If you really don’t like the new iTunes logo you can quite easily change it to a different icon if you can’t bear to look at it.

In fact, several talented folk on Dribbble have already designed some rather snazzy replacements for you to use:

So, if you really can’t stand to see the new icon in your dock you can quite simply change it over for something else. Easy! No need to get overly frustrated or angry over an icon.

Instead of moaning about the icon change (which, I’ll admit, I was guilty of doing myself when I first saw it) I’ve come up with a list of three things going on in the world that I think are more important and far more worthy of our concern than the iTunes 10 icon:

3 Genuinely Important Things:

1. Pakistan Floods – Donate online to the DEC Pakistan Floods Appea.

2. World Wildlife Fund – Become a member, adopt an animal or make a donation.

3. Oxfam UK – Get involved, raise money or donate online to Oxfam UK.

Sorry for the ranting blog post, if anything I wrote it to remind myself that an icon is just an icon – something nice to look at – and not something worth getting angry about.

Heart Internet recently got in touch with me to help get as many talented designers as possible to enter their brand new design competition. I fondly remember entering this competition last year and it was a lot of fun having the chance to create a concept advert for a big brand like Heart Internet. The eventual winner of the 2009 competition was David Baker who designed a superb advert mixing photography, imagery and Heart Internet’s brand colours.

Following on from the success of last year’s competition they are looking for another designer to create a brand new magazine advert for them and win £2,000 worth of prizes. As well as winning a 27” iMac, a 32GB iPod Touch, free Reseller hosting for a year and a free domain name the winning design will be also used in a national magazine.

The competition is open to any designer, Heart Internet customer or not, and closes 15th August.

For more information and to enter visit their website:  http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/designcompetition/

This guest article has been contributed by our friends at PeoplePerHour

Being Your Own Boss

A lot has to be said for rolling out of bed in the morning to a leisurely cup of tea before taking a short stroll to the office in the spare room. It certainly beats the daily grind of gridlocked traffic and chasing that elusive parking space. And the extra time saved can be ploughed straight back into your business or used for well earned relaxation: the time is all yours; the choice is all yours.

Being your own boss means you can tailor your workload around your other commitments, whether that involves a young family, a busy social calendar or studying for a university degree. Being your own boss creates the perfect opportunity to dictate your personal work-life balance. As freelance web designer, Phillip Lovelace stated in an interview in March 2010, “I do prefer being able to set my own hours”.

Creativity

It isn’t just the practical issues that appeal to would be freelance web designers; it is often the creative elements. Many want to break free of bureaucracies that flourish all too often in regular employment. But more than this, freelancers aspire to do their own thing. How much better it is to be rewarded with praise for a good job done and be empowered to see that job through from beginning to end. Working for yourself enables you to achieve just that, or sub-contract out the parts you don’t particularly enjoy yourself.

The overriding seller for many freelance web designers is being able to create without intrusion, without your boss pulling the plug on your project and ultimately being empowered to complete the transference of the image in your head to the blank web page you are designing. As blogger and freelance web designer, Luke van de Paverd attested in an interview in February 2010, “I feel a lot of freelancers are creative types first and business people second”.

For other freelance web designers, the motivation comes from a combination of creativity and work-life balance. It simply enables you to take complete control over all aspects of your life.

Risks

So if going freelance is so wonderful, why doesn’t everybody take the plunge? For many of us, going it alone is a pretty frightening thought.

Suddenly there is no-one to turn to if you have a problem. There is a deadline looming with no respect for the fact that you have the flu. There are piles of administrative chores to face from writing contracts to chasing payment, from bookkeeping to filing self assessment tax forms.

Despite the glamour of freelance, the tedious elements are unavoidable. Just as a business has to work hard to succeed, so does a freelancer web designer. But if you are prepared to put in the groundwork and are not above tackling the more menial stuff, freelancing can work for you. Perhaps most importantly, whilst clients will have deadlines and specific requirements, the strategic agenda is yours and no-one else’s.

Further Reading

It can be a daunting decision to take the leap in to the freelance world. Luckily, there are many articles and resources written by freelancers who have taken the risk and are prepared to share they advice. Be sure to bookmark and read the following articles:

• Start Your Own Business by Mark Boulton (essential reading!)
• Starting a Business series from John O’Nolan
• Organise and Manage Your Freelance Business from The Design Cubicle
• Become a One Man Web Agency from .net
• Contract Killer by Andy Clarke
• Invoice Like a Pro by Smashing Magazine
• Estimating Time For Web Projects More Accurately Part1 and Part 2 by Sam Barnes
• 10 Excellent Tips For Designers to Improve Their Income by Web Design Depot

The photos from this article are from Shutterstock

You can find out more information at http://www.shutterstock.com

When it comes to using photos on websites, we all know about copyright issues – or do we?  If you’re not sure of the pitfalls, check out these pointers from Shutterstock, an innovative global e-commerce company and a leading provider of stock photos, illustrations, and footage.

1. Get Permission

The most common mistake people make is using images they find online without obtaining proper permission. This can land you in serious trouble. The legal option is to buy from a royalty-free image library.

2. Model Release Forms

If you plan to use images of people on a commercial site, you need a model release form – even if you have taken the photos yourself!. Photos containing people sourced from Shutterstock already have the necessary model releases in place, so you can use the images without worry that a model might make a claim.

3. Check the Terms

Check the image agency’s Terms of Usage and the different types of licences. For example, most royalty-free stock images cannot be used in conjunction with unlawful or immoral content.

4. What Type of Licence?

Most stock agencies offer two or more licences differentiated by the scope of permitted uses. This means that if you intend to use a stock image to sell or promote a product with high distribution (such as a CD cover that would be reproduced in excess of 250,000 copies), you first need a licence that allows for this higher volume. This is to ensure that the photographer or artist who created the image is properly compensated.

5. Editorial Use Only

Another common mistake is confusion between ‘editorial’ and ‘commercial’ images.  Images labeled ‘Editorial Use Only’ cannot be used for commercial purposes – i.e. the image can only be used to illustrate a news-related story. It cannot be used to sell or promote a product, service or idea, which rules out most websites.

6. Logos and Trademarks

Royalty-free images cannot be used as part of a ‘branding’ campaign: they cannot be incorporated into logos or trademarks.

More Information

With images playing such an important role in web design, it’s well worth looking at Shutterstock’s 25-A-Day subscription which lets you choose from millions of photographs, illustrations and vectors for a flat rate. You might never worry about images again.

All images in this blog post have been sourced from Shutterstock’s library of images.

You can find out more information at http://www.shutterstock.com

To be in with a chance of winning one of the copies simply leaving a comment below or send an e-mail to phil@thewebdesignblog.co.uk

Please note: Unfortunately this competition is only available to UK residents, please accept our apologies if you are outside of the UK.

I use Expression Web as my main editor on my PC for HTML and CSS coding. The interface is clean, intuitive, extremely quick to work with and supports multiple schemas.  The particular highlights of Expression Web for myself are the superb FTP manager which allows you to quickly connect to different sites to make edits (very handy for maintaining multiple client websites) and the “Super Preview” which lets you check your website in different web browsers (including multiple versions of Internet Explorer)

If you use a PC to write HTML and CSS code I strongly recommend you download a 60 day trial of Expression Web at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ and try it out for yourself.

Competition

The competition is for one of two licences for the complete Expression Studio 3 suite including all 5 of these elements:

• Expression Web
• Expression Blend™
• SketchFlow
• Expression Design
• Expression Encoder 3

To be in with a chance of winning one of the answers simply leaving a comment below or e-mailing phil@thewebdesignblog.co.uk

The competition runs until the 30th May 2010

The two winners will be chosen at random by www.wearesocial.net who will send the product to the winner within a week of getting the winners contact details.

Unfortunately this competition is only available to UK residents.

Requirements: PC running on Windows XP & Service Pack 2, Windows Vista or Windows 7.

More Information about Expression Studio

• SketchFlow prototypes are fast, easy and inexpensive to build, making it possible to create, explore and compare multiple ideas before moving forward with a solution. Learn More
• Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier. With a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, you can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you’re seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page. Learn More
• Expression Blend™ is the tool for interaction design on the Silverlight and .NET platforms and enables user experience concepts to be delivered with full fidelity, from the initial prototype to the completed project. Learn More
• Expression Design is a professional design tool for creating graphics content that can be used within the authoring applications in Expression Studio: Expression Blend and Expression Web. Learn More
• Expression Encoder 3 provides the power of industry leading encoding, in a simple approachable interface to make it easy to prepare video for use in a variety of ways, including Silverlight on the Web. Learn More

You can download a 60 day trial at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

My Old E-mail Setup

My old e-mail and calendar system was based around Outlook and I’ve always found it met my requirements very well but it had started to become slow and cumbersome and was using a large chunk of system memory.

Over the years I had created an elaborate system of folders and sub folders for my e-mails which was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. I ended up  just using the search function to find old e-mails but Outlook was taking several minutes to search the thousands of e-mails on my system to find the one I was looking for.

After recently reading Getting Things Done by David Allen it became obvious a much simpler method of sorting and processing my e-mails was long overdue.

I wanted something that would let me send and receive e-mails from multiple accounts, let me organise things intuitively and find what I need quickly.

I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004 but it has only ever been used as a backup system for my e-mails (I’ve set a copy of every e-mail to forward to my Gmail address) and as an emergency e-mail solution when I’m out of the office. To say I hadn’t explored all the features and settings would be an understatement! It seemed the obvious choice…

Making the Transition

My first step was to explore the features Gmail offered. My existing Gmail account proved the perfect testing ground because five years worth of e-mails that were already on the system. A quick glance at the intuitive search method gave a very favourable first impression letting me find a specific e-mail from back in 2004 in just a few seconds.

I’ve got several e-mail accounts that I wanted to filter in to my Gmail inbox (web design, hosting, blog etc…) and this was easy to setup. I could choose to either have a copy of all my e-mails from my other POP3 accounts sent to my Gmail address (which I’ve had for the last five years) or I could setup the incoming server to receive all my e-mails directly in to my Gmail account.

Gmail also lets you send e-mails from “non-Gmail” e-mail addresses via your own SMTP server (for instance, with my phil@thewebdesignblog.co.uk e-mail address) and the recipient will see the e-mail as being sent from my address rather than the Gmail address associated with the account.

And, just like Outlook, if I reply to an e-mail sent to a particular address the recipient will see a reply from that e-amil address as long as I have set up the reply-to address in the Gmail settings. Very handy.

During my first week using Gmail I watched this great video from Ryan Carson explaining the benefit of using keyboard shortcuts. The basics were easy to learn and I found myself using them automatically without thinking. When viewing e-mails I quickly got used to using J and K while reading messages to move between older and newer e-mails but then I discovered using [ and ] would do the same thing but automatically archive the message without going back to your inbox each time. This has proven to be a really big time saver for me! You can literally skim through your e-mails and either archive messages with [ or ] or leave them in the inbox with J or K so they can be processed later.

If I see something is urgent when checking my messages I add it to the starred label (keyboard shortcut s) which lets me quickly view my priority e-mails. I’ve also setup custom labels for Next Actions, Someday and Projects which I can assign to each e-mail to help me sort through them at an appropriate time.

My Favourite Keybaord Shorcuts

Gmail provide an overlay of their main keyboard shortcuts which helped me learn them quickly. Simply press ? when using Gmail to quickly bring up the list.

Here are some of my favourites:

• c - Compose a new e-mail
• c + Shift – Compose a new e-mail in a new window
• k - Move the cursor to a newer conversation (or move to a next message if you are viewing the conversation)
• j – Move the cursor to an older conversation (or move to an older message if you are viewing the conversation)
• [ - Archive and go to previous message
• ] - Archive and go to next message
• x – Check or uncheck the selected conversation
• o / Enter - Open or expand the selected conversation
• n – Go to the next message in a conversation
• p – Go to the previous message in a conversation
• e – Archive the selected conversation
• s – Star a message or conversation
• r – Reply to message sender (from the conversation view)
• a - Reply to all recipients (from the conversation view)
• f – Forward a message
• l – View the labels menu
• v – Move the conversation to another section
• Shift + i - Mark as read (and skip message in conversation view)
• Shift + u – Mark as unread (and skip message in conversation view)
• z - Undo

Please click here to view the full list of shortcuts.

Combination Keys

You can also use a series of combination keys to quickly move around the different sections of Gmail:

• Tab then Enter - A really useful one! Once you’ve finished writing an e-mail just press tab followed by the enter key to send the message
• g then a - Go to all items
• g then s – View your starred itmes
• g then c – Open your list of contacts
• g then i – Go to your inbox
• g then t – Go to your sent items
• * then a – Select all mail
• * then n – Deselect all mail

Please click here to view the full list of combinations.

Using Labels and Filters

When it came to deciding if I’d start using Gmail permanently it was the labels and filters that were the clincher for me.

I am so used to using folders in an attempt to organise my e-mails and I wasn’t sure if I’d get on with Gmail’s labelling and filter system but it turned out to be a piece of cake.

All you have to do is assign a few basic rules to create a filter. For example who it is from, what the subject of the e-mail is, what keywords it contains etc… and then you can decide what Gmail does with these e-mails. For instance, you could set these e-mails to skip the inbox, apply a label, delete them, star them or even send an automatic canned response.

I’ve setup several filters which apply custom labels to both incoming mail and all archived mail.

There are so many ways you could take advantage of this to organise your inbox but I’ve listed a small selection below:

• Any e-mail that contains the word “urgent” goes gets a Urgent label
• Missed calls and answerphone message notifications have a Telephone label
• Client project questionnaires have a Worksheets label
• All online payments I’ve received have a Payments label
• Receipts (and shipping notifications) from online purchases have a Shopping label
• Twitter and Facebook messages and friend notifcations have a Twitter or Facebook label
• Hosting and domain renewal notifications have a Hosting label

What I Love About Gmail

• I can sync my e-mails and contact list with my phone (more info at http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/)
• The “Send and Archive” button (labs feature) – When you send your e-mail reply this button will send and archive the e-mail automatically which is a big time saver.
• You get over 7GB free storage space but you can upgrade your storage space if required.
• If you use Google Calendar you can set it up to send you an e-mail every morning with your daily agenda.
• If your e-mail contains the words “I’ve attached” and you try to send the message without an attachment Gmail asks if you want to send anyway or cancel and add the attachment. (via Grace Smith)

What I Think Could Be Improved

• You can already setup an automatic signature but it would great to be able to have different signatures for each e-mail address you send from.
• Some times Gmail can pause when sending emails or other actions requiring a refresh to fix (but this could be a browser or computer issue)

So, after a month of using Gmail I am hooked. I’ve now started using it permanently for all my e-mails in conjunction with Google Calendar. I’ve tried to move over to Gmail several times before without really embracing the system but this time, for whatever reason, it all seems to have clicked in to place.

Over to you!

If you are a Gmail user I’d love to hear your own tips and tricks. How have you got your labels setup? What lab features do you find useful? If you’d like to share your favourite Gmail tips please leave a comment at the end of this post!

The main Gmail icon used for this article was designed by Sergio Sanchez Lopez

Darren set up Online Selling in January 2009 providing website design and eCommerce websites.

PHP will be celebrating its 15th birthday this year, and now is a great time to look back and wonder at how it’s managed to become such an integral part of internet design and application during that time.

It has become one of the first choice languages of web application developers, the go-to language if your website needs something more than what HTML can give you. Over 20 million domains have PHP installed, and it is considered the most popular Apache HTTP Server module by far. Some of the most famous examples of PHP at work are Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Digg, Joomla, WordPress, YouTube, and more. PHP has become part of the internet.

For the anniversary of PHP, I decided a “5 Useful Tips” list was in order, to help you use PHP to its full potential (and to avoid some of the problems inherent in the language!). I hope you find these useful.

1. PHP memory allocation

PHP scripts have a memory allocation attached to them by the server. To stop a PHP script taking up too much processing power, usually an arbitrary Mb usage is allocated. Sometimes this is a hinderance to web developers, so to increase the amount of memory allowed, enter the following line into the php.ini file on the root of your website. If the php.ini doesn’t exist, you can simply create it. You can increase this number if you still need more memory, but you may find an upper limit set by your host.

memory_limit=16M

2. PHP include functions

PHP can be used to great effect on websites which don’t involve any database interaction. By using the PHP include function, you can include another .php file anywhere in the current file. This can be extremely useful to include, for examples, headers, or footers, or a left menu that stays fixed. Instead of having to make changes to each file in the future, you can change the one PHP included into all the others. The syntax for including a file is as follows:

<?php include ('directory/file.php'); ?>

3. Setting variables in PHP

Another really useful PHP tip is to create variables, which can be a huge time saver later on down the line. Do you have to regularly enter a phone number or email address? By storing bits of information into variables, you can change the information and once and have it propegate site-wide instantly. No more Find and Replace, we say. To store a variable, use the following code:

$variable_name = 'variable_result';

And to call the variable, use:

<?php echo $variable_name; ?>

4. Using if statements in PHP

Using if statements in PHP can be incredibly useful for only showing information you really want to. The potential that an if statement can give you is huge, and the syntax is incredibly easy to use. For example, if the variable telephone1 is defined, then show it:

<?php if
("$telephone1" != "") {
	echo ("$telephone1");
} ?>

5. Difference between single and double quotes

In PHP there is a difference when using either single or double quotes, either ‘ or “. If you use double quotes ” then you are telling the code to check for a variable. If you are using single quotes ‘ then you are telling it to print whatever is between them. This might seem a bit trivial, but if you use the double quotes instead of the single quotes, it will still output correctly, but you will be wasting processer time.

So that’s it, 5 useful and hopefully time-saving tips for you. I’d love to hear any feedback you have on these solutions, whether they worked for you, or whether you have another useful tip to share with others.

You can view more of Darren’s work at Online Selling where he provides website design and eCommerce websites.

About Heart Internet Reseller Professional:

Heart Internet’s Reseller Professional account has been specially tailored for web designers, Internet integrators, web hosting resellers and developers.

The Reseller package includes unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited domains at no extra charge plus many features that other hosting companies charge for, such as generic secure server access; free use of our generic name servers; and branding of your control panel with your own logo, company name and look and feel. You can add as many Linux or Windows hosting accounts as you like at no extra charge.

At just £29.99 per month the Heart Internet Reseller Professional is outstanding value for money and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, real-time account activation and the ability to cancel anytime.

Question:

How many domain names can you host with the Heart Internet Reseller Professional account?

A. 10
B. 100
C. Unlimited

WINNERS! Congratulations to Levi Ripley and Markus Holmroos who were chosen at random by Heart Internet to win the competition. Heart Internet will be in touch with you soon with more information.

My Review of Heart Internet

When Heart Internet approached me about running a competition on my website I was delighted because I’ve been a very satisfied reseller with them for nearly 3 years.

I first opened an account with Heart Internet in March 2007 mainly because my previous hosting company had made it very difficult to allow my web design clients to access their own FTP or e-mail accounts. This was fine in the early days but more and more of my clients wanted full control of their accounts so I knew I had to change.

I researched several reseller packages but decided on Heart Internet after reading several positive reviews and trying out their free hosting package to test the water. After a few days of testing their control panel and being very impressed with the technical support (support tickets have always been dealt with promptly) I decided to upgrade to the full reseller package.

I had quite a few websites to transfer over from my old host but it was more than worth doing. Now my clients all have their own control panel to setup e-mail addresses, install software (Heart Internet provide a wide selection of regularly updated software that can be installed with one click) and can manage their hosting account themselves if they want to. It is so much more flexible than what I was used to and a breath of fresh air.

At the end of 2007 Heart Internet introduced HostPay which is an automated shopping cart system to allow your customers to order domains, web hosting and administer all parts of their account (view invoices, change contact details etc…)

HostPay connects with several payment systems and you can choose to have everything automated or you can process orders manually if you prefer.

HostPay has been great and has allowed me to offer hosting to new clients rather than just my existing web design clients which is great for earning residual income alongside normal work. There are several templates included but it is quite straightforward to build your own design round the HostPay tags. In fact, pretty all parts of the reseller system are white label and give you complete control of branding!

If you ever need assistance you can contact Heart Internet via their very support ticket system which has proven to be very prompt and helpful. I’ve often got ticket responses within a few minutes (even in the middle of the night!) which is very reassuring that you are in safe hands.

Overall, I am delighted with the services Heart Internet have provided me over the last 3 years and I highly recommend them. If you are a web designer you’ll find their reseller package fantastic.

Good luck with the competition! If you want to try out Heart Internet please click here and click the free hosting option at the bottom of their home page.

Our short questionnaire is completely anonymous and should only take a minute or two of your time. It is open to web designers of all levels of experience (including agencies)

Obviously, the more people that complete the questionnaire the more accurate the data will be so I’d really, really appreciate any links or tweets to help spread the word.

Thanks for taking part

The Results So Far…

We are pleased to publish our results based on the first batch of responses to our web design pricing questionnaire. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this post so far!

To ensure we can provide the most accurate feedback we will be leaving the questionnaire open and will be updating the results every couple of weeks based on new data so please feel free to complete the survey if you haven’t already done so.

Please note: All currency conversions are approximate and based on the correct rate on the date of publication.

Number of responses data is based on: 220

Date last updated: 17th December 2009

Thanks to everyone who has submitted their rates for this survey! Hopefully the results will grow and grow over time to provide an increasingly accurate indication of web design rates. If you haven’t already submitted your rates please feel free to do so at the top of this page.

If you have any additional reports you’d like to see please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to arrange this for the next update.

You can learn more at http://www.basekit.com

Basekit have kindly offered 20 of our readers beta invitations to test it out. If you’d like to try it out for yourself please click here to e-mail Basekit. When all the invitations have been taken we’ll update this page to let you know.

If you’ve tried Basket we’d love to hear what you think about it so please feel free to leave a comment at the end of this article.

Features

Create a Website Directly From Photoshop

Import your Photoshop files and have full control over your designs. BaseKit automatically slices and dices your designs into standards-compliant HTML and CSS – in seconds.

Use the innovative grid system within BaseKit to create a website with beautifully proportioned page layouts.

Web 2.0 Website Builder

Add dynamic web 2.0 features to your website without having to write any code. BaseKit website builder lets you create a website with simple point, click, drag and drop.

Forms, galleries, blogs, news feeds, Twitter feeds, maps and more can be added and configured in seconds.

Keep it Fresh with our Website CMS

All BaseKit websites come with integrated website CMS functionality as standard and with full permissions control.

This makes it easy for you (or your client) to make quick and easy content and layout changes on the fly.

Online WYSIWYG Editing

Create a website live on the web with the next generation BaseKit website builder.

You can learn more at http://www.basekit.com