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Websites are made up of many different views and pages. One of the most important views is your administration panel – these are often coupled with custom web applications. The backend system is almost vital to managing users and editing page content.

But you have to get just the right look & feel for things to work out well. In this gallery I have gone through Dribbble and collected the most pristine examples of web dashboards. These are all designed for varying functions and you’ll pinpoint many discrepancies. Feel free to peruse the collection of user interfaces, and let us know your thoughts in the post discussion area.

Web App Header

Web Application

Admin Panel Redesign

Admin Menu

Dashboard with Tabs

WordPress Custom Admin Panel

Admin UI

UI Dashboard Zoomed

Dashboard Analytics

Web Admin Panel

Bespoke CMS Admin

Admin Header

Edit Users

Fluid Admin

Botify

Approve/Decline Widget

Administrator Links

Navigation Template

Admin Template Grape

Control Panel Stats

Custom WordPress UI

Uploading File Interface

Dashboard Table

Web Admin UI

Admin GUI Icons

Proto Admin

Admin Login Form

Left Panel Application

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The subject of video game websites is not often a popular idea. But consider how rapidly video games have advanced since the days of Atari and Nintendo. We now have so many publishers between America and Japan it’s difficult to keep track.

I put together this gallery as a look into past and present design trends. This collection of video game websites includes new releases along with titles published back in early 2000. Notice how each game brings it’s own feelings and emotions into the site layout. This is the perfect showcase if you are building a small website for a game publication – even a product launching for mobile tablets or smartphones. Video games are ingrained into our culture and they’re sure to entertain kids(and adults) for generations to come.

FFX Europe

NA Final Fantasy X

Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories

Final Fantasy XIII-2

KH3D

Rayman Origins

Final Fantasy XIV

Little Big Planet

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Katamari Damacy

Cooking Mama

Pheonix Wright Ace Attorney

Wild ARMs 4

Final Fantasy XII

Harvest Moon The Tale of Two Towns

Professor Layton

Donkey Kong Country

Pokemon USA

Xenosaga

Resident Evil Gold Edition

Ratchet and Clank

Super Mario Galaxy

Sim City

Dark Void

Grand Theft Auto IV

Pokemon Platinum

Pokemon Black and White

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time

Bukumono Japan

Rune Factory: Oceans of Destiny

Innocent Life

Rune Factory 2 DS

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You’ve probably heard about them. Clients who won’t pay. Clients who treat freelancers poorly. Clients who pile on more work than the freelancer agreed to.

You may have even had the misfortune of working for one yourself. It’s not uncommon for freelance designers to wind up working for a scammer or a bad client.

Some freelance designers view this as an inevitable part of freelancing, but I say that you can keep many scammers and bad clients out of your freelancing business if you take the proper precautions.

In this post, I’ll share a checklist to help you identify scammers and bad clients. If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Is That Client Legit or Just a Tire Kicker?

Checkpoint #1: Reputation

Just like you have an online reputation, most potential clients also have an online reputation. Before accepting work, be sure to check your prospect’s reputation using the following steps:

• Type their name and variations of their name into a search engine.
• Look for their accounts on social media.
• Find their web page and examine it carefully to see if it looks legit.
• See if they are rated by the Better Business Bureau or mentioned by scam-busting sites.

You may be surprised how much you can learn about a company online. Many scammers have a continuing pattern of scamming freelancers. A little homework on your part can keep you from being their next victim.

Remember, while a legit client could have a few of these traits; be extra cautious about any prospect who looks bad in all of these areas.

Checkpoint #2: Too Many Meetings

Meetings take your time. Unpaid meeting time reduces your income.

While it’s okay to offer to meet a client who seems serious about hiring you, be careful not to allocate too much of your time to such meetings.

It’s not unusual for a so-called client to ask a freelance designer to meet them about a “project”–only to pick the freelancer’s brain for several hours or even longer.

This is often a scam to get free consulting work from the freelancer. The so-called client never intends to hire the designer. When they’ve got what they need from you, they’ll implement your ideas using in-house staff.

You can weed out many of these scam artists by placing strict limits on free meetings and by making sure that the meeting is dedicated to them describing their project to you. Many freelancers charge a meeting fee for any meeting time that exceeds an hour.

Checkpoint #3: Prepayment

You should be requesting that initial clients pay a partial deposit up front. Do not start, I repeat, DO NOT start work until you have that initial deposit.

The amount of the initial deposit varies, but most freelance designers charge anywhere from 1/3 of the total project amount to 1/2 of the total project amount.

The initial deposit shows good faith on the client’s part and demonstrates that they are serious about hiring you for the job. They are now invested in your success.

Keep in mind that if you have trouble getting the initial deposit from a client, chances are that you’ll also have trouble collecting the final payment. Why take an unnecessary chance?

Checkpoint #4: The Freelancing Agreement

You should have a freelancing agreement for all larger projects. Ideally, this would be a contract between you and the client, but at the very least it should be a written description of the project terms that both of you agreed to.

A good agreement describes the scope of the work, the project deadline, and the payment terms. You should even get a freelancing agreement from trusted clients. It’s just too easy to forget the terms of an oral agreement.

Having such an agreement protects both you and the client. If your prospective client is honest, there’s no excuse for them not signing the agreement. If they’re not honest, well…in that case you don’t want to work for them anyway, do you?

Checkpoint #5: The Great Rate Debate

One of the first ways to weed out scammers and bad clients is to ask what their budget for the project is. If it’s way too low for the amount of work they are asking for, this is a good sign that they will not be a good client.

When confronted with an extremely low rate, too many web designers try to convince the prospect to pay more. This is a bad idea. Even if you win the rate debate and convince the prospect to pay more, they are already unhappy because they’ve gone over their anticipated budget.

If there’s a huge gap between what the client expects to pay and what you need to charge, your best option may be to walk away before they become a bad client.

Many freelancers would also tell you that lower paying clients are often more picky (and more unreasonable) than higher paying clients. In my own experience, I’ve also found this to be true.

Checkpoint #6: Not Knowing What They Want

The last checkpoint is very important for freelance designers. More than any other freelancer, you are likely to be greeted with the words, “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

Such a “client” can’t even begin to describe what they expect from you, yet somehow they want you to tackle their project.

It’s nearly impossible to get a clear scope of work from such a client. Don’t even try. You may find yourself caught in an endless loop of revisions and rework until the client sees what he or she likes (which could be never).

If you show them a few samples of your work and maybe a few other designs online and they still can’t give you enough to go on, it’s time to move on. They aren’t a good client for you.

Your Turn

It isn’t inevitable that you get saddled with bad clients and scammers. You can keep them out of your freelancing design business. In this post I hope that I’ve shown you how.

What checkpoints would you add to help freelance designers avoid bad clients and scammers? Share your insights in the comments.

Image by Lee J Haywood

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Just back a decade ago everybody was talking about web 2.0 trends. The Internet was bustling with hundreds of new startup ideas following MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, and now even things like Foursquare and Pinterest. The advancing world of tech startups has proven there is no shortage of new ideas.

And when it comes to web design the scenario is very similar. I have put together 35 examples of new startups which feature brilliant layout designs. Some are web applications, others are social networks, and even a few sites are built around mobile apps. But all of these startups bring new ideas into an otherwise stagnant digital market.

Saas Pose

All My Apps

Medigram

Collba

Path

Popset

SendHub

Localmind

Pinterest

Punchfork

BrandMyMail

Hall.com

Bugrocket

Picfull

Trippy

Farmigo

Fab.

bre.ad

we heart it

Sparked

JobSpice

Onswipe

Papyrs

meetin.gs

Magisto

Vayable

Star.me

Slidebomb

like.fm

Chewsy

Keepio

Miimr

Gridulator

ffflourish

Clueapp

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By Conrad Feagin

Let’s say you’re getting to the point where you’re a whiz at quickly building quality websites. That’s the fun part of web design.

However, if you want to increase your income, you have to look at web design as a business. And, pricing is an important part of that business.

There’s no easy answer for how much you should charge for web design projects, but the first factor you have to consider is how long it usually takes you to complete a website.

Do you even know?

Unless you actually log your time, you’re simply guessing.

When you sit down to work on a project, look at the clock and mark down the time. Log out when you break for lunch. Don’t forget to log back in when you begin work again. That sounds pretty simple, right?

Of course, you’re probably juggling more than one project at a time.

You may work on one project for a short while, then realize you need the client’s logo and other information to continue. You send a reminder e-mail to that client, then turn your attention to another project.

Then, you’re interrupted by a call from yet another client and spend some time answering his questions.

Writing down that you worked three hours before lunch isn’t helpful.

You must keep track of how much time you spent on each of the various projects. Yes, that makes it a little trickier.

If you’re getting a lot done, you don’t want to break your creative flow to log transitions from one project to another. If you’re on a tight deadline, the last thing you want to do is add another task to your day.

Why bother?

Well, check this out:

Getting $500 for one web design project may sound like good money. If it took you 5 hours to complete the project, you grossed $100 per hour, but…

If it took you 10 hours, you made $50 per hour…

If it took you 20 hours, you made $25 per hour…

If you misjudged how complicated a project would be, how much time you’d have to spend on the phone with the client or if they wanted to make more changes than you planned for, you might end up putting 70 hours into the project – and you wouldn’t have even made minimum wage.

Now that $500 doesn’t seem so sweet. That’s why you must keep track of your time.

Once you have completed a time log for your web design project, you’ll be able to see how much time it really took you to complete the project and how much you’re making per hour.

Then, you can use the data to decide how much to charge on your next web design project.

Right now, take the first step to having a profitable business as a web designer: keep track of your time.

Here are 3 free tools you can use to start tracking your time now:

1. Toggl is time tracking software you can use anywhere – on your computer or phone. They have a free plan and it takes less than a minute to sign up and start using it.

2. Harvest is very similar to Toggl. It also has a quick signup, mobile version and a free plan. Although, their free plan limits the projects and clients you can track.

3. Colorhat also has a free option and it allows you to track your time, manage projects and send invoices.

Of course, you could always use something as simple as a pen and paper. The point is that you know how much time you’re spending so you can price your projects correctly.

To learn more about setting up and running a profitable web design business, like pricing your services, managing your time and getting top-notch clients, sign up here:

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Today we have 36 brilliant icon shots from dribbble. If you like this post you might also enjoy our previous posts below.

40 Dribbble Shots of iPhone Applications

40 Useful PSDs From Dribbble

Showcase of 44 Creative Illustrations from Dribbble Artists

Get Moving Icon

Smart Cookie icon

Einstein :)

Jam Jar

The Boot

Beer

Drink Me

Gun Icon

Some custom icons

Vector Tomato web icon

Stone Owl

Corporate Style Pack Icon

Sparrow 1.0 icon

Clipboard Icon

Birdhouse

Cloud upload icon

CourseStorm web icon

SimpleGeo tools icon

Photo Camera Icon

Briefcase

Logistics icon

Radio Icon

CMS Icon

Hedgehog icon

Free St. Valentine’s icon set

Storybuilder Icon

School boy icon

Valentine’s Day Coffee

Calendar Icon

Sofa icon

New logo for Doit.im

Librarian

Flower

Insect (hi-tech)

Message icon

Icons.fm

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The art of web design takes years of practice to really understand how it works. There are so many ideas and UI elements which can build a solid impression on your audience. Designers are always striving to please the visitor and make their experience fun and easy.

Some trends have come out which are frequently seen in modern-day websites. In this guide I want to share a few ideas on how you can design a web layout which leaves a powerful lasting impression. Visitors will keep coming back to your site for the atmosphere and (hopefully) some great content.

Do Something Different

Most of the infamous websites which stand the test of time are known because of a unique personality trait. Designing a layout requires simplicity for navigation and content management. However there is plenty of room to spice up areas around your header and footer.

Considering the very top of your page is viewed by every single visitor, this is a crucial area. You want to catch their attention early with some type of unique branding. This could be a logo design, vector mascot, specialized navigation, or any other cool ideas. It doesn’t hurt to look through some web galleries and see what others have done.

A great example is the MailChimp branding with their vector mail-monkey. This little guy is seen all over their website, banner ads, and even in the admin dashboard. This impression is burned into your brain and difficult to forget. Whenever MailChimp ads are running on another website it’s definitely something I notice.

Try Experimenting

It can be fun to sit around and test out new web ideas. Sometimes these can turn into groundbreaking scripts for your sidebar or header content area. It never hurts to spend a couple hours toying around in jQuery or CSS and you may hit on a great concept.

Some examples include a unique accordion jQuery navigation menu. When you’ve got links and sub-links it takes work to put together a solid navigation system. But if it works for your layout then you know it’s got to be a unique setup on your website.

There are plenty of other examples but too many to list out here. I put a few ideas in a collection below which you can skim through. But examine your own layouts and see if you can test some ideas which fit well for you.

• dynamic search bar
• tabbed links in sidebar
• Ajax animated e-mail contact form
• image gallery slideshow
• unique CSS3 link hover effects

Building for Mobile

Folks who are constantly on their mobile phone will not stop to wait for your site to adapt. You want to catch your visitors by surprise and offer them a deeply enhanced mobile setup. This raises the bar on your website and opens the floodgates for massive amounts of new traffic sources.

Mobile Safari for iPhone and iPod Touch will render your website to scale unless specified otherwise. This means users can pinch & zoom their way around the site even if it’s not optimized for a mobile device. However the benefits far outweigh the negatives when offering your visitors a mobile-specific website layout.

The current trend is all about designing responsive website layouts. These are built using CSS3 media queries where the layout will re-size and adapt based on the viewport of the browser window. It means you don’t need to adjust for specific layouts since the whole website will modulate itself. It’s definitely worth looking into if you haven’t already.

Offer Unique Content

Visitors who are interested in your website will naturally remember the domain if your content is top-notch. You have to provide some form of content which is difficult to find elsewhere on the Internet. This may be digital media such as video/audio/images or even specialized content design.

A good example I can think of is designing a video game walkthrough website. GameFAQs is one example which takes user-submitted content related to any video game title. These guides can include a full walkthrough, items/weapons, secrets, and tons of other stuff.

Just having an idea so far ahead of the market curve means your site will quickly stand out among the rest. Unfortunately there are so many ideas already created and new developers joining the Internet every month. It may take some time before you figure out a really great idea – but it will come.

And when you do begin churning out content make sure you design around this. Catering to the user means catering to the content at large. Visitors are only on your website to find something they need, and the site design should only make that process quicker and easier.

Conclusion

There is no foolproof way to keep your visitors attached at the hip. Through A/B testing you can try new ideas and see if they stick. But ultimately you’ll need to go through many trials before capitalizing on a brand.

If your content can speak for itself then your visitors will quickly fall in love with any design. Placing a fancy website layout online with no content does not produce any active ideas. Start with a strong product or content idea and wrap a sweet layer of design all around it. If you have ideas or suggestions about impressionable design techniques be sure to let us know in the post discussion area.

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You can’t look anywhere on the web without running into at least a couple free resources for web designers. More and more young talent is coming to the surface and many of them have a lot of spare time. This means we’re seeing tons of new PSD and AI files released every week!

It can be extremely difficult to keep up with these trends. Not everybody can check for new freebies on their own each week and pick up their favorites. So I’ve put together this showcase of 29 brand new freebies released over the past 4 weeks. Grab some of your favorites and see if they can fit into any future design projects.

Navigation Bar Freebbbie

Easter Photoshop Shapes

Checkboxes

RGB Sliders

Notification

Crisp UI Kit

Quicktime Icon

Social Icons

Cloud

App Store Button

Freebie Music Player

HTML5 Freebie

Blueprint Pattern PSD

Google Chrome Icon

Cloud Icons

Mini-Flip

Social Vector Buttons

iPhone PSD

Offline Google Mail Icon

Little To-Do Thingy

Call to Action Buttons

Inline Login Form

UI Elements

Twitter Buttons

Ticket Freebie

Credit/Debit Card Icons

iOS App Icon Template

Chalkboard PSD

Clean Login Form

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Freelance designers and other freelancers often miss the boat when it comes to finding new customers and building their freelancing business.

That’s because they don’t understand how building healthy long-term business relationships fits into their marketing plan. In the eyes of some freelance designers, a contact is either an immediate prospect or they are not worth pursuing. Often, this means they miss a lot of business opportunities.

In this post, I’ll discuss the importance of building relationships and what it can mean for a freelance designer. I’ll explain why long-term relationships are important and also provide you with five tips for meeting and building business relationships. If you like this post, you may also enjoy reading Why Online Friends are Important to Freelancers.

Why You Need to Look Past the Short-term

I totally get it. You’re afraid of the feast or famine cycle. That’s why your focus is on finding short-term freelance design work.

You’re right. You probably do need short-term work right now. You need to keep that cash coming in.

But, you also need long-term business relationships. Trust me, one day those long-term relationships are going to become the source of some of your best projects.

Why are relationships so important? It’s simple, relationships with business colleagues and contacts grow trust. People prefer to do business with those people they know and trust.

Plus, you are more likely to get repeat business and referrals if you have a strong business relationship with the client.

So, if you want more design work, develop more relationships based on trust. How can you do that? Try building long-term relationships.

Your Once and Future Prospects

Most freelance designers severely underestimate the value of long-term business relationships. The prevailing attitude is: if you don’t hire me today I have no time for you.

Some freelancers are even downright rude to contacts who don’t hire them–talk about burning your bridges!!

The thing is, people move around. They change jobs. Some people move back and forth between freelancing and the corporate world.

That business contact you mouthed off to today may one day work for your ideal client. If you’ve already burned your bridges, what do you think the odds will be that he or she will hire you in their next job?

You need to shift to long-term thinking. Try to remember that the business friend you make today may have work for you in a few months or even a few years.

At the very least, try to be polite to almost everyone.

You may not be sure how to go about establishing the long-term business relationships you need. So, let’s move on to some tips that will help.

Five Business Relationship Tips

Here are five tips to help you find and develop long-term business relationships:

1. Participate. Before you can develop long-term business relationships, you need to meet people. The way to meet people is to participate. Leave meaningful comments on blogs. Connect through social media. Go to meetups and conferences.
2. Remember it’s not about you. Too many freelancers think that asking for something is connecting. It’s not. Contacting a stranger on Twitter or Google+ who has never heard of you to ask them out of the blue whether they’ll hire you isn’t building a relationship.
3. Add value to the relationship. You need to give people a reason to want to connect with you. Perhaps you are able to answer a question that they have posted. Maybe you can point them in the direction of a resource that they need. Look for ways to add value.
4. Stay in touch. It goes without saying, you can’t build a strong relationship if you don’t check in regularly. Of course, you also need to respect your contact’s time. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools may help you to insure that nobody falls through the cracks.
5. This is for business. The contacts you make may or may not be the same folks you’d invite to your pool party. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter as long as there’s trust and respect because you are not looking for new BFFs (best friends forever). These are business relationships you are nurturing.

Your Turn

How do you nurture long-term business relationships? Every freelancer handles this differently. We’d love to hear your tips.

Image by Trekking Rinjani

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The mobile web is clearly changing the way we think about layout design. Even back just 5 or 10 years ago there were barely any developers working on a solution for mobile. Now it seems everybody is doing their Internet surfing on some type of smartphone device. And because of this it’s a good idea to consider adapting your current layouts to fit a changing market.

This process can be difficult without a bit of inspiration. Thus I’ve put together this wonderful collection of 32 mobile websites. These are all live projects you can visit online either from your web browser or on your mobile phone. Many of the ideas aren’t revolutionary but have taken a long time to become adopted into mainstream. Let us know your thoughts or suggestions in the post discussion area below.

United Pixelworkers

Oliver Russell

Charmin

Cerahati

Bodhum

Love & Luxe

Culinary Institute of America

Orange

Breaking News

North Carolina Wine

Atommica

Orbital Devs

South Dakota Sioux Falls

The Land of Nod

Bluegg Digital Agency

Solid Shops

Beth Israel Medical Center

J Taylor Design

Retail-Me-Not

Heathlife

Poet Freak

The Backlog

The Intro Workshops

One Little Dream

Tim Hortons

Lifetime

Pears WordPress Theme

Orestis Web Development

Team Treehouse

Mobilism Conf 2012

Webshocker

Humana

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