Firstly, a little background information…

At the start of January this year I was unfortunate enough to have my hard drive fail on my computer. Usually the panic that comes with this kind of thing is often followed by relief when you restart the machine or swap a faulty power cable and you are back in business! Not this time. Nothing I tried would get my hard drive to boot and a trip to my local friendly computer repair shop confirmed it was well and truly broken. That is when the panic really sets it.

You try and think how long ago you’ve backed up your files to an external hard drive. You realise you’ve got urgent client deadlines to meet. You worry your online backups may not have worked – after all, when was the last time you checked? And to top things of, if you need your computer to earn a living you can expect the inevitable lost couple of days while you reinstall all your software and files on a new operating system. Not a pleasant experience at all!

When this happened earlier this year to me I was quite lucky. Most of my music and photos (with the exception of about a months worth of recent files) were safely backed up to an external hard drive. My client work too was backed up both to a hard drive and via an online backup service. Two in fact! I use Dropbox for the active client work I am working on and also Carbonite for pretty much everything else on my computer.  A bit of a belt and braces setup to cover all bases as much as possible. Now it was time to see how they got on restoring my files…

How did Dropbox do?

Dropbox had everything synced and up to date (about 10 GB of files) and downloaded them to my computer in lightning quick time. That has to be the thing that impressed me most about Dropbox – the speed. It had uploaded all my files before the hard drive failure and downloaded them again in just a couple of hours. Perfect and highly recommended!

I was so impressed I’ve upgraded my Dropbox account to allow me to backup even more files. Having the ability to sync between more than one computer is a wonderful feature too. If I was to mention a slight downside to Dropbox it would be the large amount of system memory it uses to sync (either uploading or downloading) if there is a large queue of files but it does get the job done quickly! Learn more…

How did Carbonite do?

Carbonite had the bigger job of restoring about 150 GB of files. Because my internet connection is quite slow it hadn’t quite backed up everything and was missing around the most recent 10% of files. This isn’t Carbonite’s fault, more the fact that my broadband was a bit too slow to keep up to date with it. Something I should have considered more carefully in retrospect.

The restoration process was not as easy as Dropbox but once I’d worked out how it worked I had my files downloading and it restored most things in around 3 days on my slow connection. The speeds were not as fast as Dropbox but you are given unlimited space which is handy for larger backups. I’d recommend both Dropbox and Carbonite as they work in the background and give valuable peace of mind. Learn more…

How did my manual backups do?

I was lucky to have pretty much my whole hard drive backed up to an external drive too. The trouble is it can take an absolute age to back everything up (often more than a day) so I’d got in to the habit of doing it just once a month. All my files were safely preserved but I was missing a few weeks worth. A better solution would have been a system like Time Machine for the Mac. I do most of my design and development on a PC (don’t hold it against me!) and I’ve yet to find something that works as smoothly as this.

If you’ve got any recommendations for software like this on a PC please leave a comment at the end of this article! I now backup once a week to an external hard drive (usually after finishing work on a Friday afternoon) and leave it running until it has completed. Each week I swap between two different hard drives rather than trusting just a single drive with all the data.

What other things are there to consider?

I think I was quite lucky. Admittedly I didn’t get all my files back but everything important was recovered. It is all well and good having both online and manual backups in place but what happens if they go wrong?

Fire: A fire near your computer could damage the main hard drive and any external hard drives you may have in the vicinity. I’d recommend storing your external hard drives in a safe place whenever possible.

Theft: A horrible thing to consider but if your computer equipment was stolen would you have a way of getting your data back? It may be worth considering storing your external hard drives in a secure safe or even in another location.

Syncing Problems: Once an online backup system is setup the idea is you leave it to run in the background. Consider the possibility that the sync could stop, get corrupt or even reach your storage limit. Keep a close eye on these regularly to check files are backing up properly. Since having my hard drive fail I’m definitely on top of backups more. I got off lightly last time and don’t want to have to go through that again!

Below are some links to useful backup software and resources which I hope you find useful. So don’t delay, backup TODAY!

Backup Software

• Dropbox
• Carbonite
• Backblaze
• Mozy
• Backup Direct

Backup Links and Resources

• World Backup Day

What About You?

Have you experience the loss of your data and files? Did you manage to restore everything you needed? Have you had any good or bad experiences with backup software? I’d love you to comment below and share any stories or advice!

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With any kind of artistic work, there are always trends to follow or break. Web design is no different. Each year, or even each season, brings along new trends.

1) Minimalistic layouts are in

Making people click through a thousand different links before they can get where they want to be is so last year. In 2010, it has been all about making sure that people get all the information that they need, right up front, in a clean minimalist design. In some cases, this means a single page, while in other cases there might be a few pages. Either way, you never have to go searching.

2) Typography is all the rage

Making sure that your type is in, and even using different typography techniques to add dimension to the site is one of the biggest trends of web design in 2010. With everything from typography in tag clouds to using fun and funky fonts through the site, making sure that the type and the site work well together is very important.

3) More personalized design

Everyone wants their website to stand out. You want people to remember you (and your site of course!), otherwise there wouldn’t be a point to having the website. Because of this, people are taking different approaches than before.

Having a design that looks a little more hand drawn is one way that many people are achieving this. If you are an artist, this is an exceptionally great way to go!

4) Over-sized headers and footers

Though not our favorite of design choices, the trend in 2010 has been to make everything larger. With huge headers that take up a large portion of the page before someone has to scroll down, and sometimes even larger footers, along with huge amounts of information, it is felt that you will make a great impression. To us, though, this just feels like a ploy to make it seem like there’s more on the page than there really is.

5) Social Networking

If you don’t have links to your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or Digg accounts (along with a huge variety of other social networking sites), many people are starting to wonder if you are legit. It has become almost a necessity to have these on your site in 2010. This is a trend that we don’t see going anywhere — social networking is just starting to take off!

6) Silly, fun or informative intros

Along with social networking, many people are starting to let loose a little. Many websites have an intro area, either at the top of the site or along one of the sides. This is where they can tell the reader or customer who they are, what they like, and anything else.

Whether you love or hate the way that the industry decided to head this year, it is good to know what is going on and keep constantly educated on web design. If you are planning to make a new website, keep these trends in mind. Whether you plan to follow them by the book, or shatter them completely, you need to know the rules.

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New website creation service makes sense for designers and their finances

The Smarter Web Company is offering a new service which gives designers the opportunity to fully brand a powerful online content management system (CMS) and use it as a quick and easy way to build professional quality sites at a fraction of the usual cost to their business. Designers can charge their clients any fee they want, including a monthly charge for on-going CMS access and website hosting, with the potential to create a regular income for their business.

Additionally, the hassle of actually building a site is removed, and designers are left with more time to do what they do best – the design itself.

Competition prize

To celebrate the launch of this service, My Smarter Website is giving away a free account worth £240 which enables you to build up to 10 websites in a month. For more details of the account’s benefits see below and also visit http://www.mysmartercms.co.uk

For your chance to win simply send an email to: competitions@mysmartercms.co.uk writing ‘CMS competition’ in the subject line.

Fixed price, increased profits

The branded service comes at a very low fixed price, which includes a free markup service (see below). So designers can charge the client whatever they like, and pocket the difference. This could mean vastly increased profits for a design business’ website creation services.

Free design markup service

Uniquely, a free service to take a design produced by an agency and code it into a website is included within the low monthly charge. This means a web designer doesn’t have to potentially pay thousands to a third party for doing the build element, and retains much greater control over delivery times.

Profit example

The sites are of a high quality and ordinarily a design agency could charge upwards of £3,000 to build something similar. If an agency signs up to an account with My Smarter CMS they get an agreed number of websites for a monthly charge (the packages start at 10 websites for £240 each month) and as we markup the sites for no additional charge the potential profit is huge.

Because the CMS is fully branded, and essentially ‘theirs’, the agency can quote normal fees as the involvement of My Smarter CMS is transparent to the client.

For example, an agency signs up to the bottom package which gives them 10 websites at £240 per month. They charge their clients £3,000 per website as a design and build fee and then £30 per month for hosting and the CMS access. The total year one figure would be £33,600 and after a cost of their time to design the websites, manage their clients and the charge of £2,880 by My Smarter CMS. The total profit (not accounting for the agencies time) would be £30,720!

Building up a regular monthly income

Once a client’s website has been built, that client then has the option of using the branded CMS tool to manage their site on a daily basis. Again, the designer can charge the client whatever they choose for this and because on-going access to the CMS is included in a low fixed fee package, it can help remove one of the biggest uncertainties involved in running a design business: not having a fixed, regular monthly income.

There are several packages on offer, tailored to suit the very smallest of design businesses, to large design agencies handling a high volume of business.

We think this is a great deal and makes a lot of business sense for individual designers and agencies alike. For more information take a look at http://www.mysmartercms.co.uk/ and call/mail us for more information and to discuss terms.

Good luck with the competition!

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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.

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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/

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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

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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

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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/

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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. EDIT: This is now available!
• 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

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