Recent content by IS-James

I'm looking for freelance web designers who can produce quality designs to relatively short time scales (1 week turn around). I am looking for people with a good appreciation of web design and how to use design to increase conversion opposed to just pretty design. Work wants to be done in...

Twitter can be useful for generating leads, especially if you view it as a way to respond to peoples needs than as an advertising tool. For instance if you sell say..... t-shirts with ponies on. Then you can use a tool like Tweetdeck to set up a filter so that if anyone uses the phrase...

Really you need to be doing it with CSS not using <center> tags. <center> tags are deprecated, meaning they aren't in the the HTML standard anymore. Browsers still render them properly but there is no guarantee they will forever. A better way to centre the page is to use margins. If you put a...

A fair number of web designers don't write code, it isn't unusual. As long as you have an appreciation for how something will be put together so that your designs aren't torturous to construct! Of course that doesn't mean a lot of people aren't going to be looking for someone who can do it...

All so true, I love theoatmeal.com but I hadn't seen that one. I've actually had a client reject a design and then create their own design in paint/publisher. We said over and over again that we didn't think it would work but he basically put his foot down and insisted we build it. We...

The main thing with domain names is that you need to be using it for a genuine purpose before you try and sell it. Otherwise you can have your ownership challenged by someone who has a genuine use for it especially if they have a trademark on the domain name. Even if you just throw up a load of...

My advice would be to get a book that teaches you the main techniques and then also pick up the O'Reilly pocket guide so you have something to refer to when you can't remember the names of attributes etc. The book I read when I first started was Eric Meyer on CSS. It goes through all of the...

I have quite a few clients who use Adwords and it can work very well. But it is very dependant on the industry you are in. Some industries are very saturated on Adwords with the cost per click driven through the roof. Web hosting is one of these I am sad to say, with costs of £10+ per click...

Something to bear in mind if you are going to use Magento is that it doesn't run well on a shared hosting platform. You really need at least a VPS with 128mb-256mb RAM to run it happily as it is very memory intensive.

I would be wary of buying screens second hand, apart from them being out of warranty the colour reproduction can suffer over time. With LCD screens the backlight tends to wear out over the life of the screen and this can have an affect on the brightness and colour of the picture. Good quality...

I would second the requirement of having a 'sharps bin' for the used scalpel blades. As far as preventing cuts while using scalpels, one of the main points is to change the blades regularly. Scalpel blades get blunt very quickly and blunt blades mean more force is needed to cut, increasing the...

It is important to remember that if you pitch a concept to a client as part of a free pitch then you still hold the copyright to the ideas. Right up until the point where you win the pitch and are paid for your work. The same is true in a situation where you pitch several different ideas to a...

Hi Gavin, welcome to the forum. I have taken a look at the examples you have posted and have a good idea of what you are looking for. Implementing a grid similar to the first example using a system like Magento is quite difficult due to the way they manage products. But the second example...

One of the benefits of flash is that it can easily be made to scale to any browser size. It always amazes me that so many people who build websites in flash lock it down to a tiny rectangle in the middle of the screen with tiny font sizes. The scalability of flash is down to it's vector based...

Unless the newsletter is only being sent out to a handful of people you really need to be looking at using a third-party to mail it. Sending bulk email, even to as little as a hundred recipients, can cause serious problems in the future. Once ISPs and webmail operators notice large numbers of...