How to Build a Web Design Business
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With all the HTML editors available, you too can build Web sites for profit. Time to start a small business? No! While it's easy to publish Web pages, a lot of planning is necessary to create a viable business. In this article you'll learn how. By Peggie Brown. 1212
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Why build when you can buy a fast-growing market?
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Get your company off to the right start.
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Interested in selling your crafts online? Some lessons learned by indie crafters: "Take good pictures. That's key in drawing people to your Web site. And learn to say no. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement when people want to buy what you make.
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For a lot of developers, just finding good resources to look for a job is half the challenge. Sure, there's the big guys, but what if you need something a little more focused? The Developer Tutorials blog has a few suggestions you can try.   Many position-based boards are full of employers who donÃ¢ÂÂt understand the value of quality code. [...] There are really only two ways to find a decent PHP job, then: find freelance projects from clients that will pay for your expertise, or get a full time job. Here are some good destinations for each.   Their suggestions are broken up into two different categories - freelance or waged. The freelance list includes Elance and PHP-Freelancers while their waged list includes the Zend Job Board and the PHPJobs.com website.
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Create collaborative social websites (like Ning, Myspace, Yahoo or Google groups). Each group can create a multiple web pages. They get a drop in guestbook, blog, forum and wiki. Each group is fully customizable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP.   Barnraiser: We very happy to announce the release of version 1.6 of AROUNDMe collaboration server; the perfect solution for anyone wishing to create collaborative social space on the Web.  Using AROUNDMe collaboration server you can create multiple collaborative groups/websites (like Ning, Myspace, Yahoo groups or Google groups). Each group can create a multiple page collaborative web site. They get social tools such as a guestbook (a wall), a group blog, a forum and a wiki which they can drop into web pages. Each group is fully customizable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Groups can be private or public.  People can connect to a group to contribute using OpenID. They get tracking tools such as forum digest and blog RSS feeds.  AROUNDMe collaboration server is the perfect solution for anyone wishing to create collaborative social spaces on the Web.  You can create multiple collaborative groups/websites (like Ning, Myspace, Yahoo groups or Google groups). Each group can create a multiple page collaborative web site. They get social tools such as a guestbook (a wall), a group blog, a forum and a wiki which they can drop into web pages. Each group is fully customizable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Groups can be private or public.  People can connect to a group to contribute using OpenID. They get tracking tools such as forum digest and blog RSS feeds.  New in this release 1. Multilingual - AROUNDMe collaboration server now comes with a simple language pack from which multiple languages can be created and added so that each group can be in a local language. 2. Installation simplified - the person installing can now over-ride the domain name allowing them to install first then point the domain to the directory at a later stage. 3. Tagcloud - Tagcloud font sizes added to allow for CSS size styling.  Get it AROUNDMe collaboration server is free software and is available at http://www.barnraiser.org/  Enjoy!
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Breaking down business processes into Web services components was the easy part. Weaving them together into manageable, useful services has proved more ambitious.
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Nine traps you can easily fall into when you're starting a Web 2.0 company
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Rasmus Lerdorf himself has posted some info about a little assistance he's offering to help developers get their foot in the door at Yahoo!.   Want to work on some of the busiest and coolest web apps in the world? Do you like Flickr, and want to work downtown San Francisco? Or perhaps you are into music, movies or TV and want to work out of Santa Monica? Jumpcut? Or have you seen answers.yahoo. com? Address Book, Personals, Search, Premium Services, Hot Jobs? Want to do interesting things combining PHP and Flash?   All you need to do is send a resume his way and what kind of job interests you have (check out their career site for options) and he'll get you in touch with the right people.
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On the PaymentBlogger.com site today, there's a quick tutorial on getting the OpenAds advertising management system installed and working.   With Nicks great post on selling links I thought I would follow up with a quick how to setup OpenAds and how to integrate it into your Wordpress or Drupal sites.   He steps through the process of setting up OpenAds with a series of screenshots of the interface and descriptions on what needs to be done. The actual install is only about a five step process. They also include links to WordPress and Drupal components to make integration.
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Building Web site traffic is one of the most important aspects of creating a successful online presence. An important key is learning how to maximize your visibility which you'll learn about in this article. By Kristina Mills. 0531
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On the Shadow Fox Network today, they've posted parts one and two of their look at building a better blogging system.   In part one, they talk about things where all good projects should start - with the planning and what it will take to get the project done. This includes the structure of the application, the usability, and the extensions you'll want to use.   Part two goes a step further into the planning stage by looking specifically at the design and usability of the application. They start with the base HTML and add some styling and images to make it easier to use.
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Using a sample design, a Web page is transformed from a browser-friendly page to a browser and a printer-friendly page through CSS coding.
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DevShed finishes off their two-part look at working with Inheritance in a PHP5 application (their web site template engine) with the second tutorial, a look at making the look consistent across the web engine's outputted pages.   In this final installment of the series I'm going to complete the creation of the sample website by developing a pair of additional web pages, which will come in useful for building the typical "Products" and "Contact" sections of the web site in question.   They start with an overall look at how the class will end up before getting into the parts that will need to be added. They extend the base classes even more with more inheritance, making classes for both the Product and Contact pages to render the needed elements.
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(InfoWorld) - IDG News Service recently had a chance to talk to site usability expert and consultant Steve Krug about best practices and major mistakes in Web design. Here is an edited transcript of the chat with Krug, who runs a one-man consulting firm called Advanced Common Sense in Boston, has a Web site called Sensible.com, and wrote a book titled Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. IDGNS: What are some major Web site usability best practices? Krug: The main one is to make sure you've done some user testing. Bring people in and have them use the thing while you watch. That's the best practice. Do that throughout the design cycle. Start doing it early. Don't wait until you have a finished new design. As a designer, you know too much about the site. You have to bring in people who don't know anything about the site and have them try and use it. That's my single best practice. IDGNS: How is user-generated content affecting design and usability decisions? What's the right way to incorporate those features into your design? Krug: It has become one of those things which everyone now feels compelled [to include on their sites]. You can imagine the conversations in boardrooms with bosses saying, "We've got to have social networking on our site." Because it's worked well for some people, there's a rush for everyone to incorporate it, and that's usually not a good thing. You don't want to have an attitude of "we've got to have it whether or not it makes sense for our organization." I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt. The usability and design issues aren't nearly as important as the issues of whether it's appropriate for the organization and whether you're going to be willing to put the resources into it to manage it. It takes an awful lot of work. IDGNS: Video has become very popular in the past year. How does it affect design decisions? Krug: For years, very often the reaction you'd get whenever people would open up a page that had video, was, "Oh, it's interesting, but I wouldn't use it because that stuff never works for me." The general reactions were that the video was either not going to load, be painfully slow to load, or would require a plug-in users didn't have. YouTube changed that, because it just works. It plays the video right away, it's not jerky or start-and-stop, and that turned people around. It's not that people suddenly realized they wanted to spend time watching short videos. It was like Amazon, which succeeded because it worked, and Google as well. So if you're going to implement video, do it as well as YouTube does it or don't do it at all. IDGNS: Are corporate sites today doing a good job of making their sites usable? Krug: They are certainly doing a much better job than they were five years ago. You can still go to almost any site and find one or two major problems off the bat. But that's the nature of the game with design: There's always going to be issues. When you go to a site, you usually run into usability problems pretty quickly. They're not hidden. They're not complicated. They're not baffling. They were in the design or crept into the design. That's why I go around advocating that companies do user testing. If you do that, you dramatically increase your chances of getting rid of all the serious problems in the site. IDGNS: What are some persistent, common problems you run into time and again? Krug: One I harp on a lot is this bashfulness about telling people what the site is on the home page. When you open a site and go to the home page, you should be able to tell right away who is publishing this, what's it for, and what kind of content is here. The entity has to identify itself.... A tagline or some kind of identifier up in the header space that travels on every page is useful from that regard. The assumption organizations make is that everyone knows who they are and they don't need to tell them. If you can't fit it in the header [on every page] you want to have a little blurb near the top of the home page at the beginning of the content space. People say, "We don't need to do that on the home page because most people now get here through a Google search and they don't pass through the home page." But the truth is that after people get to a page from a Google search, the next thing they do is go to that site's home page to figure out what this site is. IDGNS: Should you set an ROI (return on investment) goal for a site usability redesign? Krug: I find that difficult because it tends to be hard to calculate. Clearly, people proposing the redesign should have specific objectives for what they think will improve as a result of it. They should be able to make some kind of convincing case that this is going to produce some kind of result that will be worth the effort. It's not that hard to come up with. After a site has been up for a couple of years, everyone has a pretty good idea of what's not working. The trick is to keep the redesign project focused on fixing the things that aren't working and not just to make the site look better and have a fresh look. There is a significant cost associated not only with the effort of doing the redesign, but you can also have a certain amount of pushback from people who by human nature don't want anything changed. So I don't know about setting an ROI target upfront, but I do know it's important how you introduce the redesign. You can't just spring it on people. You want to give your existing users a preview of what's going to happen, put up a link saying we're doing a redesign and let them click through some pages of the new design before it's launched. If people feel you are looking for their input instead of springing it on them, that soothes a lot of people's feelings. And by doing this, you can also get some valid points from people about why they don't like some things. By getting that feedback before you launch it, you can go in and tweak some things and avoid inadvertently ruining the way people were doing things.
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Author Rick Rickertsen offers advice on getting the best value for your business.
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For about a decade, Frances B. Craig looked for a product to build her company around. She had started an information technology consulting company but missed building software to help companies operate efficiently.