Want a better website and don’t know where to start? Or, do you think your website changes are out of your control?
Many website owners think a better website means a complete overhaul – a brand new website. In some cases that may be true, but in my experience a couple tweaks can make the difference between bland and beautiful.
There are hundreds of things you could be doing. But, I want to take you beyond just spell-checking your site for errors.
Want to take your photo editing skills to the next level? We take a look at 20 essential tips that will have you working faster and smarter with Photoshop in no time. We cover everything you need to know – how to import and organise your photo; getting more from raw files; adding impact to your images; and the secrets of retouching creatively. Whether this is your first foray into photo editing or you need to fine-tune your techniques, this is your essential guide.
How was 2012 for you? Did you have a fruitful year, or a pretty bad one? Did you achieve any or all of your resolutions for 2012? Or do you think that it could be better but it just didn’t work out as you’ve expected?
Millions of designers, writers, and web specialists choose the freelancer path, many of whom compete with one another for work. Office employees envy the freelancer lifestyle, but the truth of the matter is that a freelancer must exert extreme dedication, innovation, and hustle if they want any chance at making a living. It’s a job that demands great work on a steady basis, and that’s no easy feat.
So how do you make yourself a better freelancer, especially one that stands out among the competition?
Being able to manage your own time is a crucial skill in the workplace.
If you work for yourself, it’s even more important – poor time management could spell the end of your business, or at least make you less successful than you’d hoped.
Poor time management can be at the root of many problems.
If you find yourself taking work home in the evenings, for instance, it might not be because you’ve got too much work but because you’re not managing your time well during the day.
And if you’re often stressed out and frustrated by your work, this might be a time management issue too: no-one likes feeling disorganized and behind with things.
If you know your time management skills aren’t quite up to scratch, try these simple steps to improve...
Instead of the advice of photography professionals, instructors and experts, (who are excellent sources of information), Panasonic decided to ask a large sample of beginner and amateur photographers what mistakes they make most often. The findings create an instructive checklist you can use to highlight the mistakes you make. Once you’ve evaluated yourself against the survey participants, you’ll then have a nice action plan of photography techniques you know need improvement. Focus on these to learn and practice.
Working with clients all day long may sometimes lead to stress in a freelance schedule. Long working hours, impending project deadlines, and constant criticism from clients can really bring down one’s enthusiastic spirit. Thus, building a compromise with your client is imperative to the success of any project.
As the provider, you have to be honest, sincere, and above all respectful of each of your clients’ opinions. Without their project needs, you wouldn’t be creating any work in the first place. And don’t get me wrong but a compromise doesn’t have to feel restrictive to either party.
In a business climate where only the best companies survive and thrive, one thing is clear: You must avoid the stupid stuff. You've got to eliminate the things that leave customers and employees scratching their heads, feeling frustrated and mystified.
The problem is that every company, no matter what size, battles to some degree a central tension—people with ideas on how to make things better, and hidden obstacles that keep those positive changes from actually happening.
OPEN Forum spoke with Neil Smith, author of the recently published How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things, to summarize the key barriers that hold back even the world’s best companies.
According to Smith, the following eight basic human tendencies are the typical barriers that stand in the way of desirable outcomes such as growth, efficiency, simplicity and profitability...
You’ve already nailed down the essentials of being a good writer, that is, you possess the ability to effectively tell a story and convince your audience that you know what you’re talking about. If you’re writing sales copy, then you have an angle that you routinely take with a pitch and a hook to reel your readers in.
Millions of designers, writers, and web specialists choose the freelancer path, many of whom compete with one another for work. Office employees envy the freelancer lifestyle, but the truth of the matter is that a freelancer must exert extreme dedication, innovation, and hustle if they want any chance at making a living. It’s a job that demands great work on a steady basis, and that’s no easy feat.
So how do you make yourself a better freelancer, especially one that stands out among the competition?
It's easy to think that you have a firm grasp of online marketing when you do a lot of it. But sometimes the world, virtual or real, is different from what you think it is. Online marketing analytics tool vendor HubSpot collected a list of interesting Internet marketing statistics "that will blow your mind." I've combed through to find some of the bigger surprises.
The most frustrating advice I ever received came from a mentor who told me, "Just follow your gut."
I had no idea what that meant nor how to do it. He made it sound as if my gut would suddenly appear in front of me and gesture for me to follow it.
Want to know why it's so hard to follow your gut? Because it requires you to stop giving a damn about what everyone else thinks.
Entrepreneurs spend so much of their lives comparing themselves to others and measuring their progress by some impossible ideal. Covers of magazines show 20-something who became billionaires off their brilliant ideas. Your bank account, meanwhile, looks more than a little pathetic. (I know mine does.) You start to feel that, whatever success is supposed to look like, you're not achieving it as well as the person next door.
Entrepreneur Josh Linkner gives advice on how to make your company more creative--and how creativity leads to growth.
Robert Louis Stevenson once said: "Everyone lives by selling something." All of us are continuously selling either our products and services, or our ideas. But with the exception of consummate sales professionals, most of us are unaware of the psychology of selling in our daily lives and, it is safe to say, that most of us also cringe at the idea of using selling tactics and techniques that might be considered manipulative. This is, however, shortsighted. Rather than discount this body of knowledge, we simply need to use it with honesty and integrity, not to manipulate, but to win people over.
So, "do no harm" should always be the foundation of any sales approach. With this in mind, here are a few tips for refining your sales approach so that you successfully sell your products, services, or ideas.
Single-cell batteries have an inherent design limitation that prevents them from producing more than 4 volts—they simply can't do it, there isn't enough energy density to produce that extra bit of output. That is, until now.
"This is what you would call a quantum leap," Army researcher Arthur Cresce said in a press release. "We've gone from circling around a certain type of four volt energy for quite a while. All of a sudden a whole new class of batteries and voltages are open to us. The door is open that was closed before." This breakthrough comes after years of research by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory into how the various battery components interact with one another.
The research team found that the inclusion of a specific, proprietary (and now patented) additive bumps the battery output from four volts to five—that's a 30-percent increase and a huge deal. As Cynthia Lundgren, chief of the electrochemical branch at the USARL explained:
Our personalities, thought patterns and emotional responses are wired into our brains, says Richard Davidson, Ph.D., author of The Emotional Life of Your Brain, but you can change your brain. Here are several exercises that will help rewire the neural pathways to help you think more positively, become more self-aware, focus better, understand social cues, ease your emotional triggers and grow more resilient.
You ever notice why some of your pictures look like they've been stained yellow or red while others look swamped with green or blue? It's because of your camera's white balance setting! The easiest way to take better pictures is to fix your white balance and this chart tells you how.
Different lights light up differently. As in, some are redder or yellower and you need to adjust your camera accordingly. The color temperature scale made by Digital Camera World shows where different light sources fall and what setting your camera's white balance needs to be. Simple! You'll get much more accurate pictures that actually look like real life as opposed to terrible and awkward shots that look like they've been peed on.
As cliché as it sounds, the best camera is the one you have with you. Fret not if you don’t have an expensive DSLR. When you have your iPhone cam ready, under the right conditions, it can take some amazing images! With the help of these 10 tips, you’ll be able to your iPhone shooting images that look as great as any point-and-shoot.
If you come to think of it, a user would not be pleased to look into a website that looks unorganized and confusing. That is why every designer has to see to it that every single aspect and detail of a website is being taken into consideration. Apart from the good design, it also needs to have good website navigation. Without good website navigation, the good design will still be useless for the users will not be able to look into the site’s content. Navigation leads the users to pages of the website that can provide them vital information.
There have been many blog posts here about how you, as a freelancer, can give your clients great customer service and why it’s important. Let’s turn the tables for a minute and focus on how you, as a freelancer, can get better customer service.
When you are a freelancer, you don’t have a boss you can go complain to when something has happened to you. Maybe you were double charged when ordering something online or you had a terrible experience flying business class. As a freelancer, you run your own business, which means dealing with your own vendors.
