Web Worker Daily |
- Web Worker Careers: Web Design
- 5 Most Popular Posts on WebWorkerDaily This Week
- FlairBuilder: Wireframing and Prototyping Web Sites
- Thanks to Our WebWorkerDaily Sponsors!
- SCHED*: Simple Social Scheduling
- How to Monitor Real-Time Information on Twitter
- Mining for Concise Tech Tutorials on wikiHow
| Web Worker Careers: Web Design Posted: 29 May 2009 04:00 PM PDT Written by Meryl Evans.
Could becoming a web designer be a good career move for you? Web Design Career Web design is not the same as web development. Web designers focus on visuals, typography, colors, layouts and other important design considerations. Their technical expertise usually consists of mainly HTML, XHTML and CSS along with one or two programming languages like JavaScript and PHP for adding interactive features. Web developers concentrate on web site function and programming, rather than design and the interface. Once upon a time, web designers could do it all. All they needed to build an entire site was to know was some HTML and possibly a little JavaScript. In the last few years, though, the web site-building process has become more complicated and has evolved to include more technologies and techniques, including CSS, AJAX, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, information architecture, search engine optimization (SEO), usability and user experience. This long list makes it impossible for anyone to know it all and do it well. Designers like Jon Phillips from Spyre Studios know this and hire freelancers with specific skills to help out with their projects. Matt Brown of thingsthatarebrown does design consulting and full-scale site development and deployment. However, as a small design shop he finds that the best use of his time and resources is focusing on design projects. “In a given day I tend to manage 2-5 projects (of various sizes) concurrently, and I’ll usually do a little work for each one during the course of the day,” he says. ”This keeps me fresh and not too ‘over-focused’ on any one client project.” How to Qualify Do you know how to do HTML and CSS, but have no portfolio to speak of beyond your own web site? Do what Reese Spykerman of Design by Reese did. She asked, “Hey, who wants a free design for their personal blog?” Offer to design a web site for friends and family. Few designers majored in anything related to design in college. Most learn through reading and studying various online resources, and also by examining the code for web sites they like. A few take design classes at a local school or online. Jon Phillips makes time to learn new tricks and experiment with web design techniques. This field is still very young, which is why those doing web design today typically don’t have degrees or certification in the field. However, new and wannabe designers have more opportunities than ever to get a formal design education as colleges and universities are increasingly adding design programs, such as the School of Visual Arts, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in graphic design, illustration, photography and more. Matt Brown recommends interning with design agencies to learn how to work with clients and gain experience in working with the latest tools and technology. Web Design Tools Photoshop, of course, is in most web designers’ toolbox, along with Fireworks and Illustrator. They love Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar Extension for editing and testing the site and its CSS. Designers often use a text editor like Textpad, TextMate or TextWrangler for hand-coding because WYSIWYG editors, like Dreamweaver, add a mess of unneeded code that weighs down the page. Besides design tools, many designers rely on business apps like FreshBooks for invoicing, Harvest for time tracking and Basecamp for project management. Geography doesn’t tie down web designers. Reese Spykerman, who’s located in Malaysia but has most of her clients in the U.S., communicates with clients through email, telephone and conference calls. Find Clients Word-of-mouth marketing takes the lead in helping designers find gigs. Jon Phillips reported that over 40 percent of his clients found him through Twitter, but they also find him through his blog and referrals. Are you considering a career in design? Image from T. Al Nakib.        |
| 5 Most Popular Posts on WebWorkerDaily This Week Posted: 29 May 2009 03:00 PM PDT Written by Simon Mackie. Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week: Celine outlines seven simple steps you can take to make your home office a more pleasant working environment. Aliza shares her 10 Golden Rules of Social Media to embrace, debate, pass around and refine. If, like Pamela, you find GTD overly complex, try this simple task categorization strategy. The latest version of Google Chrome is blazingly fast — go check it out. Although we’d like everyone to return the favor when we click that “Follow” button on Twitter, it doesn’t always happen. Meryl asks: why don’t you follow back?      |
| FlairBuilder: Wireframing and Prototyping Web Sites Posted: 29 May 2009 02:30 PM PDT Written by Imran Ali.
There are, however, a number of useful smaller options. Late last year, Mike Gunderloy evaluated the popular Balsamiq Mockups and its deliberately sketchy wireframes. I recently discovered FlairBuilder, another up-and-coming wireframing tool which, like Balsamiq, is based on the Adobe AIR platform. While lacking Balsamiq’s cutesy, sketchy style, FlairBuilder has a number of interesting features useful for wireframing:
At $99, FlairBuilder is inexpensive enough for most web design or development professionals to take a chance on — in fact, it’s only marginally more expensive than Balsamiq. Both Balsamiq and Flairbuilder do a reasonable job at a low cost. Personally, I use a combination of MindNode for high-level site structure and OmniGraffle-based wireframing templates to put together information architectures. But I can’t help thinking there’s great potential in an application or service that’s more integrated into the workflow of other common design tools such as Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop, or that’s oriented around web-based collaboration like Google Docs. Incidentally, there’s a great unsung blog called Wireframes that’s worth adding to your feed reader. What wireframing tools, methodologies and practices do you use?      |
| Thanks to Our WebWorkerDaily Sponsors! Posted: 29 May 2009 02:00 PM PDT Written by Edit Staff. We’d like to say thanks to this month’s WebWorkerDaily sponsors:
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| SCHED*: Simple Social Scheduling Posted: 29 May 2009 11:00 AM PDT Written by Imran Ali. It’s been said that the apps that break out at Austin’s South by Southwest festival are those that help festival-goers navigate and orient themselves within the sprawl of parties, panel sessions and gigs. The 2007 edition of SXSW was Twitter’s big moment, the tipping point for the now iconic service. The following year, many thought that SCHED*, a web-based event calendar and agenda builder, would be the breakout service of 2008 — the “new Twitter.” Though such expectations were inflated by the media, SCHED* provided useful personalized schedules that have endured through two editions of the festival. The latest edition of the app now includes mobile support, iPhone compatibility, and the ability to integrate with iCal and Google Calendar. As the organizer of a “proto-SXSW” here in the U.K. — LSx 2009, the second Leeds Web Festival — I figured this was a great opportunity to put SCHED* through its paces with the somewhat smaller schedule of events for LSx. Also, it’d be a useful trial run for a fuller deployment in 2010, when LSx will likely merge with the Live At Leeds music festival. Here’s how things work:
It’s unfair to compare SCHED* to Twitter as a SxSW breakout service — Twitter is a consumer app, whereas SCHED is really intended for festival and conference organizers. However, I found SCHED* to be competitively priced — compared with Crowdvine and Expectnation — and it certainly adds value to the audience of a conference or festival. What’s perhaps even more valuable for organizers is the level of direct support and account handling that the company provides, something that’s lacking in most of the self-service web services around today. Well done for great service, SCHED*. If you are involved in organizing meetups, BarCamps, work events and other gatherings, SCHED*’s a powerful tool for organizers and attendees alike. What tool do you use for scheduling your events?      |
| How to Monitor Real-Time Information on Twitter Posted: 29 May 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Dawn Foster.
Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page. Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive. My Favorite Real-time Twitter Monitoring Tool: TweetDeck TweetDeck runs as a desktop application with Growl notifications that alert me when something important happens. You set up columns with all of your followers, groups of followers, @replies, direct messages, custom searches, trending topics and more. I have my TweetDeck set up with several custom searches that look for my name and organizations or projects with which I’m involved. These searches generate alerts whenever someone posts something new on Twitter that matches my search criteria. The searches are similar to what you would find on Twitter search, and you can use Twitter’s advanced search operators for more complex searches. The biggest limitation is that TweetDeck can only use 10 columns, so I occasionally find myself bumping up against the limit when I try to add another search column for a new project. Browser-based Twitter Monitoring: Monitter Monitter certainly looks better than many of the similar browser-based online monitoring applications for Twitter (TweetGrid, for example). It works much like Tweetdeck. You add a column for every search and can add complex searches using the Twitter advanced search operators. Monitter can also use more than 10 columns. I haven’t bumped up against the limit, but there might be an upper limit to the number of columns. The downside is that it seems to be a little slow to update, and at times I’ve had it freeze up, leaving me waiting for new information. Regardless of which tool you select, make sure to take advantage of the advanced search operators that Twitter supports. There are some cool options, including negative/positive attitudes, posts with links, posts asking a question, and much more. What are your favorite real-time monitoring tools for Twitter?      |
| Mining for Concise Tech Tutorials on wikiHow Posted: 29 May 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Samuel Dean. In a recent post “5 Free Online Answer Sites for Tech Questions,” I discussed sites that can provide you with quick, good responses to tech questions at no cost. These can be valuable for people who don’t work out of a central office or have access to an IT department. I’ve been exploring the tutorials found at wikiHow, and they, in a similar vein, are excellent free resources for mastering tasks in software applications, and much more. The wikiHow site works like Wikipedia, so that anyone can edit tutorial entries, and there is a Writer’s Guide and Practice Page for learning how to edit entries. The site doesn’t cater only to tech tutorials, but runs deep with many articles on using applications that we all live with, every day. There are, for example, many step-by-step tutorials on customizing and getting more out of Firefox. In quite a few cases, the tutorials are illustrated, as seen in this one on organizing Bookmarks in the browser. This tutorial presents advanced ways to make Firefox pages load faster. There are also a lot of useful tutorials on Google tools and applications at wikiHow. This tutorial provides a short course in performing advanced searches in Google, and this one explains how to get your site indexed by Google. There aren’t as many tutorials on wikiHow for lesser-used applications. I found very few for Google Chrome, for example, but the site does turn out surprises for some smaller applications. For example, I found several tutorials for one of my favorite freeware image editors: IrfanView. It’s worth looking through wikiHow for instructions relevant to your work. In most cases, the tutorials are tight, concise and easy to follow. Where do you go for tech tutorials?      |
You wouldn’t be reading this post if it weren’t for web designers. It’s web designers who help make it possible for us to have the best and easiest web experience possible. Web design is a large and growing field; despite the downturn, Dice.com currently lists nearly 1,000 vacancies for web designers. Demand for skilled web designers is only likely to increase in the future.
The practice of 
In earlier posts, I provided some tips for 
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