Yes, as promised here are 5 more blog directories to submit your fantastic and informative blogs to. I do spoil you guys!

Blogs Avenue

BlogsAvenue is an blog directory on the Internet that allows you to get more exposure for your online publication. Every submitted blog is available to the public, and it displays some useful info like: a thumbnail of the homepage, some site information (owner, URL, category, etc.), the rating of the site, a set of SEO info (PageRank, Google / Bing backlinks, etc.) and the reviews (if any). Plus, you can check a statistics graph with unique daily visitors and pageviews for the present day, week and month referring to the blog site. Registration is necessary.
To add your site to BlogsAvenue, you must register first. Then select “submit blog” from the right sidebar panel. Here, add your blog URL, title and description of your site (160 chars minimum), RSS feed URL, and choose a category that represents what your blog is about. Last, add the BlogsAvenue reciprocal code to your blog to activate the submission.

Go Blogz

Go Blogz is a free directory and search engine where you can submit your URL to promote the content of your blog to a wider audience. Registration is not mandatory.
To submit your blog to Go Blogz, just add the title and URL of your site. Then, write a brief description for your blog and enter a reciprocal link. Last, add your e-mail address and you’re set.

Malatya

Malatya is a free RSS directory where you can submit your website RSS feed to obtain more traffic and exposure for your content. Registration is not mandatory to use the service. After you submit your RSS feed, the editors at Malatya will manually check your feed before displaying your content inside the directory.
To submit your RSS feed to Malatya, please choose a relevant category that describes your blog content and then enter the URL of your RSS feed.

Society of Socialpreneurs

Society of Socialpreneurs is a blog directory and social business network where you can submit your website or blog and get more exposure. The blog submission process is free as long as you place a button with a reciprocal link promoting the directory on your own website. Registration is not mandatory.
To submit your blog to Society of Socialpreneurs, after you post their button on your website, just provide your name and e-mail address, the title and URL of your blog and write a description for your blog.

Pingates

Pingates is not a blog directory nor an RSS directory where you can submit your website. What Pingates does is send a “ping“, a notification, to a handful of sites alerting them that your blog has been updated. Then, the web crawlers of these websites can come by and notify their readers of the update. No registration is needed.
To ping your blog using Pingates, simply type the title and url of your blog, select the sites you want to send a ping to (you can also check all of them with a single button) and then click on “Send pings“.

I will add one more blog post about top blog directories to add your blog to in the near future.

When creating a professional web design the designing effective homepages is one of the most important pages on your site. It is usually your shop window, the door to your potential sales and the place where your users will usually know whether they want to go any further on your site, so you can imagine, its vital that you get this page right, you don’t want to give a bad impression before your users have even entered the site but what is it that really makes for a great ux homepage?

We all need purpose

Everything in this world created by us humans needs purpose and websites are no different. You may argue that there are many pointless websites out there, but even if they are pointless…that is still a purpose, by being pointless, isn’t it? . Your first step in designing a homepage is firstly identifying your website’s/business goal & then developing your homepage’s purpose. Keep in mind that your main website goal is slightly different from your homepage goal.

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Is your main goal to sell more of your product or service, create more brand awareness or start communication? Then does your homepages purpose relate to this? Are you wanting to target a specific service that isn’t selling as well, or are you wanting to try and sell a product or a service? Is it purely an information site? Do you want people to subscribe to your blog or gather emails for newsletters and promotions? Whatever the reason is  a well designed call to action is vital to influence your website users into taking the action you want .

Call to Actions

What is a call to action? A call to action is a way of asking visitors to do something, take action! Usually, for most businesses it is to close a sale or to at least suggest finding out more information about a product or service that will eventually lead to the close of sale the business wants.Sometimes though, it might not be the goal to sell, it may be to get your visitors to sign up to a newsletter, make contact or subscribe to your blog. Never use “Click here”, “Read More” or “Learn More” these are not good call to actions, they are not informative or appealing enough to entice someone to act. ( 37 Call to Action to Get People to Read, Click and Buy ).

A well designed call to action will entice people with an exciting offer or something that will really appeal to your target audience.

Audience matters

So you have decided what business goal you are going to try and create a call to action for. You want to sell a specific product but saying “Buy this amazing product” is not really going to sell it. You need to put the customer first, customer is king  when doing web design and you really need to understand their needs in order to create a perfect homepage. One way of doing this is creating persona’s. A customer persona is creating an artificial customer, someone who might use your site, what they are looking for, even their hobbies and other websites, apps and things they might use outside of work. Here is a website with a quick guide in how to create one ( Website ). I will be creating another blog post on this and a free template to download in future.

Visuals

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, thus whoever your target audience is, the visuals must be targeted to them. Is your market 16-29 ? Then look at design trends for that age group, what are they buying? What are they listening to? What would appeal to this group? Are they 40+ the established professionals? What would appeal to this group? What about your business industry, what is working on the business leaders sites?

Keep in mind your branding colours at all times when designing your graphics, make it identifiable as your company but don’t be too concerned that you make all your pictures match the brand colours, it will make it all just brand in a little too much and be quite a dull page.

No one likes complex navigation. Minimalism is the way forward

Although seeing a pretty graphical website at first does make everyone think oooooooooooooooooooo…pretty, if it isn’t a useable interface people will become frustrated and the pretty pictures will soon become ugly. Websites are about usability. Make sure you can do these three things when accessing your site : –

• Identify the brand and product you are selling instantly by including your logo and company colours from your style guide.
• Make it easy to find the contact details of your company
• Make it easy to navigate to any page that the user wants

Why do this you are asking? Well it has been scientifically proven that after 8 seconds the user will make a decision whether or not to leave.

The content of a book is not on the front page, websites are no different

The homepage is not the place to go crazy on textual information! It is the page to guide the user to whatever it is they need from your site. It is important to include a “brief” description of what your company does with a link to the about page.  The home page is not the place to write a long blurb about your company’s history or founders how will that enhance the user experience? It won’t. If the user really wants a back story then that information should be left for the “About Us” page.

Make more than one option and test it

You’ve used the tips i have provided and drawn a few different layouts but how do you know which one would be the most succesful? Google Analytics provides you with a treasure trove of great tools to delve deeply into what pages are working, what is successful and what isn’t. It also provides an extra option called “experiments”. With this tool you can test a multitude of homepages that you have created so that when a visitor arrives on a particular page you the user will be given one of the new pages. Google Analytics will then give you some results to allow you to compare how succesful the new pages have been compared to the others in order for you to choose the best option for you to make the most conversions ( I will be writing about how to do this in the very near future ).

If you have anything else to add please do make more suggestions and best of luck with designing your homage web design.

As an employed graphic & web designer I am always looking for inspiration and avenues to increase my creative juices and for this reason have collated 6 useful websites for freelance designers. I feel very fortunate to be working with a team of people that are very down to earth and are easy to get along with but for some, especially at the moment, getting that job is a little more difficult with the current economic climate. If this is your case ( or even if you are just after a little bit more work to boost your CV or keep you afloat ) here are a few useful websites for freelance designers that might help you to increase your sales as well as build your brand awareness.

Hexi Design

Hexi Design is an online community of talented designers from around the world thriving in one creative hive – Providing small and large businesses with logo, stationery and website design! When I visited this site it seemed that there were not many jobs available, plus, I think as a designer because you have to design something to compete the emphasis is on the client rather than the hard work of the designer so use only if wanting to improve your cv or have a bit of a creative rush.

Freelancer

Freelancer connect over 7,160,499 employers and freelancers globally from over 234 countries & regions. Through their website, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, and accounting & legal services. The Problem with this site is that jobs can charge very little in wages ( due to the Indian market being very competitive, but if you are Indian then no problemo! ). Saying that though, just because the currency is a little different over there doesn’t guarantee them the work, lower rates doesn’t always mean better solution to the job. The old saying you get what you pay for is still very true…

TalentHouse

Finding the right platform to express yourself as a designer and to meet the right people to work with are essential elements of every artist’s success story. Talenthouse is the bridge between emerging talent and established professionals, and helps you get your own projects off the ground. This is not just for artists and designers but all variety’s of arts.
Build a following, find new collaborators and earn amazing rewards by taking part in our life-changing opportunities!

Etsy

Etsy is the marketplace for artists and crafters to sell art works. Its a place where buyers value craftsmanship in all we make. Sometimes its difficult finding the customer basis for your products and setting up your own e-commerce site can be expensive or quite difficult to learn how to do it, Etsy is simply a type of e-commerces site for artists.

LinkedIn

A great way to network with people you have worked with, join groups and share your knowledge with people in your industry. A great way to improve your reputation. Not only this but Linkedin will tell you of jobs coming up in your area that are suitable for your skills. You may never need to go the job centre ever again!

Learnable

Good Designers always advance themselves. Its a never ending quest to learn more, improve skills & keep ahead. When it comes to web and app design new coding languages are always being created. Learnable aims to make learning web design and development easy and fun. They want students to gain practical and usable skills on topics they are passionate about. Or alternatively if you feel you are a guru in an area you can deliver training that you believe in. Helping others is surely the best thing we can do with our time?

If you know of any other useful sites please feel free to share and I will add it to the list.

Like any design process a website undergoes change after change before arriving at an appropriate finishing point. Design items are never 100% complete even when they are pretty impressive, designs can always be improved upon but what helps a designer reach a stopping point is time and deadlines. This website is currently undergoing a makeover and I thought I would see if I could find my old site design online and to my surprise it is still out there on the web! Read on to see the website evolution.

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Jawzofdesign.com

My original website domain was jawzofdesign. I decided to change it because I wasn’t happy using the z in Jaws.. I felt it was a symbol of a designer trying to hard…oooo an s back to front! Really clever… :s. Why Jawz of design? Well the work i produce is all based around communication, graphics, conceptual art, websites, its all about using our jaws , talking in any medium I can find. JAW is also my initials.

Logo

You may notice the logo was a lot more rectangular than it is now. I never realised that i had extended the logo in such a way. Subconsciously I had redeveloped my logo in order to give it a more sleak appearance.

Good points

I particularly liked the banner on this website. When you hovered over an image it would pop out to the side and because each image has a unique texture it really does make you curious to see what those things are.

Bad points

I think the header wasn’t fantastic and the layout left a lot to be desired.

JA Wilson Design.com

My latest website design is okay for its purpose but its still lacking that oompf! I know it needs more clever images, I think the layout will need some alterations also. I really liked how the logo hit you as you visit the site but the problem with this is firstly, it has no call to action and secondly every time you visit any page on my site you have to scroll a whole page before you see any content. Maybe this is great for branding awareness but for usability it would seriously frustrate me and this is the reason I am going to be giving the site a makover.

Hopefully, by the start of April the website will be much more user friendly with a more sleek graphical site to feast your eyes on. It goes to show that as you gain more experience you know what works well and make improvements, nothing ever stays the same…

So you may have noticed that I am trying to make a habit of blogging. It can be quite tricky at times to fit the time in when designing many things and generally just trying to live a normal life but if you do manage to maintain a steady stream of blog posts you are going to start generating some really useful content that others may be able to benefit from but how do people find your blog? Are you relying on Twitter, Facebook & natural search engine results? What about submitting your blog to a few directories? Continue “5 Top Blog Directories to submit your Blog to”

Facebook cover photo size is

851 px x 315 px

Here are some clever cover photos for you to help get inspired by Continue “Facebook Cover Photo Size”

As a child born in the 1980’s i was a keen video game player. One of the computers I played the most was the Amiga 500. I used to spend many hours playing these games, loosing myself in the imaginary world of video game artists. One of the most famous games that I used to play was Lemmings. Lemmings was about helping a group of little green haired. blue gown wearing critters get home without being squished using various means such as building brings, floating to the ground , bashing walls and more little activities. This acrylic painting is based around this game and my philosophy on the journey of life. Continue ““Let’s go” – an Acrylic Painting by JA Wilson Designer & Artist”

This is how Harry my families Westland Terrier says hello. Can you receive a better greeting? He always brightens up your day!

Continue “Harry the Westland Terrier saying hello”

Entered into the John Moores Painting Prize 2012

We all have dreams as a child. We dream of becoming super heroes like Superman, Batman or other characters of fantasy realms. We are told to dream as a child, both from the media on the television to, as we grow older, schools and establishments telling you that you can achieve anything your heart desires and the way to do it is to get a really good education, progress with good grades, go to university, get a degree and that is bound to help you get a better future. Put £20,000 of your future “possible” earnings into an education  ..surely, that would help you get the perfect job…wouldn’t it? Continue ““Hold On” : Acrylic on my old secondary school door by JA Wilson”

You’ve started blogging a few times a week, you’ve added an RSS feed for all your fans to be able to follow you but some people don’t really like reading things on a screen ( me being one of those littlet ole chaps! ) so you want to add a print plug-in to your fabulous website but.. which one??! I have tried and tested a few different plug-ins and some of them are good but then advertise your competitor websites because it looks for keywords in the doc! ( I am not sure the person you are designing a website for will be best pleased with that!) and I finally came to this plug in…this is the daddy of all print wordpress plugins. It is the world’s best and most used eco-friendly print tool on WordPress. Top sites such as NBC News, CNN & Disney offer its users an economically and ecologically friendly printing and saving experience that saves paper, ink, and money while saving trees ( and you know what!? Im a tree hugger, so yeah…im loving this plug in, time to spread the luuuuurrrrv! ). Continue “THE best print plug-in for wordpress CMS websites”