I was recently asked via email what the necessary skills are to become a web designer. I was asked a few questions such as if having qualifications would increase the chance of attracting customers, what the hours are like, how long it takes to complete a typical project, do I work alone, how I communicate with clients, what the money is like and any other advice I may have so I will try to cover as much as I can.

The Freelance Lifestyle

The freelance lifestyle is a very flexible one. You’re the boss and you make all the decisions. You decide when you work, what you work on and how much you charge. As a freelancer; you’re the brand and the business. The two most important factors that you need for the kind of career is focus and strategy. You should be able to avoid bad habits and set times where you can work without disruptions in a calm environment. You should be able to set yourself goals and have some experience of being able to market and run a business.

Personally, I love the lifestyle, I can easily balance my work and social life so I never feel overworked but you should put in just as much hours as a 9 to 5 to focus on your work. You also get the opportunity to learn a lot as their are amazing communities that support people like us with their blogs and articles which help us learn as we work like Smashing Mag which I rely on all the time. In fact, this is how I managed to learn everything I know about web development and it’s what makes the Internet great, having the ability to share your knowledge with the world!

What Skills You Need to Start and How to Avoid Legal Issues

Well, if you’re looking to start learning web design and development you should probably start off with some books. I started off with HTML for the World Wide Web many years ago by Elizabeth Castro. One thing you should know about the web is that technologies change on a daily basis should you should keep up to date using the blogs and don’t rely on the books. This is why there is no single qualification you can obtain to become a web designer, because by the time you could finish a 2 year course on web development, so much would have changed that you’d have to do the course again!

Once you’ve mastered basic website coding like HTML you may want to go on and learn things like JavaScript which allows you to create nice animated effects in your work; learning to use a framework such as jQuery makes it easier to do the things you want and code it as well. If you want to get into hardcore development you should learn to create online databases and server side coding with PHP and MySQL which is the most popular open source database on the web. You can also use these ready made frameworks such as WordPress and other content management systems which make use of server side coding and have a back-end (an admin interface) already in place which allows you to easily manage a website and all you need to do is built your theme on top of the framework.

So that’s the development side covered. Regarding legal issues, it can differ by country. But if you’re living in the UK like me the only thing you will need to worry about is registering yourself as self-employed which is a very simple process and can be sorted with HMRC. Apart from that you will just need to make sure you pay the right amount of tax each year, if you’re smart enough to do this yourself that’s great otherwise you can use an umbrella company which manages your accounts at a low cost and take care of all tax issues for you.

Other Things You Will Need to Know

Okay, so you’re a certified developer, you’ve got your clients lining up, legal problems out of the way and you’re ready to go. But how’s this all going to work? You need to know if you’re going to be doing the designing as well, if you’re not, it can cut quite a bit of your net home pay because you would have to hire a professional to do this work for you.

This can work the other way if you do the designing yourself and hire a developer to code it so have a mix of design and development will allow you to take on whole projects yourself. Learning design can be done through practice. But you can do a course at university in graphics design which will definitely make you more employable and attractive to potential clients (also known as leads). In terms of what you need to perform this kind of work, you’d probably want a high performance Mac desktop or laptop if you need to travel around a lot to see clients. This is especially useful if you’re prepared to travel to different countries for your clients because this is an international game and is not just restricted to your local areas.

Finishing Touches

When you think you’re ready you start proposing to potential clients and build up a portfolio, a website which is essential for showcasing your work and explaining yourself to leads. Your work should be able to speak for itself and eventually the clients will find you. Getting yourself familiar with marketing techniques such as SEO (search engine optimisation), social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook and paid advertising will all help get yourself out there.

For your rates, you should charge how much you think your work will be worth, you can base this by project or as an hourly/daily rate depending on how long you believe the work will take to complete once broken down. As you build up your portfolio and improve with your skills and experience you will be able to charge more. It is a competitive market so you will need to stand out from the crowd to attract customers. Depending on the client, you should arrange meetings at different stages of the project if they’re local or phone them regularly if they’re international. Some clients may be too busy to be updated by phone all the time so it can also be useful to communicate only via email. It’s your business, you decide.

Even the way nature and things around us work is according to algorithms. Some natural things directly relate to codes which sustain the way they live and grow and SEO is quite similar. Karma has one basic principle; do good things and good things will happen to you. For example, you create some content that everyone will love then people will want to read and share it with their friends. You naturally start building traffic and you will notice the buzz about it. This is why people say a truly good product or service will sell itself.

Follow these basic rules when creating content and if it’s good enough you can be sure people will be interested and if not, they will develop interest in the topic you’re writing about:

Making Use of the Page Title

It’s the title of a page that first attracts a visitors eye. It is only if that title is interesting that they will continue to read the next few lines of the description or excerpt so make sure this is done properly. It could be a question related to something recent or something short, but descriptive so the person has no other choice but to read on.

Content Really is King

Now, we have the most important part of article or page – the content. If you get your visitors reading this far then you need to make sure it’s something worth reading. When people see huge paragraphs of text they will be most likely to close the page. Make sure you have short paragraphs or bullet points somewhere at the top that they will find interesting. Short, high quality content is much better than something that goes on forever and is off-topic. Having short sentences with a good quality of structure will keep their eyes following the text. If you’re trying to explain how to archive a specific task then using numbers or bullet points so tasks can be completed easily.

Images and Video Media

Images and video content immediately catch people’s eyes, they are more effective than titles so make the best use of images in your posts. Make sure the images are relevant to what you’re talking about and invest in some high quality pictures that people will find interesting.

Pretend to be that visitor on your site and keep in mind what goes through your head when you see the pictures in relation to your page or article. Videos are the most effective and a company like Apple relies on them to sell their products and is which is why it’s so successful. Take a look at their current homepage and the video that promotes the new iPhone 4S; if a picture tells a thousand words then imagine the impact of a high quality video. It’s professional because people will think you’ve spent a lot of time to get this together, they’ll most definitely click play so the rest is up to you.

Remember! You’re creating content for people, not for search engines. This is Google’s main rule for archiving the best results in search engines. You aim to please your visitors first and then you make sure you have best practices in place for the organisation of your information as well as code so search engines can easily crawl through your page.

Following the basic rules and keeping it simple is the way to go. If you want people to read your article and share it because they actually like it, then make sure it’s something they’d like to read. Keeping Karma’s basic rules in mind will really help weather you believe in it or not. The only way to find out if Karma is real or not is to give it a try; good luck!

Google is already taking advantage of sites that use HTML5 because it structures data in a way that makes it more understandable to them. If you’re using Google+ and your friends are already using new features such as the author tag then you’ll eventually start noticing how Google ranks content better from people who are connected with you and even shows their photo with a link to their Google+ profile, Twitter or whatever else they have stored about the person. So that’s only the start of how good this is in terms of SEO.

For starters, it has a shortened DOCTYPE tag so when you’re starting a new document instead of typing this -

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”  ”http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

You would just use this -

<!DOCTYPE html>

It makes everything much more simple. You don’t even need to add the ‘type’ attribute to your styles and scripts because it simply isn’t required anymore. It’s solved a lot of the problems you’d usually require JavaScript for such as having a required text field, having placeholder text in that text field and we can even make use of the new autofocus attribute. We can insert video using a video tag and even preload that video using the preload attribute so it really just makes our lives easier.

But HTML5 is the new craze that helps structure the web better by using semantic markup and microformats data. The other new side to it is CSS3 which allows you to style the web better in many different ways. There’s a trend going on with these 2 technologies and JavaScript because they can all work together to create stunning visual effects and functionality. Adobe has even created a new preview tool called Edge which is bound to replace Flash with it’s animation editing interface. With this useful new application you can create amazing animated effects using the very fundamental mechanics every web browser supports.

Apple loves these web standards so much that it dropped Flash support for their mobile devices. Though there is an argument here because Flash has it’s advantages too, even though it’s not a standard and a broswer add-on, it creates fancy rich media advertisements, great online games and loads of other things. YouTube has been playing it smart though as it rolls out their new HTML5 player to replace the Flash one so we can see the engine slowly going out. There’s too many features to cover but some include a new canvas tag, client side storage and WebGL which is slowly going to become the next big thing.

WebGL is a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software and if you have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl you can see some of the experiments that have already begun and in fact you may notice that there’s a lot of potential for this replacing Flash too.

So with better organised code for the web, hundreds of new features and a new graphics rendering engine powered by JavaScript it can be quite exciting web designers and developers. But with the web always evolving the standards not yet complete and won’t be for a couple of years time so anything could change. If you do decide to start updating your skills to these new standards, just keep aware of the compatibility issues that could arise as this is the only thing preventing some people from using it before it’s a complete standard. By then browsers will be HTML5 compatible and ready for these new kind of websites, but for now, use HTML5 Readiness to know which features you can make yourself comfortable with and which ones you should perhaps wait a bit for until supported.

Luckily, if you’re using one of those content management systems that have extremely wide ranges of support options and extensions such as WordPress then there’s some simple solutions. There are lot of plugins available that claim to instantly speed up your website so there’s lots to name but none of them compares to W3 Total Cache. With all my experience in bespoke web development where I have to optimise static or dynamic websites that don’t have these plugins available; this one for WordPress really does cover all the important factors as makes the biggest difference compared to the rest.

Super charge your website with W3 Cache

So What’s So Good About W3 Cache?

This plugin has been worked very hard on and deserves all the credit it gets. I’m surprised the plugin isn’t be sold instead of being available for free. Just by configuring the plugin properly, you can save 80% of your bandwidth and improve the loading times for your pages by at least 10 times. It also give you a Yahoo! YSlow A Grade which ranks your optimisation on a number of factors, YSlow is the website speed debugging tool by Yahoo! just like Google has PageSpeed and even in PageSpeed you’ll notice massive improvements in your score. It can intergrate perfectly with shared hosting servers but if you’re using a VPS, dedicated server or a cluster based service then you can make good use of the amount of power available by using Opcode or Memcache for multiple servers which are extremely powerful caching services.

And that’s only half the story! The W3 Total Cache settings are categorised by each feature. The first one is Page Cache, it caches all your pages that make queries using up server resources and time so a static one can instantly be produced to a visitor. The second one is Minify, I actually don’t use this one so I left the box un-ticked meaning nothing will be minified by Total Cache. I had some problems using this feature because I didn’t notice anything being minified what-so-ever when debugging and have always had this problem. A lot of other people have had this problem and the cause of the issue is yet to be investigated but I found a better solution for this anyway so there’s no point.

While having the Minify feature disabled in Total Cache, I’ve got the WP-Minify plugin installed which is really useful, it minifies all the CSS and JavaScript files into 2 separate documents and then presents them in the code with a ‘pretty URL’ without parameters so it works out really well. I was a bit disappointed because the W3 Minify features allow you to move separate stylesheets and scripts to different parts of the document and can be removed from a certain page if not used so it’s even more optimised. Nonetheless, the other plugin does the job quite well and I’ve never had any problems with it.

Is That All It Can Do?

Certainly not, this nifty little plugin is just packed with features and is always being updated to fix bug and implement new techniques as the web is always changing so the team is just great. The next two options for the plugin are the Database Cache which reduces the post, page and feed creating time whereas the Object Cache further reduces execution times for common operations. The settings for that are all fine tuned so I’d just leave them checked so they can do what they’re meant to do.

The next option is CloudFlare, it was recently introduced to the plugin as CF is a relatively new service. Personally I’ve had quite a bit of trouble using this and in fact I refrain from it these days because of the attacks on their servers and down-time. This is probably going to improve over time but what CloudFlare does is manage your DNS servers so once your complete the transfer they can protect your site from spammers and hackers by making them have to enter a Captcha before entering the site. It works a bit like a CDN and has a number of features to help increase your site’s speed so it sounds really good so it’s quite exciting though at time I noticed a decrease in my site’s loading times using it including downtime and even real people being blocked from my site so I ended up leaving that even after speaking to their support team on Twitter who were quite helpful indeed.

Varnish Caching. This is also a relatively new feature introduced to the plugin and is a pretty good one to have if you can make use of it. Varnish is a web application accelerator known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It’s extremely fast and according to their website it can potentially increase a website from 10x to 300x depending on the architecture of the coding.

The next is my favourite and is the Content Delivery Network. This is the most common practiced way of speeding up delivery of content on a website and is being using by Google to deploy jQuery using their servers to a number of websites online. Having resources load from more than one domain reduces latency becuase you’re having stress load put on more servers instead of all on one meaning you can have objects load simultaneously at blazing fast speeds.

W3 Total Settings

MaxCDN is a great service to use with a large amount of bandwidth, functionality and has 2 main zones available. Pull and Push zones; what you do is you firstly need to have another domain ready (so you can CNAME it to theirs) to serve the content from (well just to make the URLs look good) or you can use the ugly one they provide because content is basically hosted on their servers. Pull zones should be created for content like your images, CSS and JavaScript files; so all your small media should be setup like this when configuring the plugin becuase then when a certain file is requested, the CDN caches the file on their servers and serves it from them using the (sub-)domain you set it to use, and all this is instant so you don’t even notice.

With Push zones, and these should only be used for large media resources such as video, when you upload a video it would be pushed to their servers and uploaded there so it’s more convenient, especially in terms of bandwidth which your provided with a lot of when using MaxCDN. The best bit is that they have multiple servers located across the world, so if you were located in London, their London server will server the content with less latency and faster speeds. It simply works! Finally there’s Browser Caching which again the settings should all be fine tuned as they are. It reduces server load and decreases response times by using the cache available in site visitor’s web browser so it’s a nice one to have too.

The plugin has an amazing support community and is constantly being updated with bug fixes and new features. I’ve never seen something like this so it’s definitely worth a try. I’d also like to hear people’s experiences with the plugin so just comment if you use it already or setting it up for the first time. I’d be happy to answer any questions.

The SERP (this is an important term in SEO so remember it) determines what number position a website will come up for on a search results page for specific keywords. Having your website come up in position #1 for a keyword related to the business or organisation is all what SEO is about. It’s not that simple though; Google has the most sophisticated and complicated algorithms using advanced mathematical calculations and using many other ranking factors to determine where a site should appear in a search and with the billions of sites out there they need to make sure it’s perfected in every way possible.

Google is the world’s portal for information. It’s how people find anything and everything on the web unless you directly know about it. Larry Page who is the co-founder of Google came up with the amazing idea of PageRank. PageRank was once a simple calculation to determine how popular a site is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

Basically, a link from another website pointing to yours would count as a vote for that website, having many incoming links to your website would show that it is popular and would positively increase your search engine ranking. PR is a score out of 10 but it is no longer determined in such a simple manner. There are now thousands of factors that we aren’t told about that affects the SERP. For example, having incoming links from relevant sites is a plus compared to links coming in from spam sites which would give a negative impact on rankings.

When speaking about SEO, a lot of webmasters mention the phrase “content is king”, and that’s because it’s true. The quality of content and information provided on a website is not only what improves PR, but it’s what drives people to your website in the first place. If you have good content that people find interesting, you’ll notice those visitors come back to check for updates, so have a frequently updated website will drive even more traffic to you and this is what started blogging in the early days of the internet.

Trust is another factor, these algorithms can even find out how trusted a website is. Spam is a massive problem on the internet so Google tackles it quite efficiently, having your domain registered for a long time and using certificates from well-known organisations such as VeriSign signify that a trust is approved from a high authority and don’t expect PageRanks to update very frequently; the Google Toolbar has a PR calculator for monitoring the PR of web pages but is not always accurate. The official PageRank updates are only rolled out a few time every year. Recently content farms were targeted by the ‘Panda’ PR update meaning websites that copy content from other websites or don’t have completely original content will see a decrease in rankings meaning less traffic from Google.

These are only the basic fundamentals of search engine optimisation. There is a lot to learn and climbing to the top of SERP results is a long process of building popularity and trust. A good way to start building links is to submit to relevant directories and become active in forums and blogging. It’s a never-ending process but for the visibility of your site on the web the results can be outstanding. Without having to pay a thing and with the recession still going on lately more and more online businesses turn to SEO to build their brand and business. Social media marketing can also have a large impact, though it’s a different topic in some ways it’s a part of traffic optimisation too. Stick to these basic rules and set some goals (realistic ones with realistic time frames, we’re talking months and even years) and you’ll eventually see some really good results.

Total Property Management is an independent real estate agency based in West London and required a website with an easy to use front-end and back-end to update and manage properties. Usability, speed, SEO, functionality and marketing were important factors when developing the property portal.

Go to Total Property Management

If you’re serious about website design or online business then this should be your number one priority. If not, you shouldn’t be looking too far into the future of your empire because you won’t be able to build up good relationships with leads or customers.

Why is it important to build trusted relationships?

Well first of all, you’re probably going to lose more than 80% of your potential buyers because the internet is well known for scams and spam. People don’t like to take the chance, especially when the online market is so competitive. The other reason is your best mate Google – if they don’t trust you, people won’t find you, if people can’t find you then there’s no point in running an internet business at all. Becoming a trusted site in their eyes will not only make you more visible to the online world, but to many others too.

How to build trust with search engines and visitors

As mentioned earlier in this article, there are two main factors that will affect your business relationships, user perception and trust ranking. User perception is how a visitor understands a site in their eyes so ticking the following boxes will help gain trust in an instant :-

• Blogging - Shows a visitor that you are posting quality content on a regular basis and talking about relevant subjects can also keep them interested.
• Tweeting - Shows that you are active, especially if you post tweets every couple of hours which is what you should be doing with Twitter anyway.
• Quality - People will trust you if it looks like you put time and effort into making your site look stunning as well as professional. It should be tested by humans for humans and have a good user experience. Make sure everyone gets a great first impression.
• Being Real – Make sure you have a telephone number along with other contact details including an address if there is one so people know your business is real.

Simply put, if you came across the site and you’ve had a bad experience with dodgy sites; ask yourself if you would trust purchasing from them and why. The second element is TrustRank, the unofficial set of factors that determine how trusted a site is by using sophisticated algorithms affecting the Search Engine Ranking Process (SERP) rankings :-

• Legal Issues – In the EU, you must have a Privacy Policy explaining how cookies are used and handled if they are collected. People have seen better positions in search results by placing the policy link in their footer.
• SSL Certificates - This is a definite factor for online businesses. Major search engines can tell how trusted a site is by a Trust Authority. Companies such as VeriSign provide secure and trusted certificates with EV (Extended Validation – the green bar that appears with the HTTPS in the URL) features and is instantly recognised by visitors, spiders or crawlers.
• Domain Age - Even if you use paid services to hide WHOIS data, its been said that Google can see the actual data anyway so the data should only be hidden if really needed. The age of a domain name can show that you’ve been around a while and it can be a good idea to have at least 10 years registered on it.
• Links - The sites that link to you and the sites you link to yourself can tell a lot about an organisation. It not only determines your PageRank but if you have links to sites Google may consider spam or junk, it can affect your authority too. Make sure all your links are of good quality and are completely relevant.

There are other factors, but Google will probably never tell us. An interesting fact is that TrustRank was actually registered by the corporate giant in 2005 along with a patent to go with it. So it’s definitely real and it could mean more to the SERP than PageRank. Give it a try and see if it makes any difference because it’s definitely worth it.

You know exactly what’s going to happen now, Google already runs the social network Orkut, they have profile information for quite a bit of their visitors and they can now get their own social opinions called +1 which helps quality websites climb up the pages. But that’s nowhere near enough to compete with Facebook which currently dominates the worlds social networking.

The new network currently goes by the name of the Google+ Project. If you’ve seen their video the interface looks great, but it’s a little different. Using Facebook, you usually just add the friends you know, using Google+, you assign the people you know into ‘circles’ to separate different groups of people. It’s a bad idea as well as a good one, it’s bad because from the video it looks as if you want to hide something from one group that you’d be happy with the other group seeing; it’s like having different personalities.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI

The difference with others such as Twitter is that it’s simple, either you hide your updates or share them with the world so you can connect to the world and the people around you. So it depends on what you intend to use social networks for and it looks like Google is missing a piece of the puzzle. Once you have all the information on the web and all the information about the people in the world including what they do, what they like, who they know and more you never know if you could trust a company with all that power. It’s great because some of the good things they can do is adjust the world around you to suit your needs. Soon, even Adwords will have +1 implemented so advertisements will be affected by social opinion which can be good or bad for companies and organisations.

What they are doing and how to keep secure

The two companies are closely linked to government organisations which you probably didn’t know. It states in Facebook’s Privacy Policy that they even go as far as collecting information about you from other sources, newspapers and instant messaging services. They do this weather you use their website or not! If you read more into their legal terms you’ll find that they can pretty much do anything they want with your information including selling it to ‘trusted’ third parties and indirectly all this data is being collected by the Information Awareness Office in the U.S. who may already know more about you than you do yourself.

So make sure you read any legal print, even if it isn’t a web based service. The networking giants are most definitely up to something, weather it’s to improve our lives, or to have digital copies of people; that’s a huge amount of power in their hands and your choice to trust them or not. Perhaps it’s better not be using these social networks, they say they keep people connected, but only in a virtual world, it probably prevents a lot of people from going outside and really connecting. Twitter isn’t too bad because there’s nothing to hide, it connects businesses and people for the better.

If you are going to use other ones there is a temporary fix, make sure you have set the strictest privacy settings, double check what can be seen in the public and don’t give out too much information. People have different views, but you can never know who to trust.

What is MaxCDN and Why Use It?

MaxCDN is a very popular and powerful content delivery network. I wouldn’t have just said any old CDN if I didn’t think this one was worth it. It made a noticeable difference in speed to my site with local servers worldwide to make sure it has the best effect. They also have a great offer going on, they are giving you 1TB of storage for a year and the price is $39.95, but even if that’s still a bit too much you can use ‘wpbeginner’ as a promotion code to knock 25% off the price so it’s probably worth it. There’s many benefits, they have shared SSL and provide you with your own temporary domain for the path to the files. You can either use that or create a sub-domain and then use a CNAME in your DNS records to point it to the temporary URL.

Push and Pull Zones

There are two types of zones you can create once you’ve got it all up and running. Push zones and pull zones, both are different, and have their own advantages as well as disadvantages. Pull zones work like this – a user accesses a file, if it hasn’t been accessed before, MaxCDN has to go load the original and cache it on their servers. Once this is done it usually stays cached so it’s only slightly delayed the first time. Push zones are a little different and can be more expensive too. You upload all the content to their servers then it’s served from there. This means there won’t be any delays in loading content and most CMS plugins can do this automatically. Though usually push zones are used for larger files such as video and audio so I would suggest using a pull zone because it’s easier and more affordable.

What is CloudFlare and What Does it Do?

CloudFlare is a free service and does a hell of a lot to supercharge your site and have it better protected. For starters, you replace your nameservers with with the ones that CloudFlare gives you so your details can be kept anonymous, you have to do this in order for the service to work. Once they have control over your domain it performs a variety of tasks to ensure your visitor will never have to sit down and wait for your site to load again. It caches resources, it has a new beta feature to minify your HTML, CSS and JS if you aren’t already, the Pro version can preload other pages before you go to them so they appear instantly, it can manage integrating Google Analytics and has hotlink protection for your images. That’s barely covered half of what CloudFlare can do if you’re finding this interesting already.

The main feature is their advanced firewall feature which challenges dodgy visitors with a capture code page and blocks certain people from accessing the website automatically. How does it do this? Well, everyone who uses CloudFlare powers it so when other people have problems with certain visitors such as spam, then everyone else know about it and automatically challenge that person. You can block certain individuals yourself and it even scrambles email addresses or phone numbers on the site to heavily reduce spam. It’s always online, even if your websites server is down, CloudFlare will ensure that the site still works for them and does all this seamlessly.

Using the Services Together and How

So CloudFlare speeds up my site by caching resources and managing complex security tasks behind the scenes, and MaxCDN acts as the content delivery network with conveniently located servers to get media loaded at blazing fast speeds. The end result can be pretty fantastic upgrading your security and boosting loading speeds which ends up with a boost in Google’s rankings. It probably sounds complicated to implement, but all this can actually be done in less than 5 minutes or so.

If you’re using WordPress with W3 Total Cache then this would be very convenient to set up, all you need to do is specify the CDN to be MaxCDN and it will come up with a preset list of fields to fill it. API ID, key and hostname are the main ones, with the hostname being either the temporary URL you were given, or the subdomain with the CNAME record pointing to it. This makes all your specified media content, images, scripts and stylesheets to load from that URL instead of your normal one. If you use testing tools such as PageSpeed and find that some ones aren’t using it, then you may need to change these links manually, though it’s all usually done without you even noticing.

To set up CloudFlare is even easier, scroll down to the CloudFlare area and simply enter your account email, API key, domain and save. You may notice the two services both use an API to everything work better for you. MaxCDN’s API allows you to purge content and automatically upload files if you’re using a push zone. So even if you blog often you’re images are uploaded automatically with ease. For the other, you are able to turn on development mode which turns off the cache temporarily for you to debug and develop anything you’re working on before it’s finished. There’s also a purge button next to it to flush all the content they’ve kept for your website.

Does it Really Work?

I would suggest using an online service such as Webpage Test to monitor the length in time it takes for your website to load content with graphs to show details for each individual resource and optimisation info along with grades for using a CDN and other tasks. If you unfortunately don’t use WordPress and use another CMS, there are a wide variety of options and plugins available at your disposal. Try doing a test before and after to see if it makes a real difference because if you don’t, MaxCDN offers a 30 day money back guarantee in case the service isn’t for you. They have a great support service. Good luck getting your sites up to speed in today’s fast paced world.

Ben Sky

A very inspirational portfolio by Ben Sky, a freelance web designer based in Leeds, Yorkshire. He designs websites to a very high standard in terms of graphics, functionality, optimisation and accessibility. All his work is compliant with the WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) which can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/. It is indeed a long checklist to go through but it’s not as complicated as it looks. There is software out there that can assist with website accessibility testing as it is a big area in the design field.

He has built his own CMS for his clients known as Skypanel, you will not find a single flaw in work; building websites to high standards such as this does has it benefits.

Jay Hollywood

Jay Hollywood has the most impressive use of jQuery. I haven’t seen the carousel on his website anywhere else, it’s a great effect. The buttons all have hover effects, it inspired the use of the filter script for my portfolio and actually got me started experimenting with Javascript. Jay recently gave up his freelance profession and is now part owner of a design agency that works with many high profile clients. It’s called Humaan and you can find it at http://www.humaan.com.au/. This is another example of a great portfolio especially in terms of design.

Nick La

Nick La is a very successful web designer at works under the name of N.Design Studio. He create great content, tutorials, websites, networks and popular CMS themes. He’s based in Toronto and is extremely skilled in graphics design; mainly vector graphics in Illustrator which adds that special touch to his work. These websites preview beautifully on a wide range of mobile devices like Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.

Kev Adamson

Kev Adamson is very original and specialises in a wide variety multimedia design including illustration, web design, graphics and animation. He has a unique touch to his work which has helped him win so many awards. Awards are the only way to go when you want to make it big as a freelancer, it shows you have out-performed everyone else and that you are an elite designer within the community which will attract you all the clients you can imagine. Nevertheless, I like how his website is easy to use and everything you need is on one page instead of separate ones.

Ella Design

And last but not least we have Ella Design. With her passion to start building on her HTML5 and CSS3 skills, she has designed a one of a kind website which is very appealing – with the right browser that is. We know well that it is not fully supported by all browsers just yet as it looks best in Google Chrome. But with the effects on the clouds floating in the background and other various features, her work could become quite popular. Being an early starter using code that is not yet complete can have its consequences as the W3C validation service constantly work on updating their service and code can become invalid in an instant. It is still definitely a portfolio to feature.