BaseKit

8th September 2010

One of the most difficult aspects of being a freelance web designer is finding and maintaining a steady stream of work. This is especially true for newbie freelancers, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to sit back and wait for projects to find you – this will almost never happen, at least not when you are starting out.

There are a number of different ways you can go about finding work.

Create a website

First things first, create a website so that you can showcase your work professionally with a killer portfolio. In order to attract visitors to your site, embed widgets that connect to your blog and social network sites. If you are not sure how to build a website don’t worry, because there are many web hosting platforms out there that are able to help you build a website easily, such as Basekit which enables you to build a personalized web site without any coding.

There is very little point in creating a killer portfolio site if you are not driving traffic and potential clients towards it. One of the best ways to get more visitors to your site is to start and maintain a blog. Not only is a regularly updated content great for SEO, but it also shows potential clients that you are knowledgeable in your field.

A blog can be used to start discussions with fellow designers and developers, all of which may be a potential source of work for you in the future.Do you specialise in or have knowledge of a particular industry that is not directly related to design? Writing articles on these types of subjects may also help bring less technical potential clients to your site, since you already know a lot about their field they may just approach you for their next web project.

Utilise social media

Everyone is trying to use social media to promote their business and freelancers are no different. The problem is that a lot of people are unaware of the best ways to fully exploit the benefits of social media. Of all the social media sites that are available, these are the main three that you should use:

1. Twitter

The mistake a lot of people make is to just follow other designers and to tweet useful design related links. Whilst this is a great way to learn from others and to contribute to the community, it’s not going to help you find much work. Try to get involved in discussions, with both designers and people in a particular field you are interested in. For example if you are passionate about gaming or fashion, get involved in discussions with industry experts whilst letting them know what you do. It may lead to
potential new clients.

Another way to utilise the power of Twitter is to benefit from tools such as TweepSearch and NoisyRobin. TweepSearch allows you to search the profiles of fellow users to help you find people to follow, for example you could search for the creative directors of design studios in your area, no doubt these are great contacts to have.

NoisyRobin searches individual tweets and emails you information. The next time somebody tweets the immortal words ‘I’m looking for a freelance web designer’ you could be the first to know!

2.Facebook

Update your profile, let all of your friends know what you do for a living. Create a page promoting your business and invite all your friends to become fans. The efficiency and effectiveness of word of mouth has never been better thanks to Facebook. Put pictures of your work online for all to see, but just make sure that picture of you and your 3am kebab is not visible to everyone!

3. Linkedin

Like Twitter, a lot of people don’t know how to take full advantage of Linkedin. Linkedin is so much more than making a few connections and hoping they’ll maybe one day turn into potential clients. You can use it as a search tool to find future clients,
search Q&A to contribute and share your knowledge, you can integrate your blog, start discussions and even become a member of the hundreds of groups. It’s worth spending a few hours getting to grips with Linkedin – it has been a greater source of traffic to my site than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Comment on Blogs

This doesn’t mean commenting on blogs just for the sake of it. As a designer, you probably spend a good chunk of time reading design blogs anyway – if you have an opinion then it’s worth spending a few minutes making a comment. Not only will this help increase traffic to your site but commenting on blogs is also a form of networking. You are contributing to
discussions and letting a wider audience know what you are talking about.

Like I mentioned earlier in regards to your own blog and people you follow on Twitter – try to expand into commenting on a broader range of subjects – you never know who might be reading!

Targeted Email Campaign

It is worth spending time compiling a list of local businesses in your area, along with email addresses. Whether that means searching the Yellow Pages, local papers or business directories, it’s a good idea to build a list of potential local companies who could benefit from your services. You can even export your Linkedin contacts into a csv file to add to your mailing list.

Then simply send out an email to all the businesses informing them of the services you offer and a link to your portfolio. Sure it takes a good amount of time to build up a quality mailing list, but you’d be surprised at the results you do it right.

Flyers, Leaflets & Business Cards

Don’t underestimate the power of traditional marketing methods. A well placed flyer in the window of a local computer shop can do wonders for promoting your business locally.

What methods do you use to promote your freelance business?

This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!

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19th August 2010

Big news today for you fellow Basekiteers! The Gold release is out and ready for you to try out.

The Gold release, despite the name, is in no way our final or complete release. It is, however, still pure gold. In some ways we consider it the “social” release – we’re adding a number of new features to help you share your BaseKit sites with your friends and get them to benefit from BaseKit, through our brand new referral program. Other features of the Gold release include:

• Ability to build HTML5 and CSS3 enabled sites through BaseKit

• Instant Twitter updates

• A whole lot of new CSS styling controls

• Open Themes

• Selective Page Publication

• Additional video support

• Multi select and delete Image/files en masse

• PSD Downloads of Themes

To check these all out in greater detail read the notes below.

We’ve also deployed our first private beta widget to the BaseKit Beta Program. We’re continuing to develop incredible new widgets for BaseKit behind the scenes, and some of these need some testing in the semi-wild before we release them publicly. We only release these to our Beta Program, a select group of BaseKit enthusiasts. If you’re interested in joining the program, check it out. The new widget we’re working on should be one of the most powerful in BaseKit, so after we get some feedback from our community look for it coming soon to everyone!

Finally, we’re kicking off a long term initiative to make BaseKit the best online service to build HTML5 and CSS3 enabled sites. The shift to HTML5 and CSS3 looks to be one of the more exciting developments in the web space, and we’re fascinated to see what the BaseKit community comes up with when given these powerful tools through our user friendly GUI. Stay posted for more information as this develops – we’ll have more news on HTML5 soon – but you’ll be able to start using some of the new CSS3 tags immediately.

Without further ado, the major items :

Friend Referral Program: You enjoy using BaseKit and so might your friends too! We’ve now made it simple for you to get them on board and try out our Basekit. If you’re an active BaseKit user, you can now invite your friends directly from the dashboard in the “what’s new” section. If you don’t see it, you probably haven’t been that active, but you can always reach the referral board by logging into your BaseKit Dashboard -> Account.

The best part? refer friends to BaseKit and you and your friends get a one month free trial of a BaseKit Basic Account or £5 ($8) off if you’re already a BaseKit subscriber.

Twitter Updates: You can already pull in Twitter feeds to any BaseKit site using the Twitter widget and as of today you’re able to  notify your Twitter followers of your latest BaseKit creation. Just publish any site, and you’ll be prompted to connect with your Twitter account. Then, whenever you publish updates, opt to notify your friends automatically (or not, if it’s a minor update).

CSS3: We’ve added a whole host of new styling controls that you can find on the Text Widget -> Styles tab. These enable you to apply some of the new CSS3 items to your CSS elements. You can add shadows, gradient backgrounds, rotations, scales, skews and more and more at the drag of a slider. While not technically CSS3, we’ve also added fine-grained control over borders, which was a commonly requested item, while throwing in the CSS3 for rounded corners. By rounding each corner style independently (easy in BaseKit!) you can get some very cool asymmetric effects. This functionality should also give you a preview of how we’ll be integrating this functionality across other pieces of BaseKit soon! Here is a preview of the CSS3 controls:

Open Themes: Themes remain one of the most popular ways to try BaseKit, giving you a fully functional site to deploy, play with (or rip apart and redesign) as soon as you start. In addition, we’ve received many requests from our community members who don’t use Photoshop, but just want to set up a great looking site from scratch. So, our design team has been hard at work building a number of “open” themes. These are full design templates, all with at least 3 colour variations, that let you start a new BaseKit site with background graphics and regions, but nothing else. Build up your pages, layouts, widgets and more just as you’ve envisioned.

Here is a sneak preview of one of the open themes:

And some more minor updates:

Selective Page Publication (ie, draft pages): You can now specify a page to remain in a draft state. This means this page will not be updated to the live version of your site when you hit “Publish” – allowing you to work on new versions or long term projects on live pages without having to hold off on publishing your site. Here at BaseKit, we use it in particularly on our homepage. Since all of BaseKit.com is built in BaseKit, we have a huge number of pages that are updated daily. By leaving our homepage and other major pages in “draft” state, we ensure that they never get accidentally republished with in-progress work. Access this through the Page Options in the BaseKit editor.

More Video Support: We’ve already supported embedding some of the leading video platforms – YouTube, Vimeo, Google- inaddition, we’re now supporting new services, such as Facebook, UStream live video feeds, MetaCafe, Veoh and Blip.TV. You can drop the embed code for these services directly into the Video widget, or  just the direct URL which we’ll convert to embed code . Note that Facebook videos will need to be full public access to ensure they can be played on site.

Mass Delete on Images/Files: A common request on our team and some prolific BaseKit users, since sometimes you end up with huge numbers of images and file uploads in the media manager. Now you can multiselect and delete these en masse.

PSD Downloads of Themes: We’re making all the PSDs we use for creating the themes you find in our Theme Selector available for download. You’ll be able to see a big variety of BaseKit ready PSDs, as well as tweak your favourites in Photoshop and then re-import the new PSD. Enjoy!

That’s about it. As always, another busy release for us here at BaseKit. But we’re impatient, and ALWAYS moving quickly to provide you maximum design in the minimum time. Your feedback is what matters, to help us shape the future of BaseKit. Feel free to share with us your views, opinons and experiences through any of our community or support channels – we’re always listening.

To see the Gold release features in action watch the video below:

This post was written by Ryan Kikis at BaseKit

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2nd August 2010

The first in a new series covering the leading lights on Twitter. Here are the people to follow on the micro-blogging site whose updates we consider a cut above the norm – whether they link to brilliant content that all news providers and web-addicts should get first dibs on, provide their own great content for others to view or even if they’re just able to be LOL funny in just under 140 characters.

We’ll give you a heads up so that you can go to their profile and click the ‘follow’ button, safe in the knowledge that they really are part of an elite group of Tweeters worthy of a your time.

One thing, however – don’t expect a follow-back from any of these folk. They’re all far too busy to be wasting their time mucking about with responses in 140 characters. As most find out soon enough, the celebrated tend to go to Twitter more to be heard than to engage socially.

Having said that, we’ll also be adding Tweeters who aren’t necessarily famous out side of the Twittersphere, so read on and get following.

Stephen Fry

It’s obvious, it’s accepted, it’s almost cliché, but if you’re not following Fry, then you’re not following the site’s most famous Uncle. Formerly one half of Fry and Laurie, Stephen Fry’s been working his way to national treasure status by way of brilliant performances in Blackadder and a number of decent films – and by now he’s pretty much set himself up as everyone’s introduction to Twitter.

One of the first demonstrations of Twitter’s power, for many people, occurred when Fry became stranded in a motionless lift and communicated that problem, with photos taken on his iPhone, to the world at large. This minor incident served as a lesson in how Twitter can be used to report news instantly to a massive readership, and there’s an argument that this one elevator palaver actually kickstarted the Michael Jackson and Iran election reportage that followed. A true Twitter pioneer.

Sample Tweet: Oh lor. O crikey. Heckamighty. Lumme. Cripes and botty. *gulp*
(sent during the England v Slovenia game, World Cup 2010)

Roger Ebert

A massively-respected film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, Ebert has also worked in TV and is considered a critical God in America. His website is worth a look alone, but he also shines on Twitter.

As well as linking to his latest reviews, since having his lower mandible removed due to cancer, Ebert has been pounding his keyboard heavily ever since, in constant communication with his followers. Whether he’s telling you about the latest review or his latest medical news, his tweets and links are at once touching, amusing and sweet.

Sample Tweet: Woody Allen picks the six best woody Allen Films, and is wrong. http://dld.bz/j5Hq

Peter Serafinowicz

Known to comedy fans as the character Dwayne Bensey in Spaced, or as the creator of Look Around You, and even known to sci fi fans as the voice of Darth Maul, the man with the intensely hard to spell surname is a man of many talents, but for me, Twitter is where he really shines.

Serafinowicz seems to use Twitter as a notebook for storing half-ideas and one-liners. A quarter of the time these are unremarkable, but far more often than not he comes out with some absolute gems – often asking his followers for inspiration in the form of bizarre questions and single word muses.

Sample Tweet: The bottom line is this: the crease between the buttocks

David Lynch

If you’ve not heard of David Lynch, then I despair. Seriously, if the name doesn’t even ring a vague bell, you should probably get hold of Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and every other masterpiece he’s made in the world of cinema, watch them, then come back here…

…Back? Good. So David Lynch was an unexpected arrival on Twitter, but he certainly brightens up the Twittersphere with his detailed, precise weather reports and also some truly bizarre and heartwarming weirdness.

Only recently I found myself baffled but won over when Lynch tweeted ‘This week I’m going to find out if I’m connected to the moon’, before I saw, a couple of days later, that he’d followed up with

‘I’m pretty sure I’m connected to the moon’.

Gnomic, enigmatic, clever, silly – a lot like his best films.

Sample Tweet: It really is about how we feel when we wake up in the morning and head off to do whatever we do.

Charlie Brooker

A well-kept secret here until his Bush taunts and evangelism for HBO series the Wire made him big news overseas, Brooker is now the host of three or four separate TV shows and still maintains his famously scathing Screen Burn TV criticism column in the Guardian. The workaholic’s also added another Monday column to his workload, so it’s a wonder he ever finds time to tweet his brain-missives to his thousands and thousands of followers.

But tweet he does, and his 140 character sound-bites are often as amusing as lines in his newspaper pieces. To his immense credit, he also engages with his audience, which is rare in celebrities on the site.

Sample Tweet: Ice duvets. Why haven’t we invented ice duvets yet? Icy clouds that wrap round you and slowly evaporate in the night. Come on, scientists.

And, finally, one not to follow:

Ashton Kutcher

We love Dude, Where’s My Car as much as the next moron, but Kutcher doesn’t really do himself any favours with his tweets. Since the infamous upskirt twitpic he uploaded of partner Demi Moore’s behind, the imbecility hasn’t really lifted. He may nearly have more followers than Jesus, but Kutcher’s feed is one to avoid.

Sample Tweet: Y is it that every time some1 does an act of charity on twitter, vampires come out, call u an Ahole & complain abt what u r not doin 4 them?

Seriously – who types / texts like that these days?

This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. Which is another great way to waste your day. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.

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28th July 2010

I quite often get asked by friends if I had to take a course to be a web designer and how I got into the industry. My background is quite similar to that of many web designers in that I never had any kind of formal education in design or indeed an art or technology related degree.

When I finished college I had no idea what I wanted to do career wise but knew that I wanted to go to University – so I took the best course that my A-Level grades would allow. I ended up studying Law at the University of Liverpool, although I never really enjoyed it, this is where I first discovered my love of the web and design. A friend of mine was studying Animation and showed me a few pieces of his work in Flash. Now being the geek that I am, I knew I just had to have a go for myself. After scouring the web for Flash tutorials, I discovered Photoshop tutorials. Flash quickly got put to one side and I became pretty much addicted to experimenting in everything from Photo manipulation techniques to creating web layouts. This then turned into reading up on User Interaction, Usability & Accessibility and learning to hand code HTML and CSS – when I should have been reading up on Criminal Evidence and admissibility. I finished my degree, but I knew that a career in Law wasn’t for me and that I wanted to be a web designer. I managed (after various jobs) to land a role in a small IT Team as a designer. After that everything thing else just seemed to fall into place.

I’m entirely self-taught when it comes to web design (like many others) and it just goes to show that you don’t necessarily have to have a formal education in design to get into the industry. With enough hard work and determination you can make it as a designer, even with no formal training.

Make sure you Enjoy It

As much as I love design, there are times when it can really get you down, whether it’s an overly picky client or you’re feeling particularly uninspired. My point is, make sure that your love of design is strong enough to see you get through these times. Like any career, if you don’t love what you do then you will never be the best that you can be.

Learn Photoshop

Photoshop is the tool you will use the most during your web design career, so it makes sense to fully understand it. Photoshop is so versatile that it can be picked up relatively quickly but takes a really long time to fully master. The best way to learn Photoshop is to follow as many tutorials as possible, but don’t just limit yourself to web layout tutorials – I’ve learned techniques from Photo Touch up tutorials that I’ve been able to use when designing web layouts.
The most important part of following tutorials is to understand the steps and the techniques used, for example if the tutorial is telling you to apply a certain layer style try to understand what that particular function does and why it was used. Pay attention to the steps involved, don’t just mindlessly follow the tutorial otherwise you’re not really learning anything.

Once you’re starting to get the hang of Photoshop, maybe instead of just following tutorials you can experiment and put your own twist on them. One of the best ways to get your head around Photoshop is to experiment with all the different tools to understand what they do and how they can be used together. You can find some great tutorials on www.psd.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/ and www.good-tutorials.com

Get on Twitter

If you haven’t got a twitter account get one and get involved with the design community. I’d start off by following some of the more experienced designers and maybe even design studios. One of the great things about the design community is that everyone is willing to help each other out, if you’re having trouble or need help with something, send out a Tweet and you can guarantee that someone will get back to you with some advice.

The other great thing about following other designers on Twitter is that they regularly tweet links to articles on the latest technologies, design trends, best practices and tutorials.

Try following some of the designers on lists like these: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/designers-on-twitter/

Swot up by Reading Web Design Articles & Books

Being a web designer is so much more than learning how to use Photoshop and making things look “nice”. There’s so much to consider when designing a website: Usability; Accessibility; Colour Theory; Grid Systems; Wireframing; User Experience and User Interaction to name but a few. Smashing Magazine is a great resource for all things web design and development. Another useful resource is Sitepoint which contains some really good articles on design principles and hand coding should you decide to learn to code.

Learn or at least be aware of HTML and CSS

With tools such as the Basekit Web Site Builder you don’t necessarily need to learn how to hand code HTML & CSS in order to create stunning websites, but another string in the bow and all that. A good understanding of HTML & CSS will not only give you a better insight into how websites are built, it will also help you in your designs as you will begin to realise what is and isn’t possible with HTML & CSS when coming up with design concepts.

Although the Basekit Web Site Builder is great for building new websites, if you want to work with clients who already have an existing website you would need to know HTML & CSS. By knowing how to hand code HTML and CSS you will open yourself up to a wider range of projects in the long run.

Stick with it

When you are first starting out, it is difficult – very difficult. There is so much to take in and learn that it is easy to feel overwhelmed, especially when you take a look at the portfolios of some of the more experienced designers. I wrote a post for BaseKit a few months ago, which is definitely worth a read if you are new to the web design industry – The Newbie Designer Confidence Killer.

Design and Build a Portfolio Site

Once you’ve learned the basics by following tutorials and reading articles, it’s time to put your new found skills to new use by building a portfolio site. Even though you may not have any commercial projects that you can showcase, you can always work on some personal projects that you can show off to potential clients. The Basekit Web Site Builder would be the perfect tool to build your first portfolio site!

This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!

Picture from Flickr user Helen Olney

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