4 Reasons You Should Add Photos or Illustrations to Every Blog Post

Humor me for a moment and go dig out a copy of the White Pages — you remember, it’s that 10-pound behemoth gathering dust under the sink. Now, flip it open to any page and tell me the truth? Are you pulled into the content? Do you have any desire to continue reading or have you already closed it up and moved on to the next thing?

Online or offline, people constantly come across content and make a split-second decision about whether to stay or go. Often, the decision is made before the content is even assessed. It’s a sub-concious decision to leave based purely on looks. Read more

9 Stand-Out Real Estate Themes for WordPress

A friend of mine just earned his real estate license and now he’s in the process of setting up office online. He’s already familiar with WordPress, so he came to me and asked if I had any advice on using WordPress for a real estate website. WordPress is really the hot ticket for building real estate site right now, which is both good and bad.

On the one hand, the demand for real estate themes and plugins has encouraged innovation among developers and they’re coming up with some pretty neat tools for agents to use when managing their properties online. On the other hand, you want to make sure that your website stands out from the crowd of similarly-themed websites so that you can attract clients and impress them with your marketing skills and web savvy. For an agent, a good website shows potential clients that they have 21st century skills and can do what it takes to sell a home in this tough market.

So, in answer to his question I rounded up a list of the top WordPress themes for building a real estate website that is sure to stand out in a crowd and help you—and your listings—get noticed. Read more

9 Email Designs for Content-Heavy Newsletters

I’ve recently been working on a project to design a daily email newsletter that will be powered by MailChimp’s RSS to Email option. In some ways using RSS limits the design, however by automating the email campaign the site owner can focus on creating content rather than delivering content.

The challenge for this email campaign is to create a template that can accommodate between 4 and 8 articles with photos and summaries, a spot for advertising, branding options and of course space for all the “required” information to be can-spam compliant. Oh yeah, the content all needs to fit together elegantly and encourage users to take action by visiting the site, bookmarking an article, etc. What’s the best way to fit that much information in an email and keep it organized?

I went looking for inspiration on Emailium, and found a collection of content-heavy email designs proving that it is indeed possible to fit a mountain of information into a document no more than 600 pixels wide. Want to be inspired, too? Check out this list of email designs for content-heavy newsletters and publishing sites.

Read more

Browse Email Marketing Campaigns on Emailium for Inspiration and Ideas

Emailium, an inspiration database for designers who create email marketing campaigns, opened their public beta today. The site is free to join for now, although it makes no mention of what the prices might be once the public beta is over.

The company describes itself as “A filterable, sortable, categorizable, global database of email campaigns for competitive research, design inspiration and industry analysis.” In other words, Emailium is to email marketing what cssmania.com is to web design. Read more

Design Creative Holiday Gifts for Your Clients

As a freelancer, you are in charge of everything—from invoicing and collections to fun stuff like giving yourself an annual bonus. So, when it comes to giving holiday gifts to your clients, the choice is entirely yours. On the one hand, most clients don’t expect to receive gifts from small vendors or independent contractors. On the other hand, unexpected extras are a great way to remind your clients why they love you.

Just one note of caution: Don’t fall into the trap of “promotional gifts.” Nobody wants to receive a gift that is an obvious gimmick. Steer clear of the cheap and cheesy. This means: No refrigerator magnets; No desk calendars with your logo on the front; and by all means, please, no plastic letter openers. These things aren’t gifts they’re marketing. I’m not saying that promotional gifts don’t have their place, we all love free schwag, but holiday gifts shouldn’t scream “Look at me!”

Instead, give your clients something that shows how creative you can be without looking like an advertisement—in other words, something they’ll appreciate that won’t wind up in the garbage the minute after they open it. Here are some unique gift ideas for clients to spark your imagination. Read more

Design is in the Details: Using CSS Selection Pseudo-Classes to Declare Your Team Spirit

I’m hesitant to admit it, but I’m not a huge football fan. My boyfriend, however, loves “his” team — the USC Trojans. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that football fans will use any excuse to dress up or decorate with their team colors. Actually, real fans don’t even need a reason to show team spirit.

So, in honor of football fans everywhere and to kick off the fall football season in America, I thought it would be fun to show how to use one of the new tools in CSS3 to decorate a web page with your team colors. Let’s play with the selection declaration.

There are many neat design tricks in CSS3. The selection declaration — ::selection — is a quick way to add some polish onto a design and give a website the “wow” factor that really makes clients happy. Using a .selection class can override the operating system’s default highlight color with any color you specify.

As with so many of the best html and css goodies, browser support varies. Safari and Firefox both recognize the selection declaration, but you’ll need to implement the code a bit differently for each browser. Here’s how to use CSS3′s new selection declaration to add a dash of unexpected color to your web design. Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »