act; I’d recommend offering a range of high-demand and low-demand services at first, and perhaps cutting out the services which don’t bring in any money at a later date.

What can you offer?

Know your level of proficiency

Understanding the needs of your clients is all well and good, but you also need to understand how many of those needs you can cater for. What skills and knowledge do you have? How much have you practiced your abilities? Have you used them in a professional situation? Be sure to prioritise your stronger areas in your advertising and marketing.

It’s not just about what you know – it’s also about the tools you have. Does your setup offer the kind of features you’ll need to produce professional work, on time, to the brief you’re given?

You also have to consider your schedule and how much time you have to spare. For example, is it really feasible to provide daily 9-to-5 social media management to every client that comes along?

Grow your ability & resources

If you’re missing the necessary skills, knowledge or resources to be able to offer a certain service, you can either decline to offer that service, or – if you have the time and money to invest – you can go out there and fill in those gaps.

There’s plenty of online training resources out there to help you learn new skills and/or develop your weaker areas, and the value of upgrading your kit can far outweigh the costs of purchasing it.

Some people argue that you should charge a client upfront for your training time, particularly if the skills you’re learning are pretty specific to the project and won’t be useful for other projects. Personally, I’m wary of recommending this approach as there’s more chance of things going wrong. In my opinion, it’s better to train up in your downtime, rather than taking a gamble on your paying client (more on this later).

Buddy up (A personal favourite!)

If you don’t have the expertise, equipment or time to offer a particular service, but you know a fellow freelancer that does, ask them if they’d like to partner up.

The advantages of this approach are many – you can offer their services on your site, they can offer your services on their site, they get to share your clients, you get to share their clients, and together you can tackle bigger, more lucrative projects.

On the negative side, you‘ll have to choose your partner wisely. If they’re unreliable, they can kill your progress on a project and leave you in hot water with your client. But if you make good decisions and deliver on your promises you’ll likely build some very lucrative and lasting relationships. I work with several partners who can offer services which complement my own.

Become an expert

Don’t be afraid to specialise in a certain area. Compared with jack-of-all-trades competitors, you might end up with fewer leads, but the ones you do get will often be more valuable:

• Clients will already have a good idea of what they want
• They’re often happier to pay more
• You can offer a better quality of service, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and increasing the chances of getting referral leads.

In addition, trying to please everyone with a massive list of services can have the opposite effect – you end up spreading your skills too thin, to the point where nobody is happy with the work you produce.

Don’t overreach

Whatever you do, never offer services which you’re not 100% certain you can deliver. Even a small gap in your ability or an occasionally temperamental piece of software/hardware can derail an entire project, leaving you out of pocket and potentially tarnishing your professional reputation. It’s fine to say ‘I’ll learn as I go along with the project’ – not so good when you’ve hit a brick wall and your training won’t help you overcome it.

If a client is asking for a service which falls outside your area of competency, explain to them that you can’t offer that service at this time, and ideally direct them to someone who can. Clients will respect your honesty – they may offer to pay for your training or hire you for the services you can provide.

Be confident in your ability

Finally, don’t let a lack of self-determination talk you out of offering services which you can competently provide. Providing a service is always simply a matter of following a process – break it down into steps, then honestly ask yourself if any of those steps are beyond your capability.

Getting out of your comfort zone once in a while can lead to higher-paying jobs, greater self-confidence and a more positive outlook on your career.

The post What Services Should A Freelancer Offer? appeared first on Boshanka.

Stay on topic

Make sure the content you post is relevant to your business. I’ve seen companies posting everything from cat memes to news stories from the national and local news. Not opinion pieces about the news – the actual stories themselves.

Your potential customers aren’t interested in content that has no connection to your company, industry or the products/services you’re selling. More importantly, Google may see you as a spammer, which will harm your search visibility and reduce the amount traffic coming into your site.

That’s not to say you can’t be creative with your content topics. Think about subjects which fall slightly outside your area of business but are still highly relevant to the kind of customers you’re targeting. For example, if you’re selling car insurance, you could produce a report on driverless cars or put together a guide on saving on fuel costs.

Let your readers behind the curtain

Many businesses are understandably jittery when it comes to sharing their work processes, particularly those offering services rather than products. What if giving your trade secrets away just encourages your potential customers to do it themselves? What if your competitors use your insider knowledge to their advantage?

In reality, there’s a lot of value in offering up your own advice and giving your potential customers a brief insight into how you work.

Let’s say you work as an accountant; you could demonstrate how to fill in a self-assessment form, offer up tips on how to reduce your outgoings, or reveal some of the stranger client cases you’ve had to deal with.

By demonstrating your knowledge and expertise, and showing the world your human face, you’ll build trust with your customers and give them realistic expectations of how you can help them. (You’ll also promote yourself as an authority on your subject, so people will be more inclined to share your content and your search rankings will likely rise.)

Use human language

But formal semantics and industry vocabulary connote intellect and professionalism, don’t they?

Read that last sentence again. Isn’t it painful to get through? Now imagine a whole article written in that style.

People don’t want to read stuffy content with incomprehensible jargon that only you can understand. Cut out the complex terminology (or at least explain their definitions) and talk to your audience like a human – it makes you seem more friendly and approachable, and it helps to make unfamiliar, confusing subjects more clear and understandable.

Help your customers out

Ultimately, all the content you put out there on the internet should be there for the benefit of your prospective and existing customers – they’re the people who will be consuming it, after all.

However, it’s very easy to end up with content which is all about you. Small businesses often feel the urge to introduce themselves fully to their prospective customers, and end up with content which comes across as narcissistic and doesn’t help the customer at all.

Try creating content around frequently asked questions. Take a look at some of the queries which have been posed to you (either over the phone, via email, site comments or social media posts) and see if you can develop in-depth, authoritative guides to answer them.

You might also consider creating advice pieces to help your customers get the most out of your products or services. For example, if you sell air conditioning equipment, you might explain the best settings for particular weather conditions, to keep your unit running at its best. You might also show your customers how to inspect their AC unit for issues and how to prevent breakdowns in the first place.

The post Creating Valuable Content For Your Business appeared first on Boshanka.

These days, the core principle that defines high-quality SEO content is that it’s written for people, not search engines.

Your content should be for the benefit of your users. It should be interesting, entertaining, engaging, and if you’re a business owner, it should convert casual users into paying customers.

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? In truth, this has always been the ‘point’ of SEO – after all, Google search exists to provide its users with the highest value results for the search queries – but it’s only relatively recently that some SEO practitioners are catching on to it.

The trouble is, in the past, SEO has sometimes been viewed as a simple game of ‘beat the search engine’. Misinformed business owners have hired dodgy SEO ‘experts’ to help them ‘be number 1 on Google’ for their chosen keywords, assuming that a high search rank will always equal more sales.

This has led to a lot more internet spam over the years. Thin, insignificant content has been churned out to ‘tick the boxes’ for SEO and chase those elusive number 1 spots – with little or no regard to the people who are going to be reading it!

The arrival of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates a few years back has helped to banish low-value content from search results, and has highlighted the fact that content is for people first and foremost.

So, how do you write for people? Your content needs to be…

Clear

Focus on communicating your message to the reader as clearly as possible. On product/service landing pages, your message is ‘You should buy this, and you should buy it from us’, so you need to provide straightforward and tangible reasons for why your customers should do just that.

Each content piece should be coherent, logically-structured and easy to follow, with confusing jargon kept to a minimum. Techniques such as bullet points and bold/italics emphasis can help to break up and simply complex sections of text when used appropriately. Make sure you use correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, as excessive mistakes can make you look unprofessional and untrustworthy.

Pages can still be driven by keywords, but don’t just shoehorn your keyword phrase awkwardly into the content in the hope the page will rank – take time to assess the intent of the user searching for those keywords, and produce your content to meet their needs.

Engaging

Your content needs to be closely targeted and highly relevant to your ideal site user. It needs to inform, fascinate, excite and entertain. There are a number of ways of approaching this.

One such way is to post timely content about recent events which affect your target audience, such as posting your own commentary on new innovations in your industry, writing about changes in legislation which your customers need to know, or reviewing the latest design trends for your products.

Another strategy is to appeal to the emotional intelligence of the reader. Rather than producing a bland case study, turn it into a narrative; readers are encouraged to empathise with the struggles of your client, then feel happiness for them when you reveal how you solved their problem and improved their business with your products and services.

Visual content such as images and video work wonders for engagement, allowing you to communicate your message in a more appealing, entertaining and intuitive way. Just don’t get carried away with the production and end up with something that doesn’t meet any of your customers’ needs.

Unique

Does your content look and feel exactly the same as all your competitors? If the answer is yes, you’re not really providing a huge amount of value to web users – you’re not likely to engage them with content which they’ve seen before or they can get elsewhere. Creating unique content is very difficult, but very rewarding if you can pull it off.

Being able to write authoritatively on your area of business or expertise is a huge plus. For example, if a blog article contains exclusive insider information which helps your site visitors, it can help them build trust in your business and convert them into customers.

If you’re posting great unique content regularly, it’s more likely that social media users and other websites will be linking to it. Google has used external links as a ranking factor since the beginning – generally speaking, if real people are directing their own followers/users to your site, they must think your content is worth consuming, so Google are more likely to rank your content higher in their search results.

Beware of copying other people’s content (or your own, for that matter) word-for-word. Google is good at recognising if you’re reusing content to influence search rankings rather than helping web users. If you do use content that already exists on the web, be sure to add extra value to it – a prime example of this would be offering a point-by-point rebuttal of someone else’s opinion post, and quoting elements of their post in your article.

Appropriate in length

Now, this one’s tricky. 300 to 500 words has long been touted as the best length for a search-optimised content page. However, the rise in mobile traffic over recent years has driven a push towards more short-form content, which is easier to read and navigate through on smaller screens.

In any case, the length of your content should be optimised for how long the user will be happy to spend reading it. The purpose and context of the piece will help you work this out – for example, if it’s a detailed blog article full of analysis and commentary, it’s usually fine to go into the thousands. If it’s a mobile-optimised landing page advertising a product, the content should be more brief and succinct, and it may be wise to hide it behind a button.

Avoid trying to fill up the word count with ‘waffle’ (such as repeating points you’ve made earlier in the article). Everything you put into your content should be there for the benefit of the reader.

Looking for great content?

If you’re looking to replace, improve or create new content for your website drop me a line.

The post What Counts as Quality Content? appeared first on Boshanka.

To make matters worse, some of the people or companies you contact will require a detailed brief, something you may not feel comfortable producing and leaving you with doubts that you’ve covered everything. Others may be happy to take some basic information, offer up an estimate and run with it, again leaving you concerned that you might be in for a shock when the final website is delivered.

It’s no secret that producing a website is not nearly as complicated as it was ten years ago. The birth of out of the box content management systems and plugins now means that complex functionality can be implemented quickly and securely without significant development overheads.

Many companies now offer their own site builders, and for many, this might seem like a cost effective alternative to getting your business online.

Even back in the day, being able to build a website without any coding knowledge was fairly easy – there were plenty of free website builders, and pretty much every teenage geek had a terribly formatted website with garish colours, spinny GIFs and a counter at the bottom announcing you were the ninth person to visit that page (and one of those was your mum).

These days, teens can use social networks to talk about themselves. But the humble website builder lives on – and it’s grown up somewhat, with features such as social media integration, search engine optimisation and analytics often already integrated (or unlocked with a subscription).

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably wondered about doing it yourself, rather than spending the time learning to code – or spending the money to hire a professional developer.

But are they really worth your time? Here are a few of the best free site builders out there – and a few of the worst…

Weebly

Weebly has built up a decent level of positive reception since its launch in 2006, and it’s become one of the front runners in the ‘free websites for all’ industry, along with Wix (who we’ll get to in a moment).

There’s a variety of pricing options to choose from, but the free package isn’t bad at all Besides the absence of some features such as on-site search and a built-in video player, and the addition of Weebly branding in your footer, you can build a simple but pretty much complete site.

The style templates are fairly appealing and modern, the build process is all drag and drop in-browser, and hosting is included for you free of charge.

You have three options for your domain. Those subscribed to Weebly’s paid plans can use their own existing domain without any additional charge . Otherwise, you can either choose your own yoursite.weebly.com subdomain (which is not necessarily the SEO insta-kill you’d expect, from what I’ve heard) or purchase a domain name from Weebly itself for a pricey $39.95.

One thing to watch out for with Weebly; you might end up getting bombarded with marketing emails. I know one unlucky soul who signed up for Weebly, intending to come back and build his site once he’d spent a while planning out the structure and design he wanted.

Over the next three months, he received about twenty emails trying to coax him back to the service – and it seems others have suffered a similar fate.

WIX

Like Weebly, Wix has garnered critical praise for its intuitive user interface, and to be honest the two are very similar – even the options for hosting are pretty much the same, with Wix providing their own hosting free of charge.

You can argue that Wix has the edge over Weebly when it comes to templates – the designs are stylish, smart and there are hundreds to select from.

In fact there’s so much choice that it’s easy to get bogged down – so to help you find one that works for you, they’ve divided them into categories based on industries and themes. Pick ‘Games & Toys’ under the ‘Business & Services’ tab on the left, for example, and you’ll be shown a variety of colourful, child-friendly designs.

One very cool feature is the App Market, offering users a variety of third party apps and widgets to enhance the functionality of your site. There’s a good variety of genuinely useful apps, and many of them are absolutely free.

On the negative side, Wix sites don’t seem to perform quite as well SEO-wise compared to Weebly. In addition, Wix lets you drop elements literally anywhere you want on the page, instead of a choice of pre-determined spots; this sounds like a positive, but if you later decide you want to switch to a different template, you’ll have to start again from scratch.

WordPress.com

WordPress is a strange one – it’s probably better categorised as a free blogging platform and content management system than a website builder.

Nevertheless, it offers plenty of design versatility and customisation options (plus a wealth of design themes, plugins and third-party support), so it’s become a viable site-creation option for novices and web development experts alike. Many believe it’s the best one out there.

It’s certainly not straightforward, though. There’s a steep learning curve with WordPress, and while there are plenty of tutorials and resources out there to help, you might find a straightforward DIY site builder like Weebly or Wix is more useful to you.

The Grid

This one isn’t free – or even available to the public yet – but it’s worth including just because the premise is so outlandish.

The Grid will offer ‘AutoDesigned’ websites which are tailored to your specifications – without a human developer. You tell it what you want, and The Grid’s artificial intelligence algorithms builds you a complete website which matches your needs.

And here’s where it gets interesting – when you add new content to your site, the layout will automatically adapt to include it. You can even repost interesting content from other sites by simply right-clicking on it and selecting The Grid’s ‘Save’ option.

Images are automatically processed to create maximum visual impact, and the service even offers responsive functionality, based not only on the size of the user’s screen but also the content you’re showing them.

There’s a whole lot of other bells and whistles too, but does The Grid deliver on its central promise? Currently, the service’s own site is the only living example of the AI’s wizardry. It’s certainly a pretty site, though the layout is arguably a little disjointed in my opinion.

It remains to be seen if the software is really capable of producing beautiful, functional and unique sites for EVERYONE who signs up – we’ll have to wait and see when it launches later this month.

Tripod.com

Web veterans will recognise this one. Lycos’s Tripod was one of the beasts responsible for all those aforementioned crappy personal ‘webpages’ that clogged up the net in the nineties and early noughties, along with the now-defunct GeoCities and current Lycos labelmate Angelfire.

Remarkably, it’s still alive and kicking – but while the builder has been updated, it’s clear the service has seen better days.

In terms of user interface and functionality, it‘s not miles away from its younger competitors, but the decidedly dated template samples that Tripod proudly displays on the homepage don’t exactly inspire confidence. I’d advise giving this one a miss.

Google

What of web giant Google? They must offer a site builder, surely?

The good news is they offer at least three. The bad news is… none of them are strictly site builders.

Blogger (the blog platform/host they acquired in 2003) provides a reasonable degree of flexibility, so you might get away with using it to create a simple site. However, like WordPress, it’s probably not a viable option if you’re an absolute beginner. Some would argue Blogger is obsolete these days, anyway.

Google Sites allows you to create basic web pages and wikis, but the service seems to be positioned more as a collaboration tool for businesses (and even in that respect, it seems to have been outclassed by Google Drive).

And then there’s Google Web Designer. My fellow London developer and long time friend Ben Campbell posted a fantastic review of Google Web Designer on his own blog – it’s a HTML5 editor which lets you create full pages if you want, but mostly it’s a Flash-esque tool intended to help you create animated HTML5 adverts. Not much use as a site builder, really.

Site builders provided by hosting companies

No doubt you’ll have seen the adverts for 1&1 MyWebsite on the TV. A free website included with your hosting fees? How can you lose?

Here’s how – these kinds of free site builders exist purely to lure unsuspecting customers into paying for hosting. The builder itself is often poorly designed, with clunky navigation and features that you’ll waste an inordinate amount of time getting to grips with, and the site you end up with won’t have the kind of functionality that you’ll need from it.

What’s more, your site will be at the mercy of the hosting provider – you can’t switch it to another host if you experience downtime, because the hosting provider effectively owns it. Of course, this is also true for other site builders, but it’s in their best interests to ensure their customers’ sites stay up – their business depends on it.

The hosting provider doesn’t care. If you’ve bought a subscription with them, they’ll still be making money from you even if your site does drop out. I’ve heard some terrible horror stories from people who have been ripped off by the cheaper hosting firms – do yourself a favour and steer clear.

So, back to the title; are free DIY website builders really worth it?

Well, it depends what you want.

If you want a simple, standard site with a few pages and you don’t have the budget to pay for development, a website builder is definitely a good option. Just be aware that you’ll have to actually set aside time to create it, you’ll have no assurances that your design will work for your customers, data & content export options will be limited so you can’t go gallivanting off to a competing site builder, and if Weebly or Wix or whichever service you’ve chosen goes under, your site is gone.

(These aren’t necessarily deal-breakers; just things to keep in mind. Let’s say you run a small crafts business on weekends, alongside your steady 9-to-5 job, and you just want some kind of web presence that you can point your potential leads to – in this situation, it’s much smarter to use a DIY builder rather than hire a dev.)

If you have a specific project in mind, or you want a tailored and unique website that makes you and your business money, it’s a good idea to invest in the knowledge, expertise, time and elbow grease of a professional web designer.

A great web designer can use their ability (which they’ve honed over years of experience in the industry) to transform your ideas and plans into tangible solutions for your business and your customers.

You’ll be paying for someone to spend their time creating your site, so you can spend your time doing what you do best. They’ll already know what works and doesn’t work, so you’ll avoid hours of tedious trial-and-error and you can be sure your site will perform as you want from the moment it goes live.

Best of all, they can help you keep control over the evolution of your site, assisting with testing, analysing and improving your site’s performance (particularly when it comes you optimising your conversion).

Free website builders aren’t all bad – just remember that you get what you pay for.

The post Free Website Builders – Are They Really Worth It? appeared first on Boshanka.

To help new freelancers on their way (and to lend a hand to those still struggling to make it work for them), here’s a list of tips and advice points which have helped me over the course of my career.

Set up your base of operations

Keep your space free of distractions. If you work from home (as most freelancers do), ensure you set up a proper office space in a quiet room, away from distractions like the TV. It doesn’t have to be anything too elaborate – just a table and a laptop will do. Working from home without getting distracted is one of the most challenging aspects of building a freelance career, get this right and you’ve got the foundations you need to make your business a success.

Only place the things you need on the table, rather than the things you think you need. Is that hole punch gathering dust? Stick it in a cupboard instead.

Don’t treat it like your home. During work hours, your home is your place of work – so it’s important to treat it as such. Simple things like staying in your pajamas all day or inviting your friends over during your working hours can undermine your productivity, because they reinforce the idea that you’re there to relax, not to get things done.

Stay self-disciplined – get dressed in the morning, eat a decent breakfast, and arrange to see your friends after work (or on your lunch break). It works both ways – make sure you respect your leisure time too. Switch your phone off and chill out.

Don’t be afraid to venture out. Assuming all you need is a laptop, an internet connection and a plug socket, you  have a lot of freedom over where you can work – so don’t feel you need to spend every day cooped up indoors.

Every once in a while, set up shop in a public spot, such as a coffee shop or a pub. You need clear focus to make it work, but it’s better than staying in the working-from-home loop, and there’s the chance you might meet new people and find some new leads – so bring your business cards with you!

Use the right tools

Use accounting software to keep on top of your finances. There’s several software options out there offering an all-in-one solution – you can record your income and outgoings, create and send invoices, manage payments to suppliers, and track the profitability of your projects.

Personally I’d recommend Freeagent, which offers cloud-based storage of all your financial documents and works completely in-browser – nothing to install. It’ll also work seamlessly on mobile, so you can manage your accounts while you’re out and about.

Organise your work process with project management software. These services let you keep a to-do list of projects and their respective tasks, receive notifications when a deadline is approaching, track the time you spend on each task, communicate and collaborate with colleagues and clients and much more.

Project management software is almost essential if you’re churning out several huge projects for lots of different clients each month. Basecamp arguably offers the best solution for freelancers, but make sure the one you choose is the one that suits you best – it can be a pain to set everything up again if you switch to a different software service.

Manage your time more effectively with timekeeping apps. As mentioned earlier, project management software allows you to keep track of the amount of time you’re spending on each project, but there’s also dedicated time-tracking apps which are handy for recording how you spend your time – not just work time but also the personal errands you run each day.

Time Doctor’s time tracking software can help you with this. Not only does it track time, it also gives you data on how you spent that time. It does this by giving you additional useful reports like web and app usage. When you have all these data, it becomes easy to evaluate and improve productivity.

You could also check out Toggl, which not only helps you track how much time it’s taking to complete tasks but also which times of day are most busy and least busy for you. By scanning through Toggl’s detailed yet intuitive reports, you can identify helpful and unhelpful habits and make changes in your work schedule to utilise your time more effectively.

Know your value

Charge appropriate prices for your projects. Pricing is one of the trickiest things for freelancers to wrap their heads around. Many pitch themselves too low, either because they lack confidence in their ability or they want to attract more clients – and end up producing sub-par work as a result. Who wants to work for peanuts?

To come up with fair prices for your projects, research typical prices in your industry. Look at what other similar freelancers are quoting for their projects. When you’ve set what you consider to be a fair price, don’t let potential clients haggle you down – just be transparent and make sure the client understands what they’re getting for their money.

Itemizing your quote can be helpful in communicating your value, but it can also give the impression that you’re offering them a menu to pick from, so make sure to stress that each item is important to the overall quality and success of the project.

Make sure you also consider how you’ll charge too. Will you charge a flat price for each project, or charge by the hour? There are various pros and cons for each, but generally speaking, project-based fees are better for smaller projects while by-the-hour fees are best for ongoing project work (such as maintaining a website).

Don’t work with people who don’t value you. Don’t think of your value as the highest quote your clients are willing to pay – think of it as the benefit you bring to your clients. You’re using the expertise you’ve built up over years of experience, as well as your time and effort, to help their businesses succeed.

Don’t stick with clients that don’t respect your worth as a professional. You know the ones – they mess with your design choices, refuse to listen to your recommendations, insist on unreasonable deadlines for projects, always miss their own deadlines for payments, and they talk to you like you’re the mud on their shoe.

If clients make you feel worthless, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that you are worthless; which will seriously harm the quality of the work you do and your chances of bringing in new business. There’s plenty of reliable, honest clients out there that will value your services.

For more on project pricing check out this blog post I wrote on the subject.

Market yourself

Find your unique selling point. What can you offer that your competitors can’t? Perhaps you can offer a speedier turnaround time compared to the agencies in your industry. Maybe your prices are cheaper because you have less overheads to deal with (but beware of selling yourself short – more on this later).

Often for freelancers, their personality is their unique selling point. Agencies can be so slick with their own presentation that they appear to lack soul, which can be a turn off for potential customers (especially small business owners). If you can put a little of your own personality into your marketing, you’ll likely attract the kind of people who want to work with a human rather than a faceless creative firm.

Be an authority in your niche. It seems like being a jack-of-all-trades is more lucrative than limiting yourself to one area – but in fact, narrowing your focus can help you attract clients who are looking for more bespoke projects (and willing to pay more for them).

Find what you enjoy the most and become an expert on it. Specialising in a subject helps you build a reputation for yourself, which can give you the edge over your competition. If you’re seen as the authority in your niche, it stands to reason you’re probably the best person to get the job done.

Never lose sight of the potential client. All your marketing efforts should be primarily built around how your services will provide benefits to them. Some freelancers fall into the trap of simply describing themselves in their marketing copy, which is all well and good – but your potential client is only concerned with solving their problem. How will you help them solve it?

A good way to assess whether your marketing copy is too focused on you rather than your clients is to count the number of first-person pronouns you’ve used (eg ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’, ‘us’) versus the number of second-person pronouns (‘you’).

If there’s more of the former compared to the latter, you might want to switch the focus of a couple of sentences around to the customer. (for example, ‘I’m an expert in creating stunning websites’ could be changed to ‘You can rely on me to build you a beautiful website that attracts customers to your business’.)

Always be networking

Go to conferences, meetups and industry lunches. Event planning sites like Eventbrite and Meetup can be a goldmine for networking experiences like these. Don’t just stick to your area, though – see what’s going on further afield, particularly the larger cities.

Also, don’t just seek out the events aimed at your industry – look for places where your potential clients will be. Just be sure to approach each event as a way of learning more about their industry, as well as meeting new and interesting people. Feel free to talk about what you do, but don’t turn up just to give people the hard sell.

There’s also the opportunity to create valuable partnerships by attending events aimed at a different area of expertise in your wider industry spectrum. Let’s say you’re a web designer who builds stunning websites, but lacks the marketing know-how to get them noticed. By going to an SEO conference, for example, you could get chatting to an SEO consultant who can help you improve the rankings of your sites. I can usually be found at the yearly Brighton SEO event.

Work in business hubs. There’s plenty of facilities around the UK offering startups and entrepreneurs a space to get their business ideas off the ground, as well as providing a great breeding ground for collaboration.

They’re not free, but the rent for a desk space is often much cheaper than a dedicated office, and there’s incredible opportunity for networking with a huge variety of business professionals in a plethora of different industries. It’s a great way of reaching new clients, but also learning new skills and socialising with fellow freelancers.

Call up friends (or people you’ve met freelancing) and arrange a get together.  Not only is this a great way to catch up with old contacts and bring in new work from them, it also provides an opportunity for social interaction in an otherwise isolated line of work.

Freelancing can be a lonely existence (especially if you become a workaholic) and it’s easy to fall into a rut, so being able to socialise with the people you’ve met in your career can help to raise your spirits and gain a clearer perspective on your value as a professional.

Don’t go there to sell. If the conversation turns to business and you end up with a new lead, all the better; but don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re there to relax and have a good time.

Build positive relationships with your clients

Get to know their industries. The more you know about what they do and the kind of customers they want to attract, the better you’ll be able to communicate with them – so the work you produce will be more tailored to their needs and their customer satisfaction will be through the roof.

Be honest and realistic. Many clients are unfamiliar with your work process and anxious that they’ll be ripped off. Some may have even been ripped off in the past.

Don’t make exaggerated claims about your services, and don’t promise things that you can’t provide. Your clients will be much more appreciative if you decline a job instead of attempting it and screwing it up due to a lack of expertise or time.

Treat them as you would want to be treated. This may be common sense, but it’s surprising how many larger companies seem to forget it (which is where you can capitalise on their mistake).

Always be polite, courteous and friendly. Even if a difficult client is bothering you, be sure to respond in a respectful way. As mentioned earlier, you should drop any clients which don’t treat you with respect – but even when it comes to writing that break-up email, being rude will burn that bridge forever and can earn you a bad reputation if word gets out to others in your industry.

Take advantage of the resources available to you

Check out tutorials, guides and training resources. Developing your abilities allows you to offer a greater range of different services – and the good news is, the internet can be your mentor.

As well as in-depth training providers such as lynda.com, there’s a wealth of companies offering free informative content for freelancers – news articles, blogs, ebooks, videos, communities, the works.

I’d personally suggest checking out Upwork – it’s a site designed to connect businesses with freelancers (so it’s worth checking out the whole site) but the blog section has some great articles on everything from marketing yourself to productivity advice.

Spy on your competitors. You probably haven’t thought of your competitors’ sites as a resource, but they’re incredibly valuable for building your marketing strategy. There are a number of strategies for competitor research, but here’s one you can do right now.

Go incognito, search Google for a keyword or phrase you’re ranking highly for (or aiming to rank highly for) and examine the top three sites on the first page of organic results. What are they doing that you aren’t doing?

Go through everything with a fine toothed comb – page layout, site structure, content and design style, products/services offered, company information, marketing campaigns, social media activity etc – and take note of what features jump out at you.

Banish creative block

Stay positive. Don’t feel bad – every creative professional has moments where they draw a blank. You’re less open to new ideas when you’re feeling blue, so take a short break to do something you enjoy.

Going for a walk is a good strategy for combating creative block – the exercise releases endorphins which raise your mood, and the change of scenery can provide some much-needed inspiration – at least more than you’ll get by staying in your office chair.

Try out a new tool. Perhaps the reason you’ve hit a brick wall is because you’re trying the same things over and over. Choosing a different tack may help you overcome that pesky creative block.

Your go-to work software probably has dozens of options that you’ve never tried out. Choose one of them and run with it. Use a new font. Try a different adjustment layer. Swap flat-design pastel colours out for garish green and blue hues. Stick drop shadows on everything.  Anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone will help.

Phone a friend. Having strong relationships with fellow freelancers can be very handy when you’re in a creative rut. Reach out to your network for advice on where to go next – they can approach your project with a fresh set of eyes and might be able to suggest ideas that you haven’t considered yet.

Just make sure you’re there to help them when they ask you for help. Nobody likes a one-sided relationship.

Don’t be scared to throw ideas away. Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has been known to metaphorically ‘upend the tea table’ when a game’s development starts becoming stale.

Feel free to remove elements if they aren’t working (but store them in a ‘rejected ideas’ folder in case you need them again later).

Keep an eye on the numbers

Monitor your costs. Do you know how much money you’ll need to earn next month to offset next month’s costs? If not, why not?

Keep a detailed plan of your outgoings for each upcoming month. These should not only include the day-to-day expenses of running a business, but also the costs of living such as food and heating bills.

Beware of annual bills sneaking up on you. An MOT test, for example, can really throw a spanner in the works. If you do get blindsided by an unexpected bill, make sure you add the new cost into your plan – even if it’s already been paid, having a reference to the payment can help you avoid confusion at the end of the month.

Track the profits of your work.

Does the income you’re getting from each product justify the money you’re shelling out to complete them? Sometimes even a big project won’t actually make any profit – the costs of researching, training, acquiring resources, requests from clients and even the electricity you use to run your computer can all gang up against you, preventing you from earning the money you deserve for your efforts.

If a client isn’t making you money, drop them once their current project is complete. Find another client that will bring in the profits you need. Bear in mind that several smaller, less labour-intensive tasks can potentially bring in more money than one big project.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Building A Successful Freelance Business appeared first on Boshanka.

I’ve gathered a few tips for becoming a star client with your designer, but to be honest most of them are centred on one key aspect – communication.

Good communication is essential. It removes ambiguity, helps build trust between you and your designer and helps to give the project direction and momentum.

Know what you want

Before you having your first meeting with your designer, make sure you have a good idea of what you want them to do for you, or at least an understanding of the challenges that you want them to help you overcome.

It’s forgivable to think ‘they’re the designer, they can just do what they think is best’ – but then your designer won’t even know where to start to help you. In contrast, by having a clear vision of what you’re looking for from the outset, they can deliver work which everyone’s happy with in the end.

If you’re not sure what you need, your designer can guide you through your options and help you find a solution that works for your business.

Take your time to decide, because you won’t be able to change your mind halfway through the project. You’ll be wasting your designer’s time and your own money if you do.

Define expectations & goals for the project

All good business owners are passionate about what they do, but don’t get carried away with lofty aspirations & hypotheticals.

Agree on specific goals with your designer, including ‘checkpoints’ along the timeline of the project (eg ‘preliminary designs should be delivered to the client and signed off by client by x date’) and a final endpoint (‘finished website will be live and accessible by x date’).

It’s also a good idea to agree on your individual responsibilities for the project at this stage. For example, if your designer is building you a website with a blog, who will upload your posts? You or them?

Stay in touch…

Whether it’s the thumbs-up on preliminary designs, or a request for the content you promised to supply, your designer will be relying on your reply at some point in the project.

Without it, they can’t move forward – and chasing you for a reply takes time out of their day which they should be spending on other clients. Reply as promptly as you can.

(Speaking of emails, they’re great for creating a paper-trail history of the project. If you communicate with your designer via phone at any point, consider emailing a brief ‘minutes’ of the conversation to the client afterwards.)

…but don’t pester

Whatever profession you’re in, you don’t want to be picking up the phone to the same client every 5 minutes.

Agree how often you’ll check in with the designer before the project begins, and try to stick to that schedule – that way, you’re respecting their time and letting them get on with the work you’ve hired them to do.

If you have a question for your client, consider other ways of finding the answer. Googling your query might uncover it more quickly than reaching for the phone.

Trust your designer’s judgement

One thing many clients forget about design work is that it’s created for their customers, not themselves. What they personally like and what will appeal to the people who buy from them can be two wildly different things.

Nevertheless, business owners feel the need to micromanage all aspects of the design process, thinking they know better about design than the person who makes a living from it.

This is especially frustrating if you missed point #1 of this article and told your designer to do what they thought was best. Either you trust them as a professional or you don’t!

Instead of arguing against a particular element of the design, ask them why they made that particular design choice. Listen closely to their explanation and be prepared to change your mind.

If you feel you really need to give feedback on a design, describe your thoughts in tangible specifics. Nobody will know what you mean if you say ‘the logo needs to look more swooshy’.

Whatever you do, never say “I could do that in five minutes”. A seemingly simplistic design can be the final product of hours of market research, concept sketching and medium testing (not to mention years of training in visual communication) to make sure your corporate identity is expressed as well as it can be.

Avoid project creep

Many’s the time when a designer has delivered the final ‘finished’ project to the client, only to hear “Could you just add this in?’ This little addition is often a big feature which wasn’t discussed in the original project brief, and will take considerably more work to create.

Pretty soon, a loop will form where the designers makes the requested revision, only to have another revision request pop up from the client immediately after. Even though the project was ‘finished’ before, it’s now perpetually a work in progress.

This is known as project creep, feature creep or scope creep, and designers hate it. Not only does it eat up their precious time, it can also turn your perfectly-planned product into an unfocused mess.

Make sure there’s a defined scope of work in place at the start of the project (this will likely be in the contract your designer asks you to sign). Agree the terms for revisions with your designer at this stage – some will be happy to make small changes, but will outright refuse any additions outside the original project scope.

Don’t delay on your payments

This last one’s an easy one. Independent freelance designers don’t eat if they don’t get paid. Make sure you pay your invoices on time.

If you can’t pay on time, don’t go silent, and don’t give excuses – explain why you can’t and give a realistic timeframe for when your designer can expect the payment to arrive.

The post How to Become a Star Client with Your Web Designer appeared first on Boshanka.

Here’s a few tips to help you price your projects right.

Understand your industry

Firstly, identify what kind of work you’ll be doing. Is it web development? Graphic design? Audio engineering? Copywriting? Market research? Something else? A mix of different things? The industry area that the project occupies will directly inform the kind of fees you can expect to charge.

Now, let’s take a look at the three main ways you can price a project. Deciding which one is best is a contentious issue for even seasoned freelancers – you just need to decide which one is best for you.

Pricing by hourly rate

Charging hourly is preferred by many freelancers for a number of reasons:

• It’s good if you’re completing regular projects for a client – you can give them one contract instead of typing up a new one for each project
• It helps clients see their project as a chunk of your time that they’re paying for, so they’ll be more eager to set definite goals, provide the things you need quickly and avoid requesting extra tasks and features during the project

If you’re going to charge an hourly rate, it’s important to carefully estimate how long the project will take. Look back at similar previous projects and how long they took you to complete.

Of course, it’s a juggling act – you need to offer a timeframe that lets you complete the project satisfactorily, but also adds up to a reasonable price.

If you underestimate the time you’ll need, you’ll either be losing money or irritating your clients by asking for more (although generally speaking, clients are more understanding when you’re charging them hourly – don’t expect them to budge if you’ve priced by project). If you’re approaching your allotted project hours and you’re not sure you’ll be finished in time, get in touch with your client as soon as possible.

You may also want to charge separate hourly rates for each client, particularly if the type of work you’re doing for each one is markedly different. This can help you earn more, but keeping track of what each client owes you can be a headache.

Charging an overall project fee

Charging hourly isn’t for everyone. If you take on smaller projects with a more direct focus, charging a single fee for each project may be preferable:

• There’s less admin to deal with – you won’t need to record the time you’re spending for each client
• You’re less likely to be hassled with presumptive ‘Why is this task costing me this much? I could do it in five minutes!’ objections from clients
• You’ll be more inclined to get projects done quickly and move onto the next one, unlike time-based pricing
• Some clients won’t want to pay hourly rates in case the project takes longer than expected – they’re more likely to accept a flat fee for the whole thing

Unfortunately with project-based pricing, you may find your client is happier to bug you with questions and extra requests, and/or dawdling when you need them to provide something for the project (whether it’s advice, project files or even just approval).

Make it clear to the client at the proposal stage that any interference with your work process or changes to the project spec will set back the deadline they can expect you to meet, and any additional work not covered in the original project scope will cost them extra.

Even if they stick wholeheartedly to this agreement, it doesn’t mean the project definitely won’t drag on and on (particularly if they’re not in a hurry to see the project finished).

Pricing by value

This is a tricky strategy, but if you’ve been freelancing a long time and built up a solid reputation, it can be very lucrative. Instead of basing your price on the time and resources you’ll need, you charge your client based on the estimated value that your work will bring to their business.

You’ll need a solid grasp on the value you’ve brought to other clients with your services, and the confidence in yourself to understand your skills and expertise provide huge benefits to those who commission them. Show potential clients that you’ve provided tangible results for other clients in the past, and do not back down on the fee you propose (because it will undermine your value in their eyes).

You’d be surprised at how many clients are willing to pay value-based fees – since they can ‘see’ the extra business and/or efficiency that you’ll provide, they’re more eager to enlist your services and start raking in that moolah.

The risk comes when your work doesn’t bring the value you’ve projected, for whatever reason. It could be that you’ve over-estimated your value, or some outside influence has affected your client’s success – or maybe your work has delivered the value you said it would, but clients simply can’t see it for their own reasons.

Get payment up front

However you choose to charge your work, it’s essential you demand an initial payment for larger projects. Invoice the client for somewhere between 40% and 50% of the total quote before you start any work, and the remainder when the project is complete.

Any serious client will be happy to pay the initial up-front fee – any client who objects may be looking to rip you off, so stand firm and point out that they can look elsewhere if they won’t agree to your terms.

Avoid itemising the project

Let’s say you have a big website project. You’ll be performing graphic design duties, developing all the code, producing copy and arranging the hosting.

It may be tempting to put down individual prices for each area of the project (or even each and every little task) on the proposal you send to the client. A lot of freelancers do this to demonstrate the value of their services (“I’m just one person, but look at all the things I can do for you!”).

What it actually does is a lot less helpful. Your client will see your services like a set of options, and will be scrutinising your prices much more closely. Pretty soon you’ll be getting an email from them… “Could we leave out the copy?”

Where will that copy be coming from? A cheaper competitor, most likely. That’s money you won’t be getting, and the quality of work may well be less than you can offer (or simply doesn’t match with the style of the rest of the project – too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say).

Perhaps the copy will be coming from the client, who likely doesn’t have the expertise and/or the time to produce quality writing. Or perhaps they’ll just leave it out entirely – so the ‘finished’ website looks like a shipwreck, drives visitors away and drags down your reputation with it.

Your client could choose to take out any one of the essential elements of the project (or even multiple elements), leaving the final project full of holes and not up to their standards or yours.

The post How To Price A Project appeared first on Boshanka.

Whatever your opinion of the tech giant, you can’t deny they offer some fantastic services – and their free email provider Gmail is no exception.

Offering clean, easy-to-navigate presentation, Gmail is ideal for freelancers – but don’t let the simple exterior fool you. Under the hood you’ll find lots of handy little features to help you manage your inbox influx more efficiently – even if you only have a basic account!

Labels

Say you want to follow the paper trail on a previous project; easier said than done if each email is hiding amongst all the others in your inbox.

This is where labels come in handy. If you’ve attached the same label to several emails, you can see all those emails in one handy list by clicking the respective label in the left-hand column.

You can add a label to several emails at once, apply several different labels at once, and even nest labels within other labels. It’s great for managing your clients and the different projects you’re running for each one.

To add a label to any email, simply click the tickbox next to the subject line, then click the pencil icon near the top of the page. You’ll be presented with a list of labels which you already have – you can either click on one of these to apply it, or click ‘Create New’ to make a brand new label and apply it to the email.

Advanced search

So it turns out you added the label to all your necessary emails – except the one you actually need to find. Looks like you’ll be going through your inbox with a fine toothed comb for the next half-hour, right?

Actually, no – because Gmail’s advanced search is here to save the day. Take a look at the search bar on the page – just to the left of the search icon, you’ll see a tiny arrow pointing down. Click it, and you’ll open an Aladdin’s cave of search options.

You can search by sender, receiver, subject line or even words in the content of your email, and specify the arrival time-frame and file size of the emails you want to find.

You can also choose where to direct your search – trawl through your whole account, or narrow it down to labels or individual folders (the latter is ideal if you suspect an important message has landed in your spam by mistake).

If you’re au fait with Google’s advanced search operators, you can type your own search filter criteria without having to open the drop down menu.

Filters

But we’re just scratching the surface of what these search filters can do. Take a look at the bottom of the advanced search drop down menu and you’ll see a ‘Create filter with this search’ option.

Clicking this will allow you to set certain conditions for your incoming mail – and the possibilities are endless.

For example, with filters, you can automatically apply a ‘Networking Opportunities’ label to any emails which mention a ‘networking event’, ‘expo’ or ‘conference’ in the subject line.

You can automatically forward any emails from a particular client onto a colleague. You can ensure any email which talks about a ‘deadline’ will never be sent to your spam folder.

You can even automatically delete any future emails from contacts which you’ve already said no to working with (but who can’t seem to take no for an answer).

If one of your filters becomes obsolete, you can simply delete it by clicking the Settings cog icon near the top of your email window, then clicking the Filters tab.

The post Streamline Your Email – Tips & Tricks for Gmail Newbies appeared first on Boshanka.

But what if all the content you’re proudly displaying on your website is actually having a detrimental effect on your site’s health?

It’s perhaps a less obvious question, and from what I can see, not one that is asked very often.

Whilst pondering the subject I thought I’d play devils advocate, and hash out some reasons why constantly creating fresh content on your site may be more of a hindrance than a help.

It makes navigation a pain

If you’re adding new content to your site all the time, you’re either sticking the pages on your navigation menu or leaving them on your sitemap with maybe a few links here and there.

This puts you in a silly catch-22. The former makes your site too convoluted and imposing for visitors to browse, while the latter makes it increasingly difficult for them to find pages they’ve visited in the past (particularly if a lot of your content pages are very similar).

It can make you look bad

The more content pages you have on your site, the harder it is to keep track of them all – and the easier it is for outdated pages to remain hidden in the background.

This is especially true if you keep a blog. Older posts can wind up ranking higher in search than newer posts, and they can be pretty embarrassing –  full of ‘facts’ that have become obsolete, opinions which you’ve since changed your mind on, or simply rubbish-quality writing.

I’m guilty of this, recently a client informed me he’d been reading one of my posts, turned out it was one from 2011, I was more than a little embarrassed when I reread it, littered with mistakes and poor grammar, symptomatic of a time when I really wasn’t blogging for any other reason that it was what you were ‘supposed‘ to do. I never really expected anyone would read it. These days however, my site has a strong readership and regularly attracts new potential clients, many of which take a look back through my blog’s archives.

Pages or posts like these can become instant turn-offs for your customers, and stand between their mouse click and your ‘buy’ button.

While we’re on the subject of content that makes you look bad… It seems obvious to say it, but your content should be relevant to your website and your industry. If you’re a property firm, for example, a blog post of the top five internet cats makes you look pretty unprofessional and out of touch.

It spreads your domain authority too thin

Ok this one’s the biggy, this is what I’m most concerned about.

This blog post by V7N from 2007 (prehistoric in terms of the ever-changing SEO landscape, but still worth talking about) illustrates how having content for the sake of content results in a website full of underperforming pages. This also highlights my earlier point, that this just doesn’t seem to be a topic people are talking about. Perhaps because I’m getting my knickers in a twist over nothing. Perhaps not.

Not only does it spread your domain authority thin, if there isn’t a good internal link structure in place to link these content pages together, search engines can have a hard time identifying which pages are worth talking about. With bigger sites, they can even have trouble noticing some pages at all.

If your site is filled with content that just isn’t performing, you could be dragging down the overall ‘authority’ of your domain and harming your site’s search optimisation.

Google might smell a rat

Search engines strive to give their users the best quality results for their search terms. They look out for sites which are posting high quality content (because they’ll likely provide information that the user will want to read) and sites which are posting that content regularly (because it signifies the site is not only alive, but current and up-to-date).

But if you’re focusing on getting content out too regularly, rather than providing quality content that’s worth reading, search engines won’t want to rank you highly and may even penalise you in the long run. If your customers can’t find you on Google, you’re dead in the water.

So what can you do to avoid adding too much content to your site?

Have a clear purpose for all your content:

Make sure it’s relevant and it meets your customers’ needs – whether it’s there to help them find you, understand their buying options better etc.

Where appropriate, update old content instead of creating new stuff:

This kills three birds with one stone – it keeps your page count smaller and more focused, it can revitalise underperforming pages, and it can avoid your reputation being tarnished by outdated information.

Post regularly, but focus on quality over quantity.

Don’t put the cart before the horse – nobody wants to read poor content, and neither do Google’s spiders.

The post Dethroning the King: Does Your Site Have Too Much Content? appeared first on Boshanka.

Before we start, it’s important to understand the distinction between web designers and web developers. A designer will produce the outer graphic style and layout of your site, while a developer will build the inner skeleton and bring it to life on the web.

However, the distinction between the two disciplines is becoming ever more fuzzy, and in most cases a freelance web ‘designer’ will be able to offer you both services (though make sure you check with them before you sign up with them!).

Experienced (or not)

Real-world experience has long been touted as a means of judging ability in web design (as in most fields of work), but some argue against this notion.

It’s certainly true that having a portfolio of successful paid projects demonstrates ability, and longevity in the industry shows resilience in the competitive industry of web design.

However, it also stands to reason that older, more experienced designers are more likely to be self-taught (having started earlier when the web was a more Wild West affair) and stuck in old design process habits that work for them, but not necessarily for you. In contrast, a younger, less experienced designer may have studied a university degree in web design, and will likely be more receptive to the latest web design trends and best practices.

Don’t be tempted to dismiss a designer outright because they don’t have experience – judge them on their ability and knowledge first.

Committed to meeting your needs – not their own

It’s important you don’t pay out for a designer and end up with an artist. An artist will go out of their way to impress you with their skills and will deliver design work that’s stunningly beautiful, but ultimately meets none of your needs whatsoever.

A designer understands your website is a business investment – they strive to identify exactly what you need out of your web project, and produces work which is both beautiful and functional.

When liaising with candidates for your web project, take note of those who seem more eager to understand your business and your goals for the project. These are the keepers.

Skills

Any web designer worth his or her salt will have a thorough understanding of the fundamental tools and protocols of the web, including HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript.

They also will be able to offer search engine optimisation services (either by themselves or with the help of an outside contractor).

Ask your candidate if they ‘hand code’ their sites, and check that they validate their finished code. Steer clear of those who only use WYSIWYG editors to build sites, and approach Dreamweaver users with caution (especially those who only use the design view).

A great portfolio

As intuitive as it may seem, don’t let the style of the designer’s own website influence your initial judgement. A slightly tatty site may simply indicate they’re too busy creating fantastic sites for their clients to keep their own web presence up to date.

Look at their portfolio for a much better indicator of the designer’s style – particularly the more recent examples. Ask them about the goals their clients wanted to achieve, and how those goals affected their design choices.

If you don’t feel their style is a good fit for you, and the context behind the design doesn’t talk you round, it’s probably worth going with someone else instead.

Great references

Most designers will be able to provide you with references, or even the contact details of the clients featured in their portfolio.

Get in touch with these referees personally – be sure to confirm they were happy with the quality of work they received, and ask whether they would use the designer again in future. Find out whether they’re still using the designer’s work, and if not, why not. It could be something completely harmless or it might flag up a gap in your candidate’s skills.

Of course, if the designer in question doesn’t have much experience, they won’t have the client references; in this case, try getting hold of the tutor or institution where they studied and developed their web design skills.

A compatible personality

This may seem like an entirely superficial point, but I’d argue it’s probably the most important of the whole bunch. Being able to build a great relationship with your designer is essential, as you’ll be working closely with them throughout the project, and potentially afterwards as you’ll likely need upkeep or technical support at some point in the website’s lifetime.

Don’t go with a developer you don’t personally like. Perhaps they just make you feel vaguely uneasy, or there’s a distinct lack of rapport between you and them. If they do turn out to be a bad fit and you grow to resent them, it’ll definitely affect your communication and the project work will suffer.

That said, don’t just go with someone solely because you have a laugh with them – you won’t be laughing if they deliver you a tenth-rate website – and never give the job to a close friend or family member. They may be cheaper (or even free), but if the job they deliver is not up to scratch, you’ll either have to accept it and see your business suffer as a result, or create a personal rift out of a simple business disagreement.

The post What to Look For In Your Web Designer? appeared first on Boshanka.

The answer’s obvious, right? Two heads are better than one – surely it’s best to pick an agency, rather than a freelancer?

Actually, it’s more of a close-run thing than you might think…

Jack of all trades versus master of one

It’s important to remember that all agencies and freelancers are different – there are fantastic agencies, flawed agencies, awesome freelancers and atrocious freelancers. You must assess the suitability of anyone you work with on your own terms.

However, some jobs are better completed in the hands of a freelancer – others are more tailored to the talents of an agency. To help you decide, here’s a list of advantages for each option.

(It’s also important to note that some freelancers market themselves as ‘agencies’ – for the purpose of the article, we’re talking about agencies made up of a team of creative experts, working under one roof and being led by a director.)

Why choose an agency?

If you have a larger project in mind, particularly one which requires several different creative and artistic disciplines, an agency might be the better option for you.

• The average agency can offer you a more diverse range of in-house creative services than the average freelancer.
• Larger projects can be put together more quickly, as each team member can work on an individual part of the project simultaneously.
• There’s more infrastructure in place to keep your project going off the rails. If an employee is sick, other employees can take up the slack. If an employee leaves or gets fired, a replacement will be found. If your freelancer is sick, all progress grinds to a halt.
• Agencies can provide a more diverse variety of creative ideas, as team members can ‘bounce’ ideas off each other. Lone wolf freelancers won’t have this creative breeding ground (although they may have a list of creative contacts to help them brainstorm).
• Freelancing offers a low barrier for entry, so finding a freelancer with the chops to provide what you need can be trickier than going with an agency. (Check they have good references before you even consider signing up with them.)

Why choose a freelancer?

If your project is smaller, and requires more specialist knowledge and skills, a freelancer can offer a more affordable solution.

• The average freelancer has fewer overheads to deal with than agencies, so you’re likely to end paying much less. Most work from home, using the equipment they already own and the utilities they’re already paying for.
• Besides possibly outsourcing some tasks to external contractors, a freelancer will be completing your entire project themselves. At the proposal stage, they can communicate their creative vision and the exact costs. During the project, they can tell you the current state of progress on any particular task, in detail. With an agency, each department may be isolated to the progress of the others, and just finding the person you need to speak to can be an uphill struggle.
• If your project needs revisions, most freelancers will be able to provide them more quickly than most agencies – not to mention they’re more open to the prospect of providing them in the first place.
• A freelancer’s portfolio will contain examples of their work, while an agency’s portfolio will contain examples of the team’s work – and the team line-up is likely to have changed over the months and years. New employees may bring different creative ideas and styles than the portfolio depicts.
• For freelancers, it’s absolutely vital that they deliver their best work time after time – their reputation and continued income depends on it. For agency employees (particularly larger organisations), it’s easier to get away with ‘phoning it in’ every now and then.

So who should you pick?

Again, there are no definitive answers to which option you should pick – it all depends on the kind of creative work you need and whether or not the agency or freelancer is a good fit for you and your business. Make sure you research a variety of different creative experts, and eventually you’ll find the one that’s perfect for you.

The post Agency or Freelancer – Who Should You Work With? appeared first on Boshanka.

The good news is that for searches performed on mobile devices, websites with mobile-friendly sites might be seeing a boost in their search rankings (and by extension a rise in their traffic). The bad news is, websites which aren’t up to the standards Google expects for mobile users will likely be ranked lower in mobile searches (and may even disappear from them entirely).

The Times They are a Changin’

The announcement is unusual for Google, who tend to launch algorithm updates in secret (to keep those who try to exploit the search giant’s algorithms always one step behind). This time, they’re not out to defeat SEO cheaters, but to keep website owners on the same page as their ever-more-mobile customers and fans.

The number of internet users who surf from their smartphones and tablets has increased dramatically over the past few years and is only expected to rise in the coming years. Nowadays, less than 40% of web traffic actually comes from good old-fashioned desktop computers.

Therefore, those who fail to provide a good web experience on mobile browsers are at risk of becoming outdated and irrelevant to over half their audience.

Google have been making gradual changes to address this shift, including adding a ‘mobile-friendly’ tag to search results which meet their optimisation standards – but now it seems they’re drawing out the big guns.

No More Mobile Visitors for You?

What will happen if you don’t upgrade to a mobile-friendly website?

Nobody knows for certain how serious of an effect the algorithm update will have. Google says the update will have ‘a significant impact’ on their search results, and they’re no stranger to radically adjusting their rankings to deliver the best results for their users, so it seems logical that poorly mobile-optimised sites will be seeing a big drop in their traffic very soon.

It’s worth noting that if you’re in an industry which doesn’t receive a lot of traffic from tablet and smartphones, the number of users coming to your site from search results probably won’t change too much. Your site could still disappear from mobile results, but remain in desktop results, so your regular customers should still be able to find you. However, keep in mind this is simply speculation – we’ll just have to wait and see what happens after 21st April…

Preppin’ for the Mobile ‘Pocalypse

So, is your site mobile ready? Perhaps you’re not sure whether it is or isn’t – in which case, it probably isn’t. If you are unsure, you can use Google’s handy analysis tool to get a straightforward answer on just how mobile-friendly your site currently is.

If you haven’t got a mobile site yet, now is definitely the time to invest in one. You have two options, essentially – you can create a mobile site which is more or less independent from your desktop site, or you can upgrade your current desktop site into a responsive or adaptive website. A responsive website is Google’s preferred choice.

Responsive websites work by giving each element on your website a screen-percentage size, so they automatically adjust to the best size and layout for reading and navigation, no matter what device your users are accessing your site on.

Meanwhile, adaptive sites store a set of unique layouts which are optimised for different types of devices. There’s usually one for desktop users, one for smartphone users and one for tablet users. When a user accesses your adaptive site, the site will automatically detect the screen size of their device and pick out the adaptive layout that suits their screen the best.

A mobile-optimised site is a long-term investment, not a quick fix to dodge Google’s latest changes. Make sure you go with a reputable web developer who can deliver the right mobile solution for you.

The post Batten Down the Hatches: Google’s Mobilegeddon is Coming appeared first on Boshanka.

But as we know, every new element on a page increases its load time ever so slightly – and those load times are amplified by every new user that clicks onto your site and adds to your current site traffic.

And what if those users are accessing your site from another country? The further the distance from a user to your server location, the longer that user is going to have to wait for your page to load.

And what if they’re using a mobile device to access your site? They’re either using public wifi (along with everyone else in the coffee shop) or a 4G/3G connection, which means that loading time will drag on even longer…

Studies have shown that the average internet user won’t wait more than three seconds for a site to load before they leave and look elsewhere. Of course, the average user also has no way of seeing how many other people are trying to access your site at the same time as them, so you’ll have to forgive them for their apparent impatience. How do you provide great media content without harming your loading times (and by extension, your conversions)?

Content delivery networks aim to solve the problem by hosting your content files on many different servers distributed in strategic locations around the world. Everyone who visits your site will be delivered your content assets from the nearest server to their location, minimising the time they’ll have to wait for your site to appear.

Since each geographical group of visitors has their own content server, the strain of higher traffic on your overall site will also be reduced significantly – and if your site is targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service attack, the damage will be minimised.

MaxCDN – Content Delivery with a Wealth of Features

I’ve been using MaxCDN, one of the most popular content delivery networks on the market. MaxCDN helps you offer lightning fast performance for your site’s visitors, no matter where they’re visiting from or what kind of device they’re browsing on.

It boasts ‘FastStack’ TCP stacks powered by 100% solid state drives, direct reach into more than 90 different countries, intelligent routing and clever monitoring & analysis of latency and data packet loss – all designed to keep your site running silky-smooth at all times. It also offers integration with Sucuri’s CloudProxy to keep your site safe from a wide range of security threats.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the features than a MaxCDN subscription includes.

• Realtime cache purging – ensure your users always see the latest content with cache purging available across your entire network and within individual geographic zones.
• EdgeSSL security – let MaxCDN’s server network take care of your SSL requests to deliver a secure connection to your users quickly. SSL can be enabled instantly with a single click.
• Origin Shield – direct requests from MaxCDN’s POP servers to an Origin Shield to reduce the load on your origin server and prevent overload downtime.
• EdgeRules – set up your own set of directions for how your content is delivered to different users, such as providing different caches for mobile and desktop users and creating customised redirects.
• API – create software applications and integrate features and resources from MaxCDN, with software development kits available for Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, .NET and Go.
• MaxCDN Insights – assess the performance of your site and predict user behaviour with realtime analytics reporting.
• Security protocols – keep your content secure with two-step authentication and IP whitelisting.

As well as the Insights analytics platform, you’re also provided with a control panel. From here you can see current stats such as bandwidth usage, view detailed reports from past and present on your site’s performance, and implement changes across your server network simultaneously.

247 Super Support

One of the most attractive features of MaxCDN is their support network. On their dedicated support site, you’ll find a huge range of tutorials, FAQs, resources, blog posts and even testing tools to check if your site is running as it should be.

If you’ve got a specific query, you can call their number, drop them an email via their support address or click the chat option in the bottom-right corner of their site to talk to one of their experts, who are always friendly and happy to help you.

What if you have an urgent problem that needs to be fixed? No problem – MaxCDN’s support agents will get back to you on your problem within two minutes, and their support lines are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Great Pricing Options

In terms of pricing, MaxCDN is the cheapest content delivery network you can get. There’s a range of monthly subscription plans available, so everyone from independent webmasters to larger corporations can benefit from distributed content servers.

Plans range from 100GB/$9 bandwidth (which is what I personally use) all the way up to 350TB/$12544, and you can even set up your own customised plan if you wish.

You’ll want to select a package that’s right for you, but most larger sites will work well under their $79 per month plan – this is MaxCDN’s most popular package, and it offers 1TB of monthly bandwidth and up to 5 geographical zones. You can also opt to pay yearly on all subscriptions, which will net you a nice 20% discount.

If you’re still undecided about using MaxCDN (and you use over 15TB of bandwidth on your site a month), you can try it out for yourself by signing up for a 30-day free trial account. You’ll be given the full set of features and controls, with no obligation to buy.

The post A Cheap Content Delivery Network with a Wealth of Features – MaxCDN Review appeared first on Boshanka.

But there are still plenty of opportunities to build your list of contacts and clients, and getting into good networking habits can help you boost your reputation, bring in new business and work more assuredly & confidently.

Find your people online

The first obvious point of call is to seek out connections via the internet. There’s no shortage of great business communities out there – here are just a few to explore.

LinkedIn – known as the social network for professionals, LinkedIn is solely focused on business, so there’s fluff to wade through than other social media platforms. Join some groups in your industry sector and join in their discussions – but keep in mind that adding people you don’t know and you’ve never met or worked with is generally frowned upon.

Facebook – good if you’re offering services as opposed to products, but remember, it’s a social place. People use Facebook to communicate with friends and enjoy great content, not to see their feeds flooded with sales pitches.

Twitter – unlike other social networks, it’s somewhat acceptable on Twitter to introduce yourself to potential clients by adding them as contacts. Personally I think it’s smarter to add them to a list of ‘Cool People’ or ‘Top Companies’ – people will sit up and take notice of the person who thinks they’re interesting, and show their appreciation by following you (therefore increasing your ratio of followers vs people you’re following).

Talk to those who care enough to follow you with a friendly personal message – just make sure it’s not too sales-ey and it doesn’t look like a standard automated message.

Reddit – there’s some great subreddits for finding gigs (such as r/ForHire), interacting with fellow freelancers (r/Freelance) and promoting your expertise in your field (r/IAmA). Make an effort to integrate with the community, though – Reddit doesn’t take too kindly to shameless self promoters.

Forums – don’t discount the old message boards, since they usually play host to loyal, niche communities, allowing you to target your services more directly. For example, if you design posters and album covers for a living, you’re bound to find some valuable contacts on guitar forums.

Seek out networking events

There are plenty of trade shows, exhibitions, conferences and workshops happening around the country on a regular basis, and these provide a great way of meeting new contacts.

These events are often free to attend, and since everyone else will be on full-on networking mode too, approaching people with your spiel is a less embarrassing prospect.

Go where the clients will be

Don’t limit yourself to industry events, or events just for freelancers. See what kind of things are taking place for the kind of people you’re targeting. For example, if you’re a voiceover artist, why not see if there’s any awards evenings or conferences for radio broadcasters which you can attend for free?

Talk to everyone

When you’re at a conference, don’t just approach the people who you think might need your business. Your services might be sought by the people you’d least expect to need them. Even those who aren’t interested now might be interested months or even years later – or they might be able to recommend you to a contact of their own.

It’s also important to interact with fellow freelancers, even those who do the same work as you. They might seem like rivals, but there may be opportunities for you to collaborate, or lend each other a hand when a creative block strikes.

Use business cards

It’s 2015 – why would anyone want business cards in this age of Twitter handles and smartphones? Quite simply, business cards still work:

• They let a potential client know who you are, what you do and how they can reach you, at a glance
• They make you look professional (or at least, more professional than scrawling your email on a scrap of paper)
• They provide a tangible physical object which can be a great memory jogger down the line, if an old contact suddenly has a need for your services
• They never break down, run out of battery, lose reception, or have to be turned off for safety or legal reasons
• People are welcome to throw it away if they’re not interested, but unlike an email, your business card won’t end up landing in a spam folder by accident
• People are more likely to pass on your business card to others who might be interested in you, compared to an email address or a phone number

Keep at least three business cards with you at all times – add a few more if you’re going to a big event. Don’t just push them into the hands of everyone you meet as soon as you meet them, though – let the conversation flow naturally first, and if all goes well, offer your card when it’s time for you to go your separate ways.

Prepare what you’ll say

It’s important to know how you’ll introduce yourself, but memorising and repeating the exact same speech each time will make you sound robotic and uninspiring.

Instead, make a brief list of bullet points (two or three will do) which sum up what you do and – crucially – what you can offer them. People don’t want to hear your life story, they want to know what you can do to solve their problems. Each time you get talking to somebody new, make sure you cover all those points as succinctly as possible.

Keep your social media up to date

The first thing a potential client will do after they meet you is type your name into Google and see what social networking profiles exist for you. If they’re greeted with a Facebook page you haven’t touched in years, they’ll probably think twice about sending that follow-up email.

Don’t pester people

A follow-up message is acceptable, but nobody wants to be badgered constantly with services, even if they’re services they might be interested in. Be patient and respect other people’s time.

Don’t always focus on finding clients

Sometimes just chatting with people about your area of expertise can be enough to convince them that you’re the freelancer for them. Share your knowledge, help those that need guidance, discuss the current affairs of your industry, and above all, be yourself.

The post Getting your name out there: Networking for Freelancers appeared first on Boshanka.

The truth is, there are times when a polite but firm ‘no’ is actually the best option, both for you and for the client. Here’s a few tips on when to turn down a client’s request.

So no to biting off more than you can chew

So a client comes to you with an exciting, ambitious new project. It’s pretty much your dream job, and you’re eager to show your client what you’re made of and create something that matches their vision perfectly.

Cut to a few months later. You’ve missed your deadlines because you’re struggling to implement a key piece of software, or your tools won’t let you do what you thought they could do.

The client is on the phone, and they announce they’re going with another freelancer instead. You’ve just wasted months, and a big chunk of storage space on your hard drive, on work that you’ll never be paid for. You might even pick up a reputation of being incompetent (even if you’ve completed many other projects in the past with no hassle).

Before you take on a job, make sure you have the technical expertise and the tools to deliver what you’ve promised to deliver. It’s fine if you don’t have all the knowledge at first – but will you have the time and resources to learn, and the ability to implement what you’ve learnt at a professional level?

Don’t feel pressured into signing on the dotted line immediately. Mull it over. Take a day or two to explore what resources and skills you’ll need. Most clients will understand – and those who don’t probably won’t be much fun to work with.

If you feel you can’t complete the project singlehandedly, offer to complete the parts which you can do and point your client in the direction of another freelancer who can complete the rest. (This is where networking with competitors and similar freelancers comes in handy.)

Say no to working for free

This goes without saying – but rarely will a client explicitly ask you to work for free. They’ll wrap it up in fancy language that makes breaking your back for no monetary gain still seem like a rewarding experience.

If a client promises you wider exposure, or claims the work you do for them will be ‘great for your portfolio’, decline immediately. Working for exposure is a myth – any company which won’t pay you for your work will be unable to give you the exposure you deserve.

Of course, not every client that tries this ‘trick’ is trying to pull the wool over your eyes – some genuinely don’t have the money to pay for freelance services, and don’t fully understand the effort that goes into your work (and the value it can bring to their company). Some of these ‘clients’ might be family, or friends, or friends of the family – how can you say no to them?

The bottom line is, your efforts deserve to be rewarded properly. In addition, working without pay sets a precedent. If other companies catch wind of your antics, they’ll probably expect you to work for free for them, too. They’ll also go to you instead of other freelancers who rely on paid work to feed themselves and their families; so you’ll be dragging down the rest of the industry with you.

Say no to clients piling extra work on top

This one is particularly important if you charge your client for a certain number of hours each week. It can be easy to go over your allotted hours if your client is constantly coming to you with new tasks all the time.

Make it clear to your client that if they want a new task completed immediately, you’ll have to delay the task you’re currently working on for them. Sometimes it may be in your best interest (and theirs) to refuse to take on the new work outright – otherwise you could find yourself building up a list of unfinished tasks.

If you have the time and resources to take on the new task alongside the current task, go for it – but make sure you get paid for the extra hours you spend on the new task.

If you’re working to a project contract and your client wants something done that hasn’t been outlined in the contract terms, make it clear that you’ll be charging the task as an additional job outside the agreed contract.

Make sure you check the contract thoroughly and discuss what the client is asking for before you do this – they might just be asking for something you’ve already agreed to, but describing it in unfamiliar terminology.

So no to violating your own values

What do you do when a client wants you to do something which seems unethical to you? Some might say, just go with it – you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?

The reality is, taking on work which you don’t agree with is at best, bad for your morale (and therefore bad for the quality of the work you produce), and at worst, incredibly harmful to your own reputation. If the client gets caught out, they’ll likely try to blame the whole thing on you – and no client has the right to make you look like the bad guy when you’re not!

Talk through the work with your client, help them understand that what they’re asking for is unethical (it’s possible they’re just misguided, not crooked), and if they don’t get the message, respectfully decline their request.

The post When to Say Yes to a Client, and When to Say No appeared first on Boshanka.

You could sleep on it – but that’s maybe not an option when your deadline is looming on the horizon and your client keeps looking at their watch.

Here are a few things which have helped me in the past when I’ve been struck down by the dreaded designer’s block.

Cheer yourself up

Feeling frustrated? That bad feeling might actually be harming your creativity. Studies have shown that being down in the dumps makes you less open to fresh ideas, so you’re more likely to just stick to the things that are familiar to you.

Take a short break, and instead do something that makes you happy. Listen to a song you haven’t heard in a while. Watch a funny Youtube video. Make yourself a hot chocolate, with cream – and sprinkles. Whatever you do, don’t get caught up in your break – you’ll never defeat that designer’s block if you never actually work!

Go for a stroll

Getting up and stretching those legs in the great outdoors can be a great way to break through that design block. Like the previous tip, this works by raising your mood; the exercise will stimulate the natural release of endorphins, morphine-like chemicals which make you feel more chilled and positive.

The change of surroundings will also hopefully provide some much-needed inspiration. Make a point of studying everyday outdoor objects more closely. Take in the shapes and colours of the roads, houses, street signs, cars, traffic lights – all the things which usually just make up the backdrop of your route.

But don’t bring binoculars. You might look a bit strange.

Try a new tool

A good craftsperson never blames their tools, of course – but using the same ones over and over can suck the opportunity for artistic inspiration out of the window. Introducing a new toy into your work process can help to get the creative juices flowing.

It doesn’t have to be an expensive new gadget. Try a different brush preset. Try a different type of adjustment layer. Take a ‘bad’ design technique (such as a drop shadow, or Comic Sans text) and explore it more thoroughly. Download some free design software and see what you can make using its simplified features. You could even grab a pen and paper and start doodling.

Call up your contacts

Whenever you network, take note to build connections with your competitors. That way, whenever you’re really stuck for inspiration, you can put your heads together to come up with a solution – and as they say, two heads are better that one.

A fellow designer can approach a task without the creative exhaustion that you’ve suffered from attempting it over and over. Just make sure you remember to return the favour, or you can forget getting help from them again.

Don’t fear the delete button!!

This is more of an extreme measure, for when you’re suffering from hardcore design block. But when you’ve been struggling with a part-finished design for a long time and you simply can’t get anywhere with it, it may be more sensible to start again from scratch.

Weigh up your options before doing this. It makes sense to scrap a logo which is only a third done – not so much an entire half-finished website.

The title of this tip is a little hyperbolic – make sure you save your existing design and save it for later before you click that ‘New Project’ button. You never know when your previous design could come in handy later, or when inspiration will strike and save the design from the scrapheap.

What tips have helped you out with your own design block? Add your piece of advice using the comments section below.

The post How to Get Through Designer’s Block appeared first on Boshanka.

In this review of Sucuri’s internet security suite, I’ll be taking you through some of my experiences using their cloudproxy, website firewall, antivirus and post-hack cleaning service. As well as giving you an overview of all of Sucuri’s bells and whistles.

In recent years, hacker collectives have succeeded in bringing down some of the most high-profile brand websites and networks. The recent Sony Pictures and Christmas Day console network hacks have demonstrated that even billion-dollar industries aren’t safe from malicious attacks.

Meanwhile, criminals around the world are still making oodles of cash by exploiting the vulnerable quirks of the web – hence why you’ll still come across the odd poorly-written Viagra advert and empty ‘find out how I make $100 a day’ boasts while you browse.

How do you keep your own site (and the users that visit it every day) safe from this faceless threat?

Security Peace of Mind

Fortunately, there are many firms out there dedicated to fighting hackers and keeping the internet safe.

Sucuri is an internet security company specialising in providing firewall & antivirus solutions for website owners. Their services are designed to thwart attempts at spamming, infecting and bringing down your website – and to fix the damage if your own site becomes a victim.

The software offers a comprehensive range of preventative measures and tools – if you’re signed up with Sucuri, you’re protected against brute-force hacking, software & script exploits and even zero-day events (vulnerabilities are virtually patched).

I personally recommend their CloudProxy Service, which I’ve used with several clients’ WordPress sites. With this service, you get the protection against malware and DDoS attacks, with the added benefit of improved site performance for your users.

The CloudProxy Service comes with a ton of extra advanced security options including:

• Admin panel restricted to only Whitelisted IP addresses. A bouncer for your admin panel, blocks anyone not on the list from accessing your /wp-admin section.
  
• Additional Security Headers added to your site. Protection from clickjacking and XXS attacks.
  
• XMLRPC, Comments and Trackbacks blocked. If you’re using facebook or disqus comments, you can block all other forms of commenting, brilliant for blocking spam.
  
• Stop unfiltered HTML from being sent to your site. Prevents users from inserting unflitered HTML content into your site. Blocks Iframes and script calls from being used.
  
• Stop upload of PHP or executable content. Prevents anyone from uploading PHP, Perl or executable content to your site.
  
• Advanced evasion detection. This option enables advanced evasion detection signatures.
  
• Enable Emergency DDoS protection. HTTP Flood protection, ideal if you’re under attack and need protection fast.
  
• Advanced Intrusion Detection System. Enables Sucuri’s IDS system which runs in the backend to protect against repeat attackers.
  
• Block proxies and the top three attack countries (China, Russia and Turkey). Blocks anyone from China, Russia or Turkey from interacting with your site. They are still able to view content but not use the forms or other interactive areas.
  

In addition, using Sucuri’s Geo Blocking service you can block individual countries from either viewing your site, posting or interacting with your site or both.

If anything nasty does manage to slip through the net, you’ll be the first to know. Sucuri provides continuous monitoring of your site via a free plugin you can download, which will quickly alert you to any significant changes to your site’s code, be they malicious or benign.

You can even choose how alerts are delivered to you from a huge variety of options, including mobile phone text messages, instant messaging via social media, RSS feed alerts and more.

Fixed That For You

Sucuri will clean up your site if it has been hacked, removing the malware and delivering a final report to you once it has been fixed. As well as solving on-site issues, Sucuri checks search engine and antivirus software blacklists, to see if the hack has affected the reputability of your site and brand. If it has, they also work to get your site removed from these blacklists as soon as possible.

This service is included in their subscriptions with no extra charge – whether you’ve been a Sucuri customer for years, or you’ve only recently been hacked and you’re signing up for the first time.

If it’s a particularly nasty hack, sometimes issues can remain after the initial repair process – in these cases, a Sucuri team member can perform a more in-depth manual analysis and cleanup for you.

What if the damage done is irreversible? No problem – Sucuri creates regular backups of your site’s files, so if disaster hits, your site can be quickly restored to its former glory. Best of all, these backup files are automatically stored in the cloud, so they can be retrieved wherever you are, whenever you need them.

Your Security Taken Seriously

The Sucuri team devote a good portion of their time to researching and identifying new hacking vulnerabilities and trends, so they can quickly prepare for new threats and keep their customers safe from them. Even if your site’s hack is new to them, they can identify the principles behind such attacks and tackle them accordingly.

You can choose from a variety of subscription options from basic single-site protection to larger multi-site packages for businesses. Prices are set at regular monthly amounts, so you won’t find yourself with an unexpectedly higher bill because you’ve been targeted with a larger or more obscure attack.

If there’s anything I’ve missed or not covered in this Sucuri Review please feel free to leave a comment or alternatively you can can take a look at the Sucuri website here.

The post Sucuri Review – Website AntiVirus + Firewall and Post Hack Cleaning Service appeared first on Boshanka.

Of course, music is all a matter of preference, but studies have shown that certain genres are better than others at stimulating your brain for working.

So what should you be listening to while you work? Here are a few tips on making your music and your productivity play nice.

Choose the music you love for repetitive tasks

When it comes to boring, straightforward tasks (like answering emails or sorting accounts), listen to the music that makes you feel good. This triggers the release of dopamine, the chemical associated with the human body’s reward system (designed to reinforce successful behaviour patterns by giving you a good feeling when you carry them out).

The dopamine raises your mood, allowing you to better engage with the more tedious tasks on your list. If you’re using Spotify, you might want to start a radio channel based on one of your favourite artists – more dopamine is released when you hear a new song you like versus an old song you’ve heard many times before.

Choose ambient music for creative work

For tasks that require more creative input, choose simple, non-intrusive tracks. Ambient music has been shown to be beneficial for working creatively, putting you in a relaxed mood while also providing a subtle level of stimulation for your brain.

In addition, the broad nature of the ‘ambient’ label means you’re bound to find something you like, whether your taste leans more towards guitar music or electronic pieces.

Choose classical for great productivity

Slower Baroque-period classical pieces have been shown to create the same combo de-stressing/stimulating effect as ambient music, helping you stay upbeat and get more done in the day. Studies suggest that classical music may also help for improving your spelling and mathematical accuracy.

Forget vocals

If you want to concentrate while you’re working, it’s best to queue up some instrumental tracks. Just as you’d find it distracting to work with someone talking words at you, listening to music with vocals will draw your attention away from work as each lyric registers in the back of your brain.

With purely instrumental tracks, there’s no meaning for your brain to get hung up on and you’ll be less distracted from work as a result.

Set up your music before work

With the huge choice of music that comes with MP3 players and streaming services, selecting the tracks you want to listen to can become a major distraction.

There’s always the temptation to skip through tracks, or be spontaneous and select a song you haven’t heard in a while, and suddenly you’re flipping back and forth between your music and your work every couple of minutes.

Instead, prepare a playlist before work, or go old school and stick a pile of albums next to your CD player. Listen to each and every track, without skipping! If you fancy a change, load up some different music in your lunch break.

Ultimately, the music you listen to (and how you listen to it) is up to you, but it has to work for you!

The post The Best Musical Accompaniment to Your Freelance Work appeared first on Boshanka.

Instead, you’re free to choose what you do and when you do it (to an extent of course – no one escapes deadlines). You can recline on your sofa, not an economy-plastic office chair. You’ve got your own coffee maker, and your home phone, and your TV, and your social media access, and you’re always in to sign for packages, and… what was I talking about?

That’s the trouble with working from home. It’s filled with distractions – and not just fun distractions. There’s daily housework, family commitments, that home renovation project that you keep putting off…

How do you keep your concentration & motivation on a day to day basis? Here are a few pointers for those just starting out with freelancing from home.

Get yourself a real desk

Not the kitchen table, or the dining room table, or the coffee table in the lounge. Clear a space in one of the quieter rooms in your home, buy a desk and a chair (they don’t have to be too fancy) and set them up in your new working space.

For now, just stick a computer, your work phone and maybe a lamp on the desk. If you deal with lots of paperwork, a storage tray with shelves is a good idea too.

Don’t be tempted to fill the desk with everything you think you might need. Post-it notes, for example, might seem essential – but what will you use them for?

If they’re just for writing down reminders or contact details, you can type them on the computer, where they’ll all be in one place and within easy access – not strewn across the desk on colourful bits of paper.

Put some clothes on

Why change out of your pyjamas when you’ve got no boss, colleagues or clients to see you in person? Here’s why – staying in your nightclothes (or your, er, birthday suit) is something you might have done on lazy weekends when you had no one to see and nothing better to do than stay in bed.

Doing the same now still sends the same message to your brain: “It’s okay to be lazy today – why bother getting dressed?” And if you can’t be bothered to get dressed, why bother to work at all? Even if you’re not consciously avoiding work, you’ve created an atmosphere where completing tasks just seems like too much effort.

There’s no need to break out the shirt and tie. It’s okay to dress more casually at home, but making the effort to get dressed rather than just tumbling out of bed demonstrates to yourself that you’re ready to tackle the day proper.

This works the other way too. Change back into your PJs once the working day is over, and you’ll be signifying to your subconscious: “My leisure time has begun and I can spend it however I want” – perfect if workaholism is eating into your personal life.

Don’t invite friends over – unless it’s for lunch

But the day will fly by when you’re surrounded by your favourite people, right? Probably, but you’ll won’t be getting anything done. Friends are absolutely a distraction – even if your productivity goes unaffected, the quality of your work will suffer.

Assign yourself an hour’s break at the same time each day, and arrange to see your friends for lunch. If they want to meet up outside your break, get them to give you a ring and find out if you’re free first.

If they turn up unannounced, tell them politely but firmly you’re busy and you can only spare 15 minutes before you must get back to work. Schedule a more convenient time to meet up again, such as an evening or weekend.

Stay off social media

Yes, that does include LinkedIn. Even if you’ve set it up for business purposes, a social media account will still pull you away from the work you need to be doing.

The trouble is that social media is immediate and (seemingly) ephemeral. There’s the pressure to see what people are talking about now and provide your own response now, right this second.

But those posts will likely still be there for you to read later. So, if you have a social media account open on a tab in your browser, close it. If you have alerts set up on your phone, switch them off.

If you come across an article or video you want to share, make a note of it and post about it after work. Consider using automated software such as Hootsuite to schedule posts, so your account can still appear ‘active’ while you’re doing other things.

Sometimes social media will demand more of your attention – such as when customers post complaints on your account page. You could try checking your accounts for 30 seconds every hour to see if anyone has posted anything directly to you – but make sure any non-urgent posts are responded to at the end of the working day.

Video chat with remote clients

Email is great for conversing with clients who live further away, allowing you to share ideas and project progress in a visual way; something which you simply can’t do in a phone call.

But it’s not the most personal means of communication, and it can sometimes feel like your clients are just words on a screen. Suddenly, procrastination doesn’t seem so scandalous, and your concentration on the task in hand can falter.

Using video conferencing software & services (such as Google Hangouts) to interact with your online clients is a great way to combat this complacency. It’s not only great for brainstorming and demonstrating your plans – it’s also a great reminder that your clients are real people who are counting on you to deliver amazing work. Don’t let them down!

Ultimately, staying focused in your freelance career relies on good organisational skills and self-discipline. Master those and working from home will barely feel like work.

The post How to Work From Home – Without the Distractions! appeared first on Boshanka.

You could probably also tell me what products/services they sell, what sorts of people buy from them, what values they stand for, perhaps whether or not you would buy from them… all from just a single glance.

Here are a few tips on how to make your own logo design effective as a shorthand for your client’s whole company identity.

Keep it simple

With so many logos permeating our popular culture, the need for yours to stand out can make all those colour gradients and Photoshop paintbrush effects seem like a great idea. In reality, it’ll look unfocused and messy, and the company will seem amateurish as a result.

Look at most successful company logos and you’ll see simple geometric shapes and sparing use of colour. These logos are recognisable & memorable because they’re so straightforward.

Don’t be tempted to just copy your favourite brands, though – your logo should be unique to your company, not only in how it looks, but what it stands for.

Be smart with colour

An awareness of the psychological & cultural associations of different colours can help you convey your corporate identity more effectively when designing your logo.

That might all sound like marketing speak, but consider this – is bright orange appropriate for a funeral director’s? Would dark green & brown look right for a sexy young PR firm?

Research different colours and their symbolism, not only within popular culture but within different industries and worldwide culture – especially if the company is selling to an international market.

Don’t be too literal

A great logo instantly tells people what the company in question can do for them – but relying on an icon of the product isn’t an ideal solution.

You can use product imagery as inspiration, but being directly literal often looks tacky and leaves you little wiggle-room if the nature of the business changes down the line. Being more subtle and clever with your design can yield a more interesting, eye-catching logo.

For example, Amazon’s logo isn’t a box, or a delivery vehicle, or an assortment of different products – it’s a curved arrow pointing from the A to the Z, representing the wide catalogue of products you can buy from them. It can also be interpreted as a smile, representing Amazon as a friendly, personal company.

Plan, plan, plan

Even the most famous logo designs are the result of incremental changes over several years – but redoing your logo again and again isn’t helpful. Customers will fail to recognise the new logo belongs to the same company. It also implies the company doesn’t really know who it is or what it stands for – and who wants to do business with a company like that?

Getting it right first time means planning your design thoroughly. Create different designs. Create variations on designs. See how they fit with the company’s existing design style. Test different colours and orientations. Test how they look in print, on the net, on videos, on product packaging etc. This might all seem like a faff, but it could save you some major headaches down the line.

You could also try your hand at creating your own logo, it’s great fun and even if it’s not completely polished, it’ll be a great help should you choose to hire a professional, as it’ll help them understand what you’re trying to achieve with your new logo.

Check out some of my logos below:

The post What Makes a Good Logo? appeared first on Boshanka.

To understand what a boon responsive web design can be to your new company site, we have to take a quick history lesson…

Many former owners of older mobile phones will remember how miserable it was trying to browse the internet on them pre-2007. If you managed to find a strong enough signal for the page to actually load, you’d still end up with a mangled Frankenstein monster of the site you wanted to visit.

Fortunately, smart phones came along and users could finally view websites in their original form – but the experience was still far from ideal.

Websites were designed for viewing on desktop monitors, so attempting to read a paragraph of text required you to zoom in, then drag the screen left and right like the carriage of a typewriter. It was cumbersome and you could easily lose your place on the page. The problem was partially mitigated when tablets came along, as the larger screen helped users see a little more of the site – but zooming and swiping was still a necessary evil.

These websites were also designed for navigating with a mouse, which allowed you to hold your cursor over categories to activate drop-down menus. On mobile, these drop down menus either refused to appear entirely, or would have to be activated with a light tap – press too hard and you’d end up being directed to the category page instead.

Slider bars also failed to function in most cases, since in normal circumstances you’d be clicking and holding the left mouse button to operate them.

And then there’s the appearance of these sites, with images and elements often overlapping other elements and links being pushed off the mobile screen.

At first these issues were seen as an acceptable trade-off of browsing the net on a fairly niche device – but in the past few years, website traffic from smartphones and tablets has sharply risen, particularly for e-commerce sites. If your site performs poorly on mobile, users will get frustrated and go and find a competitor that offers them the experience they expect.

Web developers attempted to solve this problem by automatically redirecting users to mobile versions of their sites, with the functionality of the site cut down to the bare essentials. Many of these infuriated users even more, as they found themselves unable to return to the fully-functional desktop version on their mobiles and had to stick with the fluffy version instead.

But in the last few years, a true solution has emerged to users. Enter the ‘responsive website’.

Responsive web design refers to a design philosophy that websites should provide a great experience on all internet devices, as well as the web development and graphic design techniques that they use to create such website experiences.

Instead of being assigned a size in pixels or other absolute measurements, the scale of each element on the page is dependent on the size of the device’s screen.

This means text will stay at comfortable reading size on all screens and images will never be too big to fit the screen dimensions. In addition, when the screen is small enough, navigation menus and lists will disappear behind convenient buttons which your users can open with a simple tap.

Responsive web design also favours clear buttons over fiddly text links, as well as beautiful images and graphics over reams & reams of text.

And it works the other way too – on larger devices, elements will grow to fit the screen, so your site will look great on laptops, desktops and even smart televisions.

All these features add up to make an attractive, easy-to-navigate site that your site’s visitors will love, no matter what they’re reading it on.

The post What is Responsive Web Design? appeared first on Boshanka.

The pack is up for grabs over at the Inky Deals website, read on and I’ll even give you an exclusive discount so you can get even more money off!

It’s The Big Bang Bundle: $14,979 worth of Top-Quality Resources – From $49

As if that’s not all, Inky Deals are offering a 200% money back guarantee on this bundle. This means that if you’re not happy with it, you get your money back and you also get to keep the bundle.

This week they’ve launched one of the biggest bundles you’ll ever see – it’s The Big Bang Bundle: $14,979 worth of Top-Quality Resources – From $49. And because they’re my friends, they’re offering you an exclusive $9 discount coupon, so you can get this amazing deal at an even lower price! Use the code BIGBANG9 at checkout. If you buy multiple items you can also use my exclusive discount ‘Boshanka10‘ for a 10% discount off everything in your cart.

The bundle contains:

• 470 Vector Packs worth $5,845
• 925 Vector Illustrations worth $3,700
• 101 Web & Print Resources Packs worth $1,070
• 102 High-Res Texture Packs worth $1219 (6000 x 4000 px)
• 125 Photoshop & Illustrator Addons worth $1246
• 67 Photoshop Brushes Sets worth $486
• 60 T-shirt Designs worth $900
• 15 Premium Tutorials worth $197
• 9 UI Kits worth $135
• 278 Fonts in 25 Font Families worth $70
• 8 Bootstrap 3 Templates worth $76

This entire bundle comes with an extended royalty license, meaning you can use the resources in an unlimited number of personal and commercial purposes, and even merchandise!

Still not convinced?

Download an amazing freebie with $74 worth of resources and take them for a spin!

What’s in the bundle:

Click here to view the entire content of this amazing bundle!

The post The Big Bang Web Designer’s Resource Pack appeared first on Boshanka.

This post is specifically targeted at people experiencing problems with their WordPress contact forms, and sending/ receiving mail functionality who happen to be hosting their site with GoDaddy.

This fix may resolve issues on other hosts too, but broken forms and failing send mail functions are common with WordPress sites hosted with GoDaddy.

Now personally, I would advise any client or fellow freelancer to avoid GoDaddy at all costs. I’ve used my fair share of web hosting companies and my frustrations working with them can be likened to those of a developer working with IE6.

Unfortunately, we freelancers don’t always get to select the web hosting with which we must work, and for those occasions where you’ve torn your hair out trying to figure out why your contact forms aren’t working on your WordPress site – if you’re on GoDaddy – this is probably the solution for you.

The post How to make Contact Form 7 Work with WordPress on GoDaddy Hosting appeared first on Boshanka.

Getting those reviews can be intimidating. You have satisfied customers – you just have to find a way for them to rave about you online. But then once you have a written review, what do you do with it?

Don’t worry, the days of awkwardly asking for testimonials are over. If you have social media set up for your website, or even email back and forth with your clients, getting reviews is as simple as a few clicks.

Enter Get Kudos.

Get Kudos answers those questions, plus many more.

Realizing how hard it is to collect and organize reviews, Get Kudos is an easy, painless way for your clients to sing your praises, all while increasing your marketing potential.

How It Works

Curate. Collect. Display. Those three words are the backbone behind Get Kudos. By connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your Kudos account, curating reviews is just a click away. Get Kudos imports reviews from your Twitter feed and Facebook page into your Get Kudos account. From there, you click the “Get Kudos” icon and you’ve collected a review. You also have complete control over what reviews you share and which you don’t.

The team behind Get Kudos realizes there is more than one way to connect with customers and have created widgets, forms, and links that are simple to embed in your website or email. Also, do you have a Live Chat feature on your website? Get Kudos can grab reviews from that too.

Side note: If you’re looking for a live chat provider, check out Zopim. Here’s what I love about that product.

The email signature link is a subtle “hey, remember you like my work?” reminder to clients that they liked working with you and want to spread the word. It’s literally a click for them to get to the review page. From there, they do have to sign in to their Facebook or Twitter account (this is required in order to make sure the review is legit), then they give their review and they’re done.

You can also see the stats of where your reviews have come from, allowing you to focus your energies on specific social networks. If you don’t have many Twitter kudos, perhaps connecting with more of your clients there is in order.

Why I Love It

I’ve been using Get Kudos for a little over three months now, and I really like the ease of use. Set up was really simple and by interacting with my clients on Facebook and Twitter (something I was doing anyway), I was able to curate reviews and easily organize them in a way I wasn’t able to before.

I love that I can subtly influence my clients to leave a review by simply having a “Give me kudos” link in my email signature. This is a noninvasive way to ask for a testimonial. While they may not write a testimonial right away, as I continue to interact with them, they see my Kudos link and they are again reminded of the option to leave a review.

Again, it’s the “remember you like my work” hint that is completely different from the old way of collecting reviews.

The website widgets are also useful yet subtle and don’t take up much space on my website. They work as seamlessly on mobile as they do on the desktop browser. By clicking on the crown widget on my site, my client is brought to my specific Get Kudos page that displays all of my Kudos. It really couldn’t be simpler.

What’s Missing

While Facebook and Twitter are essential for building the social network around your company, LinkedIn and Google+ are also huge players in the social media game. Currently, Get Kudos only works with Facebook and Twitter. I’d love for my clients to be able to connect on my professional profile on LinkedIn and if they leave a review, I can curate that into the Get Kudos system. Google+ is also becoming a great professional networking site that generates reviews.

I’m hopeful Get Kudos will soon be able to connect just as easily to other social networks as it does Facebook and Twitter.

Another thing I love is that the service is currently free! While it’s in beta, the creators are offering the ‘House Plan,’ which includes unlimited widgets, reviews and import channels, free of charge. When it’s fully up and running, that level of service is set to cost less than $5 a month. The ‘Hut Plan,’ which will always be free allows for one import channel, 10 reviews, and five website embeds.

Overall, Get Kudos is a great product that covers the bases in terms of curating and collecting reviews through social media. The set up and maintenance are very simple to understand and allows you to connect and interact with customers all while collecting their positive feedback.

There’s no harm in trying it out – especially while it’s free! — and I think you’ll be pleased with the power behind the tool. I think it’ll only continue to get more powerful as it grows.

Thanks for reading and please leave your comments below. If you enjoyed this review, why not give me some Kudos?

The post My secret weapon for collecting more client Kudos appeared first on Boshanka.

I had dabbled with other helpdesk and live chat providers, but a lack of support for mobile and older browsers meant that my search continued.

Zopim makes it easy to engage with visitors live on your website, answer their questions and turn those virtual window shoppers into paying customers.

Since going live with Zopim Live Chat on my website I’ve more than doubled the amount of leads I receive and convert each month, in this article I’ll explain how you can too.

What you will learn

• How to build meaningful relationships with live visitors to your website
• How to customise the Zopim Widget
• How to set up customised greetings and alerts
• How to set up and manage a team of live chat agents
• How to configure Zopim with your own IM software
• How to combat spam
• How to increase leads and business profitability using Zopim

Zopim live Chat Review and Tutorial

This article will teach you how to set up and configure Zopim Live Chat, and optimise your workflow to generate more leads and build more meaningful relationships with potential clients.

[sociallocker]

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Zopim Live Chat is a tool which sits live on your website, and allows you or your agents to initiate live discussions with visitors as they browse your products or services.

Zopim is available to any business, large or small – run it yourself or set up a help desk and departments to categorise your agents and get the right help for your website visitors.

A beautiful user interface

Zopim Chat administration is split between two areas: My Account and the Dashboard. My Account is where you deal with your billing and subscription settings and the Dashboard is where you’ll spend most of your time.

The dashboard is the first thing you’ll see after logging in, and gives you some summarised analytics of your website traffic during recent hours, days or months. The graph shows total visitors, uniques and the number of chats held.

You can also view what’s happening right now by clicking the visitors list tab. From here you can instigate a real time live chat with any of the visitors live on your site.

Simply click on a visitor to start a chat.

Your visitor will see your message appear in real time on the front end of your website.

Visualisation Buckets

One of the coolest features offered by Zopim is the visualisation section. Here you can see a real time visualisation of visitors on your site, you can then segment them into helpful buckets such as browser type, keyword, page title, country, browser and lots more.

You can interact and initiate chats with the visitors directly from within this screen, as well as see any incoming chat notifications.

With Zopim’s Free live chat you can run one live chat at a time, but the premium packages offer unlimited simultaneous chats.

The agent management section is again limited to one on the free version, but with the premium version you can deligate tasks and create multiple agents who can all access the dashboard to deal with customers independently of each other.

As the account holder you can silently shadow live chats as they happen without the agent or the customer knowing, very handy for quality control.

To maximise efficiency, you’ll want to set up plenty of shortcuts, these are automatically applied to chats when the a short cut is entered into the widget. You can also create multiple choice questions, to engage the user without requiring them to type anything.

As you might expect, you can easily ban problem visitors by IP address, ensuring you quickly weed out any time wasters.

Proactive Lead Generation

In my experience, this is the most valuable section. By setting up proactive triggers, Zopim will automatically pop up and initiate a chat with users. You create the message to be displayed and set up the action that will trigger it.

A trigger action can be almost anything, time on page, 2nd, 3rd visit to the page, hitting a specific page like a basket or a product, or even something more complex.

Zopim is an attractive widget that will encourage users to contact you where they perhaps wouldn’t have before, but add the awesome power of proactive triggers and you will dramatically increase your leads, overnight.

Triggers are a premium feature, but with premium plans for Zopim starting at $14.00 / month – its an option you can’t afford to live without.

The Trigger shown above will automatically respond the user if they start a chat but no one is around to answer them. It’ll ask them to wait or give them my contact details, or better yet ask them to leave theirs.

The time on site trigger I have set up just pops up when a user has been on my site for 30 seconds.

Integrating Zopim Chat into your website

It’s pretty simple, just copy the script from the widget section in your dashboard into your website header. It’s also worth noting here that if you’re using Zopim with Cloudflare and you have your scripts set to load with rocketscript – Zopim may not work. Not a problem though just modify the first line of the Zopim js code to include data-cfasync=”false”. An example is shown below:

You can also customise the widget’s look and feel to match your site. Again, premium account holders win here with lots of features and added benefits such as social login etc. But basic customisation is possible with Zopim Free.

Support for mobile and responsive websites

Zopim is mobile friendly, the chat widget automatically adjusts to the device on which it is viewed. Users will have a completely seamless experience using Zopim on your site no matter what device they are using.

Multilingual Chat Support

Zopim allows you and your chat agents to translate text from visitors on the fly. This is a massively cool feature, opening up a whole world of potential customers that may previously have been unavailable to you, and without the cost of hiring translators.

Software and Application Integration

Zopim can be fully integrated with the following products, and they have a solid API which can be used for bespoke integrations:

• Jira
• Salesforce
• Highrise
• SugarCRM
• Vtiger
• ZohoCRM
• Batchbook
• Pivotal Tracker
• OsTicket
• ZenDesk
• NetSuite
• UserVoice

Resources in this Article

• Zopim Live Chat

// ]]>

The post The Best Free live Chat and Help Desk Software appeared first on Boshanka.

What is a job board site?

For those of you who don’t know, a Job Board website is an online version of the traditional Job board. In recent years, a string of well known developers have built easy to use out of the box Job Board themes to make it easy for individuals to build out and run their own Employment Websites. It offers a simple pricing model and with the right niche and some smart SEO and promotional tactics it’s not as difficult as you might think to get your new online business up and running. As themes have advanced, you can now find yourself with a feature rich jobsite with just a few hours work. These WordPress Job Boards are typically piped into common payment gateways, and make it easy to set up pay per ad or ad buckets with ease. More recently I’ve seen some of these developers including automatic feeds to sites such as Indeed Jobs – so you don’t even have to create the content yourself. Other great features have included CV Libraries, tailored areas for recruiters or applicants separately and the ability to have users create their own profiles showcasing their work. For the purposes of my own learning I did set up and now run with some moderate success the growing WordPress Job List (Using JobRoller from App Themes).

The best Job Board themes for WordPress – Reviewed!

JobRoller

From App Themes

[rating=5]

$99

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo

Taking the top spot once again is App Themes. Those guys just know how to create a solid WordPress theme! JobRoller is a beautiful, feature rich, out of the box wordpress job board theme.

JobRoller is one of the most well known and most popular wordpress job themes available, and for good reason. It has all of the standard functionality you might expect and caters to all three aspects of the market. Recruiter and Job Seeker registration, a CV database with an easy to use search function, and of course a simple application process for the job ads themselves. The process of submitting jobs is remarkably simple two, the easy to use submission wizard helps employers quickly post great looking job ads to the site in just a few minutes.

JobRoller user management is also excellent, offering multiple dashboards tailored to the level of access for the given user. So no matter what the role of the logged in user, access to the tools they need is right there at their fingertips, uncluttered by unnessisary fluff.

Out of the box JobRoller comes packaged with a great looking User Interface, though it is advisable to make significant alterations to this, to break yourself apart from the plethora of other sites out there which use the theme. As a starting point it’s fantastic. The theme is fully responsive, so it looks great on mobile and tablet devices, and the feature rich interface makes it a breeze for users. Possibly one of the most important aspects to consider is the ability to search. JobRoller offers users the convenience of a radius/ location based search, allowing job seekers to browse for jobs in or around their location. Multi-language support means you can build a global job hunting website, and charging and earning money is a breeze as it comes with paypal plugged in from day one – additionaly you can purchase plugins to allow the theme to support many other payment gateways in just a few moments.

JobRoller has a very powerful settings page, allowing users to make changes in general to the way the site works, great job and cv moderation tools so you can ensure only quality content is being submitted by your users, automatic spam moderation and an integrated advertising panel so you can monetise the site further with key advertisements. Additionaly you get all the added functionality you’ve come to expect as standard with wordpress – such as custom URLs, taxonomy configuration and the omi-present admin toolbar.

JobRoller is a well established theme on the market, it’s stable and has come along way since it’s first release several years ago. The pioneering theme from App Themes it’s virtually bug free and is well documented and has pleny of support. With so many developers and thousands of job sites now being powered by this theme, it’s a virtual certainty that if you have a problem, someone else has already had it, and solved it.

All in all, JobRoller is a solid theme with plenty of support. It’s great for anyone looking to start slow with fast results. Full of quick wins and hidden features, you can spend as little or as much time as you want cultivating your site, and with regular updates and first class support you shouldn’t ever be stuck for too long. As always I suggest you check out the demo first, play around and test it out before you commit to buy. For users without the technical know how it’s a great theme to get started with, and for those who want to get to the nuts and bolts of it, it’s well supported and easy to understand, with exceptionally well commented code. For recruiters and employers job posting is simple and can be automated, and the CV library is a welcome additon in recent versions. Job seekers will be happy too, with the powerful search and job filtering tools, and the email alerts to get job updates

Key Features

• Easy to customize front page
• Custom Job Types
• Resume (CV) Database
• Auto Resized Images
• AJAX & jQuery Features
• Job feeds from Indeed & More
• Responsive Design
• Advanced search functionality
• Social Network integration
• Category and site wide rss feeds
• Themed login and sign up pages
• Multi-currency support
• Sales and job charts widgets

• Support for recruiters and recruiter specific roles
• Transaction Logging
• Apply for Job Form
• Hundreds of Child Themes and Plugins
• Powerful API
• Multiple colour schemes
• SEO Optimised
• Ajax auto-complete
• Multi-language support
• Email alert engine
• PayPal IPN support
• Automatic job pruning

JobEngine

From Engine Themes

[rating=4]

$129

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo

JobEngine from wizard developers EngineThemes is a super simple, super customizable WordPress theme with a great UI. It’s got much of the standard stuff you might expect from a solid job board theme, with a searchable CV library, job application form and filtering for jobs by location, type and category. The site utilises AJAX so everything’s very slick and very smooth and page reloading is kept to a minimum. JobEngine really excels at it’s payment structuring, with out of the box support for multiple gateways and different easy to customise payment plans. As is the standard these days, the theme is fully optimised for mobile devices.

The JobEngine admin panel is full of lots of functions and features. From here you can manage the pricing structure and the job types. You can add, remove and test diffetent payment gateways and control virtually every aspect of your new job site.

Key Features

• Job Management – location, type and category sorting
• AJAX job filtering
• Resume (CV) Database
• Online applications
• Email templates and management

• Flexible payment plans
• Lots of payment gateways
• Smart design tools
• Translation support
• Regular updates

JobJockey

From Color Labs

[rating=4]

$79

GET THEME Colour Labs Theme Demo

JobJockey is a lightweight premium WordPress Job application theme that requires probably the least amount of technical knowledge to set up. At $79.00 it’s at the lower end of the job board pricing pool, and can form the basis of a good solid job board website. Out of the box it supports paypal and has the basic functionality you might expect, but it lacks some of the cooler bells and whistles found on the higher end themes such as JobRoller or JobEngine.

Whilst it does lack a few more complex features, it does have a few tricks of it’s own. The interaction controls are fantastic, and this is what really set’s it a part and makes it a bargain at the price tag it’s offered at. Administrators have control over how the users and visitors interact with the site. By defining the roles of users (all be it only by a choice of two), it’s possible to customise the features and functions specifically for that user group. This makes it really easy to truly tailor the website to the needs of the specific user. This added control also brings an extra level of security, block/ ban tools are prominent, and administrators and users can choose whether or not to make information such as their CV’s public on the site.

Simple filtering tools make it easy to search and browse for jobs too. Where JobJockey falls short is the lack of ability to customise email templates, there are some great features relating to email notifications, it is not possible to alter the content of said notifications, there is also a lack of automation – themes like JobRoller make automation super simple, where as even the act of featuring a job post is a manual process with JobJockey. Be prepared to spend some of your time on basic admin tasks.

It’s a solid theme at the right price, but it lacks the overwhelming features offered by the slightly more expensive themes.

Key Features

• Job Seeker Registration/ Employer Registration
• Separate dashboards for seekers/ employers
• Favourites and notifications
• Custom Forms
• Responsive Design

• Paypal integration
• Slick and well designed UI
• Lifetime membership and support
• Cost Effective
• SEO Optimised

Other notable WordPress Job Themes

JobsHub from ColorLabs

Price: $79.00

Demo Buy Now

JobPress from Dailywp

Price: $119.00

Demo Buy Now

Jobify from ThemeForest

Price: $55.00

Demo Buy Now

SpotFinder from ThemeForest

Price: $45.00

Demo Buy Now

Pricerr from Sitemile

Price: $69.00

Demo Buy Now

Remember: Choose a WordPress job theme that’s fit for your audience

Of course you can just upload a job board theme, buy your domain, enter your settings and launch your job site, in little more than a few hours. But to really be successful and realise a recurring income, there’s a significant amount of effort that needs to be put in. Job listing websites have three key audiences. The employment seekers, the recruiters and the employers. When selecting the right theme for your new online business it’s important to consider all three, and make sure you’re asking the right questions.

• Does the theme cater to all three demographics?
• What type of users can I expect to encounter in my chosen niche?
• Does the employment sector you’re targeting use recruiters or are they primarily focused on direct recruitment?
• Are you focused on the full time employment market, or the freelance market?

Potential employers and recruiters will always look to use online job listing websites, it’s a fact of life that the internet is an multifacceted hub and a significant percentage of recruitment now happens online. Choosing a job board theme which is well suited to your audience and the people most likely to use your website will give you the best head start possible. You’ll also want to consider this when setting up your business. Where is the revene coming from? Do you plan to charge individuals to post jobs – the more typical method, or do you plan to charge employment seekers to reply to ads – this method, whilst less well known has been seen to work with great success on Freelance Switch from the Australian company Envato. Envato saw huge success, in no small part thanks to their previously untapped resources – having a healthy base of freelancers in their various marketplaces, meant when they launched their job site, they already had a huge network of hungry freelancers willing to pay to get access to new freelance projects and leads. Their low cost monthly subscription meant for a freelancer, even just winning one or two projects a year from the site made it a worthwhile investment.

The post The Best Job Board Theme for WordPress appeared first on Boshanka.

I’ve touched on the subject of accounting in previous articles, and have been planning to put my thoughts down on virtual paper for a while now. Continuing the theme of recent product review driven posts, I would like to give you some of my experiences with the some of the accountancy/ bookkeeping software products available to freelancers and small businesses. I’ve tried (and neglected) several during my time as a freelancer, but now I’ve finally found a harmonious place when it comes to keeping my books in order and more importantly, my invoices paid!

The Problem

My bookkeeping started out virtually none existent (as I’m sure it did for many) – I’m talking some time ago now (in internet years anyway), back in the days when my creative icons still had the words Macromedia above them, I used to work freelance on the side, as a registered sole trader. Without the seemingly daunting responsibility of a ltd company, I lacked motivation. I struggled with the guilt of not keeping proper books but the lack of cost effective, easy to use tools out there made it a futile struggle. I tried using excel, along with a string of other equally unexciting applications and services all of which were eventually neglected long enough to no longer have sensible, relevant or useful information, finding it easier to just filter through deposits from my bank statements when it came to submit my tax returns.

I dipped in and out of a few other seemingly viable options over the years, as I transitioned from student freelancer to full time freelancer. Quickbooks? Too over complicated. Freshbooks!? Too expensive. Wave Accounting? Too buggy! Billings? Too time consuming… yawn.

You get the idea. Then I found FreeAgent.

I was all but ready to give up, until I found FreeAgent. I signed up for the Free trial, with little to no intent on continuing a paid version once the trial ended, but just like they said it would, It converted me. To anyone who’s found themselves in the same or a similar spot to me, this review is for you.

It’s not just me either, FreeAgent has garnered a wealth of credits and positive user reviews, thanks to a great product, great support and at an affordable price. FreeAgent, for those who haven’t figured it out yet is an online based accountancy/ bookkeeping software tailored especially for freelancers and small businesses. Whilst it contains a vast array of polished, intelligent features – it’s all laid out in a way that’s easy to understand, and puts the information you need at the tips of your fingers. I have a tendency to run away with myself some times, so for the purposes of this review and so as to ensure it’s as helpful to you as possible, I’ll attempt to keep to some sort of structure from here on out.

I’ll cover:

• Price
• User interface
• Main features
• Support and documentation
• Company information
• The Verdict

Price

Most importantly, how much does it cost? Well the first month is Free. After that you can select a plan to sign up for. They have Sole Trader accounts at £15.00 per month, Partnerships or LLPs at £20.00 per month and full LTD companies at £25.00 per month. With this discount code: 42ql612n they’ll give you a 10% discount on your account for life.

User interface

The first thing you’ll notice about FreeAgent accounting software the simplicity of dashboard, with plenty of spacing and an attractive UI it’s a breath of fresh air compared with many of it’s local-installation based counterparts. The design is kept simple and devoid of clutter and presents a clear picture of your business as soon as you log in. No crowded tables or ridiculous icons, it’s just clean and easy to navigate

Use of colours and fonts is excellent, with nothing feeling out of place or lost. The simplicity of the dashboard flows into the various sections and screens as you navigate around. Each new page is as pleasant as the one that preceded it and as you navigate through everything feels like a natural progression. For first timers you can expect to me helped through the process with tips and tricks for each section, and during my first few weeks, at the times I did come across something I didn’t understand there was always an explanation near by in the form of a hint or helpful notification. It’s very intuitive and will teach you as you go. As far as UI goes, FreeAgent really have got it just right.

So as not to exclude anyone, It should be noted that FreeAgent isn’t strictly for web designers, any Freelancer or small business owner can (and should) use it, and the guides are so helpful It’s can be understood by anyone, even those with an irrational fear of computers, accounting or just life in general. The guide also helps when it comes to those who are somewhat business illiterate (like me!), it tells me if I’m attributing costs in the wrong place or if an expense should be in the out of pocket section and not a bill, and I have a little app on my phone which lets me scan receipts straight into FreeAgent and attach them to purchases (my accountant loves this!).

More complex areas of FreeAgent such as the invoicing have been created with the same care and attention to detail as the overview and reports pages. The intuitive WYSIWYG interface allows you to see the invoices you’ve created, automatically push non-billed, tracked time into an itemised invoice and send it to your client all from within the application, not only that but if you connect your account to PayPal your clients can pay you instantly via a button which will be sent along with their invoice. Nifty.

Primary Features

Journal Entries

The Journal Entry feature is great for people without a lot of accounting experience. Like everything else available with this software, it is very user-friendly. You will be able to make changes to your books quickly using this powerful but simple tool.

The journal is essentially the place which keeps track on how you move amounts from category to category. FreeAgent makes it possible to move figures around with ease, i.e. editing a bill to move it into another category. However there are occasions where moving figures around is not so easy. This is where the journal comes in. The journal section is requires a little more information than there’s room to explain in a general review, but for those seeking more information on journals, you can check out this comprehensive guide to FreeAgent Journals.

Reconciliation

Periodically it is necessary to check the information in your accounting software against your bank statements. FreeAgent matches all the transactions and then marks the explained transactions with green checks and unexplained ones with red question marks. If you click on any transaction, you will be able to view and attach an explanation. Reconciliation can be done automatically via a connection with your bank (they support most banks) or by uploading a spreadsheet of transaction. FreeAgent reconciliation also supports PayPal.

Data import

FreeAgent allows you to import data like contacts from your email, or projects from basecamp. This saves time and makes it feel more connected with your existing freelance world. I’ve found the basecamp connection to be exceptionally useful, any new projects created by me or by my clients for me are automatically imported into FreeAgent, and I can then track my time against them. At the end of the month my client’s love me as I can tell them exactly which of their projects has cost them the most in a given month – extremely useful if you’re providing multiple services to a single client, e.g. Hosting, Design, SEO or Insight.

As I’ve already mentioned, you can sync your bank accounts automatically with FreeAgent saving you from the tedious task of copying information from printed bank statements into data entry fields or even the hassle of logging into your online banking account to export a statement (which can be a daunting enough task with some banks!). It doesn’t matter if you’re new to FreeAgent, you can still import the old data from your bank and you choose when to start the import from. Whenever data is imported from your bank account, FreeAgent will attempt to explain it for you. Over time, FreeAgent will learn and get better at explaining your transactions, as it learns about your business – but at first the explanations can be wrong and often a bit unreliable – so be sure to check and verify each one yourself. FreeAgent will always inform you which explanations it’s created for you and ask you to confirm them.

Data export

Simple but vital. You can (and should) export all of your FreeAgent data on a regular basis – keeping a local copy for yourself is just common sense. FreeAgent makes it simple to grab and export everything. No Fuss.

Reports

FreeAgent divides reports into three types: High Level, Breakdown and Detailed. The High Level reports include Profit & Loss, daily income minus expenses, and the Balance Sheet – a summary of what you own opposed to what you owe at the time of the report.

The Breakdown reports include Aged Debtors, Aged Creditors and Capital Assets. Aged Debtors shows what your customers owe while Aged Creditors shows how much you owe to your suppliers. The Capital Assets report lists all of your company’s capital assets along with their depreciation over time.
The Detailed reports include Show Transactions – a breakdown of all transactions, and Trial Balance, a listing of totals of each and every incoming or outgoing spend categories.

Attaching documents

FreeAgent allows you to attach documents to any transaction, bill or expense. This is fantastic for tracking receipts or proof of purchases notes. You’ll be able to search passed transactions to view this document at a later stage – as I said before, your accountant will love this. This has very clear benefits – obviously, and the helpful app I mentioned earlier will make it a snap to stay on top of this. Scenario – “Past You” attaches a scanned copy of a bill to an entry in your bank ledger. “Future You” finds a discrepancy in your books! No problem! “Future you” simply check’s the attached document to make sure that “Past You” did not erroneously enter data by comparing the numbers in the document to that of the entry. FreeAgent even provides you with a thumbnail preview of each attached document so you don’t have to open/ download each one to find what you are looking for. In addition to attaching documents directly to transactions, you can also store other documents in the handy Files section. I often store exported invoices, statements or timesheets in here, or even spec documents and contracts.

Foreign currency handling

I work with several overseas clients so I’ve found this feature particularly helpful. No doubt in today’s business world, it is increasingly important for small businesses to work in more than one currency. FreeAgent allows you to send out invoices in multiple currencies and tallies everything up nice and neat in your books.

Payment processing

FreeAgent recently began supporting PayPal electronic payments services. Since PayPal allows payments by all major credit cards, you will also be able to accept credit card payments from your clients. With a PayPal Premier or a Business account, you will be able to enter PayPal payments into your books automatically as paid. FreeAgent also supports two cardless payment options, Dwolla and GoCardless. These systems allow direct electronic payment from customer’s bank accounts rather than through credit cards. All of these payment methods can be sent out along with your invoices to ensure the smoothest, simplest process possible. Great for you, great for your clients.

Invoicing & Estimates

Here is one of FreeAgent’s most powerful features. You will be able to customize your invoices to present a professional and highly personalized look and feel. The template editor has a Theme Gallery that you can use to choose style elements quickly. With a bit of know how you can also create custom themes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or you can even purchase premium FreeAgent Invoice Templates. As well as invoicing, FreeAgent allows you to create and send professional looking estimates to your prospective clients, which can later be converted into full invoices at the click of a button.

Mobile apps

I am always on the move and it is essential to be able to access my accounts through my mobile. FreeAgent provides cross-platform support for mobiles and tablets which run on windows, iOS or Android operating systems. Not only is the software application accessible, but it is very mobile-friendly! With FreeAgent, you’ll have a remarkably easy time updating your accounts from any location, seriously. I’ve updated my books from the jungles of Guatemala!

Free trial

If you are worried that FreeAgent may just be hype, then you have the option of a 30-day free trial that does not require any credit card. You can give the software a full-feature test drive to see if it meets your requirements. And if you use this discount code: 42ql612n, they’ll give you 10% offevery month for life! Or you can sign up via this link and the discount will be added for you automatically.

Time Tracking

Whilst FreeAgent lacks the capacity to actually track time with a timer, it does allow you to easily add time to a given project. At the end of the month you can easily convert your tracked time into invoices for your clients. Irritatingly, FreeAgent only allows you to complile the tracked time for individual projects, not for individual clients – which can be frustrating if you’re running multiple projects for a single client. You can get around this by going into your invoicing, creating an invoice for your tracked time on a project and adding it to the invoice, then editing the invoice and changing the project – effectively adding the additional items for each project by editing the invoice each time. This is a little bit cumbersome, but is a feature they’re looking to improve in the near future, or so I’m told.

FreeAgent also offers inventory, payroll, integration and other useful features.

Support, Documentation and Community

FreeAgent is so user-friendly and intuitive that most people may not even need to use the customer support or help documentation. For anyone who does, you’ll find their support staff to be quick to respond and relentless in their quest to take your question to a satisfactory outcome. Like the rest of the system, the Knowledge Base is very easy to use and there is a Community Discussion area for anyone who would rather interact with other users.
As well as an excellent knowledgebase and first class support, FreeAgent also send out helpful and more importantly entertaining weekly emails and run regular free training webinars.

Verdict

In my experience, FreeAgent is the best accounting software for freelancers and small business owners. It’s simply the easiest software to use for non-accountants, and actually makes the task of accounting far less mind numbing. I’ve found myself rather enjoying it once or twice. The gradual learning curve will be one of the most important features for people who do not have time to fiddle with complicated software.

If you are looking for an easy accounting software solution that is still powerful with a great range of features then you will certainly want to give FreeAgent a try. I did. I won’t go back. Ever. If you’ve become an instant convert following this FreeAgent review then click your way to a free trial using the link below.

The post FreeAgent Review – The best online accounting software for freelancers appeared first on Boshanka.

I’m no stranger to working with Classified Ads themes, I recently undertook the task of creating my own classified ads website – which is aimed at helping families buy dogs and puppies from reputable breeders. A site still in its infancy, but growing steadily. I wrestled over the various WordPress themes out there on which to build my thriving new community, and in many ways, this article is born out of my exploration of all those options, I spent hours testing and using the themes you’ll find listed below to make the right choice for my project; to build a profitable community driven classified ads website.

[sociallocker]

[/sociallocker]

There are several premium themes in the classified advertising niche, and hopefully this article will save you some time and help you make a decision about which classified ads theme is right for you. Each theme reviewed comes with a star rating, which takes into consideration a number of factors, including:

• Ease of set up and configuration
• User Interface and front end options
• Price tag/ Value for Money
• Complex Functionality
• Robustness

ClassiPress

[rating=5]

$99

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo Admin Demo

There’s no way to have a list of the best classified ads themes without mentioning this amazing theme by App Themes. If you’ve done any research into these types of WordPress themes, chances are you’ll already have come across Classipress. It’s the most popular classified ads theme now available for WordPress. It’s exciting array of features makes it a versatile solution for any classified ads based website and the simple admin interface makes the set up and configuration of the theme very simple. It’s also very well documented and comes with great support from a thriving development community, so for the first timer this is a great solution.

The current release (at the time of writing) is 3.3, it’s now a well established theme, and was one of the first to be created by App Themes. This makes it a really viable option, as it’s been around long enough that most of the bugs have been ironed out, and what’s left is a solid, tight well thought out theme application, and one that’ll get you up and running in no time at all.

Key Features

• Easy to customize front page
• 2 page layouts
• Upload your own banner ads and logo
• 5 Colour schemes to choose from
• Custom fields/ form builder
• Edit and expand the categorization from the back end
• Membership packs – decide on your own pricing structure
• Advanced search functionality

• Coupons and Discount Codes
• Real time twitter feed
• WordPress Multilanguage (WPML) Support
• Fully responsive design
• Auto complete and site suggest search
• Login/ registration with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks
• Customer dashboard and ad manager
• Visitor stats on your ad listings

ClassifiedTheme by Sitemile

[rating=5]

$69.99

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo

ClassifiedTheme by Sitemile is my classified theme of choice. Don’t get me wrong, other themes on the market have lots of amazing features too, but this Sitemile theme, for me, is the best solution when it comes to wanting to really develop your own website. ClassiPress for example, is a great theme for someone looking to get off the ground quickly, however I find it rather restrictive – it does have options to change the visuals and add custom skins, but you’re essentially boxed in to the way that theme works. ClassifiedTheme by Sitemile is much more organic. It’s a little more dev focused, and works really well with plugins like Types or Advanced Custom Fields – so you can easily and quickly build out your own custom taxonomies to really make the theme your own.

It also has all the usual out of the box features you might expect from a solid classified ads theme, such as pre paid ad packages, out of the box payment gateways, social network login and lots of other rich features.

Once you get down into the nuts and bolts of the theme, it’s really easy to edit and alter the templates, to create new landing pages and change the way in which users navigate and interact with your site. The theme lends itself to almost any classified ads industry, including Real Estate, PC Ads, High Tech, Auto/Car ads and custom fields make it possible to create your own.

The theme is built on Sitemile’s world class theme framework, which has been solidly tuned over several years, giving you a really stable platform to work with. A minor irritation I noted when using this theme was when trying to configure the social networking login, this part of the theme requires the use of a third party plugin, and the whole process is rather clunky and doesn’t work terribly well, with some solid dev knowledge it’s possible to get it working, but beginners may struggle. Furthermore, the UI and design of the theme out of the box isn’t great, so be prepared to spend time crafting your own design – this might put some people off but for me it just means I’m forced to work on a better more intuative UI, and means you end up with a front end user experience which is different and stands out from the crowd. Other classified ads themes which come with a nice UI out of the box tend to look similar, as website creators don’t put the time into make the design their own – just take a look at the App Themes Showcase and you’ll see what I mean.

Key Features

• Classified Ads Custom Post Types
• Easy to assign new categories, locations, tags and your own taxonomies
• Upload your own banner ads and logo
• Google maps and street view integration
• Signup/ Register Email notifications, report ads feature and ad expiry notifications
• Custom fields to easily add to forms and taxonomies
• Integrated payment gateways including PayPal, AlertPay, MoneyBookers and Google Checkout
• Multiple currency support including USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, JPY and others

• Lifetime developer support
• Twitter feed integration
• Ad expiry
• Social integration – share ads with Facebook, Twiiter and others
• Autocomplete and site suggest search
• Login/ registration with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks
• Customer dashboard and ad manager
• Flexible pricing and ad packs

Classifieds

[rating=3]

$79

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo

Classifieds by PremiumPress is a little more basic than the last two classified beasts. It’s simple set up includes easy to administer membership packages, website ad slots and functional design. What the theme lacks in functionality, it makes up for in an abundance of available front ends, there’s over 20 colour schemes and designs to choose from, and whilst none of them will blow you away, they do provide a good starting point for you to lay out your own styles.

Like ClassifiedTheme by Sitemile, if you want to do anything really cool with it you’re going to need to invest some dev time, and unlike the two themes featured earlier on, the development community behind the theme isn’t very rich or responsive, for all intents and purposes you’re likely to be going at this one alone. That being said, the code is open source and you can play around with it to your hearts content.

According to PremiumPress, Classifieds “allows anyone to easily turn a standard WordPress blog into a powerful community driven classified ads serving platform”. I’m not sure If I would agree 100% with this statement, but it will get you off the ground. The ads themselves are basically well presented, and the categorization and tagging is chosen by your customers which means you’ll spend less time worrying about it. How you choose to set up and market the theme is up to you, but there are a few cool additions which give it something of an edge – Multiple Payment Gateways, Google Integration for Analytics, Adsense and Webmaster tools and the automatic eBay import tool.

Key Features

• eBay Import tool
• User driven categorisation and tagging
• Google Apps support – Analytics, Adsense and Webmaster Tools
• Over 20 color schemes and layouts
• Simple, Fast set up
• Multiple language options
• Integrated payment gateways
• Customizable search fields

• Built in packages with custom fields
• Unlimited Installations
• Ad management
• Printer friendly pages
• Monthly sales chart
• Auto removal tools
• On/Off theme options
• Flexible pricing and membership packs

Classicraft

[rating=4]

$97

GET THEME Developer Theme Demo

ClassiCraft is a lesser known and greatly overlooked classified ads WordPress theme. With a 1 off cost of $97.00 it’s a bit steep given it’s lacking in a few areas. ClassiCraft is a little bit different to the three theme’s we’ve already mentioned, it seems to be largely based on the ever popular Craigslist, or at least it was greatly inspired by it. Think of it like a feature rich WordPress version of Craigslist.

The UI, like so many other classified ads themes leaves a lot to be desired, though as you’ve probably figured out by now, I like this. It’s simple, functional and easy to use, and can be easily themed and skinned to your brand or desired style. Like the first two themes mentioned, it has a featured slider at the top, but unlike the first two themes mentioned it is not customisable, so you can’t choose which ads end up here without putting in some dev time. Again, unlike the first two themes, the content boxes on the front end can’t really be changed, the listing count and sub-categories will show on the front end and cannot be altered in the admin area. Like ClassifiedsTheme by Sitemile, Classicraft includes functionality to allow users to submit a gallery of images to their ads and integrates automatically with Google Maps, making your classified ads much more engaging. Unfortunately the Google Maps integration does not allow you to select a default city, which can be problematic if you have country targeted site, with Google Maps automatically loading in a different locale or country. Some other minor design tweaks would go a long way to improving this theme, larger prices for example have a tendency to get cut off and listings are not grouped well which can be confusing. Another real irritation with this theme is the inclusion of the WordPress header when users log in, for some reason this has not been removed. You will need to remove this manually with a plugin or in code if you plan to run your business on this theme. ClassiCraft is mobile ready out of the box, the design is fully responsive and really looks great on tablets and modern mobiles.

Listings themselves are stored in a custom post type, and users can register easily to submit their own ads. Paypal is supported out of the box to allow users to purchase premium listings on your site and can have an expiry time set in the admin panel. Unlike ClassifiedsTheme it is not possible to have ads which never expire, depending on your business or subject this may or may not be a problem. The theme provides it’s users with basic ad stats when they log into their dashboard, giving them an overview of the ad impressions and the status of each listing.

This theme has a great many positives, but it feels like a few significant areas have been missed or forgotten about, most significantly of which is the contact seller area. With the current version of Classicraft, it is not possible for users to contact sellers regarding their ads direct from the ad, the only method of contact is to leave a public comment on the ad listing itself, and if they do not want to or forget to leave their own contact information in the comment, then it’s pretty valueless to the seller.

Key Features

• Listing management
• Responsive design
• Google Maps Integration
• Paypal Support
• Simple, Fast set up
• Lifetime Support
• Push Notifications
• Multilingual support

• Recurring Payments
• Integrated user rating system
• Ad management
• Multiple color Schemes
• Video Widgets
• Premium Ads, Popular Ads & Recent Ads Widgets
• Multiple Currency Support
• One Click Auto Install

That’s it for now, as I review and get to know other classified ads themes I will of course ad them to this list and grow it over time. Have you had experience with any of these or other classified ads themes? Do you agree with my ratings or think I’ve been overly generous or unfair? Leave a comment below, I like to read them and It may well help other readers make an informed choice on which classified ads theme to buy.

The post The Best Classified Ads WordPress Themes appeared first on Boshanka.

Retina Support

In addition to intuitive designs, retina support is a growing trend among Web design. Originally, Apple was the first organization to engineer the idea of retina support. They used it in the iPhone 4 and then quickly applied the idea to a range of other devices. Retina screens are two times as dense as most LCD screens. This means that double the pixels are squeezed with the same amount of space. For Web designers, the new retina screens mean that each image must have two versions. One must have double the pixels for a retina screen while another image is used for older devices. To easily do this, designers can use retina.js. The JavaScript library helps to display retina screen images automatically.

Feature Tours for Homepages

Another of the hottest design trends is to have demo videos or sliding images on the homepage. Using these informational screens work well for landing pages and startups to draw readers in. If the sliding images are done well, they can be appealing and profitable for the company. Images can be rotated or slide across the screen. The larger graphics and icons instantly catch the reader’s eye and provide a clean landing page for the user.

Mobile Navigation Toggle

In order to have intuitive design for a website, the pages must have the best navigation. Readers have to be able to access important links easily and without too many distractions. One of the most recent developments in this area is the mobile navigation toggle menu. It works on smartphones and in web browsers to create a responsive layout. The menu can be designed in multiple formats. Links can slide down or content can be moved from the left or right side. As more designers use toggled navigation over the coming months, the possible formats will expand drastically.

Full Screen Typography

Depending on the user, this design concept works extremely well. Oversized font can offer rich text effects with CSS3 properties. For this method to work the best, it must be placed in the appropriate layout. If this is done, it can make the page easier to navigate. Full screen typography can also be used with oversized images.

Oversized Photo Backgrounds

Along with full screen typography, many of the most innovative websites are using extra-large photos for the backgrounds. In addition to pleasing the photography buffs out there, this design strategy is extremely eye-catching to any readers. Oversized photos can give the website a boost in marketing and can be a part of customized-branding methods.

CSS Transparency

As CSS3 properties have developed, they have made it possible for transparency within any Web browser. This allows for opacity edits and Web designers can set up a background with internal elements. Transparency can be manipulated using rgba() color syntax. Through CSS, designers can choose difference colors such as blue, green or red for transparency.

Minimalist Transparency Pages

In the race toward the future, many websites are being created with minimalistic designs. Marketers understand this strategy because it is one of the easiest ways to capture new users and readers. Once the clutter is cleared away from the page, the user can focus on the video, product or creative resource being sold on the site. Simplifying the design makes it easier to use the site and more intuitive for new users.

Social Media Badges

Although Web designers like to focus on beautifying the site, the key to success is finding more users and customers. To do this, social media tools are a must-have accessory. Social media badges can be placed on a website so users can easily share the website with their friends and family. Most social communities offer easy to share badges and can be pinned to any article in the layout. It makes it easier for users to share their favorite site and increases the likelihood that a website will go viral. Top social badges can be found for Pinterest, Stumble Upon, Google +1, Dzone and LinkedIn.

Infinite Scrolling

Although this design method has been around for several years, it has not made it into the mainstream until recently. Part of the upsurge in the popularity is due to Pinterest. Pinterest’s layout uses infinite scrolling within their website. As users search for something and scroll downward, new search entries continue to be added to the bottom of the page. Overall, infinite scrolling enhances the user’s experience and is extremely simple. It may not work for every website, but it can greatly improve the right pages.

CSS3 Animations

CCS dynamic effects and transitions can be used for innovative new designs. Web designers can use hover effects or form input fields. These animations can be further customized using different times and settings. With the right designer, websites will be able have some of the latest and most creative CSS3 Animations.

Vertical Navigation

Originally, the trend toward vertical layouts was inconsistently and inelegantly carried out. Over the last year, more websites are creating brilliant solutions that offer tasteful vertical navigation. Border textures and hover effects can improve the implantation of vertical navigation.

With the increase in mobile devices and smartphones, more websites have to adjust. To be successful, each website has to be optimized for a range of websites. The change in layouts over the last year is just the beginning. New design concepts, animation and navigation techniques will take hold as Web designers adjust to the needs of the modern user.

The post Web Design Trends to watch out for in 2013 appeared first on Boshanka.

WordPress Plugins for Performance

WordPress Plugins for SEO

WordPress Plugins for Engagement

WordPress Plugins for Security

But always, always, ALWAYS remember…

WordPress plugins are varied in quality and functionality, so it’s imperative to make sure you back up your entire site before getting too trigger happy with the WordPress plugin directory. WordPress plugins can serve to enhance the user experience and create innovotive functionality that’ll wow your visitors, but for those times where a WordPress plugin isn’t quite giving you the result you need, you can always call upon a WordPress expert to help you get to where you need to be!

The post The Best WordPress Plugins – 24 Plugins That’ll Make Your WordPress Site Awesome! appeared first on Boshanka.

1. Free Agent

Website: freeagent.com
Price: £24 per month after 30-day free trial
(Get 10% Off with Discount Code: 42ql612n).

One of the hardest parts about freelancing is managing the personal finances, client invoices, tax records, and everything in between. Because freelancers serve as their own, boss, accountant, secretary, and supervisor, these tasks must be done between client projects in a way that is easily accessible and highly usable in a pinch. Free Agent is just such a solution for the accounting side of a freelance operation, allowing for online and cloud-based documentation of finances and other sources of revenue.

The software can also produce a robust client invoice and offer it up for payment. Because the Free Agent service integrates with third-party websites like PayPal, Basecamp, Capsule, and Google’s long list of applications, it can be used to generate to-dos, accept payment, and work with virtually every financial facet of the freelance reality.

Free Agent is available to new users as a 30-day free trial. And you can have an additional 10 percent discount for life if you have a Free Agent Code (42ql612n). After that trial expires, members have the option of continuing with the service for a flat monthly rate of £24 minus your 10% discount :-).

2. Freelance Switch

Website: freelanceswitch.com
Price: $7 per month

Freelancers need to have quick access to a resource that will match them up with clients, and Freelance Switch is quickly becoming the top choice of website designers who need to find work. The site functions in several different ways, blending freelance work with tools for those looking to make the switch into the freelance industry. The website’s blog offers tips about everything from self-management to client cultivation, and the company offers a number of great tips for those who are just making the switch away from a traditional employer.

To help with that transition into freelancing, Freelance Switch operates one of the largest and most useful job boards in the industry. Website designers who pay the site’s $7 monthly fee will be able to view jobs, read job descriptions, and apply directly to the clients who are most in need of work. Though the application process is competitive, there are simply few websites like Freelance Switch that offer so many tools, tips, and potential work opportunities, making it one of the smartest monthly subscription services available to website developers and designers.

3. Basecamp

Website: basecamp.com
Price: $20 per month for a basic membership, up to $3,000 per month for unlimited features

Basecamp is perhaps one of the most widely known names in the freelance industry, especially among web designers, as the software is the perfect blend of collaborative communication and project management. Using Basecamp, developers can keep a cloud-based list of to-do items for each design project that they’re working on at any given time. Logins can even be given to clients, allowing them to modify the list, add notes, or attach materials that might be of use to the designer as they work through the project.

The Basecamp software is ultimately the best way to enhance client communication, boost productivity in the freelance design world, and produce an agreeable end result that will further the business. Best of all, the entry-level package offered by the company comes in at just $20 monthly for simultaneous management of three projects. Monthly prices escalate beyond that price point for simultaneous management of more than three projects, with a $3,000 monthly fee for unlimited simultaneous projects at any given time.

4. Zopim

Website: Zopim.com
Price: Free option available, up to $20.00 per month for all the bells and whistles!

Communication is perhaps the most important quality for freelancers, as many freelance designers find themselves working on projects for clients that are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. without being able to meet in person, tech support and instructional information can be pretty hard to convey as a project nears completion, becomes integrated with shopping cart software and CMS solutions like WordPress, and takes on real functionality.

The best way to provide client support in this case is through a service like Zopim, which allows freelancers to operate their own online, live chat support solution for clients who require access to real-time chat, instructional information, and broad technical support. Zopim can be integrated fully into services like Skype, GTalk, Yahoo IM, MSN and AIM which means you don’t have to change your existing processes. For marketers it integrates with the big boys such as salesforce too.

The potential to convert new visitors to your website into paying customers is astonishing. I convert almost 80% of people who instigate chats with me via the chat window on my website, and the real time visitor information makes it easy to gather relevant information about the person you’re talking to, and in turn sound informed and switched on to the visitors needs.

The service is free for freelancers who will be acting as a sole tech support agent. The free service only stores your chat history for 14 days and allows only 1 chat at a time. The customization and options available increase with each of the three tiered packages.

5. Open Site Explorer

Website: opensiteexplorer.org
Price: $99 per month after free 30-day trial

Open Site Explorer is operated by SEOMoz, which is arguably the leading name in search engine optimization and outreach management. The goal of the Open Site Explorer service is to judge how influential a domain has become through its links to other blogs, generally through referrals, guest posts, and other link building strategies. Numerous free services are available to developers, including page authority and total linked domains. For more advanced information, or more than three reports per month, a premium subscription is required. That subscription costs $99 per month after a 30-day trial.

6. Code Canyon

Website:codecanyon.com
Price: Varies per script

Developers in search of the “next big thing” in scripting and page management will love Code Canyon. The site is dedicated to listing a series of free or premium website scripts that can do anything from turn the site into a web-based application to enrich its existing WordPress comment section. Some scripts are free, but many others are priced at a premium level starting at just $1. Designers can pay for scripts on an as-needed basis, and they must remain loyal to the license at the time the script is purchased and downloaded.

7. Toggl

Website: toggl.com
Price: Free, or $5 monthly for advanced features

Time management is the number one way for freelance designers to maximize their earning potential while produce quick, amazing website designs for their selected list of clients. With Toggl, it’s possible to list a day’s tasks and monitor the exact amount of time it has taken to complete them. Over time, reports will be available that show where the most time is spent throughout the workday and how that time could be more efficiently utilized to get work done more quickly.

8. Mail Chimp

Website: mailchimp.com
Price: Free, or as much as $200 monthly

The best way to cultivate repeat clients is to keep them in the loop about developments going on in the web design world. Freelancers who communicate with both new and old clients will prime themselves for more future business, and MailChimp is here to help. The service dispatches newsletters at a frequency of the user’s choosing, to an email list that they have generated on their own. A base package is included for free, but premium pricing will be required to reach a larger email list with more frequent updates. Pricing starts at $10 per month and escalates to as much as $200 per month based on readership.

9. Shutterstock

Website: shutterstock.com
Price: Varies

For $19 per image, or as little as $199 per month, Shutterstock offers the Internet’s largest collection of stock photography. Most freelance designers know how important a good, relevant stock image can be to a great design. With the company’s vast options and affordable pricing, there is no reason to go with more generic options during the design process.

10. Adobe Kuler

Website: kuler.adobe.com
Price: Free

The right color palette can bring a design to live, meshing a company’s overall message with a look and feel that will resonate with their target audience. Good freelance designers know this, but sometimes they can have trouble selecting the right blend of colors for the job. That’s where Adobe Kuler comes in. The site’s pre-made color swatches are perfect for creating grounded, enjoyable designs with matching colors that speak to a client’s market goals.

Great Options for Today’s Freelance Designers

From managing the books to picking the right colors, images, and schedules for a great design, the ten tools mentioned above will take freelance web designers to the next level. Clients will be impressed with great time management, excellent communication tools, and a thorough understanding of how to approach every aspect of design and communication.

The post The 10 Best Freelance Tools That No Web Designer Should Be Without appeared first on Boshanka.

Where it all started

I’ve always been pretty passionate about what I like, and in my final year at School, music was my passion. At the time I was really into the band Matchbox Twenty, and around the same time a buddy of mine had started a band of his own. I was a self confessed geek, so he approached me and asked me If I could build a website for his new band, not really having a clue what I was getting into, I told him “no problem”.

I started out fresh with a copy of Serif Web Pro and started throwing buttons, boxes, mp3’s images, animated gifs and most anything I could find onto the canvas and I was pretty damn proud of the pink through to lime green gradient I had going on in the background, only problem was that upon saving it, not much seemed to be happening, so how to I get to it online? I clearly needed to do some more research.

Phase 2 – Find a web host!

I found my way to GeoCities, and talked to a tutor about the sort of website’s he thought were good, and he mentioned the BBC website as being one of his favorites. I decided I would have a practice run before building my friends website, and so I decided to create a site about Matchbox Twenty.

No longer was I playing around with Serif Web Plus, Oh No, I had upgraded my arsenal to Photoshop Elements 7. Armed with a solid web host and the right tools, I set about creating my first site. I never bothered much with the online editor, opting to do it right first time and write the HTML using Dreamweaver, and basing my first design loosely on the boxed layout of the BBC website (thanks to the recommendation of my tutor).

Several days and late nights later, and my first website was up and running. Thanks to OO Cities (who I guess must have mass duplicated Geocities websites after Geocities died a death), you can still see my very first incarceration of the site here: http://www.oocities.org/matchbox20fans2003/. So the website was up and running, all that was left was the domain. I registered www.matchbox20fans.com on 12 Jul 2003 at 16:42 and pointed it at my Geocities Matchbox Twenty site. I was proud.

It certainly didn’t stop there however, over the coming months and years, I became a little bit obsessive, I found myself working tirelessly on that website, day and night. I got a real kick out of seeing it grow and develop, and I loved showing it to friends and family. Things really started to get exciting when I installed my first ‘Invision Powerboard Forum’ (Remeber those!) and actually had a few active members for a while. That was It, I was hooked. I had the web design bug.

An unexpected email

I eventually finished college and went off and studied web design at the University of Leeds, then worked for a few agencies in London and Brighton before striking out as a Freelancer. But all the while I never let the Matchbox Twenty website slide, I kept it running and it’s grown with me. I’ve lost count of how many re-design’s that website’s had over the years. These days it’s pretty popular and has more than repaid me for all the hard work I put in. In the spring of 2006 I received an email from Kyle Cook, Matchbox Twenty’s lead guitar player, thanking me for the site and the support I had shown the band. One thing lead to another and now, years later we’re starting a record label together.

As if that’s not all, in september 2011 the site was nominated by it’s users in the people’s choice category for Best Fansite at the BT Digital Music Awards. I was invited to attend a glitzy event at London’s round house. The site came second in the end, but it was a wonderful moment.

This July, the site will be 10 years old, and It’s been an amazing, and truly for-filling journey. Anyone considering web design as a career, or a hobby – I can highly recommend it.

Click here to visit the current version of Matchbox Twenty Plus

If you’re a web designer or just like to tinker, why not share your story – 123 Reg nudged me into writing this post, as an entry to their ‘My First Website’ competition. You can find out all about by clicking here for more information. Submit your own entry for a chance to win a Macbook Pro or £100 in Amazon vouchers. Cool!

The post My First Website appeared first on Boshanka.

Effective Content Creation is key to SEO

The words that are on your website are the bread and butter of Search Engine Optimisation. Your content needs to have, on every page, key words or phrases that you want to be found for. For example, if you were a financial consultancy based in Richmond, you would want to be found when someone searches for your industry and location.

Although you may have flooded your website with keywords, you shouldn’t just leave it at that. Search engines are always changing the rules when it comes to how websites are ranked. Make sure to analyse your website’s ranking on all search engines at least once a month to make sure that your key words are still effective.

Make it original and useful

When you populate your website with content, make sure that it’s useful. This mostly applies to blogs and areas of your website where you put personal messages. You want to show to your users that you are skilled in your field, so tell them about personal experiences you have had in the industry. Everyone learns something new on the job, so share with your readers when you’ve gained. It also encourages them to share your knowledge with others, and we all know how powerful word-of-mouth can be!

Use plenty of images

Images are just as important as text. Most websites, across the majority of industries, will benefit from having original images instead of stock imagery or clip art. It not only shows off your business practice, but it gives your website that personal touch that users like to see.

Don’t forget to optimise the web pages that your images are on by adding descriptions into the alternative text. By including keywords that you want your website to be found for, this helps your positioning in search engine results pages.

Update your content regularly

When websites look out-dated, viewers mentally mark them down. This is especially so in the instances of blogs or date-stamped posts, as they show how regular and attentive you are to you site. Make sure to update at least once a day, to show that you are always making sure that your website is up to scratch.

This can be through testimonials from customers, blog updates, or changing the images on the front page. Not only does it make your business looking busier and more reliable, your customers are more inclined to trust your site. If you struggle to come up with the content you need to populate your website, sites such as Monétisez votre site can give you suggestions on how to outsource this, as well as earning extra cash for your business.

Remember, quality is king. You may be posting something every day, but what you write needs to be good. Making sure your content is relevant helps to improve your page rank. This will in turn get you more viewers due to being found more regularly in search engine results pages. Your content brings in the customers and keeps them coming back.

The post Content is King! appeared first on Boshanka.

To make thumbnails appear, on the widget, you’ll need to first set up a new thumbnail size image in your functions.php file, I created the image size ’90×90′.

Open up functions.php and add the following line:

Next up, open up wp-favorite-posts.php located in the folder for the WP Favorite Posts Plugin and scroll down to around line 216. Locate the following code:

Just below it, alter the code to look like what I have below:

The above will make the widget display images for you, but you can reuse the same code inside ‘wpfp-page-template.php’ to get it working on your notebook page too.

Happy Coding!

The post How to make images appear in WP Favourite Posts Plugin & Widget appeared first on Boshanka.

Try not to invest to early

In the past, I have felt like I was beginning to loose sight of a project, and the simple fact that wanted to bring it home would take over. Often I am invested in the project too early, it’s not unusual for me to provide lengthy emails and have long conversations with potential clients, helping them spec out an idea. Sometimes I’m just on the phone with them bouncing ideas around. I can’t help it. I’m a creative person and I like speaking to other creatives about good ideas. I find it difficult to draw the line and recognize the value of all this free advice, and the impact it has on my working day. I’m not kidding, I’ve literally spent entire days just talking to clients about projects that haven’t ever lifted off the ground.

Don’t get me wrong, some of this time spent does indeed lead to rewarding working relationships, other times I’ve found myself wrapped up in the discussion way too early and I’ve realized too late that the potential client wasn’t that serious about moving forward.

This is where for so long I and so many others like me have been going wrong.

First up, know your value.

If the work you do is at a high standard (and it should be!) then let it speak for it’s self, make it easy for your potential clients to view your portfolio, perhaps this is stating the obvious but make sure you have a link to your portfolio in your email signature, and social profiles.

Your attitude towards a potential client will have a direct impact on how they view you. A potential client wants to work with an expert, and an expert is generally someone who’s in demand and who has authority on the subject they speak of. Don’t beg for a project, or pitch to low just to win it. When you pitch too low you devalue your own work and ultimately you make the project less worthwhile for you. This will, no matter how hard you try, have an impact on the quality of work you do. No one likes working for peanuts! Occasionally a potential client may indeed walk away from a quote you give, the simple fact is that it happens, move on.

There is a hugely varied view of the costs and time associated with web design and development, and some will have completely un-realistic expectations, ultimately it’s your job as the freelancer to manage expectations and be transparent. It might be as simple as the potential client not fully understanding what’s involved in the development of their project. That’s fine, just be clear and honest with them. Itemize your estimate, so they understand the costs and why they’re where they are. If your potential client still feels as though you’re quote is too high, then maybe it’s not the right project for you.

You’re the expert, not the employee!

A potential client is not going to become your boss, they’re looking to you for guidance. Naturally it’s important to listen to your client and listen to their ideas, often they know their audience better than you do and their ideas will often be good ones. This doesn’t mean to say that you should be afraid to respectfully identify a bad idea when you hear one, or make a case for a better alternative. You should always remember, right from the start that you’re building a working relationship with your new client, as an equal not as an employer.

Know your limits but don’t be afraid! Build a network of trusted colleges.

This is all about finding the right balance. Sure, It’s important not to bite of more than you can chew as taking on a project you simply don’t have the time or skill set for will likely end in disaster.  It’ll probably cause you incredible amounts of stress and your other projects will almost certainly suffer because of it.

That being said, you shouldn’t be scared of a project simply because a portion of it requires skills you do not have. First up, a challenging project which makes you learn a new skill can be great, for example something that might encourage you to learn a new piece of software or a different way of working – this is great. You learn on the job and often you’ll feel more rewarded, you’re essentially getting paid to learn. Brilliant.  I like to take on projects which require significant back end development, whilst I’m confident enough in my knowledge of WordPress development to get most functionality up and running, this can some times mean I end up spending hours and hours on a solution which isn’t quite right and probably isn’t very efficient. This is why it’s important to build a network of trusted colleges who can ease your burden, with whom you can collaborate with on projects to provide the best solution to your client. These relationships are great as not only does it rapidly expand your service offering, your network will likely call upon you when they have a project they need help with. For me design and front end is my passion, so my network is filled with lots of excellent and trusted back end developers. You can build your network quickly by talking to people and being active in the community. Post on sites like Freelance Switch or the Envato Marketplaces to meet new freelancers. You can also try hiring people from freelancer sites such as ODesk. Sometimes using sites like ODesk can mean taking a bit of a punt, as you’re going into business with someone you don’t know, this is why wherever possible, I prefer to work with people based on recommendations, however ODesk has a comprehensive ratings and testimonials system. It’s also worth firing out emails to colleagues past and present asking if they’ve worked with any great PHP developers or Drupal specialists. 9 times out of 10 someone comes back with an email address and boom, your network grows by 1.  Another door opened, another potential lead.

Show your own website some love!

I’m as guilty as the next freelancer here.. for years my website just sat there beginning to stagnate, to say the least it was unloved. This domain has been representing me for just over 10 years, it’s the first thing a new contact learns about me when I email them. Still, for the best part of the last 10 years it wasn’t really maintained. As most other freelancers can relate, the simple fact of the matter is that it’s hard to find the time to love your own site, especially as the rewards aren’t likely to be instant, or even soon. At the end of the day you just have to consider it a matter of pride.. and believe me, take pride in your website and eventually it’ll repay you ten fold. After some TLC my site is now a valuable tool in generating new business for me, and one I am proud to share my ideas and knowledge on. Love your own website, and it’ll love you back!

Of course, It’s not just about having a good looking site. Google is a self confessed content lover. Without good content, Google won’t give you the position in search engine results pages (SERPS) that you and your beautifully crafted website deserve. Even the best looking website needs some substance. Use your site to demo your expertise and become an authority. Overtime as your archive of rich, interesting articles expands you’ll see more and more readers on your site. Say hello! Follow up with all those new leads you created. Well done you. Good Job. You’ll be a successful freelancer in no time.

The post How to get more customers & win more contracts? appeared first on Boshanka.

New free New Years Eve flyer templates added to the list courtesy of StyleFlyers.

As New Years Eve 2012 approaches, the resulting array of parties is inevitable. For those needing to save some time or money on promotional costs this year, here’s a list of 10 awesome Free and premium New Years Eve flyers ready to download!

The post 12 Free New Years Eve Flyer Templates [Updated October 2020] appeared first on Boshanka.

WordPress has come a long way since it’s humble beginnings as a blogging tool, transforming itself into a full blown content management system. I’ve been using WordPress for years, though it’s certainly not where I began my journey. I had attempted to use Joomla, Drupal and a huge variety of alternatives long before I settled on WordPress.

It would be wrong of me to say simply that WordPress is the best, as all of the popular Content Management Systems out there have some great features to bring to the table, that being said, I doubt very much that I’ll be changing any time soon. It’s a popular debate amongst web designers, each having strong opinions about the CMS systems they’ve mastered, and understandably so. Learning to use a new CMS is no small task. I have spent years learning the way WordPress works, I have invested time and resource into the best features and plugins to use as a base, and at this stage, I’m pretty quick at turning  a site around with WordPress. This means better value for my clients as I’m billing less hours, and a more robust solution with less bugs, as I know and trust the system, and am aware of the major pitfalls. I also find it easy to find skilled WordPress developers, this means if my client needs some really bespoke functionality for their website, WordPress has a dedicated base of developers who can create virtually any plugin at an affordable cost – again this is hugely beneficial to my clients. What this also means, is that should they ever choose to move forward with a different designer/ developer – it’s safe to assume the new designer will be able to pick up where I left of with relative ease.

Again I want to clarify, I’m not saying WordPress is the best, I’m saying that for me and my clients it’s the best solution all around.

If you’re using another CMS, should you switch to WordPress?

This really raises a number of questions; Will you get a return on investment? There’s many factors to be considered, such as how all your existing content is going to be ported across? Are their alternative WordPress plugins out there which will compensate for any bespoke functionality your current site has, not available out of the box with WordPress? How much time and resource have you spent learning your current CMS solution? Do you have time to learn something new? Will a new CMS actually save you time?

What does WordPress do that other CMS’s don’t? What are the Pro’s and Cons of using WordPress?

Pro – A super friendly back end

Well first up, WordPress does have, in my opinion, the most user friendly back end. It’s simply laid out and easy to navigate. There are also a range of plugins out there which can help you limit the amount of stuff shown to your clients in the back end, if there’s no need for them to see all 35 plugins then hide them, why over complicate matters?! Make use of those different account levels.

Con – WordPress is set up like a blogging system

As aforementioned, WordPress started out as a blogging tool and it has stayed very true to it’s roots. When you’re using the back end it very much feels like you’re being pushed to blog. Posts feature more prominently than pages. Whilst WordPress does absolutely have the functionality to create a structured page based sitemap, this is not prominent, instead you’re lead more towards creating categories and adding posts into categories.

Pro – Easy to navigate to specific areas to make changes

When logged in as an administrator, you can navigate your website from the front end, and click the edit button in the top grey bar and be taken directly to the edit page section, where you can update and save your changes to that page – this makes it exceptionally easy for users less familiar with WordPress to easily navigate and update their content.

Con – Trigger happy plugin downloads can be a nightmare!

WordPress can be exceptionally easy to break for anyone who’s a little trigger happy. Not so much of a problem for a professional, but for a client who’s just found the plugin repository, it can be a serious concern. Installing the wrong plugin can cause the dreaded white screen of death, or even create a hole in the site’s security, making it vulnerable to hackers. Excessive use of plugins can also cause conflicts and performance issues, furthermore, using hundreds of plugins can also cause issues when updating to the latest version of WordPress. Often plugins are not updated with the same frequency as WordPress, if at all, which means down the line it’s likely you’ll either need to ditch the plugin, or stop updating WordPress – neither of which is ideal.

Pro – Custom post types and taxonomies

More recently, the WordPress team have embraced the idea of allowing web designers and developers to create their own custom post types and taxonomies. So instead of just having Pages and Posts, you might also have a section called Books or Movies. This really opens the doors to the idea of a faceted navigational structure and gives designers and developers the free range to create as many different page layouts for the different types of content a client is likely to be publishing to their site. This also means eCommerce functionality is a breeze, allowing for specific shop based category taxonomies, so your blog posts don’t get mixed up with your store products.

Con – Legacy content handling

Creating a new theme and porting content from an old one can be very time consuming. I’m not sure this is a con of WordPress specifically, moreover it’s a problem that every designer/developer will face. WordPress makes it so simple to add content to a website, that frequently a client with a site that has hundreds upon hundreds of archives of posts, all of which have varying structure and code snippets – this can cause difficulty to anyone looking to create a wildly different design or structure to that used with an existing site. One way around this is to tackle the most visited content first, review your Analytics package and develop a set of priorities. Alternatively, you might want to strip old content out, or change code structure – switching from HTML4 to HTML5 for example. There’s a great plugin entitled “WordPress Search and Replace” that will search through all of your posts and allow you to change specific HTML to something else, or H2s to H3s for example.

Pro – The almighty Functions.php file!

Adding new post types, registering new widgets, sidebars, or menus is an absolute breeze. Adding almost any additional simple functionality can be done simply by adding a few lines of code into the WordPress functions.php file. Not only that, but there is such a rich community of developers clambering to support each other for free, that is rare you’ll ever find yourself without an avenue to explore to reach a solution to your problem.

Con – Plugin safety!

You’re never 100% sure that the plugin you’re using is 100% safe. There’s often a lot of uncertainty around who made the plugin and what security holes it might cause to your site. Whilst you can never totally alleviate these problems, you can get a sense for how trust worthy the plugin is on the WordPress.org developer forums. Check the plugin rating, see how many times it’s been downloaded and how many people have rated it. Check the support forums to see if many issues have been raised regarding the plugin. Finally, check the frequency of updates to the plugin the author makes – anything over a year old should probably be considered unsupported and no longer stable with current WordPress installations. Don’t just install from the back end of WordPress, do your research properly! For performance, It’s advisable to keep to 20 plugins or less.

Pro – SEO

WordPress is an exceptional platform for SEO. Google Loves WordPress. It’s undeniable. Don’t get me wrong, WordPress isn’t going to put you on page 1 for your key terms, but it provides the best possible foundations to build upon. In addition to this, there are some remarkable SEO plugins out there, which can give you a truly global view of your website’s content, and the ability to edit on mass your key meta information. Combine this with a well coded semantically correct theme, and proper Key Word Research and you’re well on your way.

Conclusion

For me, it’s all about being careful. Ensuring changes are being made in a test environment before they’re pushed live. Make changes 1 step at a time, so it’s easy to roll a change back if it breaks something. Educate your clients, make sure they understand the dangers, and what they should and shouldn’t be doing in the WordPress back end. Take regular back ups too!

As best you can, try to future proof things as much as possible. Make sure you’re using well supported plugins and don’t rely on plugins which add stuff to your content. Plugins with shortcodes for example – if you stop using that plugin because it’s no longer supported in a new version of WordPress you’re liable to loose a lot of key functionality and have shortcodes displayed as raw text.

In my opinion the benefits far outway the negatives, but then of course, given the time I have invested into WordPress as my go to CMS solution, I have to say that. I’m sure every Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine lover out their will disagree and pick holes in WordPress – but it’s really a simple matter of being careful. The CMS you’re using has an impact but shouldn’t be the driving force behind your design and development. Do your research properly and you’ll be fine.

The post The Pros and Cons of Using WordPress. Is it the best CMS Solution? appeared first on Boshanka.

Beautiful Banner Ads

Whether you’re looking for some inspiration, or you’ve got a quality product or service to advertise check out the 25 premium banner designs below!

1. Retro Banner Ads Set

Beautiful retro banners in a range of colors and sizes. Beautifully crafted.

2. Summertime Banner Ads Set

This summertime banner ad set is perfect for holiday ads and beach time products!

3. Modern Banner Ads Set

These professional looking banner ads are ideal for businesses looking to make an impact. Hosting companies are idea!

4. Fashion Banner Ads Set

High fashion banner ads for a high fashion product. These funky designs are guaranteed to make your clothing line stand out!

5. Retro Banner Ads Set

These beautiful retro style banners are perfect for groovy businesses with a distinct style. Perfect for sweet shops!

6. Tartan Banner Ads

These beautiful, sophisticated tartan banner ad designs are sure to give your product some bang.

7. Vector Banner Ads

These vector banner ads are highly customizable and can be retro-fitted for almost any product.

8. Product Image Banner Ads

These big feature banner ads are ideal for presenting products. Great for online shops and retailers.

9. Rock Gig Banner Ads

These edgy banners are tailored for the music scene. Perfect for advertising gigs and festivals.

10. Classy Dark Banner Ads

Elegant and slick, these banners offer a cool feel for your product or service.

11. Creative Banner Ads

Highly creative and ideal for professional companies.

12. Product Banner Ads

The second in our set of product based banner ads, these are ideal for advertising e-books and web downloads.

13. Professional Banner Ads

These beautifully crafted pixel-perfect banners and excellent value for money and come with a range of different layouts.

14. Vintage Banner Ads

These super cool vintage badges are the perfect complement to any vintage style banner, and ideal for use in small spaces.

15. Featured Product Banner Ads

These banners feature a central product, idea for software and downloads

16. Colourful, Creative Banner Ads

Extremely colourful and highly customizable, these 5 star banner ads have one of the best ratings on Graphic River and are sure to help drive traffic to your website.

17. Campaign Banner Ads

These campaign banner ads can form the basis for a strong online marketing campaign for your business or service.

18. More Vintage Banner Ads

Extremely creative, these highly stylized vintage banner ads are perfect for those who want to give their product an aged, trusted feel.

19. E-Marketing Web Banner Ads

These E-Marketing style banner ads are perfect for those wanting to advertise their online marketing or website analysis services. Clean and memorable, a great buy.

20. More Vintage Web Banner Ads

These beautiful web boxes are ideal for use on or off your own website. A beautifully crafted design and super keen attention to detail make these boxes a stunningly creative addition to any promotional campaign.

21. Summertime Web Banner Ads

Continuing our summer theme, these banners are perfect for summer campaigns. Not running a summer campaign? No worries, switch out the image and boom, a completely different look and feel. Highly customizable and easy to use.

22. Multipurpose Banner Ads

These banners are extremely popular, the immense scope of this pack means it’s probably the only one you’ll ever need.

23. Luxury Banner Ads

If you’re looking to add a touch of class to your online campaign, these banners could be for you. Regal and beautiful, these are ideally suited for spas and high end hotels.

24. Colourful Banner Ads

These disco style banner ads feature vibrant colours and immense designs. Super high impact and guaranteed to grab peoples attention.

Origami Banner Boxes

These beautiful quirky web boxes are sure to catch a users eye, and are perfect for the display of a featured product.

The post 25 Beautiful Banner Ad sets that will sell your product! appeared first on Boshanka.

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How to start a website the right way? Don’t run before you can walk!

Obviously you could hire a freelance web designer (oh come on what did you expect?!). But this isn’t aimed at those with a budget and a deadline. This guide is aimed at helping those interested in how to start a website, get it off the ground.

Where to begin with your new website

My web design career started back in my college days, when I was studying IT Networking and Comms. A buddy asked me if I would mind helping him set up a website for his band Skirmish – I had an interest in Web Design, but up until that point, hadn’t really ever really had a meaningful subject. I had, in the past, set up a free page with a company called Homestead who at the time offered a free online site builder. I crafted a page which featured every animated flashing gif I could find on the web, and a nice centre spread photograph of me in the middle of the page – terribly pixelated due to my lack of knowledge regarding photo resizing.

This was my first shot, I signed up for a Geocities account, who again offered the online site builder and some free hosting, and I began putting together a website for my fiend’s band. The key here was that i finally had a meaningful subject, something that other people might actually be interested in, and furthermore, I had some motivation, my friend was keen to see the project move forward and would want to see its progress regularly. Web designers in my experience thrive when they’re thrown in at the deep end. There is so much support out there on the World Wide Web, that with almost any problem you might face, you just need to remember that GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND. Search for your specific problem, and it’s likely that someone else has faced the same problem as you at some point in time, just as likely is that some clever individual has solved said problem and posted step by step instructions on how to resolve it. So don’t be afraid to take on a challenge, the support is out there!

So that gives you your first key steps..

1. Find a meaningful subject, that other people might actually be interested in!
There’s nothing worse than putting all that work into a site, and then day after day watching web analytics gathering dust. It’s demoralizing. Build a site about somthing other people will find useful and interesting, or build a website for a friend who needs it – that way you can collaborate and enjoy the process with another person who is genuinely interested, and who doesn’t want to help out a friend!?

2. Find a webhost that offers you a free site builder
As i said before, don’t run before you can walk. Web technology today allows you to build simple static websites easily, without needing to use code. That’s something you’ll move on to further down the line, once you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, like building your website navigation and laying out content. The online site builders allow you to get a better understanding for how a website is structured and how users will interact with it, it makes you think about it properly, and probably for the first time. Its best to get this understanding before you start learning the code. Here’s a few online site builders with free plans to get you started:

• Moonfruit
• Wix
• Yola
• Web Starts
• Weebly

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Buying a Domain name!

Next up, you’ll probably want to get a domain name. Domain names are cheap, you can pick up a .co.uk for as little as £5.00 per year. I use Namecheap.

Obviously you need to choose a domain that’s relevent to your subject, the band name, the business name or the product or service name. If the single name is gone, try appending the field, such as “Skirmish-music.com” or “Joes-Snooker.co.uk”. The addition of the extra keyword is good for your search engine rankings anyway, but don’t let SEO determine your domain name choice, choose the domain that’s best suited to your Idea. Once you’ve purchased your domain name, you just have to point it to your newly created site. Typically you can do this by simply forwarding your domain to your free site builders address – such as “joes-snooker.moonfruit.com”. Eventually, when you go for a proper host and decide to code your website yourself, you will need to update your DNS settings to associate them with your new server, but that’s for later.

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So you’ve started your site, promoted it locally and you’re getting a few visitors each day. Where do you go now?

By this stage you’ve probably gotten to know your site well, and you understand the site builder like the back of your hand. No doubt you’ve been tweaking and changing almost daily! With this confidence and knowledge, you’ve probably also begin to feel the limitations of the free site builder. You’ve been looking at other sites which just look nicer, cleaner and not as ‘blocky’ (for want of a better word!). When you’ve reached this stage, it is indeed time to start thinking about designing your website using a proper web design tool, and creating the HTML files that will make up version 2 of your site.

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Finding a good webhost

There are millions of web hosts out there, they all range in price and quality of service. In my experience, you’ll be disappointed with most. Unfortunately it’s a common problem, web hosts are often slow, your site may occasionally go down, and support is somtimes hard to get. Every individual’s experience is different. One person may tell you that 123-reg.co.uk is the best thing since sliced break, another person may warn you to avoid them at all costs. Every web host has horror stories attached to it, so my preference has always been to pick one with good support. With that in mind here’s my two recommendations.

1. Hostgator.com
Hostgator are a massive US based host and they’re not going anywhere. They are not advisable for a large professional website, as their shared packages do have a tendency to go down, but they have 24 hour support via live chat, and they will help you with almost any problem you’re facing, even if it’s not technically their fault, they’re pretty great for beginners. You can get 25% off their hosting packages with this discount code too: BOSHANKA25OFF.

2. 5 Quid Host
Don’t be fooled by the name, 5 Quid host are extremely professional, and as the name suggests, they’re cheap. With packages starting at £5.00 per month. 5 Quid Host are UK based, and are currently responsible for hosting all of my sites. I found sites load fast with them and whilst they don’t have a phone number (which can put people off) their email support response time is exceptional, usually within minutes. I’ve used both Hostgator and 5 quid host, and whilst both are good, my preference lies firmly with 5 Quid Host.

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Web Design Tools

In order to build your website, you’re going to need some tools. My preference is Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Dreamweaver, though there are many free alternatives out there. Student’s and Education professionals can also get a discount on Adobe Products. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be focusing on Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

Creating your site in Adobe Dreamweaver

When you start your site in Dreamweaver, it organizes the files of your website on your local computer. So all of your site files and associated documents are available within dreamweaver. From here you can edit files, set up links and transfer your site files to a web server. Dreamweaver essentially becomes the management system for every part of your website. Typically, a Dreamweaver site is made up of two parts.

1. The Local Folder – The place which contains all of the files you’re going to work on.
2. The Remote Folder – This is the live location of your site, where you keep all of the files that are running on your web server or host – such as 5QuidHost, as discussed earlier.

All you need to do to get started setting up your site in dreamweaver is to define a site in Dreamweaver. Give your site a name and tell Dreamweaver where you want to store the local files. Dreamweaver will ask you for further information as and when it requires it. Simple!

You can follow an excellent tutorial which details the sett up of your website in Dreamweaver here. The tutorial also includes example files for your website.

Using Adobe Photoshop to give your site the WOW factor!

Adobe Photoshop allows you to create beautiful designs which will make your website jump out! You can take inspiration from the thousands of CSS galleries out there, but you must try to keep your design your own. My personal favorites include CSS Drive and CSS Mania. You can download a FREE Photoshop website template i’ve put together from a previous article I have put together here: Free Photoshop Website PSD Template .

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Test your website, then test it again, and then TEST IT AGAIN!

There’s no excuse for not fully testing a website, badly designed, poorly coded websites will prevent users from visiting and interacting with your site. If you want to give your website the best possible chance at generating visitors, you must make sure it’s compatible with all modern web browsers and mobile devices. The only way to ensure this is to test it thoroughly. Download a copy of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Your website should work perfectly on all of these browsers, but feel free to go further than this. Put Google Analytics on your website to track what the most common browser types are, and test your website on all of them. Lastly, try validating your website code and aim to get a perfect score.

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Get your website noticed online!

So you’ve tested your site, you’ve given it an awesome design treatment and you’ve uploaded it to your web server! Next up, you need to generate some traffic. Off the bat you should have already made sure you’re web content is unique, relevant and well written, don’t copy and rewrite content from other websites, write your own and don’t be afraid to add a dash of your personality into it, or the personality of your brand, product or business. Make sure your site is structured properly, use appropriate header tags – I’ve written an article here about how to write good Search Engine Friendly content. Next up, submit your site to Google and Bing.

[TBS_BUTTON color=”success” style=”text-decoration:none” link=”https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=/addurl” title=”Submit your site to Google”]Add Your Site to Google[/TBS_BUTTON]

[TBS_BUTTON color=”warning” style=”text-decoration:none” link=”http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url” title=”Submit your Site to Bing”]Add Your Site to Bing[/TBS_BUTTON]

Then write and release a press release advertising your site, and interact with other websites in your industry, read other blogs and leave meaningful comments. If you’re lucky those website owners will visit your website and return the favour, and they might even tell their readers about you. Its about building relationships and meaningful connections.

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Wrapping Up

Obviously this list isn’t exhaustive, and there’s hours and hours more stuff to cover, web design is an amazing and rewarding industry, from the amateur level to the professional level. I would highly recommend anyone give it a go, there’s something wonderful about getting your first website online and watching it grow. My advice is to pick a subject you’re passionate about, something you’ll enjoy spending time on and giving lots of TLC. Of course if you ever need help, you can always get in touch with a professional web designer who can give you advice and support or jump in and resolve a problem you might be having.

I would also like to open the comments below up for discussion or advice – if you have a question or need some advice, please leave me a comment below and I’ll do my best to help you resolve your problem or provide you with some expert advice.

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The post How to start a website appeared first on Boshanka.

This full Photoshop PSD template is free for personal or commercial use – obviously a credit is appreciated but not mandatory.

This Magazine style layout features latest news, contact information and a great looking lead banner with space for a slider. Please note the news images used were sourced from Google Images and are for the concept only – you should replace these before using this free template.

Download the Concept

If you have any questions or need support using the template please just leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you ASAP!

The post Free Magazine style Website PSD Download appeared first on Boshanka.

There’s a ton of plugins out there to help you create your own custom post types, if you don’t feel like registering them yourself via your functions.php file – it all depends on what it is you’re attempting to do.

One universal issue I have found, which seems to have befouled a great many WP Developers and Designers is that regardless of how you’ve gone about creating your custom post type, the damn things just won’t play nice with your archive or category pages.

This is caused by your archive and category pages only querying items from the wp_posts table for posts of the “post” type, and therefore, when you create a new custom post called “books” for example and drop that into a category, when you view the category page you’ll be informed by wordpress that there’s nothing posted inside that category. Thanks for that.

The Fix!

Fear not, there is a super simple solution that’ll get posts of any type displaying inside your category, archive or tags templates. Just drop this little baby into your functions.php file, replacing “YOUR-POST-TYPE” with your own custom post type.

Job’s a good’un.

The post Getting WordPress Custom Post Types to work on Category Archive Pages appeared first on Boshanka.

It’s not that the iPhone 4 is a bad phone, It’s not. But after 12 months of use and two or three OS upgrades, it just didn’t run as smoothly as it used to, not to mention the home button which almost completely stopped working – requiring that the phone be on a hard surface while i pushed on it with all my strength to get the home screen to load, and forget double pressing it – I just didn’t have the strength. Along with the physical flaws, the Apple App store no longer garnered the same excitement in me that it once had.

My contract finally ran out last month, paving the way for me to upgrade to a shiny new phone, and even with Apple’s new generation iPhone 5 out at the same time, I found the decision to switch a pretty easy one. I did a little research and a popular choice was emerging, the Galaxy S III with Google Ice Cream Sandwich. I took the plunge and upgraded, received my new phone and plunged into the Google Play app store for the first time… I wasn’t disappointed.

After using the phone and the Play store for just over a month, here’s my round up of my favorite Android based Apps.

12. doubleTwist Air Sync

The doubleTwist app is nothing new, offering Android users with an all-in-one music application. Thanks, however, to a recent software update, the app now features what the company has dubbed “iTunes for Android” which supports Apple’s open AirPlay media streaming technology – meaning those with Apple TV can control and send media to their Apple TV device from their Android phone. The feature allows users to sync all of their music, movies and media wirelessly to all AirPlay devices and automatically adds any new music purchases to your iTunes library. As an added bonus, the app also supports DLNA devices such as the Xbox 360, Google TV and the Sony Play Station 3.

11. gAnalytics

In my opinion Google have really missed a trick in not getting a web version of Google Analytics working properly on mobile devices, you can get to it, but it’s not a pleasant experience. gAnalytics does a relatively good job of bridging the gap, there’s nothing terribly complex here, and you can’t get to every aspect of your web stats, but it does provide a nice slick and fast interface, with quick access to your top level reports. It also makes generating and sharing reports really simple, with just one click.

Click on the app image to visit the app in the Google Play store!

10. WhatTheFont?

A great app, when it works. What the Font is a service doing pretty much what it says on the tin. You take a picture of some text on your phone, upload it to the app which then tries to figure out what font it it, or at least offer some best matches. It’s a bit hit and miss, but when it works its spectacular. I typically use it for a little inspiration, don’t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed.

9. Adobe Edge Inspect

When Adobe do it right, they REALLY do it right. Edge Inspect is geared towards web developers & designers who work on mobile web projects. It allows you to pair up all your devices, iPad, iPhone, Android Tablet etc etc and have them browse in sync with your main computer. It allows you to perform remote inspection and debugging so you can see the HTML/CSS/Java changes instantly on all the devices. The app requires the corresponding desktop software to work.

8. AVG Antivirus Free

AVG Antivirus Free is the free alternative to the companies premium app. I’ve never tried the premium version, and honestly I can’t see why anyone would when the free version is so comprehensive. The app sits in the background effortlessly scanning files as they’re downloaded to the device and keeping things tidy. You can easily scan the device or perform a quick tune up too. The app comes with an app manager and a range of other features to keep your device healthy. Probably even cooler than all that is the tracking capability, which has everything that Apple’s “Find My Iphone” system has, the ability to view where the phone is on a map, remotely lock or wipe it, display a message on screen or make the device make a noise so you can find it, even if it’s on silent!

7. Skype

Not the most exciting of apps i know, but I use this app probably more than any other. It’s super fast and keeps me connected to clients and colleagues when i’m on the move. Off all the apps in my top 12, I literally could not do without it. The only real downside I’ve come across is that it eats data, so be careful if you’re on a limited data package, even simple text chat’s seem to push the data up and up as the month goes by.

6. WhatsApp

Quite simply, Brilliant! WhatsApp is available on virtually all modern mobile devices, and offers the ability to chat, send pictures and video just like you would in a text message, only it’s all done over 3G, and this included in your data package. No more costly MMS messages! Not sure the mobile networks were very happy about this one but it seems to be here to stay. Download it, authorize your phone by receiving a text and inputting the code and you’re ready to you.

5. Pandora

This FREE internet radio app offers FREE streaming music direct your phone over your data network, best for users with an unlimited data plan, it’s the most reliable internet radio app on android. Pandora has a huge song database, and you can start, pause, skip and bookmark songs, the audio quality is exceptional and the album cover art to accompany the song your listening too is high quality – which is nice! With the free version you can skip up to a maximum of 6 songs per hour, but the station is customized to your taste so that should be plenty! The android version is every bit as slick as it’s iOS counter part, and in my opinion, the album art looks great on the giant S III screen, by comparison to the rather narrow iPhone 5 screen.

4. iOn Road Augmented Driving

What the hell is this you might ask! Well the current buzz about augmented reality has paved the way for apps like this. An app which enables your phone to help drive your car, offering helpful saftey alerts at appropriate time, and tracking and preempting dangers which might be looming. It’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but it is free, and it is cool, definitely worth a download, just mind you don’t get to distracted playing with it, it can’t warn you against your own stupidity.

3. Great Big War Game

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! This is just one of those games that’ll keep you going for hours. It’s only a few pounds to buy and it’s worth every penny. Basically, they’ve taken Worms, smooshed it together with Red Alert, given it some slick smooth 3D and created an absolute beauty. The game is turn based, and you move each of your units towards the enemy during your turn, attacking or planting guns and towers where appropriate and earning money through oil towers, which allows you to buy more units. There’s loads of missions to runt through and several different modes, this game makes train journeys a pleasure – and I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, It’s stunning on the larger screen phones.

2. Venture Towns

Most regular gamers, have probably played a Kairosoft game by now, they pretty much own the sim management section in both the Apple App store and Google Play store.  No list would be complete without at least one of their titles. I’m going with Venture Towns, a city building sim which puts you in charge of your very own Utopia. You build your thriving metropolis from the ground up. You have a great range of properties to chose from, building houses, stores, mansions and office blocks. Watch as your citizens upgrade their properties and buy pets and cars too! You might even spot the occasional lottery winner!! You can gain combos by grouping certain businesses together to get extra bonuses and progress faster. This is a real time waster, you’ll have hours of fun just watching your city grow.

1. Air Droid

I’m a little bias, as I own a Macbook Pro, and needed somthing smooth and simple to bridge the gap between my Samsung Galaxy s III and the Mac – unlike the PC, you can’t simply plugin and access the phone like any other drive. Air Droid makes this process remarkably simple on mac. Simply connect the Mac and the phone to the same network, then open up http://web.airdroid.com on your Macbook. Open up the app on your phone and hit connect, then boom – you’ll see a lovely slick interface pop open in your web browser, from there you can drop files onto your phone from your Mac, edit/ delete apps, access contents, make changes – do pretty much anything you want. It’s stunning, and effortlessly functional. A must for any Mac User with an Android phone!

Disagree? Got an app you think should be added to the list? Leave a comment below and let me know!

The post 12 best Apps for Google Android Phones (In this web designer’s opinion!) appeared first on Boshanka.

First up, reserve h1 tags for the most important thematic title. That is, make it really obvious what the page is about. Secondly, move down the headers focusing on navigable structure, not keywords – h2 tags should indicate a subsection of h1, h3 a subsection of h2 and so on. The words in these headers are not treated as more important for SEO purposes, but they do count for a great deal when Google comes to analysing your page structure for ‘quality’ content.

If you want to make something obvious, but it’s not entirely related to the content, consider using CSS to style a normal ‘p’ tag. For example:

Could be styled with the following CSS:

to make it stand out, while not being overly important to the structure of the page. Google rewards pages designed for visitors, not for search engines.

Another point to make about SEO strategy in general is considering using SEO techniques as part of your wider marketing strategy. For example, there’s still a decently-sized demographic who prefer word-of-mouth marketing, and like to accompany that with printed copies of webpages. For Goodness’ sake, don’t make it hard for them! The first thing you should be doing if your page is ever suitable for print – and it’s best to treat every page as suitable for print – is to take measures for making that easy.

For example, strip out backgrounds when pages are sent through to print. Almost all browsers will do this automatically, but to make certain of it, insert unnecessary-to-print images as CSS background-image attributes, not using tags. That way, browsers will pick up on their background nature and deliberately ignore them. Even if your users are using colour laser printers – which are renowned for their toner longevity and low print costs (they use toner powder instead of ink, and are typically less fussy about paper choices) – printing out a bunch of useless backgrounds will cause unnecessary ill will.

A few words for the wise on this: First of all, remember that a background-image has no size; it scales to fit whatever div it’s in. That means you have to set the width and height attributes of that div to see the image.
Secondly, when using the background-image attribute to fill foreground divs (say, to avoid printing foreground div backgrounds, if you get my drift), be aware that background-image does not support transparency. You can ‘fake’ transparency by messing with the opacity of the layer in Photoshop (and saving as a PNG), but other layers will not actually be visible through the div that owns that background-image.

The post How Google Uses Headers – Tips for optimising your website for SEO appeared first on Boshanka.

Open up functions.php in your theme files and add the following code. The numbers 10,20,30 in the second part refer to the order the tabs will be rendered, so placing 10 next to an item will render that one first, and 30 last.

Happy coding!

The post Change the Order of the Product Tabs in Woocommerce appeared first on Boshanka.

I’ve been adding e-commerce to this site using the wonderful WooCommerce, and had set the “add items to the cart via AJAX when on a product page” in WooCommerce settings. Problem is, the cart widget, also shown on that same page, wasn’t updating at the same time.

Well i found the answer, and it’s incredibly simple.

First up – add this to your theme wherever you want your cart to display (you could even use a text widget – with extended PHP functionality.)

Then just add this to your “functions.php” file and your cart widget will magically become ajaxed – so when you add items from the category page, your cart total will update on the fly.

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By default, the loop-shop.php page fetched the data from the main editable field in the “our services” page, however it would not display any custom fields i had set up on that page – simply adding the custom fields to the “loop-shop.php” page in the traditional way wasn’t working.

The answer to my problem, and to anyone wanting to add data from a custom field from a specific page to another page somewhere in your theme is as follows:

1. Put this at the beginning of where you want to start displaying your custom field data (replacing the Page ID parameter with the page ID which contains the custom field you wish to display:

2. Call your custom field by name:

3. Wrap up your loop

You can call as many custom fields from that page within a given loop, to call from a new page simply create a new loop after the first.

The post How to display a specific custom field from a specific page on any other page template in WordPress appeared first on Boshanka.

Occasionally the server errors out when restarting after quitting out of the application a few times, giving me an “Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!” notice.

Here’s a really simple fix that will get you up and running once again.

1. Quit MAMP
2. Open terminal from “utilities” and enter the following command: 

   1	killall -9 mysqld

3. Restart MAMP

That’s all there is to it, happy coding :-).

The post Quick fix for when MAMP won’t start MySQL server appeared first on Boshanka.

So how did i actually earn a very modest $1,200 on the web last year? I’m not talking about paid work as a Freelance Web Designer as such, nor am I talking about creating a blog and selling it for a profit. This method is so much simpler, and truly a very real option for anyone with a knowledge of photoshop and a bit of design flair, and the best part about this is that it’s recurring, once you’ve put the work into it, it will continue to send you a modest, but steady flow of income each month, and as every freelancer knows, it’s often these steady modest monthly pay checks which ensure the bills are paid.

Ok, so I’ll stop beating around the bush, you may already be aware of and maybe even have a portfolio on stock graphics websites. Website’s like iStock etc are all well and good, but it’s hard to get on them as a seller in the first place, and the Stock Photography Market is saturated – it’s hard to find your niche. About 12 months ago I found Graphic River, a website designed to help designers sell high quality stock graphics to consumers. Graphic River is one of the many Envato marketplaces and has grown exponentially in the past few years. The site plays home to some 50,000 stock graphics growing every day.

So 12 months ago, I set about creating my first piece of stock photography, a simple set of buttons in a few different colours and took me a few hours to design. The first time I uploaded it, it was rejected by Graphic River staff, who made some comments for how the item could be improved. I made the relevant changes and re-uploaded the item, and sure enough a few days later I had my very first item on Graphic River, priced at $3.00. As an exclusive seller (meaning i do not offer my items anywhere else for sale on the internet) i am entitled to 50% commission on all of the items I sell, so as the sales of my first item began to rack up, I watched the $1.50’s start collecting on in my account balance. Just 1 or 2 sales per week at first, so i left it to see how it built up. A week or two later I logged back in to see my account balance had surpassed the $20.00 mark , still modest but not bad considering I’ve done nothing, and I’ve put more work into creating adsense sites that have returned only a few pence per month!

I continued creating items at a rate of 1 or 2 per month and submitting them to Graphic River, around 50% of the items i submitted were rejected, though some were later accepted following some design changes and tweaks. 12 months later i have a graphic design portfolio of 27 items and have racked some 850 item sales, with my items priced between $3.00 and $18.00. I now make a steady stream of between $150.00 and $200.00 per month. Not bad for somthing i do in my spare time, and next month if I’m too busy to create a new item, that money still arrives, and the one after and the one after that.

You’re not going to make thousands of pounds over night with this, but you might well earn a little extra over time without putting in too much effort.

The post How I earned a modest but very real $1,200 on the web last year. appeared first on Boshanka.

1. Pay attention to your Sidebar
The WordPress side bar is present in nearly every single WordPress based website, and for me the term “sidebar” is a little misleading. The WordPress sidebar area doesn’t need to be in the sidebar, it can form part of your footer, header or any other content space on your website where features will consistently appear across different areas of your site.
Think about the content in the sidebar area, don’t just include the standard blogroll, categories and archives pages – be creative. Think about the content of your site and add useful meaningful sidebar widgets that help the user navigate your site and discover all that great content. Feature a specific post or guide, add a video, post a feed, link to your social networks or add a site search.

2. Set up your permalinks and custom URL structure.
I typically use /%category%/%postname%/ which displays the titles of my posts and the category in which they are posted nicely, getting rid of the user and search engine unfriendly post IDs. If you intend your posts and articles to be listed in Google news you may wish to include the post ID at the end as Google News requires a unique number at the end of each post in order to be aggregated.
Setting up your permalinks might seem like a complete no brainer, but time and time again I see CMS sites using the standard ugly URLs.

3. Download and Install the SEO Ultimate plug-in
This plug in should form part of the standard list of plug-ins you use with every single WordPress site you build. The plug in lets you easily create useful relevant meta content for each individual post, post category and page and comes with a whole host of other technical options that you can spend hours tweaking and testing the results. WordPress by default inserts Meta data into each post, but so much of the time it ends up being duplicated for each post – this is bad news for SEO, and what’s more if your posts are unique, then so should their meta content be!
SEO Ultimate Plugin on WordPress.org

4. Use Tags & the tag cloud appropriately
Tags and tag clouds are considered by many to be very “web 2.0”, the way in which tag clouds are used is a real pet peeve of mine – so often I see WordPress sites where someone has posted hundreds of useless tags to the post which are then shown in the site’s tag cloud. The concept of a tag cloud is great, and when they first appeared they were a nice way to help users find posts about a subject they were interested in. My advice is to use tag clouds appropriately, look over your post tags and filter out the rubbish, consider the top 1 or 2 keywords or subjects covered in that post and use those as your tags. Additionally make sure you don’t have two tags in different posts that mean the same thing -0 if you’ve used “web design” as a tag in one post, don’t use “website design” in another. Your tag cloud should truly reflect the content of your website, it’s a summary of all the subjects and key points covered during the time in which your site has been online – so make sure it counts.

5. Use the “Nice Search” plug-in
Relating back to the reasoning behind updating permalinks, the Nice search plug-in allows you to replace the typical WordPress search string “?s=my%20search” to a nicer looking, more SEO friendly version – “/search/my+search.htm”
Nice Search Plugin

6. Use CSS instead of Images where possible
Of course you need to use images for your website, but use them appropriately, if you can achieve the same effect with CSS then do it; it’s faster and friendlier to users on mobile devices or really slow connections. Depending on who you’re targeting, you may also which to consider using CSS3 to create some of the effects on your website, but check which browsers and versions will be able to cope with your CSS3 selectors.

7. Track your website with Google Analytics
Track your website with Google Analytics. It’s completely free and very comprehensive, though not 100% accurate; Google Analytics will give you some incredible insight into your website and its conversion. Use Google Analytics to monitor the impact of any changes you make, check the bounce rate and other user behaviour metrics, and use annotations to mark key changes you have made.

Conclusion.
I realise some of these tips may be stating the obvious, but it’s imperative to get the foundations right before moving forward, otherwise your website will crumble under it’s own weight. There’s plenty of good reason to become a WordPress web design expert, there’s lots of WordPress Jobs out there that many people make a very good living out of, and if you’re not looking to become a professional WordPress designer, follow these tips where appropriate and make your own WordPress website awesome! Your readers will thank you for it by coming back time and time again and Google will reward you for it by giving your site more exposure!

The post WordPress Tips – Building your Website with WordPress appeared first on Boshanka.

1.  Build up a contact list and perfect your strategies for connection by means of e-mail with your consumers.  Terms and statements can be misunderstood via e-mail so spend some time drafting a few email messages to see how you may act in response when you received that specific e-mail.  It will show you a whole lot regarding if you are connecting well with your clients on your e-mail subscriber list.  When you are you’ll likely see your Google rankings increase.

2.  Any time you talk with your clients be sure you are utilizing their first name and continually be certain you react to them in a timely way.  Whether that means you reply or an associate responds for you, it must be done.  These web marketing strategies help to make the buyer feel needed and appreciated.  In the event that you are making your web visitors feel this way they may likely keep coming back to get more.

3.  Communicating with people by way of user discussion forums will certainly be useful for you.  An internet marketing forum is a relatively informal place for people to share and exchange thoughts.  You could possibly get some new ideas and you will also interact with your target audience through these particular forums.  There is nothing better than obtaining a bit of feedback directly from your prospective buyers.

Establishing connections is absolutely crucial in the world of online marketing.  This happens because your visitors do not usually speak to you or see you therefore it is difficult to build rapport sometimes.  If you’ve got a few distinctive tactics on hand you could absolutely establish these interactions quickly and easily and begin to discover economic accomplishment right away.

The post A Few Fantastic Ways To Enhance Interactions With Consumers On The Internet appeared first on Boshanka.

For those who haven’t dealt with excerpts in WordPress before, it’s basically used to display the first few lines or words of your WordPress post – allowing you to provide an insight into the post to encourage users to read more.

Changing the_excerpt length in WordPress is incredibly simple, just follow these steps:

Open up your functions.php template file from your theme directory and find the closing “?>” at the end of your functions file. Just above it, paste the following code:

The WordPress excerpt is by default set at 55 words, the code above will lower that to 40 words, you can put whatever number you like in here depending on your requirements.

Once you’ve added the code to your functions file and set the number of words you want to display, add the excerpt to the post like you would normally using

.

And that’s it :-).

The post How to change the length of the_excerpt() in wordpress appeared first on Boshanka.

A collection of 40 stunningly beautiful and carefully crafted awe inspiring wordpress themes for your wordpress websites. These incredible wordpress themes have been carefully selected because of their originality, and premium quality. Enjoy!

1. Screen

2. Habitat

3. Simplic

4. Monolith

5. Overall

6. Mephisto Corporate

7. Mason

8. Moderna

9. Collective

10. Blueprint

11. DotMobi

12. Alabastros

13. Breeze

14. Awake

15. Vulcan

16. Openhouse

17. Showtime

18. Unite

19. Jewelry Shop

20. Stylishweb

21. Softshell

22. Bigfeature

23. Minibuzz

24. Infocus

25. Webstudio

26. Echoes

27. Display

28. Complexity

29. Viroshop

30. Intelligible

31. Tesla

32. Cleancut

33. Expose

34. Newscast

35. Levitation

36. Twicet

37. Forged

38. Pacifica

39. Traject

40. Prototype

The post 40 Awesome premium wordpress themes! appeared first on Boshanka.

‘companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.’ [4]

Of these new ways to do business, the first three: distributing cocreation; using consumers as innovators; and tapping into a world of talent, were all heralded as both fantastic challenges and enormous opportunities for business leaders to take hold of. The key is to open everything up, knock down the corporate boundaries and turn not just the employer-employee relationship on its head but also the producer-consumer relationship too, but what exactly does this mean for the shape of business, for the nature of the employee-employer relationship, and what about the impact on and changing role of the individual as a consumer and the business as a producer? What will it be like to live in a world where there are no prescribed boundaries between the two? Is there really more wisdom passing you by outside in the street waiting to be tapped into than sitting there on the other side of the office? And if so, do you need to employ anyone at all anymore? Should you be competing to fill your office with the best and brightest – and pay for them? Or should you throw every innovation challenge your business faces out there and let someone half way around the world take care of it, for a tenth – even less – of the salary you’d pay an internal team? Should you even have an office in the first place? Is this phenomenon the end of the office, the end of the boundaries between those that make and those that buy? Is it wise for the crowds or just wise for business?

This essay looks at these three McKinsey predications and attempts to look at the effect on business should their predictions be taken up by the business community and put into practice. It looks at what it means to break down the boundaries and embrace ‘them’. It then takes a look at it from the other side of the coin, from the perspective of the individual who is suddenly being empowered and entrusted with being both creator and consumer of their own products. What are the benefits for them? Is it just another gimmick to get them to keep buying the same products and services as before, or is there a real power shift going on here that has lasting and profound importance to the future shape of the information society.

The first McKinsey predication is on ‘distributing cocreation’. According to the McKinsey article, this involves companies making a radical use of internet technologies to ‘harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries’[5]. Great business speak about ‘harvesting’, but the implications are much more profound than simply telling business leaders to reach out to the talent they don’t actually employ or to look beyond existing boundaries such as geography, culture, or market. The prediction calls for a radical shift in thinking, a radical move toward not just reaching out to find sources of innovation – individual innovators – but allowing those innovators to come in, poke around the business, and see how they can help. In this sense the call is not to simply lower ‘corporate boundaries’ but dismantle them, not just scale them down one way or the other but like the Berlin Wall find ways to pull them down for good.

How does this work in reality? Quite simply where companies once relied on recruiting the brightest minds, innovating a product internally, and then hoping it sells, the successfully innovative business of 2008 has to decentralise; the roof over the production line has to be taken off, even the drawing board unveiled, so that everyone – customers, suppliers, specialists, and independent contractors alike – can all be proactively involved in the cocreation and distribution (selling) of the products themselves. Citing companies like Loncin, a leading Chinese motorcycle manufacturer who sets deliberately broad specifications for their motorcycles to enable suppliers to work with one another to design the components and make sure everything fits together (and thereby reduce costs), McKinsey suggests that no company could or should leave anyone out of any stage of the development of its products or the refinement of its services. The benefits: ‘companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.’ [6] And the estimates if this really broadens out from Chinese motorcycles to everything else we buy and use is staggering: ‘If this approach to innovation becomes broadly accepted, the impact on companies and industries could be substantial. We estimate, for instance, that in the US economy alone roughly 12 percent of all labor activity could be transformed by more distributed and networked forms of innovation—from reducing the amount of legal and administrative activity that intellectual property involves to restructuring or eliminating some traditional R&D work.’ [7] Whilst this sounds promising, there are pitfalls we shall look at later.

The second of the eight key 2008 McKinsey tech trends to watch out for follows naturally the first: There is obvious value in using technology to lower corporate boundaries and indeed in enabling cocreation with partners and suppliers, but how do you get your customers to innovate for you, to innovate the very products they want you to sell back to them, to act as not only the designers but also their own sales people? This is not as hard as it might seem: it is all down to enabling interactions, the nature of them, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

Of course the global marketplace is not a new phenomena, the globalisation of products and services has become commonplace through Internet based companies such as eBay and Amazon. These services are now well embedded in our day to day lives with millions of people logging on to utilize these services. More recently than this is the Wiki trend, which over the last 5 years has swept across the Internet, encouraging people from all over the world to communicate and collaborate on projects and ideas. But crowdsourcing and cocreating and distributing products and services is more than just bringing people together. To agree on the correct definition of ‘crowdsouricng’ and ‘cocreation’ itself, we must take a closer look. It has huge implications for the shape of businesses and the nature of the business-consumer relationship, and Web.20 technologies have already enabled these interactions to become commonplace. Open-standards-based computing technology and networking capabilities (surely 2007’s top trend) have already facilitated feedback mechanisms with powerful effects. As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks. In fact, companies can be entirely born on this model. A good example of this is online clothing store Threadless. ‘….Threadless, asks people to submit new designs for T-shirts. Each week, hundreds of participants propose ideas and the community at large votes for its favorites. The top four to six designs are printed on shirts and sold in the store; the winners receive a combination of cash prizes and store credit.’ [8] In September 2007 Threadless[9] opened its first physical retail operation in Chicago, so they are not just click and mortar, but the way they work is built on constant interactions and feedback. Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get not just better ideas with which to make better products, but also better insights into customer needs and behaviour that may be able to cut the cost of acquiring new customers, engendering greater loyalty, and speeding up development cycles.

But this leads us to our third key McKinsey trend: Tapping into a world of talent. If you can open up your business, if you see the benefits and opportunities presented by cocreation and crowdsourcing, how do you know you are getting the best ideas out there, which crowds do you chase? What if the people you already employ are the best and brightest? What if your problems are so specialised that your consumers themselves wouldn’t have a clue how to help you?

One good example of this phenomenon is the birth of the Idea Marketplace or ideagora. (There are a number of so called idea marketplaces out there, but of these the three of most interest are, InnoCentive[10] (Science), TopCoder[11] (Technology/ Software) and NineSigma[12] (Science). For the purposes of this essay we will look at InnoCentive.) In the late 1990s, US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly wondered if it was getting enough bang for its R&D buck. They employed some of the best and brightest scientific minds in the world to keep them ahead of the competition, and with competition from companies like Proctor and Gamble the cost of R&D and the salaries they were paying were substantial, but at least they had talent within with which they could tackle their most pressing challenges. But then one day Alph Bingham – then vice president in research and development for Lilly – recalled his student days, how his professors would throw open their problems to their graduate students in the hope that one of them would prove resourceful with some problem or another, and that often they would be able to help. Bingham wondered if there was a way to do just that: to throw their problems out to the world and see if they could help, not only in finding solutions to things their own researchers couldn’t solve, but in finding new and more novel solutions to those problems. As Bingham says: “Thinking about the way scientific creativity manifests, it’s not always a given that the next problem you encounter will be solved by a Nobel laureate. Perhaps it will be by some guy at a rural, private college in Vermont or a small research facility in China or an East German startup……So we asked ourselves, if we had enough diversity of exposure, would we get novel solutions? And the answer was yes.”[13]

After an initial yes he asked Lilly to invest several million dollars in building a platform for anyone interested in the research they were doing to come together and look at (in private and anonymously) the problems they had, in 2001 InnoCentive was born. How it works is quite simple: Lilly – as a ‘Seeker’ – has a problem its own internal researchers can’t solve (maybe no one can, because the problem in unsolvable, but knowing that you’ve reached a dead end is as good as endlessly going over the same ground). These problems are converted into easily understandable possible projects, or Challenges, and then, given a price tag or prize (there are prizes on the site now in excess of $1,000,000), they are literally thrown out to a global network of what InnoCentive calls ‘Solvers’ to work on, with a deadline for their solutions and the prize awarded (or not) to the successfully accepted solution. It worked. Seven years later, InnoCentive has over 30 Seeker companies, 140,000+ Solvers in 175 Countries(a surprising fact as noted in the Harvard Study and not originally predicted by Innocentive was that the more removed an InnoCentive problem was from a Solver’s area of expertise, the more likely he or she was to solve it. In other words, if you want the answer to an engineering problem, an engineering network isn’t always the best place to find your answer. This has led to Innocentive looking for a much broader range of Solvers), and they have expanded from Lilly style pharmaceutical problems to over 40 Industry Disciplines including green technologies and business. Of the 350 challenges posted on InnoCentive since it opened, about a third have been solved, which is, according to a Harvard Study[14], pretty good when you consider that there is only a 12% success rate at research-based companies like P&G, one of InnoCentive’s earliest customers, drawing only on their internal capabilities.

So what does this say about R&D? Does it mark a high water mark in the recruitment of scientists when companies can literally get more solutions by posting their problems on sites like Innocentive? Initially, you would have to say yes. P&G for example, “a company whose corporate culture was once so limited it became known as the Kremlin on the Ohio,”[15] have put a hold on recruiting any new R&D staff after coming against the Innocentive model. Larry Huston, Procter & Gamble’s vice president of innovation and knowledge says: “Every year research budgets increase at a faster rate than sales. The current R&D model is broken.” [16]

But even though P&G figure that for every one of the 9,000 top scientists inside their labs, there are another 200 outside just as good. That’s a total of 1.8 million people in areas like Brazil, China, India, and Eastern Europe whose talents it doesn’t use, and even though they have capped recruitment, they have not shed those 9,000 scientists and sent them running to sign up to Innocentive. Rather than cut P&G’s in-house R&D department they have instead sought to change the way they work, looking for all the ways of working that we have looked at earlier, for crowdsourcing and cocreation, increasing the number of eyes and ears they have at their disposal. And it has worked. After coming up against Innocentive, P&G set a goal of increasing the number of innovations acquired from outside its walls from 15 percent to 50 percent. Six years later, critical components of more than 35 percent of the company’s initiatives were generated outside P&G. R&D productivity is up 60 percent, and the stock has returned to five-year highs. “It has changed how we define the organization,” Huston says. “We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks. The line between the two is hard to draw.” [17]

So the business benefits are clear. If you can tap into the right talent, you can get them to work for you, not in the sense of outsourcing, but in a more broader, ongoing creative and collaborative sense, whether because they like your t-shirts or because they want the prize money. But is it all good news for those companies that embrace these new ways of working?Not necessarily. As McKinsey was keen to point out that ‘Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.’ [18] A company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn’t unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations. With all this knowledge at the fingertips of the people with the problems, companies will still need to find a method of selection – how do they know which solution truly is the best? They will still need to employ research scientists and consultants to filter the aggregated solutions and implement their design, could this just be like panning for gold? Pushing money towards something with an uncertain outcome? There is still no cast iron guarantee that a problem will be solved, but the evidence remains that any one company will never have more than 1% of all the resources it really needs, and so outsourcing there R&D is cost-effective and time consuming way to see if their problem can be answered, and InnoCentive still maintain the right to ‘Award’ the project if they feel that a valid solution has been found. “Nobody is as smart as everybody”[19] Traditionally, the CEO of a company is the person with the BIG ideas, that person’s workforce, are the idea builders. They take the initial innovations of the CEO – the Richard Branson, Steve Jobbs, and Bill Gates of this world – and develop and produce their ideas. This still works of course. No one is saying that great ideas don’t come from great individuals, just that you can never hope to employ all the best and brightest minds. But as we have seen there are limitations to this model.

But what’s in it for the Solvers? What’s in it for the consumers, the prosumers, the crowd? Money? Another finding of the Harvard study into innocentive showed that cash was not a sole motivating factor in why Solvers worked on Seeker Challenges. So although some people – possibly those scientists not employed due to P&G’s decision to stop hiring – may be there for the spare cash between jobs, there are other motivating factors such as prestige and ego, the old image of the eccentric in the garden shed just happy to tinker away. Empowerment? Yes, it is good that consumers and their feedback is taken seriously – even more than seriously, that consumers are being empowered with having an almost majority share in opinion within the company, in the direction and shape of the companies next developments. But is that enough? Is that sustainable once the thrill of the Challenge dies down, when the crowd no longer feel the value of being valued? And if it is, is it exploitative? After all, it’s free labour when one considers how valuable the Intellectual Property rights they are signing over are? If we are now crowdsourcing – for the chance of a reward or just because we believe in or are passionate about a company or its products – is the only real reward going to the company? We are not now needed as employees – or at least new employees – and are now competing against everyone else? Are we being groomed to serve when companies should be serving us? Is this just the next source of legalized sweatshop labour where you never even need to meet face-to-face, let alone account for, the people doing the work? Is this a good model where the world’s biggest challenges are concerned? The answer is yes and no.

Let’s take the example of Cisco[20]. Cisco is currently still running the Cisco I-Prize which was split into three phases: Phase I – Brainstorm (Innovators submit ideas and other registered innovators comment and vote on the submissions. Then innovators find other innovators to form a dream idea team.), Phase II – refine (the teams collaborate to build their idea and technology plan and define the market opportunity.) and Phase III – present (Finalist teams present these plans to a judging panal of industry top dogs and Cisco seniors using Cisco TelePresence to communicate their ideas, passion and drive). Quite simply, the Cisco I-Prize is all about helping Cisco identify and find new business opportunities. It is free to anyone over 18 to register and take part. It asks individuals from ‘the Human Network’ to not only submit but also grade and crowdsource other individual’s submissions. This all sounds like some kind of Matrix style human ideas powerplant, where not only the ideas themselves are farmed, but also the maintenance is taken care of without Cisco doing anything more than setting up the registration process and fielding the final solutions that are then narrowed down. But ‘the winning team may have the opportunity to be hired by Cisco to found a new business unit and share a $250,000 signing bonus. Cisco may invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on your idea.[21]’ So it’s not just about the prize, not just about the thrill, there is long term potential here for those willing to put in some hard work. It’s not just about getting people to do work for free. It’s also about giving something back in return. Which takes us to the business model as it applies to wider economic and social issues. According to a recent Evalueserve Business Case Study[22], the InnoCentive solver network is distributed worldwide, a quarter of which is in poorer countries.It has emerged however, that poorer regions such as Eastern Europe and South Asia have yielded almost equal quantities of solvers as regions within western civilisation, such as Western Europe and Asia Pacific. This offers much confidence in the idea that their truly is an untapped resource of solvers not being utilized – this kind of profound change in the way big business R&D problems are solved could dramatically speed up the process of innovation, and the speed at which we see our technological advances in all aspects of our lives.All fields of research can benefit from this method of global collaboration, and as always, there are massive profits to be made.As was pointed out in the Financial Times article, the solvers inability to exploit the technology once it has been developed gives headway to poorer civilisations to benefit from the new freely available product, though this is not the kind of prolific change that will happen over night.

From a philanthropic perspective, the opportunities provided by InnoCentive are endless, increasingly we will see benevolent prizes offered for solutions to the problems faced by the world, The Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Accelerating Innovation for Development’ Initiative (Also set up by Spencer Trask) now hold a section on the InnoCentive website dedicated to this kind of philanthropic innovation[23], and have posted various ‘clean technology’ challenges. Kimberlin calls for innovation that is ‘every bit as revolutionary as Edison’s incandescent bulb’ [24]. The InnoCentive site also includes a section dedicated to clean technology and renewable energy[25]. This deploys a very simple image, one of unity and the collaboration of minds from across the globe with a view to save the planet – certainly the kind of image any global giant would want to be part of, and there have been many recent takers, such as the £10m offered to the person who can prevent the climate change crisis by Richard Branson[26], and the Pneumococcal Vaccine Advance Market Commitment which was launched in 2007 by the governments of Canada, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom, as well as the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and announced a $1.5 billion “Advanced Market Commitment” or AMC for pneumococcal vaccines. The AMC sets out specifications for the vaccines and has pledged $1.5billion to “heavily subsidize” their purchase. “Backers suggest the AMC will speed delivery of vaccine to developing countries by 10 years and save the lives of 5.4 million children by 2030.”[27]

“We’re in the first inning of a new renaissance.”[28] One thing McKinsey forgets to mention in its forecast, perhaps because it is a forecast, is that this whole new crowdsourcing boundary removing prize based paradigm does have historical precedent. A recent article in the Financial Times suggested that crowdsourcing might not be such a modern idea. The article details how in 1737 John Harrison ‘a self taught clockmaker from Yorkshire’[29] provided a unique solution to the then notorious Challenge of how to determine a ships longitude – and in turn it’s position at sea. The incentive: £20,000, which is equivalent to around £5,000,000 today, is several times more than the highest prizes posted at InnoCetive. So it is worth considering that the notion of crowdsourcing and prize induced challenges has been around for hundreds of years, and companies such as InnoCentive are simply re-discovering the benefits, albeit with the help of technology. But is it wise for the crowds or just wise for business?

It is good for both. It is good for businesses to open up and involve people, the people that matter just as much as their ‘most precious asset’ – their people – their customers. It doesn’t mean the end of employees, just a more realistic appraisal of their value, and more people being paid on the outside to look in – who might have been and even still could be hired anyway. It’s good for customers to have their say, and good for people who would previously never be exposed to big business to get themselves in the spotlight. Talent will always find a place to work and ideas will always find their place in the sun. Employers will always need both new ideas and new talent to put them into action. Prizes help, but as we have seen, prize money is not the only incentive, and so these new ways of working will have to find new ways of making it work, new ways of involving, incentivising, motivating and collaborating with one another and new ways of sharing the rewards, not only between themselves but also with the wider world. And if business leaders buying into McKinsey don’t see this, if all they see is a one sided way forward, a way of cutting staff and R&D, as a way of getting everything for nothing, then someone within the crowd will talk, and the talent within those crowds will move on somewhere where their collective as well as their individual voices will be heard. Or worse, they will turn around to each other and say, let’s pool our collective talent together and create products and services without these companies, or let’s create ideas which we can sell to them – for much more than they are currently said to be worth, and share the profits equally amongst ourselves. That way the companies work for their customers, which is perhaps as it should be anyway. Then again, maybe human nature will take over. The novelty of always losing to more talented people in the competition for prizes will see the crowd dispersing, stopping to look at the company whose walls have suddenly come down. Then McKinsey will have to come up with a new future trend: the end of the crowd.

Bibliography

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Websites referenced within this essay:

· http://www.bcg.com

· http://www.boozallen.com

· http://www.threadless.com/

· http://www.innocentive.com/

· http://www.topcoder.com/

· http://www.ninesigma.com/

· http://www.conft.com/web/solutions/iprize/index.html

· http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/iprize/contest_overview.html

· http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/branson-offers-16310m-to-the-person-who-can-prevent-the-climate-change-crisis-435647.html

· http://www.keionline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29

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