I just wrote a blog post called “Top Web Design Trends for 2013″ over at www.bestpsdfreebies.com. My post includes new trends such as:

• Responsive Design
• Masonry Grids
• Parrallax Scrolling
• and Fixed Headers

Read Full Post Here

After you read this post, let me know if you think I’m right or if I’m missed some key trends.

Best of luck to you and yours in 2013!

Are you skeptical about buying something over the Internet? Nervous about leaving a deposit for an item sight unseen? Iverified.org can help. It has independent agents in thousands of locations throughout North America; and are recruiting more daily! Check out their new and trendy website.

This past month we got a chance to redesign a website that was one of the first websites we ever designed at YasTech. With over 25 years of experience in the housing industry, Brant Homes is committed to offering personalized customer service ensuring you receive the home you imagine, desire, and love for years to come.

Dirty ducts, done dirt cheap. Caliber Air Repair has a catchy tag line to go along with their flashy blue website. Check it out.

Quality Hearing Centre is owned and operated by Ron and Jody Villeneuve. Since 2005, they have realized the need for reputable and caring hearing aid dispensers in Saskatchewan. They have expanded their business to include a full time office in Saskatoon and an office in North Battleford with weekly service.

Pure Elements is a local company specializing in all your plumbing, heating and electrical needs. They are a company with highly skilled young, innovative team of tradespeople. They are involved with many projects including spec homes, custom homes, renovations and design consulting.

If you have a website that looks dull or boring, or don’t have a website at all, send us the details and we’ll get you a quote.

This year is bringing out new challenges and opportunities which are exciting. If you haven’t visited our newly launched side project at www.bestpsdfreebies.com, go check it out today and let us know what you think.

This WordPress theme is jam packed full of features, and best of all, you don’t need any web development skills to customize it to your liking. Some of the top features include:

• Filterable Porftolio with Pagination
• Many Custom Widgets including Twitter, Flickr & Recent Work
• International Language Support (contains .po / .mo files)
• Multiple Post Formats including Images, Galleries, Standard, Audio, Video
• Built-in shortcodes including columns, buttons, toggles, tabs, alerts, headings and more
• 3 Home Page Styles
• Flexible Theme Options Panel
• Powerful Slider
• Like Counter for Portfolio & Blog Items
• Great help and theme support files found at support.bestpsdfreebies.com

The best part of this whole post is that this theme is ONLY $35. Yup, that’s right, it is a steal. Follow the link below to view a demo of this theme and to purchase your copy today.

Creativio Demo and Features

Like this theme but need help installing and setting up? We can help. Just contact us and we would be happy to get your website setup with this theme.

South Country Estates is a 421 acre rural residential subdivision of 86 sites ranging in size from 2.04 acres to 7.07 acres. It is conveniently located 10 minutes south of Saskatoon on paved roads. You can enjoy the space and peacefulness of country living while being close to city amenities and Blackstrap Lake Provincial Park.

Driven Industries is a mobile welding contractor that specializes in pressure piping, aluminum, stainless, and custom fabrication. They are one of a small number of local companies certified by both the Canadian Welding Bureau (CWB) and by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Northern Sky is a locally owned Family business. The team at Northern Sky Developments is both knowledgeable and committed to providing you with the very best in design concepts, quality and workmanship. They offer extensive design and consultation experience that will assure your new home will end up spectacular and as individual as you.

Kitchen Designs by Delta has successfully produced and manufactured cabinetry for commercial, residential and industrial projects for the last 24 years. Their attention to detail ensures unique designs, fine craftsmanship and a quality built product. They believe in quality without compromise and that is why they have recruited the best craftsmen in the industry.

If you have a website that looks dull or boring, or don’t have a website at all, send us the details and we’ll get you a quote to build a new one.

This year is bringing out new challenges and opportunities which are exciting. If you haven’t visited our newly launched side project at www.bestpsdfreebies.com, go check it out today and let us know what you think. We are planning to release our first WordPress theme in early May. Stay tuned for more details.

On one of the MDBP posts they said, “people who keep an accountability journal consistently outperform those who don’t keep journals by a wide margin”. This is our journal.

If you missed our first journal entry, you can read it here http://www.yastech.ca/blog/million-dollar-blog-project-were-in/.

We have been learning a lot, so let’s dive in…

What we did

Over the past two weeks we have dedicated ourselves to posting new freebies on the website at least three times a week. This might be a tough trend to keep up with but one way this has helped is with search engine traffic. More and more people each day are finding our site by searching new key terms.

We have also been able to find a couple more great places where we can place our content online that drives traffic back to our website. Our top two referral sites are Creattica.com and Design-Newz.com.

One new thing we have started is Pay-With-a-Tweet Friday’s. On Friday’s we release a premium design freebie and only give visitors the download link after they have tweeted or liked our post. To be honest I thought this would have helped our social media traffic more than it has.

Lastly, we have been able to convince a couple bigger blogs to post one of our freebies to their site. Both of these sites will be posting our content this week and we stoked to find out how much this might help our traffic numbers.

What we learned

Be consistent and always learn from others. We were denied guest posts on a couple large blogs but by making our content better and continuing to ask, we have landed some fairly large opportunities to expand our audience.

We have feel like the quality of our freebies has gone up. Sure there has been a couple days where we had to scramble to get something up and could have spent more time on something, but overall the experience has been good.

Google is a powerful source of website traffic. We have had days where we have seen over 140+ visitors just from Google organic searches. Quality content, strong titles, and a growing list of back-links have helped us rank well for many keywords.

What we plan to do

Our email subscribers are trickling in quite slow, so we are going to be working on an exclusive freebie for visitors who sign up for our newsletter. We are confident this will help our numbers.

Our first WordPress design is complete, so we are going to start on the development here in April. We want to launch this theme on Themeforest near the beginning of May, but know we have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to release a quality product.

We still want to create some type of contest to run for a large design blog. Like we said in our last journal entry, this might just mean designing a premium file for Graphic River and give a few of them away for free.

Our Successes

Our first month online has gone quite well. We have seen nearly 5000 unique visitors on our site and over 3500 freebie downloads. We never really set a goal for our first month as we weren’t really sure what to expect. Our goal for our second month is to double our unique traffic.

We continue to make great connections online and hope to continue to build relationships with other bloggers. Others are starting to contact us to have us guest post on their blogs so we hope take advantage of this and continue to build our audience.

If you made it all the way to this part of the blog, thank you! I would love to know what you think about our Million Dollar Blog Project posts and know if you are learning anything so please leave a comment below. Stay tuned. In two weeks we will follow up with how we are doing and if we actually did the things we said we were going to do.

For the MDBP, Think Traffic was going to build a blog from scratch and show everyone how they did it, and how they were going to make 1 million dollars from that blog. Wow, that sounds exciting. Maybe if we follow what they do maybe we can build a blog that will make $1000000000?

The second part of this project was that they wanted it to spawn other bloggers to make a total of a million dollars over the next two years. So we signed up and you can track our progress here http://thinktraffic.net/mdbp/.

On one of the MDBP posts they said, “people who keep an accountability journal consistently out perform those who don’t keep journals by a wide margin”. We are going to be keeping an accountability journal for bestpsdfreebies.com right here on our YasTech blog. Every two weeks we are going to tell you what we did on our blog, what we learned and what we are going to do next.

If you’re interested in starting a blog, or already have one, and want to learn about what we’re doing to create a successful blog, follow this series. Bestpsdfreebies.com has now been live for two weeks so here’s our first accountability entry:

What We Did

Before we launched our blog, we setup a landing page that allowed people to sign up to get notified of our big launch. We didn’t do a whole lot of pre-launch promo so we didn’t get a whole lot of people sign up.

The most important thing we did though before we launched was to stuff our new blog full of content, 15 blog posts to be exact. We wanted to make sure there was good content there before we started promoting it to the world.

Then on March 1st, we launched the blog. We spent most of March 2nd submitting news articles to design blogs notifying them about our new website. And then the traffic started to come. We continue to submit news articles to popular design blogs each time we post a new freebie, and this has been our best source of new website traffic.

Another thing that we have done was stumbled a few of our pages and submitted links to reddit. We have seen mediocre results from this but hope for one of our future posts to go viral.

What We Learned

This is more work than we first thought. We are spending more time trying to promote this site than we first anticipated, but it has been fun.

We have learned what our best sources of website traffic has been and have a solid list of sites we now post our new freebies to on each new release.

We also learned that it is going to take longer than first anticipated to build up our readership numbers. RSS subscribers seem tough to come by.

What We Plan To Do

Very soon we plan to move our RSS subscribe popup from our freebies page to home page. We had some issues with the popup appearing underneath our home page slider so we will work out those kinks and get it onto the home page. We hope this translates into more subscribers as our home page is the busiest page on the site.

We also plan on designing a couple exclusive freebies for some big web design blogs. There are a few blogs that are willing to post one of our freebies on their site, but that freebie has to be unique to their site and can’t be found elsewhere on the web.
One of the goals of this website was to create a platform for us to promote the sale of WordPress themes. Our first theme design is almost complete, and we hope to start on the development of this theme very soon.

Lastly, we are going to be working on a premium set of icons that we are going to sell on Graphic River and have a contest to give a few of these icon sets away for free.

Our Successes

Our site has only been live for just over two weeks now and you can find us on the second page of Think Traffic MDBP leaderboard. We are quite proud of this and actually hope to be on the first page by month’s end.

Over the first couple of weeks we have also made some great connections online and hope to continue to build relationships with other bloggers online that will help us promote our new site.

If you made it all the way to this part of the blog, thank you! You must really be interested in what we are doing, so stay tuned. In two weeks we will follow up with how we are doing and if we actually did the things we said we were going to do.

Our goal is to provide designers and web enthusiasts with more resources to make their job easier and to help inspire greater designs.

Every week we will be adding new freebies to our collection. This will be no easy task though and we do need your help. We encourage everyone to send us your PSD freebie ideas and share this resource with your friends.

Since launching this site last Friday the response has been awesome. We have receive lots of positive and constructive comments that will help us make this website better.

So check it out at www.bestpsdfreebies.com and let us know what you think. Don’t forget to follow bestpsdfreebies on Twitter, Facebook and by RSS to get updates on all the new freebies.

We just released our first element. It is available to purchase on Graphic River, for only $2. This is an Ultra Modern Accordion slider that would add value to any new website design.

I’d love to hear what you think about this accordion style slider, so please leave a comment below, or on Graphic River.

There are some elements we design though that we believe should be available to everyone to use without first having to buy it. That is why we have also been working on a new website called bestpsdfreebies.com that will provide designers an developers with free resources they can use for their projects.

We are super excited about this new website and hope to be releasing it really soon. Keep an eye on our blog for future details about this new project of ours. You can also signup to receive notification of the launch of this new site by visiting bestpsdfreebies.com today.

Website redesign can be beneficial in many ways. If you find any of the ways a redesign can benefit your companies website below, give us a shout at YasTech Developments and we would be more than happy to sit down with you and discuss your website.

• It helps you stay up-to-date with new technologies.
• Increases search engine friendliness.
• Creating a professional image.
• Helps you communicate in a better way with your customers using web 2.0 standards.
• Makes your website more efficient.
• To gain more visitors and increase sales.
• To have a better online presence and better navigation system.
• To make the website more visually appealing with latest graphical technologies.
• To have better accessibility in all screen resolutions.

Pilots Lodge, located on the Fond du Lac River in the great Northern Saskatchewan wilderness, has been in operation for over 29 years. A drive to Points North or fly from Saskatoon, then enjoy a scenic half hour flight over the Canadian Sheild to the beautiful and scenic Fond du Lac River where Pilots Lodge is nestled in a protected cover along the river bank.

Real Radio is a Saskatchewan based independent radio company from Saskatoon. In 2012, they expanded their focus by adding this local Internet portal to deliver Saskatoon news, Saskatoon weather and Saskatoon sports information.

If you have a website that looks dull or boring, or don’t have a website at all, send us the details and we’ll get you a quote to build a new one.

Best wishes to everyone in 2012! This year is bringing out new challenges and opportunities which are exciting.