Get advice and give advice

I spend a lot of time in all those webmaster forum. Before this, I wasn’t really a web designer yet, but a designer. Works a lot on logos, t-shirt design and web page design (no coding yet).

I spend time wandering on forums to get advice. It is also one of the way I interactive with those designer/developer who also now in my MSN list. I’ve even have a PHP programmer as my partner years ago, and we still planning to work together.

Do free work

I know it sound bitch. I started off with a lot of spec work, this is, somehow, to polish my design skill too.

While learning new tricks on designing, I also learn to get used to most important technique. Forum and some contest website always a good to go.

Being a freelancer now, I sometimes, calculate my rate too. If the cost of the project is low due to their budget, I would know what and which kind of design I will go for the low budget. It helps me to create an eye on design according to the budget.

Learn one CMS at a time

Even if I’m good in XHTML/CSS, I probably won’t get too much static website to build nowadays. Looking at the prespective that most company likes to update their website on their own, or perhaps, a cooporate blog.

Get more knowledge on CMS, e-Commerce or so. It’s always an added advantage to get lean a CMS script. Wordpress is a good start, since it has the most tutorial on the Internet.

It is not easy to start up to become a freelancer. I get lots of bomb and critic when I started out and still getting them. But that’s is how I grow. The more the client are demanding, the more I know how to handle client and web design trend.

My wife and I are freelance web designers and yet we still survive even without much of internet connection for this 2 weeks.

Work on design, or design something

Design and more design. Either work with the current client’s project or just create a new design, such as a free theme be released for public. If any creative-block strikes in, go have a short break. Take a walk outside or have a cup of coffee in the pantry will do. Have all the time in hand to get inspiration.

Sometimes when I want to take a break from sitting in front of the computer, I will get my sketchbook and start doodling on it. I actually don’t have the habit of sketching before doing the design in computer. But when I do, the result will be an amazing one. Hence, I’ve started to spend quite a lot of time in sketching and mind mapping my proposal when I’m not with computer and Internet.

Take a walk, do some exercise

It is important to let your body sweats some times.

Most of the time, my girlfriend and I are sitting next to each other and worst, don’t talk much when some urgent works approached. So the best thing to do is to take a walk, have some long conversation or work-out together.

Movies, celebrities gossip, music, karaoke

Spend some quality time with the family and watch a movie, either at home or in a cinema.

As a freelancer, very oftern we find a movie title that click, but can’t find a time out to watch it because of “tons of work” ahead.

Clean up your machine, table and all the mess

I’m sure there were lots of “Tomorrow” while working on the desk. It is the time to do all those work. A clean work station can really boost productivity. From whipping the computer to cleaning up all the paper work on the table is a good start.

Learn more script

Even if you’re good in one particular CMS, you probably won’t get only Wordpress to build nowadays. Get more knowledge on CMS, e-Commerce or so. It’s always an added advantage to get more experience on lots of CMS.

I once had a client asked me to design their MODx CMS script, which I have totally no experience at all, I have been working with him for a few project, mainly, Wordpress. You can’t tell if a client would continue working with you if they look ahead with another freelancer and feel more comfortable with them instead. That’s a totaly lost.

I’ve personally downloaded some common CMS and e-Commerce script on my localhost readily to study them once I’m out of Internet.

Social media becoming an important aspect for all business. Whatever site it is, it is crucial to have social media icons ready for users to submit to their favorite social media

Download

1. Floral Day

A two columns theme with right sidebar and three columns in the footer area.
Live Demo l Download

2. Brown Stitch

It has similar layout structure with Floral Day, but in subtle brown color and different scrapbook element.
Live Demo l Download

3. Green Scrapbook Diary

Three columns scrapbook theme with widget ready and right sidebar
Live Demo l Download

4. Scrapbook Mania

Two columns crafty theme for scrapbook mania.
Live Demo l Download

5. Memoriqu

Two columns with widgetized footer and 125 x 125 banner ad ready at right sidebar
Live Demo l Download

You can have unlimited access to the Premium Wordpress themes at $19.95 ONLY per year. Each WordPress theme is expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, widget ready, and compatible with the latest version of WordPress. There is a support forum for members whom purchase the membership.

2. WOO Themes

You can purchase the Premium Wordpress themes individually, starts from $70 for standard package and from $150 for developer package. BONUS: Buy 1 theme and get 1 FREE! Otherwise, you can purchase the club membership and gain access to all of the Premium Wordpress themes, starts from $125.

3. WP Now

Brand new Wordpress theme company that offer the best Premium Wordpress theme at an affordable price, starts from as low as $29. Help and support after purchasing the theme is available too.

4. Studio Press

StudioPress themes are perfect for a small business or an individual looking to establish their online presence with WordPress. The premium theme starts from $59.95 and repeat client will get 25% discount.

5. Themeforest

A Wordpress theme marketplace with lots of choices for Premium Wordpress theme. Price starts from as low as $5 based on the complexity, quality and use of the file.

6. NattyWP

Join the Premium Wordpress Themes Club and gain access to all of the professional templates. Price start from $75 for 3 months membership. Alternatively, you can buy the theme individually and get the bonus – Buy 1 theme and get 1 FREE!

7. Gorilla Themes

Unique Premium Wordpress themes that are easy to use. Their celebrity theme and real estate themes are the best that you can find. The theme price starts from $79.95. Limited Bonus: get 15% off any Gorilla Theme with the exclusive Twitter coupon.

8. Zidalgo

They offer premium WordPress themes, custom design services, and a blog to help you stay up to date with all things WordPress. The theme price starts from $75 only, including unlimited install support, community forum access, and unlimited updates.

9. RichWP

They provide the state-of-the-art WordPress content management system (CMS) to easily build and maintain your presence on the Internet. You can get the all-themes-package at $249.00 only or buy the theme individually from $69.90 only.

10. Theme Shift

Build by Simon Rimkus, a German freelance web designer whom is a big WordPress fan and specialized in creating professional WordPress themes.

11. Aloha Themes

An online marketplace for WordPress Themes run by Scott Bernadot – used to be partnered with Gorilla Themes. Get the premium theme at $75 for unlimited usage.

12. WPRemix

A completely customizable, quality coded & comes bundled with many layout options that helps everyone create custom websites in minutes. Get the theme for $75 only.

13. WPZoom

Offers professional premium magazine Wordpress theme at an affordable price and theme support. Special offer: Buy 2 themes for only $99.

1. Stylesheet media handling
2. Re-structure the CSS/Web layout
3. Trim down images loading

Anyway, I might miss something else, but do correct me if I’m wrong. After all, it’s my first time working on mobile web. Can’t say it’s a pure mobile web, but it’s a transformation from a screen web to mobile web, depending on how Opera Mini was config. I have a Nokia E71 with Opera Mini too, I have to set it to “Mobile View” in order to use the handheld view.

Stylesheet media handling

Normally a website should consider 3 stylesheet, one for screen, one for mobile and one for printing. For mobile, the media is “handheld”
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css" />
Only browser that set to view in mobile only can view mobile version though, or else it will still shows full web.

Due to the cost of mobile browsing, consider hidden all the images on the site.

Re-structure the CSS/Web layout

When it comes to re-structure the same layout, display: none is a good friend. I’ve hide sidebar, some header images, content images.

Trim down images loading

By using also display: none it should help mobile browsing faster.

Things that you should consider to display: none:
Sidebar
Most people will crumpled their sidebar with ads and images, which will take a lot of bandwidth. Consider don’t need the sidebar when showing in mobile, the common screen resolution of mobile are just only 240×360.

Footer or the sitemap
Because browsing in mobile is a “light” activity. There is no need for full information on the web anymore.

Advertisement and Javascript
Advertisement and Javascript are those takes the longest time to load and also the bandwidth eater.

I’ve trim down from 50kb to only 5kb load of mobile web, saving my bandwidth and cost

Web design, as in all kind of design or a specific design

What is the content of the “design” in web design. It is the effect? The structure? The arrangement? Or the guide on a webpage? Which one is the core job of the web designer? Designing a web site shouldn’t be a web designer, but a web architecture, because one need to know how to structure the whole layout, then guiding the visitor from one part to another.

Web designer are multi talent already

If you’re still speak about design and design only, I would suggest to go for a design firm instead. Some of my ex-colleagues still keeping web design as a topic, which I think it is a little out of date. Web designers nowadays is more than just design the layout, there are a lot of area they explore into. For instance, cutting down the resources, solving web technical problem,

Web trend then web copy

Some say follow the recent “we trend” some say it is copying the design. I would say it is just the way of web appear to the people now. Web cannot be copy unless, you clone the exact same one, else it is not a copy, but a trend people following. Big typeface, gradient background and etc are the web trend now, are they copying each other? Not likely.

Keeno

Chris Rowe

Yalamber Subba

Josh Minnich

John Sutherland

Tyler Finck

SOFA

MISONA

infekted

Bunton

Google Pagerank

A lot of people has difficulty get Google page ranking, but what does it really do. Google PR only for Google search engine, the higher your site PR is, the more search result it will comes out, means Google put priority on your site instead of other relevant site. It does not mean that if you have no Google PR for your site, your site won’t comes out from the search result too. So the key to win the situation when you have no Google PR is to get a real good keyword, the most in-demand keyword if you can. Well, Google Webmasters tool is the complete set of tool for you to understand and know your position and keyword of your site.

Alexa Ranking

Alexa ranking is not depending on the redirect like everyone talking about, after all the redirect is not working now, because of the abuse people placing all over the Internet. In order to build Alexa ranking, you’ll need Alexa toolbar for Firefox. Alexa pull information from users who use Alexa toolbar, and monitor how and what those users visiting. So Alexa ranking is greatly depending on your visitors’ browsers. If most of your visitors are using IE, forget it!

Seriously, Alexa ranking is nothing. When I was working in a firm, my manager asked me to build Alexa ranking for the company site. All I did was install Alexa toolbar and open the company site everyday. Within one week, the ranking went up 20,000.

Ranking is really not the key to success now, but it is essential information for advertisers to know how they’re going to be expose. However, that can be done with traffic too.

Delete unused or inactive plugins

Most people doesn’t care about the plugins, doesn’t matter how many unused plugin on their list, as long as they did not activate it, they thought it would be fine. Which is not really, because each time you load your Wordpress, it will go through all the script in the engine so it won’t miss anything out to load. The listing is taking time, and resources on your CPU. Consider to delete them, install them again if needed, some how, Wordpress 2.8 has a nice built-in plugin search and installation with a few clicks.

Clean up the template CSS

Seriously, I find this funny too. Each spacing is the key of cleaning up the template code. Both CSS and PHP template always has lots of space between lines and columns. Delete them or use shorthand code.

Code like:
#div {
font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, San-serif;
font-size: 1.2em;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
}

Can be shorthanded into:

#div {font: bold italic 1.2em Arial, Verdana, Tahnoma, San-serif;}

Spacing and long winding has been cut short for easier loading.

Clean up the template PHP

While you’re cleaning up the CSS, you should consider about the PHP too. Just take a look into header.php, there are too much code that is not necessary, if you know your site well.

Things like:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<?php wp_head(); ?>

Are not necessary, if you know your website well. Language and charset, instead of asking to query the PHP again, it is always best to fix it yourself. Normally the language set to en-US and charset is UTF-8.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Of course the wp_head() are mostly SEO friendly meta tag. SEO can easily archived by a plugin, I normally delete the line too.

WP Super Cache really helps

I ended all my Wordpress sites with WP Super cache plugin. I can’t deny the power of gzip compression it created to help cutting down the load of Wordpress. WP Cache will create a static HTML files for certain pages, instead of query the PHP and your database again, it will show the static HTML to the rest of the visitors, which it doesn’t query any PHP at all.

I believe it’s not all yet. Those are what I normally do to cut down my sites and host load. Recently my host provider has a problem with high load server. The thing is m,y host provider is WPWebhost, a Wordpress specialised hosting provider, I’m pretty sure there are bunch of account with Wordpress sites did not optimise their Wordpress.