Efex Studios

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Urban Fonts

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1001 Fonts

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How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer is an eBook by Cyan and Collis Ta’eed of FreelanceSwitch.com, a fantastic resources for freelancers as well as bloggers.

At 212 pages, this book is packed with useful material for both beginner and intermediate freelancers. If you are already making solid income as a freelancer, chances are you will not learn anything new, but for everybody else this eBook is a useful guide and planning tool.

What impressed me most about this book was its comprehensiveness - it did not only talk about how to get clients, but other aspects of freelancing that you might not ordinarily consider in the planning process, such as maintaining your health as a freelancer, money management and still maintaining an active life outside of your freelancing job. It also covers some other less covered aspects of freelancing such as maintaining your brand.

It also manages to go into detail on the finer aspects of freelancing, such as subcontracting, getting leads, client management and establishing long term clients as well as dealing with problem clients.

While those who are well established freelancing entrepreneurs, for those considering venturing into the world of freelancing, How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer is a highly useful resource as well as planning guide, and will give you a solid foundation on which to start your own freelancing business.

You can learn more about this eBook and others at Rockable Press.

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Having a custom email address for your website is important for giving it that professional feel. However, using the default email provider generally means using an underpowered alternative. With Windows Live Admin Center you can keep your custom website address such as hello@domain.com without sacrificing functionality by allowing you to manage your custom email address through Hotmail. The newly redisigned Windows Live Admin Center, formerly Windows Live Custom Domains, is now much easier to use.

If you’re new to the service, here’s a quick walkthrough on how to set it up.

Click “Get Started” on the homepage and add your domain. Then click “Create a new Windows Live ID in your domain, ex: email@mydomain.com.” After completing the registration info, you will be at the administration control panel.

Initially, it will say that the domain has not been setup. Simply click on “Domain Settings” and look for “MX Reconfiguration”. Then copy the entire MX server domain, and navigate to your site’s MX Entry, typically located in the CPanel. All you have to do is replace the default MX location to the one provided.

The next time you use your custom domain email, just login through Hotmail.com. A bonus of using Windows Live Admin to manage your email is linked accounts, which allows you to instantly jump between linked accounts without signing out and signing back in. This is a fantastic feature if you want to create numerous emails on a domain, and even better if you’re managing numerous website emails.

Another cool feature of Windows Live Admin is the open membership feature, which allows anybody to register an email address with your domain through Windows Live Hotmail, and this is a great way to promote your site. In addition, you can even brand your site’s email with a logo.

Windows Live Admin has set up a fantastic service that is quite underrated. There’s pretty much nothing like it on the web, and the service is sure to simplify managing your website.

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1. Gallery Theme

Demo | Download | Link

2. Personal Wordpress Theme

Demo | Download | Link

3. CODA

Demo | Download | Link

4. Theseus

Demo | Download | Link

5. Colourise

Demo | Download | Link

6. Illacrimo

—- | Download | Link

7. Outdoorsy

Demo | Download | Link

8. Wordpress Fun

Demo | Download | Link

9. Resurrection

—- | Download | Link

10. Aspire

Demo | Download | Link

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Adobe Flash just isn’t good for search engine optimization because spiders cannot index the links. So here are three incredible menus with all the animation of Javascript plus easy indexing.

http://alistapart.com/articles/sprites2

http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/jquery-bg-image-animations/

http://devthought.com/cssjavascript-true-power-fancy-menu/

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Ask any web designer, and one of the biggest irritations is often coding for cross browser compatibility. There’s so many browsers crowding the market as well as many different versions of every individual browser. The worst part is that many older versions of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) do not support many modern web technologies, making it impossible to deliver modern web experiences.

Current browser usage statistics six different browsers in use, including two versions of Internet Explorer. The main problem for most designers is IE6, a browser that does not support transparent PNGs and also renders code vastly different from others. The best method is to redirect IE6 users to a separate page, preferably with instructions to upgrade their browser.

Below here is an easily modifiable Javascript code to redirect any version of Internet Explorer. As shown below the code is set up to redirect IE versions 6 and 7, two commonly used browsers that do not support many web standards. This was coded with the release of Internet Explorer 8 in mind, which supports web standards and passes the Acid Test. IE8 may potentially create a similar browser situation, but with IE7 instead of IE6

The following code is clean and easily modifiable to redirect any version of Internet Explorer. Just save it as a Javascript file or insert it into your head tag. Feel free to use it in any of your sites. A link back to us is always appreciated!

version=parseInt(navigator.appVersion);
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf('6.')>1){version=6};
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf('7.')>1){version=7};
if (navigator.appName=='Microsoft Internet Explorer') {
browser='IE'+version;
}
if (browser=='IE6') {
window.location='http://www.efexstudios.com/ie.html'
}
if (browser=='IE7') {
window.location='http://www.efexstudios.com/ie.html'
}

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Knowledge of search engine optimization is a crucial skill for any web designer. Without organic search engine traffic, a website will be more reliant on costly advertising methods. If a site is not search engine friendly, it might be losing a lot of traffic that you are not even aware of. Without organic traffic, direct traffic and backlinks are the only ways people can find your site. Ultimately, SEO is simply good business, which is why it is crucial to have experience in this field.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated SEO, is the process of improving traffic from search engines through targeting specific search keywords. In general, most search engine optimization is focused on Google because it is the dominant search engine, currently commanding around 62% of total searches. Here are the basics to search engine optimization.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Most search engines are crawler based. Each search engine “crawls” the web with spiders. These are essentially requests made by a server for the webpage, the same way your browser requests a page when you visit a website. The only difference is that the spiders do it in the thousands. The spiders then follow the links on a website and find more pages, while the visited pages are collected into an index. The key to search engine optimization is how relevant your content is ranked by a search engine. The more relevant your page, the higher it will rank.

Keyword Optimization

The number one way to optimize a website is to target a specific keyword. Every site needs to target several specific keywords to be ranked for. The more general the keyword, the more results there are and thus the more difficult it is to reach the top of the search engine results page, or SERPs.

So the kind of keyword that must be targeted is a “long tail keyword“. This term refers to more specific keywords. For example instead of “buy computer”, a long tail keyword is “buy a cheap HP laptop”. Long tails have fewer results, thus it is easier to be ranked.

Sites can be optimized for the selected keyword simply by using the term more frequently. The following section will be explaining how to implement on page SEO.

On Page SEO Elements

Web Address

Search engines will read the words in a web address and search for keywords. For example, if two websites are both targeting the “cheap web design” keyword, http://www.cheap-web-design.com/ would rank better than http://www.efexstudios.com/. Note that while dashes can be used to separate words, underscores are not read by search engines as spaces.

Title Tag

The title of a webpage should also use targeted keywords. For pages other than the main page, the subject of the main page should come before the website name. For example, “Contact: My Website” instead of “My Website: Contact”.

Metadata

There are two metadata tags that need to be optimize - content and keywords. Google does not factor keywords into its algorithm because it is frequently used to keyword spam, but Yahoo! still gives it a slight amount of importance, so the keywords metatag will only be useful for being ranked in Yahoo! and is necessary.

Header Tags

Headers are basically tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc., The lower the number, the more relevance the term will be deemed. So the most important terms should be tagged with H1 and the less important with H2, etc.

Tags

Particular keywords can be optimized for with tags such as b, i, u (bold, italics, underline). These three are roughly equal in added significance.

Image Names

Just like with URLs, the name of images is also significant, especially when people are searching for specific images.

Alt Tags

It is crucial to give every image an alt tag, as it is another opportunity to optimize for keywords. In general, a good way to tag the images is by labeling them “picture subject image”. For example, if there was a picture of a laptop computer, an image can be tagged “Laptop Computer Image”. Thus keywords can be added while increasing overall word count.

Words of Caution

Keyword Stuffing

Optimizing a page excessively can adversely affect its ranking. The optimal keyword density is around 3%-4%, although given numbers may vary. Anything less and the page may not be deemed highly relevant and any more and it will be marked as spam, sending it to the bottom of the SERPs. This applies not only to the content, but the site in general. A webpage stuffed with more keywords than content will be marked as spam by search engines and will not show up in the SERPs.

Domains

Note that http://efexstudios.com/ and http://www.efexstudios.com/ are read as different websites by search engines. If you promote one version, be sure to set up a redirect from the other version so that your traffic (and backlink) power is not split.

Splash Pages

Unless your website or brand is already very well established, such as a popular music band, splash pages disrupt the ranking of your pages by making it more difficult to spider your site.

Useful Tools

Google Analytics

This fantastic tool provides comprehensive tracking information for a website that is completely free, and it is highly recommended that it is implemented. A useful feature is the “keywords” feature which will show a site’s organic traffic and what keywords visitors used to find your site.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools provides useful statistics about your site that Analytics does not provide such as errors received, keywords other websites are linking to you with,

AdWord Analyzer

Despite the rather spammy sales page, this is a fantastically useful tool for finding untapped keywords.

Lynx Viewer

A great tool you can use is the Lynx Viewer, which outputs a website as all text - essentially the same way a search engine web crawler would see it. It’s a great way for checking at a glance what your site (and you’re competitors’ sites) are being optimized for.

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ColorZilla

This fantastic tool allows the sampling of colors directly from a webpage with and eyedropper. This is perfect for web designers when testing colors and creating color schemes

FireFTP

Rather than download and load a separate application, FireFTP loads a this FTP tool integrates FTP into Firefox, saving you the trouble of downloading a separate application and switching between windows.

FireShot

FireShot takes screenshots of webpages and saves a ton of hassle. It even adds annotation, editing and other modification tools.

Hyperwords

This is quite similar to the Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators. This simply allows you to highlight words, locations, etc. and specific context menus will appear to allow you to instantly define, locate, email particular terms.

SeoQuake

An all in one tool for researching the SEO of websites.

Statusbar

The download menu can often interfere with the browsing experience, and Status bar will keep all downloads in plain site without an extra menu.

StumbleUpon Toolbar

StumbleUpon is essentially like Digg - users can “stumble upon” new and exciting websites. This is crucial for web developers because it is a fantastic source of inspiration. Quite often you will stumble upon some strange and exciting sites, and these will often provide inspiration for a new idea.

Validaty

Instantly validates a site through the W3C.

CSS Validator

Instantly validates a site through the W3C.

Why Aren’t These Here?
Advertisement blockers, Greasemonkey, etc.,

To me, blocking ads really is really a disadvantage to web designers. Advertisements are a great way to keep up with the latest design trends.

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