Archive for the 'Resource' Category
Free Easter Bunny Icons at Icon Dock
Just in time for Easter, Icon Dock has released a set of 40 free icons which you can use on your marketing material, blog, etc…
Check out their website for other great icons.
Web Search explained by Common Craft
The web wouldn’t be what it is without the ability to search. My home page is set to Google and use it to search for everything. Finding information is often quite tedious because there are so many web pages out there. Luckily a few tricks are available to allow you to refine your search.
Lee Fever at Common Craft has created this wonderful video explaining how web searches work and offers tips on how you can avoid being swallowed up by the web.
Free Guide to Learn How to Create Web Videos
So you’ve been blogging for a few years now and started podcasting… but video is what you really want to do? Via Kate, I discovered this great website put together by video blogger Jim Kukral. Simply sign up for free and you’ll learn what equipment to use, how to set up lighting, where to upload your videos and a whole lot more for free.
How to create a privacy policy
When building websites, I am given all of the website content, but more often than not, the privacy policy is not part of this document. As a result I end up looking at the current site and copying the existing text or searching the web for inspiration and writing something brief for the client.
If you are collecting any type of information from your website, such as email for a newsletter or comments on your blog, then you should have a privacy policy in place. But what do you put in there?
Google Calendar for your Website
Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)
You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.
There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.
How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site
If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.
- Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
- Make a page in WordPress
- Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
- Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.
Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.
That’s it. Neat trick, eh?
Creative Culture & Success in Business
Adaptive Path (a user experience design firm in San Francisco) has a wealth of articles on their site which, as a designer, I find interesting. Many articles are of interest to a broader business audience – such as this interview with Chris Conley.
Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:
- strongly adhering to a higher purpose – in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
- dynamic leadership & a talented team – every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
- a highly iterative and tangible process – experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.
Finally, Conley says
If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.
There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?
Finally the perfect web design showcase!
When designing websites there are always a few components that are more difficult to design. Navigation, icons, call to action items, forms and headlines come to mind. When setting up blogs, headlines, comment forms and the entry metadata is often just straight from the design template. Looking at different websites and blogs is a great way to be inspired but finding the right site takes a lot of time and effort. After reading Smashing Magazine article today, I came across Elements of Design, the alternative web design showcase. This wonderful resource is the design showcase of Christian Watson. Instead of displaying great looking websites, he provides us with snippets such as great icons, headlines, pull quotes, calendars, search boxes and even code display. I’m bookmarking this site right now and subscribing to their RSS feed!
Learn Ruby on Rails with the help of sitepoint
At an event apart this summer in Seattle, one of the best speaker was Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems. He urged web designers to pick up a Ruby on Rails and start learning this new technology right away. I’ve yet to pick up my book, because as everyone else, I too busy. However, this morning I just learned from the folks at sitepoint that they are giving away their book for FREE. This is just the incentive that I needed.
Their book will be available for FREE until the end of October. Get your copy today.
46 Productivity Tips
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
Here are five of my favourites:
continue reading »
Facebook is surprisingly useful
Recently a friend of mine sent me an invitation to join her network on Facebook. I ignored it at first, thinking back to my first experience with the social networking site; I had seen how my college-aged step-daughter uses it. She and her friends post tons of photos and notes for each other, mainly centering around recent parties etc. Theirs is a socially active world with time to spare, compared to mine. So Facebook didn’t seem like it was a place for me.
But recently the site has broken past it’s college bounds and people from all walks of life are signing up. I was convinced to try it out after reading reviews by Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham.