Archive for March, 2010
5 Websites & Tools Bloggers Should Know About
While the job is interesting and one gets to discover the latest about the Internet, blogging is no easy task. “Time is money” could not be any truer for bloggers; impossible deadlines put us under harsh time constraints. Due to this constraint, bloggers are always actively on the lookout for the next great tool that can help us cut back on the time it takes to write our articles/reviews.
Bloggers who run their own website, on the other hand, are not under any critical deadlines – their worries are of a different nature. Taking constant care of their website and monitoring it is an absolute must for them; if a site owner’s website unexpectedly goes down, his/her income will be negatively affected.
Therefore one way or the other, all bloggers have problems whether they are self-employed, freelancing, or fulltime employed. They need all the help they can get.
Today we present to our fellow bloggers five tools available on the internet which will help them in one way or the other. We hope you all find the following tools as helpful as we did.
You are welcome to share if you know more useful tools which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
1. DomainTools
For somebody who plans to start out his/her own website, the first most important step is to come up with a great name. Once the great name has been thought of, one needs to check its availability. DomainTools is a free website that does both things. Firstly it can suggest various names to a user by taking as input a keyword. Secondly it shows us which domain extensions (COM, NET, etc.) is the site name available. If a user wishes, he/she can buy and register the domain name right from the site. In this way, DomainTools eventually saves us a lot of time in the process of naming our website.
2. WhoisLookup/WhoisApplication
WhoisLookup is a freeware application less than 100KB in size. The EXE file is downloaded and can be run without any installation. In the program we can enter the URL of a site and get its Whois information which shows us the site’s various attributes such as its registrar’s information, the location of the site, and the details of its administrator. Whois specifics can help out a great deal when trying to determine which website to blog about. To some extent, it can also show us whether or not the site’s claimed location matches its actual location; this helps us judge the trueness of the website’s credentials.
3. dnspchecker
This nifty little freeware is about 3MB to download and is helpful in determining the status of a website. It is compatible with Linux and Windows operating systems. After we enter a URL into the program, it uses ping command to see if the DNS is live. In other words you can see if a site is up or not. A successful message is show each time the site if up; if the site is down or a valid response could not be received then it automatically checks the site every 60 seconds. This way we do not have to recheck the status of the site each minute (because it is automatically being done for us). To have it not interfere with our work, the program can be minimized to the System Tray and gives an alert when DNS is propagated.
4. Observu
dnschecker can only help you if you have it installed on your system. If you are using a computer on which you do not have the privilege to install new programs and you would like to check the status of your websites, the only way that comes to mind is by actually visiting the website in your internet browser. If the number of websites is more than one then the process could be considerably time consuming. Observu is a free website that lets us register for a free account and enter an unlimited number of websites to be automatically monitored. If any one of them goes down, we are immediately emailed of its negative status. There is no limit to the number of sites we want monitored. Observu can be helpful not only for site owners but also for bloggers who have reviewed a website and want to stay informed of its status. For instance John, a blogger, blogs about www.XYZABC123.com and he is emailed of its negative status the next month; upon receiving the notification, John can updates his previous review and add a note saying that the site is currently experiencing problems and is down. Such responsibility can go a long way and earn loyal readers.
5. BlogDesk
WordPress is a blogging platform used by many bloggers. Other widely used platforms are MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine. To blog in these platforms, we open up our internet browser window, log into our blogging Dashboard and get started. With the latest platforms we can save our work as we go along but having the data secure on our hard drive is something that most bloggers find comfortable. Also while typing on these platforms, one has to go through special means while inserting hyperlinks and pictures. BlogDesk is a 4MB freeware program that eliminates all the problems associated with typing our blogs on these platforms. It is a desktop application that enables us to type up our blog offline with ease. When we want to publish the article, we can simply blog from BlogDesk directly. The abovementioned blogging platforms are supported by the program. But before you go using it, make sure its option is enabled in the online settings of your blogging platform.
DotNetNuke Makes It Easier For You To Build Feature-Rich, Interactive Web Sites And Applications
DotNetNuke Community Edition is a leading free open-source content management system for ASP.NET websites. With DotNetNuke, you can quickly and effectively deploy dynamic web applications with almost no technical knowledge, however if you are an ASP.NET developer, you can customize it in the way you want to fulfill your specific needs. Whether you need to deploy a simple website or a feature-rich dynamic application, DotNetNuke cater your needs in the way you want.
Unlike legacy web applications, you don’t need services of a web developer in order to make changes in your content and locations of different modules. You can easily achieve this task on-the-fly by logging into the administration control panel.
Since DotNetNuke is open-source, you can enhance and extend the functionality of it if you are familiar with ASP.NET programming. In addition to the existing modules in DotNetNuke, you can develop custom modules over it or use from a number of pre-developed modules by different third party vendors to extend the functionality as per your business needs.
DotNetNuke is the world’s most widely adopted framework for building web applications on Microsoft Windows platform. DotNetNuke powers over 500,000 portals, web applications and public web sites. It has a large open-source community to support the development of the system. Furthermore, you can find number of help and support resources and books that help you find solutions to your problems while you work.
The Ultimate (Fresh) Collection Of High-Quality Free Social Media Icon Sets
A beautifully designed icon is the perfect way to represent your product or service, and they always come in handy whether you want to place them on your blog or want to represent yourself in an outstanding manner. A comprehensively designed icon can provide your user with the memorable metaphors and illustrations, even sometimes users only remember the icon they saw on the website.
Here we have compiled a list of some outstanding and beautifully designed FREE and FRESH 50 Sets of Social Media Icons such as digg icons, stumbleupon icons, reddit icons, twitter, RSS feed icon, facebook icons and more, so that you can use them on your blog and website. You can also use them in corporate designs as well, Kindly feel free to share your comments with us.
You are welcome if you want to share more free social icon sets that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken.
The icons are designed in 32px and 16px vector format. With the vector format, you can scale the icon to any size to fit with your design or use it in high quality print materials.
Here is a new free social icons vector set, which consists of 16 popular icons, available in both vector and PNG (64×64 pixels) format. Free for any use
Free and Exclusive Icons: Brown Social Icon Pack
In the pack, you will find 12 glossy polished icons in different size variations: 32×32px, 64×64px and 128×128px for maximum flexibility. All files are .PNG format and are mainly brown-colored especially for all you brown fanatic bloggers that like to share posts over the social networks nowadays.
Free Social Network Icons from IconShock
Included icons are for following services. Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious.
Another high quality free Twitter icon set
There are 10 colorful, spacious and unstoppable social trucks at a whopping 512×512 px resolution for you
inFocus Simple White Social Media Icons
Free Grass Textured Social Bookmarking Icon Set
Circular Social Media Icons Repack
There are 10 colorful, spacious and unstoppable social trucks at a whopping 512×512 px resolution for you
inFocus Simple White Social Media Icons
These Iconshock icon set comes in 6 different sizes: 12×12, 16×16, 24×24, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 covering social various social network logos like Blogger, Delicious, Facebook, Flickr, Linked-in, Reddit, RSS feed, Stumble Upon, Technorati and Twitter.
Four social icons for Facebook, RSS, StumbleUpon and Twitter available as 128×128, 64×64 and 48×48 PNGs.
Free Furry Cushions Social Icons Set
A Free Sophisticated Premium Peel Over Icon Set
New & Free Social Media Icon Set For Your Blog
This high quality, hand made, icon pack is full with 20 Extreme Grunge Social Media Garments. Each icon is in .png format with transparent backgrounds, sized at 256×256px. Icons are free for commercial and personal use.
Free Set of 25 Icons from TurboMilk
This set of 25 web icons in 3 sizes was created by Eugene Artsebasov and the illustrious Turbomilk team!
Featuring the PNG goodness you’ve come to love in 3 sizes: small (48 px), pint (64 px) and pitcher (128px).
This set contains 20 200px x 200px PNG files that you can easily resize and edit for your website design.
Social Cubes – Exclusive Vectortuts+ Free Pack
If you’re looking for high-quality social icons for your next web project, then check out these icons. This set of 18 high quality freebies is available to download today! Enjoy!
Free Social Media Icon Set: Chrome
This set includes 19 social networks along with a standard RSS icon in PNG format.
108 Glowing Neon Social Media Icons, 512px * 512px Free for personal and commercial use
This icon set consists of 12 social icons, in PNG and EPS format as well.
Free Set of Social Media Icons
In this set, you will find 23 different icons that is perfect for content-centered websites such as blogs, news sites, etc. You will find PNG, ICO, and BMP file formats of various sizes (up to 512×512px) for ultimate flexibility and usability.
Available in two durable materials, PNG and EPS, at the comfortable size of 128×128 pixels.
A brand new set that consists of 20 3D icons in PNG format (64×64 & 128×128pixels).
Here’s another social icon set from webtoolkit4.me. This time the theme is wood. The set consists of 11 icons in PNG format (64 x 64). It’s free for both personal and commercial projects.
New free social icons sticker set
81 Pixel perfect Social Media Icons
108 Black Inlay on Steel Social Media Icons
Location: Free Social Media Icon Set
Free Set of Social Media Icons – Rivet Social
Stunning Pieces Of Digital Art That Would Make You Say ‘Wow’
This is a post in which we are listing down some Stunning Pieces Of Digital Art That Make You Say ‘Wow’. These are some of the beautiful digital artwork and illustration examples. These are the wonder creations of designers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.
You are welcome to share if you want to share more Digital Art And Illustration For Creative Inspiration that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken.
Skullduggery by by Ng Fhze Yang
Fire flower.. by ~shadow-light13
King of the Ash World by Diane Özdamar
The Monster Nian by Jason Juan
Metamorphosis by Cristiano Siqueira
Let Me Fly To Freedom by *Rockfield
5 Great Extensions To Manage Various Tasks On Google Chrome
From opening a new tab to restoring or saving our session, we perform various tasks in our internet browsers. Sometimes these tasks are present in the browser in an already convenient enough manner to make life easier for the user. But at other times, in the form of extensions and add-ons, third-party developers make these browser tasks easier for us.
Since I use Chrome most of the time, I gathered 5 browser extensions which I think most Chrome users will appreciate. These extensions facilitate users in different ways, from saving our browsing sessions and managing our tabs to letting us choose hotkey shortcuts.
Give the list a thorough reading, try out any extension you are interested in, and let me know in the comments how they worked out for you. You are welcome to share if you know more useful google extension which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
Chrome, like all other modern browsers, supports the usage of multiple browser tabs. While this feature is mostly convenient, it can cause problems if the number of our tabs gets larger. The usual problem faced is finding the right tab when we cannot even view the favicon of the webpage, much less read its title in the tab. Too Many Tabs lets places an icon in our address bar which we can click to view our tabs as cascaded thumbnails; this view makes finding the right tab easier. Custom color schemes and interface designs make Too Many Tabs a great extension to manage tabs in Chrome.
LastPass is a free password manager and form filler which comes in the form of an extension not just for Chrome but also for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari (Mac). While the standalone extension works fine in other browsers, in Chrome we need to download LastPass’s complete windows installer (available here). This tiny extension lets us import and export passwords to and from numerous storage vendors. Supported vendors include RoboForm, 1Password, KeePass, Password Safe, MyPasswordSafe, Sxipper, TurboPasswords, Passpack, Firefox, and Internet Explorer’s built-in password managers.
I personally found Session Manager to be more suited to my own needs. I often have a lot of tabs open when I get involved in a topic. I open up multiple web resources and references for that topic and end with a lot of simultaneously open tabs. Saving them all in the bookmarks will cause bookmark-clutter. Session Manager lets me conveniently save the entire session with a description to accompany it. I can save multiple sessions and restore them any time I want.
If you are looking for a session manager that will work across multiple computers, then FreshStart for Chrome is what will serve your needs best. With this extension, when we save our sessions, we can choose to exclude certain tabs. Our sessions are saved locally in the FreshStart bookmarks folder and synced to the cloud via Google Chrome’s bookmark sync feature. This way we can access our saved sessions on any computer which has Chrome with FreshStart installed.
Shortcut Manager will benefit anybody wanting to set custom hotkeys to various Chrome tasks. We can change the browser default shortcut keys, and assign any bookmarklets or JavaScript actions to our hotkeys. Apart from built-in Chrome actions and the JavaScript actions which can assign, we can also capture the screen and insert our signature on a page.
How to Make a Killer Viral Photo Gallery
This post is by the online imagery experts at Shutterstock, a subscription stock photo agency.
You see photo galleries all over the web: The top 10 such-and-such photos, or 25 amazing this-or-that pictures. If you’re like us, you click on almost every one of them. Themed photo galleries on blogs work for a simple reason: Almost everyone appreciates great pictures and enjoys sharing them with friends. If you can dream up a good theme, write a good headline, and deliver a payoff of stunning visuals, you’ve got a viral hit on your hands.
The difficulty is getting the pictures legally and fairly. You could look for photos on Flickr or Google Images, but you face some time-consuming work: making sure you have permission to republish the pictures. Usually this means contacting every photographer or their agents individually. Some photographers will be delighted that you’re sharing their work, but others will be offended if you fail to give them a say in how the work is presented (or, of course, pay them for it). With rare exceptions (such as NASA images and very old photos), every photograph is copyrighted unless the rights holder says otherwise. You’ve probably read stories about web sites that have had to pull content offline after complaints or legal action from photographers. You don’t want to be in that position.
This tutorial will teach you how to use a stock image library to find images you can legally and safely use on a blog. Obviously, we’d love it if you get your images from Shutterstock (Spoiler alert: There’s a coupon at the end of the article) but we hope you find this information useful even if you don’t. This tutorial offers some basic guidelines for image searching and selection, and assumes you’re already familiar with the fundamentals of blogging and have access to Adobe Photoshop. Let’s get started on building a viral photo gallery for your blog.
1. Come up with an idea and a title.
Pictures of lightning? Underwater scenes? Ugly pets? Things with spots? Get creative, but keep in mind some ideas naturally lend themselves to great photographs. For this tutorial, we’re going to put together a gallery of pictures of impressive bridges. Your title should be short, catchy and as bold as possible without overpromising. Remember, this will be what people see in RSS feeds and social networking sites, so it should make it obvious that it’s a photo gallery. Audiences also respond well to titles that specify a number of images, so they know they’re not about to be overwhelmed with somebody’s collection of 1,000 vacation snapshots. For this exercise, let’s go with the title “Photo Gallery: The World’s 5 Most Beautiful Bridges.” (We might go with 10 or 20 pictures on a blog, but here we want to keep it short.)
2. Visit a stock library and start searching.
When you first start to search, you might be overwhelmed with your choices. If you type “bridge” into Shutterstock, you’ll get more than 65,000 results, including both illustrations and images. You can refine your search by limiting it to just photos and sorting the results by the most popular images. As you get a feel for what kinds of images are in the library, you might want to add more keywords, like “river” or “night” or “suspension.” If you see a picture you really like, you can display images similar to it by clicking on the similar images icon that appears below each thumbnail (on Shutterstock, it looks like two overlapping squares). You can also click on a photographer’s name to display more images by the same photographer, since there’s a chance they might have other images that fit your theme.
3. Build a lightbox and choose your favorite photos.
A lightbox is a folder you create on a stock site to keep track of images you might want to download. On Shutterstock, when you see an image you like, click on the icon that looks like a light bulb. Select “new lightbox” from the menu, give it a name, and start adding pictures to it. Go crazy – add everything you like.
Now, the editing process begins. Photo editing is a skill that improves with practice and some sort of an art background, but even if you’re new to it, you probably know more than you think. Do you see an image that makes you laugh, that reminds you of something you like, or that you would want to immediately share with a friend? Keep that one. Are there a couple of images that look really similar? Pick one and forget the rest. Edit tight. Don’t be afraid of passing up the wrong image, and go with your instincts. Remember, you want to give your visitors a surprise-and-delight moment, not bore them.
4. Download and resize your images.
OK, we’ve settled on the images we want. Now we visit each image page and download the size we need. This is a good time to check the usage terms for the site to make sure the usage we want is allowed. Shutterstock limits online usage to a maximum of 800 x 600 pixels. That restriction is in place to keep people from distributing print-quality images online, and it’s plenty big enough for most blogs. (This particular blog has a width of 540 pixels, so we’re in good shape.) For most of the images we’re about to download, the medium-size images will be the proper size, so we’ll download that size. (When in doubt, download a larger size than you need.)
Next, use Photoshop or another image editing program to make sure all your images are resized to the pixel width of your blog and saved as JPEG format.
5. Order your photos, write captions, and place them in your blog.
Like editing, sequencing is a skill that gets easier with practice. To start, you can’t go wrong if you arrange your photos in a way that tells a story, and write captions to match. Alternately, you can lead with your best photo, then alternate between traditional, conservative shots and unexpected, creative ones. Your captions should be short but contain enough information to answer any obvious questions a visitor will have when looking at the photo. (Such as: What is this, and why is it so great?) You should also credit the photographer and the source of the image. It’s useful to include a link to the source of the image as well.
When you’re happy with your images and captions, enter them into your blogging program, publish, and start spreading the word.
To show you what we came up with following these steps, here’s our mini list of bridges.
Photo Gallery: The World’s 5 Most Beautiful Bridges
The Brooklyn Bridge, New York, completed 1883.
© Richard Semik / Shutterstock
Millau Viaduct, France, the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, completed 2004.
Tower Bridge, London, completed 1894.
Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy, completed 1354.
Tsing Ma Bridge, Hong Kong, completed 1997.
There are plenty of other beautiful bridges out there, but you get the idea.
We hope this leaves you feeling inspired to give stock photography a try as a source of content for your blog. Be picky, be creative, be funny, and above all give your audience something they’ll genuinely enjoy. If you want to try Shutterstock, they have monthly subscription packages that let you download up to 25 images a day, plus “On Demand” plans if you need just a few images. They invite you to save 10% with coupon code SMASH10*.
For more tips on how to use Shutterstock images, visit our blog: blog.shutterstock.com.
*10% Discount on Standard Licenses Only
The Colorful Showcase Of Beautiful Floral Typography
Floral Typography is a form of art that coalesce typography, calligraphy, and lettering to create dynamic, flourishing designs. Since flowers are universal images that never go out-of-date, many designers opt to create floral typography for their designs. With floral typography, you can create appealing and noteworthy designs that capture the attention of your visitors. You can convey your message in very artistic way and with the floral ornament you can make your design inspiring, revitalizing and make it stand out of the world. So, here we have listed some really impressive Floral Typography to inspire those designers who are working on enhancing their creative skills.
You are welcome to share if you know more beautiful floral typography which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
Chanel 4 25th Anniversary Book
What we do in life, echoes in eternity
Now Embed Free Online Photo Editor In Your Website With Picmeleo
Picmeleo is a free online photo editor that any third-party developers can easily add Picmeleo to their web service and launch the light-weight yet powerful photo editor whenever their users need to to upload or to edit an image. By adding Picmeleo to your web service, you can now engage your users with even richer content. This is the smartest way to let your users upload and edit images for your service.
Unlike other photo editors, Picmeleo opens within your site and your users never leave your service.. Integration and ease of use. Everything about Picmeleo is designed for easy integration to your website. The lightweight editor does not clutter your service and you can also fully customize Picmeleo’s tool box.
Open Editor
The editor can be launched anywhere in your layout by calling the picmeleoApi.open method. Your open link could look like this:
<a href="javascript:picmeleoApi.open('')" >Open Picmeleo editor</a>
Pass the url of the image if you want the editor to open with a default image. Omitting the url will open an empty editor
Integrating Picmeleo to your website couldn’t be easier. Just copy a few lines of embed code and Picmeleo is working on your site!
Custom Tools
Unlike other photo editors, you can customize the tools of Picmeleo any time you want in the online admin interface. Sometimes photo editors can be overwhelming. Picmeleo allows you to pick the tools your users really need. Choose from a growing list of tools including Crop, Scale, Rotate, Auto-fix, Filters and many more.
Multilanguage Support
Picmeleo has built-in multilanguage support and you can easily set the language in the online admin interface. We are still working on different language options at the moment, stay tuned for more.
Picmeleo can be utilized in numerous places. Think of these examples:
let your users crop their profile images
let your users enhance their product images during upload
let your users easily edit your images online without leaving the site
The possibilities are endless…
Need Interactive Charts For Your Personal Website? Try Highcharts
If you have a non-commercial website and you need to add charting capabilities in your website, Highcharts may suit your needs. Highcharts is a free charting control developed purely with Javascript so that you can show interactive charts on your website. Since its purely developed with Javascript, you don’t need any special server side technologies like ASP.NET or PHP and no client-side plug-ins are required like Flash or Silverlight.
Highcharts is dynamic in nature. With the support of jQuery and Ajax API, you can dynamically set axes and points of charts at runtime, hence making Highcharts an excellent choice for demonstrating real-time data like Stocks and Forex.
It works with all major web browsers including iPhone and supports a number of chart types, such as:
- Line
- SplineArea
- Areaspline
- Column
- Bar
- Pie
- Scatter
Implementing Highcharts just require some basic understanding of Javascript and you don’t need to be an expert programmer having special programming skills in specific languages. The syntax is very simple and the integration is almost seamless.
In addition to all this, Highcharts gives your website an enhanced user experience with interactive moving charts with cool designs and eye-catching colors.
Get Noticed And Grow Your Business With MyTemplateBox
The Internet is filled with useful resources for business owners and especially for web designers and developers. From free icon sets to CSS templates, and from web design inspiration to stock images, websites like these have everything one may need. There are a number of tools, useful pieces of advice, and free stock resources available for anyone to grow their business or grow as a web designer.
In this post we’re going to look over one website in particular that is dedicated to providing a variety of free resources to its users, completely free of charge.
We’ll also look into how MyTemplateBox, and other websites like it, can help get you become recognized in the design world and find more work.
What is MyTemplateBox?
First of all, what exactly is MyTemplateBox? MyTemplateBox is a website holding thousands of free templates for anyone to use, free of charge, and mostly free of licensing restrictions. They carry everything from basic CSS templates, to Blogger and WordPress themes. Furthermore, the templates cover a variety of categories: Art & Photography, Beauty & Fashion, Business, Cafe/Restaurant, Cars, Celebrity, Charity, Family, Wedding, etc.
Premium Resources
In MyTemplateBox’s premium section, they also carry templates for other popular platforms such as Drupal, OS Commerce, Mambo, and more. Logo templates and icon sets are among the view other categories as well. What’s great about the premium section of MyTemplateBox is that all of these designs are made of exceptional quality, and reviewed for premium use. They come with two types of licenses: basic and unique. The basic price is an incredibly reasonable price for the quality of stock being bought, and the unique price, while more costly, gives one unique licensing to restrict others from using it throughout the web.
Web Design Books
The books section of MyTemplateBox features many of the top web design and development books in the industry today. Handpicked by the owner of MyTemplateBox herself, the books featured are of the best rated and most useful for those within the web design niche. The books topics cover web design, website development, logo and branding design, graphic design, usability issues, and more.
The Forum
Besides just giving out free resources for all of MyTemplateBox’s visitors, they also feature a forum section covering the subjects web design and development, SEO, marketing, business, articles, tutorials, design reviews, and showcases. This is a great area to collaborate with other designers and developers, and to grow as an individual within the field. There is also a lot of practical advice concerning the business side of design and development, whether it is working as a freelancer or for a firm.
The Blog
The MyTemplateBox blog may be just another web design blog out there, but it is synced with the rest of the features on MyTemplateBox, and is a portal of useful articles and inspiration
for any web designer. Updated multiple times a week, the blog is a great place to learn something new and give your own feedback on the day’s post topic. The topics include anything and everything design and development related, and includes a few topics on freelance and business-related matters.
The writers of the blog are designers and developers themselves, just anxious to share their own thoughts and experiences within the niche. Always feel free to chime in with a comment or two, as we love to hear back from the community.
What’s in it for Web Designers?
Now that we’ve gone over what MyTemplateBox is all about, let’s get into how it can actually help a web designer grow. What’s in it for the average web designer? Among many things, websites like MyTemplateBox can help a web designer get noticed within the community, grow their skills set, and share what they already know to other developing designers. Let’s look a bit closer in each area below:
Learn, Expand, and Grow Your Skill Set
Websites like this are not only here to give out freebies and speed up your production time. Through the forum, the blog, the books, and even through the free templates, any web designer can learn more to develop themselves professionally. Because many of the templates are free with an available commercial license, downloading templates from other designers is an effective way to study new methods and possibilities in web design. After all, each web designer knows what they know best by building upon the support and teachings of other designers. By reviewing templates from other designers, one can develop their own skills more efficiently.
Speed Up Your Work
With a heavy load of clients under my belt, it can be comforting to know that there are many resources out there to speed up my productivity. Free themes, templates, and other resources can do this. Instead of building an icon set from scratch, many web designers are finding that using either free or premium icons found on MyTemplateBox is just as good of a choice. As another example, instead of coding a new design from scratch, many of the free or premium templates found on MyTemplateBox can be used as a basis for customizing your own web design for a client.
The fact of the matter is, MyTemplateBox is a resource site first and foremost, and we love when we can help other designers out by speeding up their workflow and doing half of the job for them!
Get Into the Community
Any experienced web designer knows that getting involved with the design community is essential for success. Through others we can learn, find work, and get noticed within our niche. MyTemplateBox is just one more place to do that. The active forum may be enough for some to get feedback on their work, find work from clients, or just get to know others doing the same thing. However, discussions in the blog and throughout the rest of the site are going on as well for anyone to share their own knowledge, or to meet others in the field.
What’s in it for Business Owners?
If you are not a web designer, but in fact a business owner looking to build
upon your web presence, MyTemplateBox also has a lot of benefits for you as
well. Many start-up businesses are in need of a website, but have a limited
budget. MyTemplateBox’s free templates are perfect for these types of startups, and even the premium sections can give a new website a more polished look for a budget-friendly price.
The WordPress or Bloggers themes provide great templates to use for any websites that need a more dynamic approach to content management, and the free icons and other useful resources can be used to spice up the content of any website for better conversions. Even when a small business needs a more custom approach though, when hiring a web designer, MyTemplateBox can be a wonderful source of inspiration.
Wrapping Up
To get a live experience of what all the hype is about, and to see what it can do for you, head on over to MyTemplateBox. Signing up is free, getting involved in the community is free, and taking advantage of all the benefits are free. We hope to be seeing you soon within the MyTemplateBox community!
