Articles - Page 142

Reviews / 15 Mar 2018

Build a Website for Any Business With Wix

Different business niches have completely different requirements when it comes to their website. Restaurants need a booking and menu system, musicians need support for playing their tracks, photographers need a beautiful gallery.

No matter what business area you’re currently working on a project for, it’s worth taking a look at what Wix has to offer. They have a range of professional designs and functionality to use a range of businesses—large and small.

Today we’re taking a quick look at the features and templates on offer, whether it’s for your business, portfolio – or for a client.

Software / 12 Mar 2018

10 Best Safari Extensions for Web Designers & Developers

Apple’s Safari web browser is beloved by many Apple and Mac enthusiasts. It’s a solid alternative to Chrome (and often does a great job on the privacy and security front). There are some great Safari extensions that can help designers increase their productivity, and create a better browsing experience.

You can find all of these extensions in Apple’s extensions gallery, but we’ve curated some of our favorites below. Whether you’re wanting to improve your typeface recognition, understand what’s powering a website behind the scenes, or better check your grammar—we’ve got you covered!

Business / 7 Mar 2018

8 Ideas for Creating Evergreen Website Content

Developing evergreen content for your website is an important element in your overall strategy. Evergreen content is information – pages or blog content – that remain relevant and don’t get old. It’s a practical approach to making your investment in content pay off long-term.

The best evergreen content is directly related to the core information on your website. It complements more timely news and information and can help boost search rankings over time as well. But you can’t just post and forget about it; even evergreen content will need the occasional update to ensure that it remains relevant over time.

Here are eight ways to create evergreen website content (with examples of websites that are doing it well).

Business / 6 Mar 2018

15+ Quick Tips to Improve Your Design Portfolio

If you’re like many designers, you’ve had every intention of updating your design portfolio — for the last two years at least. But procrastinating on your portfolio is a mistake. You never know what opportunities you could be missing out on because someone landed on your tired, old portfolio.

As the co-founder of Semplice, a portfolio system for designers, I’ve learned how crucial a portfolio is to getting new work. And the only thing worse than not having a design portfolio is having one that’s poorly made or out of date. Here are some quick tips to refresh your portfolio and start getting more of the work you want to do.

Typography / 5 Mar 2018

Serif, Sans, Script & Slab: 4 Font Types Explained

Always wanted to know the difference between serif, sans, script, and slab fonts? Look no further. Take your typography game to the next level, and quit guessing if certain typefaces or font pairs work together. Back your logic with a little design theory!

Having a better knowledge of fonts and typography can make explaining your choices to clients easier (always a bonus), and will give you more confidence when selecting font pairs. Here’s a primer (or refresher) on four common font types and how to use them in your design projects.

Reviews / 2 Mar 2018

5 Reasons to Be Counting Your Words

Almost everyone is a writer in some way. Whether you’re crafting copy for a website, working on a paper for a class, or a content marketing professional trying to develop the perfect tweet, Word Counter is a tool that can make your life easier.

A good word counter helps you stay on target with your writing without wasting time trying to guess how much you’ve written by eyeballing it on the screen (or even worse, counting words manually.)

If your writing tools don’t have built in word counters (or you want something a bit more powerful), we’ve got a helpful suggestion for you.

Business / 28 Feb 2018

6 Finance Apps for Your Freelance Business

A great set of financial apps and tools can make it easier to manage your freelance business. From tracking receipts and invoices for clients, to making sure you’re ready for tax season and have all your expenses accounted for. There are plenty of great apps to help you manage your freelance business.

Characteristics of great finance apps are that they are secure, cloud-based, include automation tools to help you work more efficiently, are affordable, come with financial accounting and reporting that you can understand and customer support when you need it. All of the apps on this list fit the bill.

CSS / 26 Feb 2018

13 Best Ways to Learn CSS Grid

CSS Grid an increasingly popular method for creating complex responsive web design layouts that render more consistently across browsers. Now is the time to familiarize yourself with CSS Grid, so we’ve collected 13 of the best ways to get started learning today.

Rather than old-school methods such as tables or the box model, CSS Grid allows you to create more asymmetrical layouts and more standardized code that is cross-browser compatible. Most major website browsers already support CSS Grid and it is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, which would formalize it as a standard practice. It’s widely believed that CSS Grid will be the future of website layouts.

Reviews / 26 Feb 2018

Wix Code Review: Building Web Apps With Ease

One of the common problems most front-end web designers face is building the back-end of website projects. Usually, designers have to team up with web developers to work on projects such as web apps and eCommerce platforms.

What if there was a way to easily design both the front-end and back-ends of websites such as checkout systems, membership databases, web apps, and more, in a user-friendly and approachable way? Well, that’s exactly what Wix Code does. Let’s take a closer look.

Mobile / 21 Feb 2018

5 Fun Augmented Reality Apps for Design Inspiration

Augmented reality is a growing trend in application design and development. Apple has invested in the technology with recent updates (ARKit), and plans to include even more AR features. So how do you start planning to design for augmented reality?

It starts with playing with apps already on the market to see how they work. What do you like (or dislike)? Here are five AR apps to help jumpstart your design inspiration and hopefully get you thinking about this next generation technology. (And how to make it look great and function well.)

Typography / 14 Feb 2018

How to Design Readable Content for the Web

Designing content is more than just making something look great. You have to create a design that people will actually read, and help them engage with the content. Sometimes, that’s easier said than done.

People generally have short attention spans, and you shouldn’t expect them to digest every word on the screen. But you can use certain design techniques and elements to help users read as much as possible.

Business / 12 Feb 2018

20 DIY Projects to Improve Your Freelance Office

A creative workspace is good for your creativity. That’s why companies such as Apple and Google have open and innovative workspaces. While you probably don’t have that kind of budget, there are some great DIY projects you can take on to improve your freelance or home office!

So grab your hammer, paint and creative thinking to make your workspace somewhere you’ll want to spend most of the day. Some of these projects take a few minutes, some a few hours, or some a few weeks or months. But it’s a great starting point for some creative thinking!