Cre8ive Commando » Web Design

Tips on Marketing your Portfolio

Kate Manning — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:02:37 +0000

Portfolios demonstrate your artistic capabilities and help target and influence important buyers to choose your design services over competitive artists. By providing a limited number of targeted examples to showcase your finest work, you will not waste a busy client’s time with unrelated material, which will convince the prospect that you understand the importance of prioritizing in the modern marketplace. Dynamic websites strive to answer clients’ most important questions and provide clear methods of contact and never fail to challenge the prospect boldly to initiate that contact immediately.

It is not enough to have a great website and portfolio to attract potential clients. You don’t need to be an online MBA program graduate to be able to market your site and services effectively to realize the benefits a good site can provide. Clients demand a clear website that pinpoints the market you wish to influence. List all the reasons a client should hire you, and clearly state the benefits such a decision will provide. By exhibiting confidence and demonstrating clear examples of competent performance, you make it easy for a buyer to decide you are the perfect candidate for the job.

In some cases you may want to encourage companies to hire you directly. Perhaps you wish to generate sales leads for future work. You may want to enhance your reputation in the designing community or target a specific type of company. Multiple websites may be your best answer if you have many different goals. Below are presented five important ways to increase traffic to your site.

1. Design your website appropriately for the market.

Keep the most important and relevant work prominent. Always use the best examples from your portfolio. If you do not have many that fit the theme, then go with what you have or create new examples. Never show inferior work to fill space. Tailor the site to target potential clients with clear, concise writing. If you want companies to hire you, make it easy for them to do so with a “hire me” page. Include an updated resume employers can download.

2. Promote your work in all relevant media

Join professional online communities to expand your base. These can relate specifically to artistic design or the companies that use your services. Submit your designs to gallery websites or CSS galleries. Write and post informative blogs that can reach potential customers. Consider starting a blog on your site to increase viewer traffic.

Add featured content to attract viewers. The content can link with search engines and social media to draw a larger potential audience. Testimonials can also add valuable information that will influence clients. Here are some more creative ways to promote your online portfolio.

3. Target the specific market you wish to reach.

If you want to reach corporate clients, then it is important to provide clean work that addresses theme in particular. Limit your portfolio to the best work you have produced. A few clean relevant examples will enhance your reputation better than a large collection of unrelated work. Avoid general artwork that does not address the types of client your wish to hire you, no matter how creative it may be. Never show partial or poorly-developed themes when you wish to impress corporate buyers.

In some cases you may wish to enhance your reputation with articles and posts aimed at the market you want to reach.

4. Employ the proper technology in website design.

It’s important to be sure that potential viewers can easily access your website from a number of browsers. Google is the most important since it conducts two-thirds of all online searches. Niche market searches may also be important since they return viewers more likely to hire you. Build your site to function properly. Then you can add upgrades for enhancement. Consider employing CSS to craft you site to enhance access.

5. Provide clear contact information.

Include the information on every page of your site. Respond to requests for information as quickly as possible. Include references to your website in all media postings.

Employing these techniques will not only increase website traffic but also increase your conversion rate. Display your best work tailored to the specific function you are promoting and you will realize substantial results.

Validate HTML Emails Across Different Email Clients

Adham Dannaway — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:16:53 +0000

Creating HTML emails can be quite a daunting task if you’re not well versed in writing cross client email code. There are so many quirks to look out for and so many email clients to test them in. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that you could use to validate your email code? There is and it’s called Fractal!

Fractal is a clever online tool that allows you to validate your email CSS across 24 of the most popular email clients simply by uploading your email code (HTML/CSS). You’ll receive a report that outlines the problems in your code and it will show you which email clients support your code. This is great as it allows email developers to design, build and test their emails more efficiently. Fractal will even suggest fixes to your code to ensure that it is cross client compatible, you can even contribute your own fixes if you’re feeling particularly inspired.

Fractal validates your HTML email across all the major email clients and automagically fixes known email quirks. It’s FREE to use so give it a try next time you’re working on an email.

The Evolution of the Web

Adham Dannaway — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:39:05 +0000

The World Wide Web is constantly evolving, we see new website experiences every day and many of these are made possible by constant advancements in the underlying web technologies including: HTML5, CSS3, WebGL and of course the web browsers that run them.

As web developers it’s great to see that the web is advancing, this gives us the chance to use these new technologies to create new web experiences. This interactive infographic is quite interesting as it shows us the evolution of the web over the past 20 years. You can see the interaction between web technologies and browsers and you can even click on different browsers to see how their interface has evolved over the years. I wonder what this diagram will look like over the next 5 years? Any ideas?

Win a Free Poster Print From imageMEDIA.com!

Adham Dannaway — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:22:47 +0000

imageMEDIA is a leading online printing company that specializes in a variety of printing services such as business cards, posters, postcard printing and more. Today they are offering Cre8ive Commando readers a chance to win an awesome high quality rolled poster print that you can use for your portfolio, a client or whatever design you want!

A great prize:

A 24 x 36 inch rolled poster ($70 value) – Printed on a premium Epson printer with full bleed and full color!

Here are the rules:

You may only enter this contest once. Anyone submitting more than once will be disqualified
Please enter a valid email address
You must be of legal age in the jurisdiction that you reside to enter
Free shipping to the US only, shipping costs will apply to winner in another location
You may optionally follow us on Twitter and Facebook

How to enter:

Entering is simple, just leave a comment telling us how you would use the poster print and follow imageMEDIA on Facebook. A winner will be randomly picked two weeks from this date. Good luck!

And the winner is:

Sleeman! Congratulations, you’ll receive an email soon regarding how to claim your prize.

A Simple Way to Draw Vector Graphics on the Web – Raphael JS!

Adham Dannaway — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:53:56 +0000

If you’re looking to draw vector graphics on your website then you’re in luck, Raphael is a JavaScript library that will simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you’re looking to create a chart, rotate or crop an image then this clever JavaScript library will help you do just that quickly and easily.

Raphael uses SVG W3C Recommendation and a VML base for creating vector images on websites. So you can basically create shapes on your web page and these shapes are all DOM objects that can be controlled by JavaScript. You can even animate your images once you have drawn them. It’s quite a powerful and relatively simple tool and it’s cross browser compliant too which means that you can use it in your website projects without having to worry about browser compatibility.

How to use it:

Download and include raphael.js into your HTML page, then use it as follows:

// Creates canvas 320 × 200 at 10, 50
var paper = Raphael(10, 50, 320, 200);

// Creates circle at x = 50, y = 40, with radius 10
var circle = paper.circle(50, 40, 10);
// Sets the fill attribute of the circle to red (#f00)
circle.attr("fill", "#f00");

// Sets the stroke attribute of the circle to white
circle.attr("stroke", "#fff");

Convert an Image to CSS Automatically

Adham Dannaway — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:49:42 +0000

Have you ever wondered if you could automatically convert an image into HTML and CSS code? It could come in handy when trying to bypass the image filters in email clients. Well, Img to CSS is an interesting little online tool that does just this. It converts an image into HTML/CSS automatically.

It’s actually quite a clever little tool. It basically takes the image file and creates a HTML table of pixels with background colours that match the image file. Row by row it reads the pixels on the image and builds the HTML table, inserting the CSS styles inline.

The basic idea behind Img to CSS is to bypass image filters in email clients to ensure that images don’t get blocked. The HTML/CSS conversion does create quite a lot of code though so I’m not sure how useful it would be when dealing with commercial email templates. It’s definitely clever though and lots of fun to have a play with. Convert your image to CSS today!

Make your CSS more Powerful with Sass

Adham Dannaway — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:40:39 +0000

Writing CSS can be a timely task and there is often quite a lot of repetition and redundancy in style sheets, especially those in larger websites. If only there was a way to write CSS in a more powerful and structured way, there is and it’s called Sass.

Sass is basically a language that’s placed on top of CSS that’s used to define styles in a more structured and powerful way than normal CSS allows. It’s a simpler, more elegant language than CSS and it has quite a few interesting features that allow you to manage your style sheet more easily. The way it works is pretty simple, you write your Sass code then translate it automatically into flat CSS using a command line tool.

The main features Sass offers include nested rules (you can avoid repetition by nesting selectors within one another), variables (you can define variables to re-use), mixins (re-use whole chunks of CSS) and selector inheritance (one selector can inherit all the styles of another without any duplication).

It’s quite an interesting concept which could come in handy for larger website projects. Have a play and let me know what you think.

The Social Stock Market – Empire Avenue

Adham Dannaway — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 06:47:58 +0000

These days we’re all pretty active on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. What if our social activity actually had economic value? Empire Avenue is the Social Stock Market where you can actually grow your social capital online (with virtual money of course). It’s an interesting idea and more and more people seem to be getting involved. Here’s how it works.

The concept is quite simple. When you join you Empire Avenue you actually connect your social networking accounts and you’ll be given a virtual share price based on your online social activity. The more active you are, the higher your share price. Like the stock market you can actually invest virtual money to own shares of other people on Empire Avenue. The more good investments you make, the more virtual money you’ll make. Your shareholders will even be paid dividends based on your engagement and activity.

So what is the whole point of this? Well, there isn’t really much point to it but it is a good way to have some fun with social networking and make some cool new connections. Who knows, with some smart investing and some rapid tweeting you might even become a virtual millionaire.

Premium WordPress Themes

Adham Dannaway — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:29:26 +0000

With so many great Premium WordPress Themes to choose from it’s sometimes difficult to find the one you’re really looking for. Each theme is comprised of different design elements, functionality and features, so how do you find the one that’s right for your particular website project? I’ve come across quite a few Premium WordPress Themes and below you’ll find some of the best ones I’ve seen. I hope it helps you on your search.

Most of the Premium WordPress Themes below only cost around $35 each which sounds like a pretty good investment to me. These themes are especially good because you can customize them to suit your specific needs and best of all you don’t need to know how to write any code. You can customize things like colour schemes, layouts, background images, fonts, logos, social media widgets and much more. Some very creative web designers have put a lot of time and effort into designing and building these pixel perfect website themes and it really shows when you look at them. Simply click on a theme below to buy it or find out more about it. Best of luck finding your premium theme!

Display- Premium Business WordPress Theme: $40

This theme is best suited for portfolio and business websites. A fantastic 3D image slider sits center stage on the homepage and can be easily controlled from the backend. There are 3 great skins to allow you to change the look and feel of the website with ease and the huge backend allows you to customise much of your site without needing to know any coding.

London Creative – Premium Blog Theme: $40

This is a modern high impact theme which comes in a range of great colours. It’s suitable for blogs, news sites, portfolio sites and even business sites looking to show off their creative flair. It come with quite a few special features including: automatic jQuery image slider, lightbox image plugin, validating contact form as well as a highly customizable backend that allows you to manage your theme via a simple interface. This means you spend more time writing articles and less time getting your theme setup.

Big Feature – Premium WordPress Theme: $30

This clean and flexible theme features large article images along with nice typography making it a great theme for graphically rich blogs and news sites. It comes with heaps of great templates, layouts, features and custom widgets to really help you customize your site so that it stands out from the rest. A solid theme with some great features.

Newscast – Premium Magazine Theme: $35

Best suited for magazines and blogs this theme comes with 4 great looking skins along with 3 different image and news slide shows, jQuery drop down menu and multiple page layouts. It has a clean and simple design making it great for use in almost any web magazine or blog.

Twicet – Premium Business WordPress Theme: $35

This stylish theme is best suited for business and portfolio websites. It comes with 5 different skins, a sleek jQuery image slider, drop down menu, gallery page with lightbox along with a bunch of useful backend functions. A solid theme for any business or portfolio website.

Shapeshifter – Single Page Premium WordPress Theme: $30

This is a very simple and stylish single page WordPress theme which is especially good for creative business websites and design agencies. Built using a template that slides vertically from one section to the next this single page theme works really well with simple sites that don’t have much content. It’s also very easy to customize and comes with jQuery lightbox, CU3ER 3D image slider, “Build your own” contact form and unlimited colour scheme options. A simple yet very powerful theme.

Karma – Modern Premium WordPress Theme: $35

Karma is a stylish modern theme that features the famous CU3ER 3D image slider on its homepage. It’s built on a highly intelligent framework and includes 20 different page layouts, 20 colour scheme variants, over 100 shortcodes, 3D portfolio, custom pricing tables along with some impressive 3D image transitions. A highly customizable theme suited to corporate websites, blogs, magazines and even portfolios.

Avisio – Premium Portfolio WordPress Theme: $40

Avisio is a modern theme with a stylish look and feel that’s best suited for business and portfolio websites. This theme is highly customizable and allows you to change the look and feel of your site with a few simple mouse clicks, no coding required. A large image slider fills the homepage and the portfolio page is put together cleverly using some nice jQuery effects.

King Size -Full-screen Background WordPress Theme: $35

King Size is a very unique theme which features full screen background images which create a very rich looking website. This theme is suitable for many type of websites but is mainly focused towards photographers who want a nice way of showing their portfolio of photos. This theme is highly customizable with 5 different gallery styles and 3 light-box variations. It also allows you to blog about your photos too which is a nice bonus.

Striking – Premium Corporate WordPress Theme: $35

Striking is a Powerful Premium WordPress theme that can be used for blogs, portfolio websites and business websites. It’s easy to customize via the admin panel, and it provides full control over all major design elements throughout your website, including colour and fonts.

inFocus – Professional WordPress Theme: $35

This theme comes with an impressive fully customizable jQuery homepage slider with 3 different staging effects. The custom back-end area gives you complete control over the look and style of your theme and best of all there’s 10 theme variations to choose from.

Prestige – Ultimate WordPress Theme: $35

Prestige is a unique and advanced WordPress theme that comes with a pack of different skins, short-codes, widgets and fonts that are all easily changed via the admin panel.

More Corporate WordPress Themes »

Minimalist WordPress Themes

Adham Dannaway — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 12:26:54 +0000

Minimalist WordPress Themes are growing in popularity these days as more and more businesses and individuals are looking to create a simple and minimal look and feel for their brand. Minimalist websites are timeless as they are built on solid design foundations and aren’t affected by short-term design trends and fads. With so many Minimal Style WordPress Themes out there it’s sometimes hard to find the one you’re looking for, here are some of my favorites based on quality, creativity and functionality.

There are tons of free WordPress themes out there but if you’re looking for a unique theme I’d stay away from the freebies as they’re usually of a lower quality and everyone is already using them. You can get a premium WordPress theme for just $35 which is a pretty good investment if you ask me. Many of these themes are highly customizable as well which will allow you to get a bit creative and customize your site layout and design to fit your individual needs. You can change the colour schemes, layouts, images and backgrounds without writing any code. You can read more details about any of the minimalist themes below or buy them by simply clicking on the theme images. Hope that helps you on your search for the perfect minimalist WordPress theme.

Classica – Minimalist WordPress Theme: $35

A beautiful and simple minimalist WordPress theme that allows you to make your content the focal point of your website. This theme features a clean black font on a white background with plenty of room to showcase your work. This is a simple yet powerful theme that’s great for portfolio websites or design or art related news and blog sites.

Find out more »

Vulcan – Minimal Business WordPress Theme: $35

A minimalist business theme, Vulcan gives you the simplicity of a minimal theme along with the polish of a modern business website. This flexible theme is great for almost any type of website with many customizations. You can choose between five colour schemes and several widgets and layouts making it a solid theme for anyone looking for a clean and simple look and feel.

Find out more »

Atlantica – Premium Minimalist WordPress Theme: $30

A complete WordPress theme with a clean and crisp style, best suited for portfolio websites but also great for almost any other type of website that needs a beautiful layout. Artists, designers, photographers and other creatives will love this theme as it’s quite image heavy but it also balances typographical elements nicely. This theme is loaded with detailed features including: 6 unique skins, jQuery lightbox, homepage slider and you can even upload your own favicon for those of you who worry about the smaller details.

Find out more »

Concept – Clean Minimal WordPress Theme: $30

A clean and polished theme that can be used for just about any type of website that needs a clean-cut layout. This theme comes complete with 6 uniquely styles skins, custom admin panel, clean commented code, jQuery lightbox, and optional sIFR custom font rendering to add some nice typography to your site. A solid and flexible multipurpose theme.

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Minimal – Minimalist WordPress Theme: $25

This theme is a minimal as they come. It relies much on typography rather than images which gives it a very monotone minimalist look and feel. Great for writers and bloggers who aren’t big on images and who prefer to let their content do the talking. This theme come with custom fading taglines, custom admin panel, social media widgets and even a contact form to allow people to email you with ease. A theme for those who truly love minimalism.

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Folioway – Minimalist Portfolio WordPress Theme: $35

A clean and elegant theme with loads of useful features. This theme uses whitespace to bring attention to your images. Features include unlimited colours, sliders, patterns, custom fonts using Cufon as well as auto generated thumbnail images. A simple yet flexible theme suitable for many different websites.

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Repro – Minimalist Magazine WordPress Theme: $35

A great minimal magazine style theme suitable for content producers at all levels including online magazines, bloggers and newspapers. It looks beautiful by default but you can always add your own touch to this theme via its many customisable features including: 8 custom widgets, social media integration, unlimited colour schemes and you can even upload your own logo.

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Vilisya – Minimalist Business WordPress Theme: $35

A clean and minimal corporate theme that’s suitable for professional corporate websites. It comes with 6 colour schemes, a jQuery image slider, Cufon font replacement, contact form, automatic image thumbnails, a custom admin panel along with great SEO Optimization. A powerful theme with everything you need for your ultimate business website.

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Elegance – Minimalist WordPress Theme: $35

A simple and beautifully crafted WordPress theme that’s great for portfolios, business websites, blogs and magazines. A large image slider with custom editable type fills the homepage and the 4 different template layouts allow you to tweak the design to suit your purpose. Complete with Cufon font replacement, lightbox image support, custom widgets and a multi level drop-down menu this is a powerful yet beautiful theme.

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Air – Great Minimalist WordPress Theme: $35

This is a simple but functional WordPress theme that’s probably best for use as an online portfolio although it could very easily be used for other types of websites too. You can choose from a white, grey or black background colour along with several different grid layouts for your portfolio designs. There are even a few custom blog layouts to choose from if you’re looking to add a blog to your site. A nice and simple theme that’s definitely worth a look.

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Chalong – Clean and Simple WordPress Theme: $35

A clean and simple theme with a bit of a corporate look and feel. This theme is great for professional business websites and best of all it comes jam-packed with heaps of the latest WordPress features including: custom post type, unlimited colour schemes, custom admin panel, 7 slider styles and many social media widgets. Don’t be fooled, this theme isn’t as simple as it looks!

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Gridlocked – Minimal Portfolio WordPress Theme: $35

This is an interesting theme as it uses a grid based layout which actually shuffles dynamically depending on the size of the browser window. This highly versatile theme is perfect for a creative portfolio or even an image rich blog as you can choose to focus on your work or your blogs or both! Gridlocked comes with a sortable portfolio, post format support, widgets and audio and video support. A truly versatile minimalist theme.

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The Agency – Premium Minimal WordPress Theme: $35

A premium WordPress theme that has a clean and minimal design, perfect for design agencies that want to showcase their work, publish projects and write blog posts, news and articles. It’s easy to use and has many great features including: sophisticated image gallery with image loading and beautiful hover animations. The individual project page is perfectly suited to agencies as it allows you to include details such as client role, type and URL.

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Minimalisto – Clean Business WordPress Theme: $35

A clean business theme suitable for virtually any business website. Minimalisto has many great features that allow you to customise your website including: 2 skins, custom admin panel, jQuery image slider, multi-level drop-down menu, widgets, useful shortcodes, 9 page layouts and great documentation. A clean and simple theme with some solid functionality.

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