Life On The Freelance Circuit
February 18, 2012I’ve got a good few years under my belt now freelancing around various different agencies and working with a number of clients, I figured it would be a good post to let any new freelancers out there what it can be like on the freelance circuit when working for a number of different design agencies. (more…)
A Bit About Cheetah3D
June 7, 2011Cheetah3D is relatively unknown in the web design world, it’s one of my favourite apps to play around with and packs a hell of a punch for it’s price (currently $149). I figured it was probably about time I wrote a post about it…
I bought Cheetah3D a few years back now when I decided I wanted to try my hand at a bit of 3D. Most of the industry standard apps cost thousands of pounds and that is a massive outlay if you’re just trying some software out. I know most apps offer a 30 day trial but to the novice 3d user that’s nowhere near enough time to decide if you want part with that amount of cash. Step forward Cheetah3D. I downloaded the demo had a play around and within an hour or so I’d made the purchase. I loved the Mac style interface, the learning curve seemed about right and the quality of the renders I’d seen on the website and in the forum convinced me it would be a wise decision. (more…)
When Your Client Goes Bust Without Paying
May 12, 2011A few months back I was contacted by a local design agency that I hadn’t worked for before. They needed help with some new visuals for a large project for one of their clients. We agreed a fee, I went to meet them and made a start on the project. The project went well (I always tend to go above and beyond the call of duty for new clients) and everyone was happy with the work I produced. Great. I sent my invoice over and got back to working on various other projects I had with other clients. (more…)
Workflow | 7 comments
Expression Engine – First Thoughts
March 17, 2011
For quite a long time now I’ve wanted to give ExpressionEngine a try – for those of you that don’t know ExpressionEngine is a CMS that is very popular within the web design community. Many of you will know that I’m not a developer myself, I either work with developers or off the shelf CMS’s, so I was keen to get my hands of Expression Engine and see whether it could potentially add another string to my bow.
After taking the plunge and forking out $299 for a license I quickly installed ExpressionEngine on my local web server and started going through the documents. It’s fair to say that I hit a wall pretty quickly, none of the terminology really made any sense to me: channels, categories, custom fields, status groups – what’s the difference between a category and a channel? Why do I need category groups? (more…)
Development | 3 comments
Google Clamp Down On Keyword Domains
March 11, 2011A few years back (was it really that long ago?) I wrote a post called The Power Of A Keyword Rich Domain highlighting what was essentially an SEO loophole to help give you a competitive edge. This week Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team has been talking down the value of keyword domain names and more than hinting that Google are placing more emphasis on brand building. This ties in with the depreciation of repetitive anchor text links with little to no variation that we’ve seen kick in since the Google Caffeine update back in August 2010. (more…)
SEO | No comment