As a designer, you should probably already know that white space helps a lot to create more elegant designs, separate elements better from one another, and allow to focus and make things more readable. You client doesn’t know all that, so the best way to teach him is to explain him with examples that ring a bell for him. If you know your client well, you may find one of these examples fitting, who knows?

Food

This is the first example that I ever gave to one of my clients, maybe as an european I’m a bit too concerned with the presentation of food. Tell your client that he should remember the last time he went to a high-end restaurant. What did he see? A plate full of food like in a school cantine? Obviously not. What he saw was some food delicately dropped on the plate, with some color arrangements and… a lot of white space!

The white space in that case, just like for graphic design, helps to create a layout with the food, putting a strong emphasis on the meal.

Use of white space? Check. Looking yummy? Double check. Image by William Schmitt on Flickr.

Gardening

Gardening is a bit different, you cannot tell your client to just think about a garden, because many gardens are full of flowers and look beautiful that way. In that case, you will need to give him the japanese zen gardens as example. These gardens are very minimal, and the position of every rock or plant is studied to create a calm atmosphere.

A zen garden. Notice the white space? Image by Tess on Flickr.

First class vs second class

Travelling in 1st class from time to time is a great way to understand the importance of white space, although in this specific example talking about empty space would be more appropriate. Nevertheless, travelling in 1st class is much more expensive mainly for one reason: you have more room for your legs or for reading your newspaper. That might ring a bell to your client and help him understand how a design can become more comfortable if you allow more white space to fit in.

Second class seats in an airplane. Image by Vik Cuban on Flickr.

First class seats, notice a difference? Image by S. Yume on Flickr.

Where is Charly?

Remember that guy with the white and red stripes? Finding him in a double-page layout was often a pain in the ass because the illustrator drew tons of other little characters with features similar to Charly.

Try to explain your client that his logo might become a bit like Charly if it is layed out in the middle of 50 other pictures and two tons of text. Trust me no client wants his logo to go unnoticed.

Where the hell is Charly? Not in the white space for sure.

Famous ads

Last but not least, you can use some famous ads to make your point. Try to find examples in your client’s industry. For example, if you work for a garage you can take some advertising made for Volkswagen, Mercedes or Mini Cooper. Seeing that succesful brands are not afraid of white space should assure your client that he can get away with it.

Following are a few examples of car advertising making good use of white space.

When you are conducting your own business there will become a time when a person feels you should do certain work for them and not get paid. Relatives and ‘friends’ are notorious for this and it is not uncommon for others who simply feel they are close enough to you to enable them to extract the same ‘favours.’ There are also others who damn well have no intentions of paying for anything unless they are somehow forced into doing so.

How you handle your friends and relatives is up to you but there is no way a virtual stranger should have any work done for them and not expect to have to pay at the finish. No business can sustain giving away free products or services for too long and if you want to be successful you too must ensure that your efforts are rewarded. Why? There will be a cost involved in running your business and in order to survive you will need to make a profit over and above that cost. It is really that simple.

What is not so simple however is how to get a serial bad payer to cough up as many play on the fact you will eventually give up asking for compensation and they will then have got what they wanted.

There are some basic rules about lowering the risks of not getting paid and if you cover all these bases you may avoid building up too large a list of debtors. Debtors than can put you out of business, even when, on paper, your enterprise looks quite sound.

Rule Number One

Be upfront right form the beginning. Don’t undertake any work unless you have an agreement in place of how and when you are to be paid for the work you are about to embark on. This need not have to be a long winded policy statement full of small print and traps. It can be quite brief and straight to the point. The main thing being that you both know where each other stands before you you get started.

Rule Number Two

Insist on part payment as a show of goodwill. If you are fortunate enough to be in a business where you can insist on payment before you start any work you will be very lucky. If this is not possible try to get a deposit paid. By doing this it indicates the client can and will pay when required. It is not always possible but if you are able to be strict in this area right from the beginning you can save a lot of future heartache.

Rule Number Three

Hold back on delivery. When you have finished what you have been requested to do and it is all ready to be passed over, have a policy whereby you will only send the product once you have received payment. Once again, when you are first starting out this might be hard, but give it a go and you could be surprised how many people these days are willing to pay in this way.

Rule Number Four

Don’t be too willing to offer credit. There may be a situation where giving credit can be beneficial but this is not to be treated as being normal. Only give credit if you are getting something in return but under normal business circumstances you should be able to be paid before you hand your finished work over. If you are dealing with other business people they will all understand this and if it is an individual you are dealing with there is no reason why you should have to carry them financially. They should have access to their own banks and credit cards to pay when they have to. If they can’t do this it could indicate they are a bad risk.

Rule Number Five

Readjust your attitude to monthly billing. It is still commonplace to bill many clients at the end of each month but in this fast moving modern world you should not need to adhere to such protocols any longer. Much work can be undertaken in a month and a lot of money can pile up during that time. Unless your business is such that monthly billing is desirable, such as when you produce a large number of small products to the one customer, it is not generally to your advantage. If your client in not going to promise ongoing business on a regular basis there is no reason why that client can not pay as soon as the product is finished.

Rule Number Six

You have got caught out and your client is not paying. It will happen, have no doubt about it, you won’t be able to escape the odd debtor but when it does occur don’t pussyfoot around. Before the end of the month send out a demand for your money. If the month comes around and no payment has been received call him or her by phone and ask if there is any reason why their account with you can not be settled. At this stage you can make fresh but firm new conditions and if this is not complied with send out a debtor notice. If the second month comes around and no payment has been received don’t hesitate to put the account in the hands of a debt collector.

There are many ways people try to recover money owed to them for services and products delivered. Don’t get yourself too involved in these tricks. Keep everything you do professional and don’t waste time chasing money. You are far better off making it. Leave the chasing to the experts, even if it costs you something in the process. Eventually you will be able to add this cost to the prices you charge.

About the author: Kristy is a freelance designer and writer for  Life Insurance Finder where she helps other freelance designers compare income protection insurance policies.

So you decided that you’ll take a big step and start freelancing? Great idea! However, there is a lot you’ll have to learn if you want to be successful, I have gone myself through a lot of trial and error before getting a comfortable income, and I still make many mistakes. To help you out a little, I have written a little guide of things to consider before starting your own freelance business.

Where will you work from?

This is the first choice you’ll have to make, will you work from home, share a studio or rent your own? Each of these solutions has its ups and downs.

Setting your freelance business at home

The advantages of such a solutions are quite obvious: it’s cheaper, you don’t need to commute and to get dressed for work, you also don’t have to wake up too early if you are a night owl, no more nine to five for you.

This said, I’m not sure if the advantages of having your freelance business at home outweigh the disadvantages. For example, it is quite hard to have customers coming over. It is also hard to stay disciplined and to keep a normal social life, which is bad for networking.

Share a studio with other freelancers

This is probably the solution I would chose if I were to restart. Sharing a studio is a great solution because it’s not too expensive, gives you a working environment with people who can give you feedback. The best is probably to work with other freelancers in complementary fields, if you are a designer you can find a programmer, a writer an illustrator,…

On the other hand, you have limited space and it can be noisy. If somebody wants to move or bankrupts you need to replace that person.

Have your own studio

This is the most expensive solution, but it can be good if you plan to meet your clients at your studio regularly. You can focus better in such a place, because nobody will talk to you while you are trying to concentrate. On the other hand it can feel a bit lonely.

Get the right material to get the job done

A lot of the design work happens in your imagination, that where most of your creativity comes from. However, good material is crucial in making these ideas becoming real.

Mac or PC?

No, I will not start trolling my blog readers with such a debate, just go with whatever you feel comfortable with. Most designers use Macs, so file exchange can be made a bit easier if you also have one (for example for fonts). Here are a few suggestions I’d make to chose a computer for a freelance business.

27 inches iMac

A big screen increases your productivity, so this iMac should be a good pick. It also avoids having a PC tower bothering you, which is always good, as well as an awesome design. The downside? It’s more expensive than an equivalent PC, and if anything breaks and you must send it to Apple support, you have to send the whole thing.

See more on Amazon

Sony VAIO VPC-L22

This 24 inches PC is powerful and comes with great hardware as well as a space-saving design.

See more on Amazon

These are of course only two choices among many computers that could be suitable for your freelance business. If you are considering buying a laptop, we already have an article that lists the best laptops for designers. For mouses, we already wrote about the best mice for designers.

Chose a good printer

First, let me tell you a sad truth. When you’ll buy a printer, no matter how well you chose you will be tricked into spending insane amounts of money on ink. If you are a graphic design, I suggest that you invest in an A3 format printer. Try to trust brands that have a reputation for consuming less inks and not breaking after 3 weeks.

Brother MFC-5890CN

If you don’t need a too high-end scanner or printer, you can also consider buying one of those all-in-one printers. It is both space and money saving.

Epson WorkForce 840 Color Ink Jet

Canon PIXMA MG8120

Find the right camera

If you are freelancing, no matter if you are a graphic designer or a web designer, some of your clients will be small companies who have no budget to spend on a professional photographer. Some would see this as an annoyance, but you should see it as an opportunity to learn more about photography and take that job. For the task you’ll need a decent camera, we already covered the topic on Designer Daily: 8 cameras to consider if you are a freelance designer.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, heavily recommended by our readers.

Get yourself a decent mouse

You will spend most of your days holding on a mouse, so make sure that you are using a comfortable, accurate, and professional one. Once again, we did a round-up post on the best mice for designer: What is the best mouse for a designer?

The Logitech Wireless Performance Mouse MX is hands-down my favorite mouse for design work.

Get yourself a website

Don’t even dream about it, you will not get most of your work from the Internet, or at least not before a long time. This said, a strong online presence is a must if you plan to setup a serious freelance business.

Your portfolio

Before anything else, you should have your own portfolio, on your own domain name. Think carefuly before chosing your domaine name, there is nothing wrong with using your own name, at least you can be sure (or almost) that it will not change. For your portfolio, make sure to chose the best way to present your work with images, and make sure to be easy to contact. There are many articles online to help you build your design portfolio the right way:

• 10 steps to the perfect portfolio website
• Creating the perfect portfolio
• Showcase of 25 brilliant portfolio websites
• 7 Things You Should Include in Your Web Design Portfolio Website

How to build your website

If you have never built a website, you will need either to learn some new skills or to hire someone to do it for you.

Find a good web host

Don’t aim too high, if you just need to host your portfolio you won’t need an expensive host. Some cheap and reliable hosts like Dreamhost should do the trick. If you want to make a little money on the site by hosting your clients’ websites, go for a reseller hosting plan.

Code it or use a good CMS

If you are familiar with HTML and CSS, you can build your website from scratch and code it to your liking. Doing so would create a rather static website, and you might miss on some more advanced functionalities (or will have to build them yourself).

For a CMS, I recommend using WordPress, Drupal or Concrete5. All those are quite simple to install, customize and update. If you don’t know anything about installing those, you can always try to use a service that installs WordPress for you for free.

Design portfolio networks

There are plenty of networks that will host your portfolio and promote it if your work is popular. These portfolio networks will not substitute for your personal portfolio, but they are a great way to get more exposure for your work, get back links and network with other designers. These websites are also a place where bloggers head to find great designers (I know something about this).

Some of the popular portfolio community sites are:

• The Behance Network
• Design:related
• Coroflot
• Carbonmade
• DeviantArt

Should you start a blog?

As a blogger whose freelance business benefited a lot from blogging, I would recommend blogging to freelance designers. However bloggin is not for everyone, you may not be able to make some time for it or want to blog, then don’t. If you want to try blogging, the benefits can be an opportunity to gain exposure, position yourself as an expert, and eventually to make money.

Prepare your marketing material

Promoting your freelance business online is a very good idea, but it will not be enough to market yourself properly in real life. For that, you will need some printed marketing material as well.

Business cards

Getting a business card is a must, you will have to learn to distribute it wisely every time you get the chance to meet new people and network. To create a good and memorable business card, take a look at these articles, tutorials, and inspiration:

• How to design the perfect business card
• Business Card Design Starter Kit
• 11 Tutorials for Business Card Design
• 40+ Business Card Tutorials, PSD Templates and Inspirational Showcases

Letterheads

You letterhead and envelope design are not really part of your marketing, but they are important in you branding effort. If you don’t have a letterhead, it is a clear sign of lack of professionalism that your clients will quickly see. We did share some letterhead inspiration on Designer Daily.

Brochure or printed portfolio

Your online portfolio is a great way to quickly share your work with potential clients and let them see what you can do. However, having a printed version of your portfolio or a brochure that shows some of your work is important. You can find some good examples of that in our old post on brochure design.

Greeting cards

Networking and keepting relationships alive should be at the center of your marketing effort. When you meet someone and want to follow up, your client has an event, or anything else, you should be ready to keep in touch and have a delicate reminder of your freelance business will not hurt.

Sales copy

This is a crucial point that is often ignored by freelance designers. Prepare good copy for landing pages on your website, for proposals you will make, and for eventual advertising you will create for your business.

Testimonials

If your clients are happy with your work, why not let everyone know about it? Getting referrals is a good way to let other people talk about your strengths and about how good of a designer you are. Remember: telling people you are wonderful is good, getting other people to say that about you is better.

Secure your freelance business

One of the downsides of being a freelancer is probably the lack of job security. No customers, no money, it’s as simple as that.

Insure your business

Make sure you have your ass covered in case of unexpected trouble, nobody will cover it for you. I cannot go into details here since insurances work differently in many countries, so you should do some searching by yourself. The types of insurances you should get, at least, are: health insurance, accident insurance, business insurance (to get covered if everything burns), gain-loss insurance (if you cannot work, they’ll provide a temporary income to compensate), and of course a life insurance.

Get an inverter

Unless you are still working like 20 years ago, it’s likely that you are using a computer, a printer and other electronic material. This is your main working material, so you should try to avoid getting it broken. An inverted will help to protect your computer against power surges. You can buy an inverter on Amazon.

Organize your backups

Make yourself a good backup strategy. You should not rely solely on an external hard drive for your backups, try to also maintain online backups (try Dropbox) and keep all your documents save in at least two places.

Get a fire proof cabinet

Yup! This might sound like paranoid advice, but if you want to keept your files in case of disaster in your home or office, it’s the best thing you can do. You can get some not too expensive fire-proof file cabinet on Amazon like this one, or try to look for second-hand ones.

Software you’ll need

Pretty much all the professional work will be based on the computer, so your machine should be equiped with the best software for the work.

Graphic design software

For graphic design, most freelancers use the same tools: the Adobe Creative Suite. In this suite you get the basic tools: Photoshop for image editing, Illustrator for vector drawing, InDesign for layouts, Acrobat for collaboration,…

You can also try to take the Open Source route by working with for image editing, InkScape for vector drawing and Scribus for layouts. It is not as performant yet, but these are also great tools.

Web design software

For web design, the tools you’ll use will depend on whether you code yourself or not. For non-coders, you could use the software of… Adobe once again. Dreamweaver or Flash are decent tools. Other tools if you don’t want to code are Kompozer or Aptana.

If you code websites yourself, you can work with Notepad++, jEdit or Coda for your coding needs. In terms of CMSs, I suggest using Concrete5, WordPress or Drupal, all Open Source. Of course, there are also many Firefox extensions you can use to improve your web design workflow.

Management software

As a freelancer, you will also have to setup a good workflow to make sure you don’t waste time on managing the business side of freelancing. Here are a few suggestions of software that will help you.

Billing software

To save yourself some time, I suggest that you get a workflow for billing your clients and keep some accounting. I’d say that Freshbooks is perfect for that.

Productivity software

As a freelancers, you’ll have no manager to tell you what to do and push you, you’ll have to push yoursel. For that, I have found that writing down your tasks in the form of to-do list is an awesome way. There are many softwares for keeping to-do lists, but I can strongly suggest using Remember the Milk.

Online collaboration tools for freelancers

With the help of the internet, you can build your own team anywhere. Even better, your team members may be in different parts of the world and yet communicating with the help of online collaboration tools.

Nowadays, people are more attentive on each dollar spent and any economical activity is suffering a contraction. The web design market is also part of this global and unstable economy, so it is facing the same challenges, even though outsourcing has become a very common activity, producing good profits for both the outsourcers and workers.

Freelancers and web design companies reacted to this sad context, proposing various and attractive offers. In spite of these offers, many people have put on hold or gave up having an online presence because of the costs involved. It is very hard to fight against an old and worldwide spread conception that creating a website is something for kids. Are truly the prices of creating a website too high? There can’t be an ideal answer to these interesting questions and each situation needs a particular approach. Here, I want to present some aspects regarding the prices of web design projects which should give you a good idea why the costs of web services are maybe too high.

It may sound a little harsh and avaricious but money is the mobile which is governing the capitalist economies and almost everything depends on them. I believe that the best solution to explain the cost of a web design project is to present the most important and common sub-costs. Please, let me know if you have another idea, other sub-costs to add or cut from here, so use the comment form!

1. The cost of school and after-school specialization

The school must be regarded as an investment which, with the passing of time, it should be amortized; the same principle is applied to any other after-school specialization. Each project must offer a small compensation to the huge amount of money invested in order to amortize the total cost of education. The more people are working on a project, the more money is required to amortize the education and the hired specialists. The immediate conclusion is that a more specialized project will cost more because the preparation of the designer was longer, more difficult and of course more expensive. The bad news is that the prices of the education are higher and higher.

2. The costs of software, tools and other adjacent stuff

The Creative Suite 5 has a total cost of 2500$+, a pretty huge amount of money but all the specialists say that the products are amazing, fully deserving their cost. Another part of the cost of any project is to amortize the money invested in these software and tools.

The coolest projects are made using the features of the latest versions and I highly recommend purchasing these. In spite of that, there are many specialists who never want to update their software and the work resulting is still amazing. Anyway, a lot of time is saved due to the richness of the possibilities. This sub-cost implies the cost of acquisition of other tools, not directly related to design. A busy freelancer may keep the accountancy using an online application which has a purchasing cost. Definitely, almost everything may be substituted with free solutions but a serious brand needs the best alternatives.

3. The office rent

A nice office from a towering building is the dream of anyone but to realize that it is a must to pay a pretty decent rent. A company or a freelancer based in such a coveted office must pay a rent which should be monthly amortized (if the rent is paid on a monthly basis). We all know that the rent depends on the location in the city, the age of building, the facilities, the furniture but it is almost a law of commerce that a luxury place attracts rich clients.

4. The cost of employees non design related/time spent of non design activities

When someone wants a web project, he has two possibilities:
1. Hire a specialized company, which will have employees who will effectively contribute to design but there are people who will work for non-design activities i.e. clearance, acquaintance, justice presence, advertising.
2. Hire a freelancer who will accomplish both design and non-design related activities.
Here comes in another sub-cost of the total: all the employers non-design related must be paid and their wages come from the payments of the clients so the final price of a web design price includes a part corresponding to the wages of the non-design related employers. The freelancers are doing everything by themselves and they also are asking money for their time spent on non-design activities as accounting, paying taxes, or self promoting. The rule of capitalist economy says that time is money.

5. The cost of insurance

To avoid any “chance” of bankruptcy, both freelancers and design companies must save some money for worst situations and once again, a part from the overall price of the web design projects is canalized to these special funds. Besides that, a freelancer must pay his taxes to benefit from medical care, various insurances and taxes.

6. The profit

Adding up the amounts of money from the previous points, the provider of web services is making the price which guarantees the amortization of the investment but nothing more. Nowadays, the entire society is headed towards profit so the real price must include another sub-cost, which in fact is the profit. Nothing is worth without obtaining the extra money. Some people may consider me avaricious but it depends on the perspective: without adding the supplementary cost-the profit, the provider is on zero, but what about the work invested? I believe it is for the best to consider the profit as the reward of the intrinsic work, and each one rewards him as he wishes.

In conclusion, some people may say that all that really matters is the final amount of money to pay, not the sub-cost or any other partition of the cost. Anyway, this post gives everyone insight of the factors which contribute to the price of a web design service and reading and understanding it may conduct to a better dialogue between client and employer. It will be the supreme reward to the author to find out that a client now comprehends what the work of a designer is all about, the problem of the payment being more decently solved.

About the author: Alexandra Vlasceanu works for conversion rate optimization Company Invesp and enjoys writing on landing Page optimization and affiliate marketing.

Fluctuating income

Freelancing has lots of advantages, unfotunatly a consistent income isn’t one of them. The solution to that issue is actually quite simple: set yourself a minimal income needed to run your business, then try to do a projection of what your regular income will be. Doing a projectsion will of course be easier if you’ve been freelancing for a while.

To find out what your minimal income needed, you should take a look at your past year’s expenses and make a monthly average. This is a good time to also find out some organisational problems and see where you could cut out some spendings. Then you can take you past year’s income to see how much money you expect to get every month.

Work & Life are mixed

This is a big issue for most freelancers, especially the ones working from home. There is no obvious boundaries between your personal and freelancing lives.

To create a budget for your freelance business, you MUST separate working and private spendings. Start by getting two separated bank accounts and dedicated credit cards (if you use credit cards).

You can also have two phones to handle your business and personal matters separatedly, it will help you keep some sanity as well as track the business communication spendings.

You have no salary

At least most freelancers don’t budget a salary for themselves, but they should. Save at the end of month with better income and create a little cushion for yourself, this way you won’t suffer too much during bad months and get your regular income.

1. Google Docs (Free)

As the top free program for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, Google Docs is a lifesaver for anyone who needs an easy way to get work done. Furthermore, Google Docs allows you to collaborate with businesses, clients or other freelancers on the same document – all you have to do is give them access to it, and you’ll be able to work from long distances to put together a mutual report, presentation or spreadsheet.

2. Basecamp ($49 – 149 /month)

While Google Docs is good for collaborating on single documents, if you need to work on an all-inclusive project strategy involving multiple schedules, meetings, presentations and more, you might need to drop some money on Basecamp. Perfect for the freelancer who never wants to be out of the loop, Basecamp provides, as the name would suggest, a home base for everyone working together on the same project. Give clients their own home space online with all the information that’s pertinent to them, and keep all your information organized with this online tool.

3. Harvest ($12 – 90 /month)

Harvest is an all-in-one time manager, allowing you to keep track of your and your employees’ hours, to print out professional invoices, and to develop budget and earnings reports with ease. This tool is ideal for people who need to look and feel more official as well as people who have a hard time handling money. Harvest provides templates and programs to handle all these business needs.

4. FreshBooks (Free – $39.95 /month)

FreshBooks is an accounting tool specifically designed to create and organize all your invoices to keep your books up to date. All of your invoices are kept online in an encrypted, secure environment, and you can send them via snail mail or email to any clients who might need them with the touch of a button. All you have to do is enter the appropriate information, and FreshBooks will generate an official invoice.

5. inDinero (Free – $99.95 /month)

For anyone concerned with their business’ long-term finances, inDinero monitors trends and numbers related to how much money you’re spending. It then offers predictions for future months based on the types of purchases and gains you’ve made in previous months, allowing you to prepare for financial issues in the future before they become a problem. Furthermore, inDinero does all this automatically by tracking your banking and invoicing information, meaning you don’t have to spend hours every day doing manual data entry!

6. Campfire ($12 – 99 /month)

Another collaboration app, Campfire is unique in that it provides real-time chat for business groups collaborating over the Internet. It handles conference calls, live image uploads and saves all the chat logs so you can go back and remember that one great idea everyone had. Finally, Campfire can integrate with Basecamp, allowing you to add chat functionality to your project management base of operations.

7. Backpack ($24 – 149 /month)

Another project management tool, Backpack is basically a self-organizing file cabinet for any and all media that you and your clients need to save. An easy-to-navigate system allows users to find whatever needs to be found, making Backpack an online office, so no matter where anyone is in the world, the office is accessible over the Internet.

8. Assembla ($4 – 249 /month)

Great for freelance developers who work with code, Assembla allows designers to collaborate with programmers and anyone else on a software development team over the Internet. Online code browsing, bug and issue tracking, and tools for everything from administration to branding make Assembla a one-stop online office geared specifically toward software development professionals.

9. Mailchimp (Free – 240 /month)

Want to keep track of your customers and do some market research? Mailchimp allows you to track the activity anyone who participates in an opt-in email advertising campaign so you can better engage them with your products and services. Marketing your freelance business is hard because you don’t know what your potential clients want. Mailchimp automates the whole process and provides you with easy-to-understand graphs, metrics and reports.

David is a writer for one of Australia’s leading consumer advice websites offering a thorough comparison of credit cards, including a range of business credit cards offering rewards.

When running a business, you obviously want to increase your income. Chances are that you also want to reduce your expenses, or that you have too. For designers, software costs quite a lot (yes, I’m thinking of you Adobe Creative Suite). I never could make the switch to use open-source software only for graphic design work, but I wouldn’t switch back to paid software for some tasks.

Among thoses tasks that can be handled with Open Sources software, I’d like to mention a few that have been very useful to me over the past years.

FreeMind

My favorite mind-mapping application. I’ve tried quite a few online apps for that but wasn’t satisfied with it. If you don’t use mind mapping you should, it helps you to structure your thoughts on complex things. You can use it for various tasks like creating a website’s hierarchy, structuring a blog posts, planning your business’ promotion or pretty much whatever you can think of. FreeMind is quite straightforward to learn and multi-platforms, so why don’t you give it a try?

Gnu Cash

Whether you like it or not, if you have a company you’ll have to do a bit of accounting. Instead of investing in some expensive accounting software, why don’t you give a try to GnuCash?

Open Office

A full and efficient office suit for all your office needs, it’s already very popular so if you don’t use it yet, I strongly suggest that you try it.

By using our testking 642-437 and testking E22-275 e-book facility, you can carry your testking 220-701 prep solutions anywhere along with you. The testking 000-107 and 646-985 tutorials are also accessible with free downloadable features.

Somewhere I believe there is an Island of Misfit Designs. It contains Moleskine notebooks filled with sketches that never found a home – graphics that didn’t match a company’s vision. But all that effort doesn’t have to be for naught – below are a handful of outlets for your creativity. Not only can you make some money off your rejected work, but you also might earn some new business!

Threadless

This popular website has a huge catalog of unique T-shirts emblazoned with designs submitted by anyone. The Threadless community votes on its favorites, and winners get their submissions printed on shirts – along with $2,000. Pop culture references, trendy owls and ninjas as well as gorgeous illustrations reign on this site, so scan the pages of shirts in categories such as Zombies, Ironic, Typography and Bikes and then submit your graphic designs that have the most chance of getting votes. Don’t forget to rally your networking crew to vote for your submission!

http://www.threadless.com

Etsy

Etsy has become a full-time job for some crafty people, but it can also be a way to come up with new mediums for your graphic design on the side. Think about printing greeting cards or stickers – something you can do affordably – with one of your bold images or witty statements. Then set up a shop on Etsy, which provides you with an easy-to-navigate page in which you provide photos of your wares and descriptions. Signing up is free, and fees are minimal: 20 cents to list an item for four months and a 3.5 percent transaction fee for each item of yours that is sold.

http://www.etsy.com

CafePressand Zazzle

But maybe you don’t have any spare cash to invest in products – that’s where CafePress and Zazzle come in. You set up your own gallery on each site and choose your design to be on T-shirts, posters, mugs or an array of other products. Visitors to each site can then find your items. Each site has different levels of shops, so you can spend a little to make more or simply opt for the free shops.

http://www.cafepress.com
http://www.zazzle.com

99 Designsand Brandstack

99 Designs is aimed at businesses rather than consumers. Companies hold contests by submitting a design brief, and then designers enter their submissions for prize money. The company chooses the winner as well as a prize amount. Categories include logos, web design, merchandise and more. Meanwhile, Brandstack has the same idea as 99 Designs but in reverse – graphic designers submit their logos, and companies sift through the site until they find one that meshes with their vision. It’s free to sign up with Brandstack, and you get 85 percent commission when your design is purchased.

http://99designs.com/
http://brandstack.com

This is a guest article by Jennifer Moline, who writes for the PsPrint Blog http://blog.psprint.com. PsPrint is an online printing http://www.psprint.com/ solutions company, which you can follow on Twitter and Facebook.

If you are a regular web worker and/or a freelancer, you must already work with a lot of online apps like Google Docs or YouSendIt. Many online applications are free, but some others are not. Following are the ones I would recommend.

1. Fuze Meeting

This one could save me in a near future, as you probably don’t know I will move to live in China in a couple of months. I’ve been looking for solutions to make my not tech-saavy clients feel better about collaborating from a distance. I’ve been trying it for a few weeks now and I can say that it just rocks. It’s 100% browser-based, lets you share your screen and organize HD conferences. If you’re working with long-distance clients, I suggest that you give it a try, you can try it free for 30 days.

2. FreshBooks

Invoicing and accounting in general are the worst sides of freelancing (well… except if you are a freelance accountant). For the average freelancer, FreshBooks takes a lot of the annoyances of invoicing away, it’s really a perfect fit for web workers too. Track your expenses and time, manage your contractors or re-bill your clients painlessly with this wonderful app.

3. Basecamp

Although I’m not a Basecamp user yet, I’ve worked with it for some clients. It’s a very simple and straightforward, probably the best I’ve seen so far when it comes to multiple users project management.

What about you? Which other paid online apps would you recommend?

If you are serious about your website or blog, you should definitly take the analytics part seriously. In this post I explain how to track some events on your pages to help you improve the website. These examples are targetting mostly WordPress and Google Analytics users, but most analytics tools should be able to perform these actions (if they don’t you should think about changing).

1. Site search

By tracking the searches on your website, you will know a little more about what’s on your visitors’ mind. You can check if they found some interesting results or if the information they were looking for was missing. There is many ways to track this, here are two:

Track site search with a WordPress plugin

If you have a Search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for and whether they are finding what they are looking for. The plugin is great, but if you already have many plugins on your website I wouldn’t recommend installing one more. Get the plugin here.

Track site search with Google Analytics

Tracking what people are searching on your website is fairly easy with Google Analytics, to do so you should go to your website profile, then edit your Main Website profile information. You can then add the query parameter (usually “s” for WordPress blogs).

2. Track your new RSS feed subscribers

If you want to get more feed subscribers, one good thing would be to have data about which visitors are more likely to subscribe. Knowing that helps you to chose how to focus your efforts to attract such visitors. This technique is not perfect because only tracks clicks to the feed, you can not be sure that people have subscribed. At least you will know who shows interest for the subscription.

How to track your feed subscribers

To track your new subscribers, you should start by setting a goal in Google Analytics, to do this you should go in your website’s Profile Settings, then add a goal and set it as in the following image. The goal url doesn’t have to be an existing one.

To set the goal in your template, you should then add the goal in your WordPress theme. You can do so by adding this code (check the Google Analytics help though, you may not be using the same version than I do).

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DailyDesignerNews" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/rss/subscription');" />

3. Track document downloads

If you take the time and effort to create textures for download, vectors or an e-book, why wouldn’t you want to know how many people download it. To track these downloads, there is many solutions, following are two.

Use the WordPress Download Monitor plugin

This is the solution I chose, it makes adding new tracked download from a WordPress post very easy. The only missing capability to this plugin is that it doesn’t track the referrer for the downloads. Get the plugin here.

Track downloads with Google Analytics

Tracking downloads with Google Analytics works the same way as tracking RSS subscribers. Just set a goal for tracking links and add it to your file’s link like suggested in point number 2 above. For more advanced users and better productivity, you may want to have a look at how to automatically track file downloads in Google Analytics.

4. Track your WordPress comments with Google Analytics

Again, you will have for that to create a goal in your website’s profile.

Then, in the comments.php file in your template, you’ll need to find the submit button and to add the onclick javascript piece in it as follows.

<input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="<?php echo attribute_escape(__('Submit Comment')); ?>" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/submit/comment');" />

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