Web Design Blog
Freelance Web Designer’s toolbox: Managing your business
April 20th, 2009 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of tools out there for the freelancer that can help you to run your business more smoothly and excel at not only get the projects completed but also managing your projects. I have compiled a list of all of the tools I currently use to keep my freelance web design business running smoothly as well as a few alternatives that may better suit others.
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Freelance web designer tools and productivity management
June 12th, 2008 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of benefits to being a freelance web designer. The freedom to work your own hours (all of them) and the ability to choose what web projects you take on (how much you charge) and which you decline. However, with as much responsibility that a freelance web designer takes on there is a need for a lot of tools to manage it all. Being a freelance web designer is a lot of being an entire design firm, you have to take control of the sales, customer service, project management, design layout, web development and programming. There are a lot of these tasks that we can outsource but for the most part, a lot of our projects can consist of all of the above and so choosing the right tools for the job is a task that we don’t take lightly.
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An easy to use to-do list web app
February 26th, 2008 by Dustin BrewerA buddy of mine Amine has launched his to-do list web app for public use. It is extremely simply and similar to tada lists. I like this one better due to the simplicity of the project. It is very easy to use, no clutter or other things in the way of organizing the things you have to do.
It allows you to create multiple lists with multiple items on the list. You can easy check them off and they fade away until you delete them. It is pretty cool, leave a comment about what you think. I’m sure he would be interested to hear them.
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Web developer tool for Firefox, IE6, IE7, Opera and Safari
January 28th, 2008 by Dustin BrewerIt is rare to come across a tool that works across all of these browsers but it looks like there is one that can be very helpful. It is a lot like Aardvark meets the Web Developer toolbar. The tool is called XRAY and it is a bookmarklet that you can drag to your links toolbar in order to click and activate it on any web site you want. The tool works by you activating it and then selecting an object on the web page you are on. Once you have selected the object it will give you information about the position, width, height, float, border, margin and padding as well as the exact height and width of the object you have selected while highlighting the entire object. A very handy addition to your web development arsenal.
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The best free web development add-ons for IE 6 and 7
January 21st, 2008 by Dustin BrewerWe have all used the great Firefox extensions that make our lives easier, there are thousands of lists out there of the top 10-15 Firefox extensions for web developers. There is of course a lot of resistance from web developers against using Internet Explorer because of its lack of standards support. A lot of this is carried over from IE 6 being so fundamentally broken at rendering web pages with CSS. There are always time though when we need to test web sites in IE6 or IE7 and just like we use our extensions for development in Firefox— it is a huge help to have add-ons installed for Internet Explorer that will allow us to do our job more effectively.
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Top 10 job boards for freelance web designers
January 17th, 2008 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of job boards out there that can help freelance web designers find work, a lot of them aren’t very good and you can find some clients that expect to pay pennies for hours worth of potential work. The problem you will mostly find is that a lot of people that post jobs on job boards aren’t expecting to pay much. I have compiled a list of freelance job boards for web developers that will allow you, the freelance web designer, to find work that actually pays good enough to be worth your time. Contact me, however, if you are looking for a freelance web designer.
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Top 5 free SEO tools for web developers and marketing professionals
December 18th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of tools out there for web developers and marketers that do all kinds of different things. It is hard to know what is important and what isn’t important when you are using some of the tools available. When it comes down to it, the best way to get search traffic is to get more links to your site. But once you have those links coming in, you have to make sure that you have relevant content to ensure that the search robots (and your visitors!) know what your site is about and where the content is located. But don’t over do it, keep it simple stupid applies to search marketing also.
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Finding inspiration for a color scheme
December 12th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerWe all have our different practices that we use for starting a design of any kind. Sometimes we start with paper and pen or sometimes we may even jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and begin tossing around ideas. One step we can’t skip though is choosing the right color scheme for our design. It is always important to ensure that we understand the color we use in our design. Whether our design be a web site design or print work the color combination we choose is one of the most important choices. In order to ensure that we have a combination that will work well there is always some research that may be done. Especially when it comes to designing a logo or doing branding for a company.
There are several web sites available for designers from Oklahoma to Japan to find color schemes that will match their client’s or own design ideas. There is even color software available for web designers to use for pulling color from images.
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Aptana has come out of beta with Aptana Studio 1.0
October 30th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI have previously mentioned my use of Aptana IDE as a replacement for Dreamweaver, not for any point and click interface but to simplify my coding. The biggest part of my editor that I need to be easy and straightforward is a simple auto-complete and key board shortcuts for code snippets. There are other features that are important to me like memory management and interface design but they aren’t quite as important as the previous two. Read more »
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
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