It’s only a few days away till August and it’s been a pretty hectic last couple of months for the ChillyBin Web Design team, we’ve had a lot of projects on the go and got the go-ahead from two of our clients to publish their websites live, so things have been really busy. The sites came together really well for Miami Horror and Vigahs Marine Technologies (view more details on our portfolio) and both companies are extreemly happy with the work that’s been done, internally we are really proud of the work we’ve done too.

We have a few resources for you this week that we found interesting over browsing the interwebs over the last week, so please enjoy…

Top 10 Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

Social Networking has become a necessity for the majority of businesses with an online presence, and it’s got an even more significant footprint with the general community. There are more than 400 million active users on Facebook, and people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Significantly for business, there are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events). Those are amazing statistics so it’s something you want to make sure your website has the capability to tap into, should your users decide to share your content. Which means that you will need to include these social bookmarking links on your website, for those of you on WordPress, there are some really easy ways to integrate it into your current site, so no excuses…
Read the whole article at speckyboy.com

And on that note, we have a link to a Free Full Layered Facebook GUI in PSD format for those budding designers out there. It’s a great start and a very useful tool for presenting ideas and/or mockups to clients of prospective Facebook designs. You can download it from Smashing Magazine for FREE!

10 Free Online Books for Web Designers

Things are moving pretty quickly in the web design world, sometimes you need to take some time for yourself and do a bit of self-education, there are plenty of wonderful books out there written by some fantastic authors. I’m personally working through some of the SitePoint books as well as some Digital Photography Guides on my iPad when I have some spare time. If you don’t have any spare cash, let’s face it, who does? then we have a fantastic resource for you, webdesignledger.com has put up links to 10 free web design books, so browse and download to your heart is content, or your eyes start bleeding, one or the other will do Read the full article at webdesignledger.com.

The 7 Sins of Managing Web Projects

Here are some really great tips from the team at ThinkVitamin that every project manager should read, The 7 Sins of Managing Web Projects, we’re all guilty of at least a couple of them.

Read the full article at sizrevisions.com

I’m undertaking a HTML5 course at the moment, courtesy of the lovely folks at SitePoint, it’s only a few days in, but things are starting to make sense already, and with that knowledge I hope to at least keep up to date with the upcoming web-standard. Alongside HTML5, there have been some significant steps made in CSS3 implementation and sixrevisions.com has some pretty nifty demo’s and experiments linked up. They really showcase how powerful this will all become in the next few years once all major browsers have fully supported them, and we’re on a pretty good path with 4/5 major browsers having partial integration, and IE9 promising that it will support HTML5 and CSS3 also, some really exciting times. Read the full article at sizrevisions.com.

Every Cigarette Smoked in Mad Men

Lastly, because season 4 of Mad Men has just started, we bring you every cigarette ever smoked in Mad Men

It’s been a while since we have had any time to sit down and blog about anything, but we have found a little bit of time this friday morning to take a look back at some of or favourite articles from the past week, as well as a little musical treat at the end to brighten your friday.

Freelancers Leaving the Comfort Zone

Noupe has a great article this week about starting out as a freelancer, and they feature some really good tips for those who are just starting out on their own. We found it a really informative piece and there were good tips on time management, preparation for sales, getting the client involved in what you are doing for them, as well as tips for selling the benefits of websites to potential clients. A really worthwhile read.

You’re a designer right? Then as part of your preparation you need to have an informative brochure or sell sheet when you are going to approach a new business prospect. Some sales people refer to this as a “leave behind”, but I’d prefer to think of it as your presentation. It doesn’t have to be fancy and printed on the nicest gold-gilded paper, but it does have to tell your story. If you’re great at page layout, but not so great at writing copy, maybe you have a connection or two that can assist you in this area. I’m a big fan of bartering among contemporaries, so maybe you can offer your skills to someone on a future project if they’ll help you write some copy for your sell sheet.

Read the whole article at noupe.com

The Worst Freelance Project Ever

So now that you know what to do, here is a pretty good article on what not to do, or at least, what to learn to avoid when discussing potential projects with prospective clients.

Every once in awhile we come across one of those nightmare clients you read about online and wonder if someone could really be like that. The sad, sad answer is yes–there are plenty of crazies in the world. And they like hiring freelancers for some reason.

Read the whole article at freelancefolder.com

30 Innovative Icon-Based Navigation Menus

This week, Design Shack has a really good compilation of icon based navigational menus. Something, that when done right can really bring a website design to the next level and make it remarkably easier for the visitor to identify and navigate throughout the site more effectively. Personally we really like the Pixel Resort & Yanis Markin menus’ So go have a browse, there is a good list of free icon resources at the bottom of the post too.

Adding icons to your navigation can not only give you an aesthetic boost but actually make for a quicker visual read of the link. Here’s a collection of over thirty icon-based navigation menus that we found online. We’ll conclude with a few resources you can use to snag some free icons to create your own fancy menus.

Read the whole article at designshack.co.uk

Getting Started with WordPress Custom Menus

ChillyBin has been pretty busy lately converting all our clients to WordPress 3.0, and making sure that all functions of the website are working as expected. WordPress 3 has been a real pleasure to work with so far, and as far as we’re concerned it’s moving in the right direction for us as a design firm as well as our clients who are after a robust CMS solution that will fulfill all their needs. WordPress 3 has taken a giant leap forward with it’s new inclusion of custom navigational menus, & custom post taxonomies which will allow us to do some pretty funky things in the near future, so watch this space. Think Vitamin has a pretty good introductory article on getting started with wordpress 3′s custom menu’s, it’s worth a read.
Read the whole article at thinkvitamin.com

13 Sexy Sign Up Forms

Sign up forms, and forms in general are really important to get right on any site design, they need to be easily accessible for all users. Designm.ag has put together a good list of some of their fave’s, and we would have to agree! We especially love Kontain.

When it comes to online strategies you should never overlook the design of your sign up page. Some of the given examples are sites than many of you I’m sure are familiar with, although, I feel there are some growing gems among the group. (And when I say sexy, I really mean quality) Take a look around!

Read the whole article at designm.ag

New Music for Your Ears

And lastly, to help you get though those friday afternoon struggles, we have for you a new track from aussie electro rockers Cut Copy. Just sign up to their mailing list and you will get a copy of one of the new tracks off their upcoming album, it’s definitely worth a listen so go check em out.

We’ve all had these problems working with WordPress as designers where you are trying to format an article or something for a client and have everything lined up perfectly, publish the article, only to find out that WordPress has removed all your manual line-breaks!

Fortunately there is a pretty simple fix, I had to edit formatting.php in order to keep wpautop() from removing my deliberate breaks. I commented out the following line which replaces two occurrences of BR separated only by whitespace with two newlines:

//$pee = preg_replace('|<br />\s*<br />|', "\n\n", $pee);

Then, I commented out this line found towards the end of the function and replaced it with a version that exempts BRs from being removed:

Commented out:
//$pee = preg_replace('!<br />(\s*</?(?:p|li|div|dl|dd|dt|th|pre|td|ul|ol)[^>]*>)!', '$1', $pee);

Replaced with:
$pee = preg_replace('!(\s*</?(?:p|li|div|dl|dd|dt|th|pre|td|ul|ol)[^>]*>)!', '$1', $pee);

This keeps wordpress from stripping the breaks, but it does not keep Tiny MCE from doing it if you go to visual mode.

chillybin Web Design & Consultancy would like to wish all of our clients, friends, partners and readers a happy and prosperous New Year!

chillybin will be closed on Feb 15th & 16th for New Year celebrations and will return Wednesday 17th.

Customer loyalty can never be mis-underestimated but it often is. It is a proven fact that it is much cheaper to re-market to your current customers and costs less in time and money to resell to them than to find new customers. Why do you think the multinationals bend over backwards with discounts when you are threatening to leave them. Mobile Phone & Pay TV providers for example suddenly offer amazing new deals & handset upgrades when you are showing that you are about to go to their rivals.

But how do you keep customers and keep them keen. Here’s a few tips that might help you…

1. Communications
If you keep communications hot with customers then they will more likely be in a position to buy from you in the future. This could be through a blog, email marketing campaigns or even printed newsletters. Keeping in touch is key as the buyer (customer) goes through different buying cycles and decisions. By giving them information on the latest skills you’ve acquired (hired) or latest technologies applied to your recent website creation in your portfolio, they may just want that upgrade too.

2. Add Value
Be there for your customers and deliver a good quality product. It’s not all about how cheap it is, there are more important things for customers. Are you there to answer phone calls or emails when they need support? Are you active on your support forum? Do you do extra work such as logo design or brochures on top of website design? Can you SEO the site for when it launches? Do you throw in a couple of email marketing templates too? There are lots of things you can do to add extra value to the purchase a customer makes other than just a discount.

3. Loyalty Schemes
A successful loyalty scheme can encourage frequent purchases from customers over time. Ideas might include yearly discounts on hosting over the monthly price; buy 5 hours of changes for the price of 4 and even a yearly refresh in design for a % off the usual design price you charge. Be creative, reward loyal customers and they’ll keep coming back for more and even turn into your advocates. When that happens, you won’t be able to handle the work that comes your way.

4. Customers are God
In Japan, there’s a well know proverb that says that “customers are God”. Customer service is very important for your brand, business and customer loyalty. Make sure you handle complaints effectively, manage their expectations and answer any questions promptly. The biggest problems for designers can often be managing expectations with the design brief. My advice is to always under promise and over deliver and you’ll do just fine.

5. Listen to your Customers
The more you know and learn about your customers, the easier it is to shape your business’ and its direction to meet your customers’ needs and desires. Yes, add getsatifaction.com’s feedback widget to your site, ask customers for feedback through surveys and referrals, call customers and find out how they are doing if you’ve not heard from them and listen to what they have to say. Then, act on it. There’s no good hearing and disagreeing. Remember, customers are gods and although they don’t know what a CMS system or an H1 tag necessarily is, they know what they want and you have to give it to them for your design business to succeed.

Whether you think your customer is a God or have a strict policy to answer all support emails within 48 hours, there are lots of things we can all do to improve our customer relations and ultimately our bottom line. Happy customers equals loyal customers. And, loyal customers equals healthy business.

Need a quick definition of a word in Safari or an email? Yes, you probably already knew you could right-click on a highlighted word and bring up the OS X dictionary, but how about this? Press Command+Control+D while hovering over any word, and up pops the definition almost immediately. If you continue to hold down those keys you can slide your mouse over any other word and get a definition as well. Let go of the keys, and click somewhere else and the dictionary vanishes.

This little feature doesn’t work everywhere. It requires you be in a Cocoa application, like Safari or Mail. It works in Pages, but not in MS Word because it was based on Carbon. Sadly, it doesn’t work in Firefox. In fact, you can’t right-click in Firefox and get a definition in the ‘normal’ Apple way.

If you want even more information than the little definition, click on the word ‘more’ at the lower right of the pop-up, and you’ll get a lot more stuff from the Apple dictionary app, including usage suggestions and the origins of the word.

A couple of notes: If you are using a macro program like QuicKeys, make sure you aren’t mapping the key combination you need to activate this feature, or re-map it to something else. If you click on the word ‘dictionary’ you can bring up the thesaurus, and if you launch the Apple dictionary application you can get into preferences and change the order of display, so you get the thesaurus as a default. You can also change your right-click behavior to open the concise panel instead of the larger definition page. Once I memorised the command key sequence I find myself using this all the time. It’s quick and dirty.

Ho Ho Ho,

As the Holiday Season is well and truly upon us, we here at ChillyBin Web Design & Consultancy find ourselves reflecting on the past year and on those who have helped to shape our business in a most significant way. We value our relationship with you and look forward to working with you in the years to come. We wish you a very happy Holiday Season and a New Year filled with peace and prosperity.

I’ve been using macs for quite a while now and one thing I love about the operating system is the wealth of well designed and useful software which is available. Windows has a large breadth of software available but since switching over in 2003 I’ve not had to go back to windows unless I am browser testing a website in Internet Explorer. For me, there is nothing that my mac can’t do, be it work or play.

I’ve compiled a list of my favourite applications, most of them I use on at least a weekly basis, and in no particular order.

Perian
A must have download for anyone who wants to consume video content on thier mac. Install it and let Quicktime open all your video files with ease.

Tweetie
Tweet much? Well if you haven’t already downloaded Tweetie for your iPhone or your mac then you are missing out. It’s a wonderfully designed application that features multiple accounts, independent compose windows, search trends, threaded dm’s, user details & bookmarklets which make it my Twitter application of choice. Best of all, they offer a free version (ad supported)

Billings
Since starting my own business (ChillyBin Web Design & Consultancy) earlier in the year Billings has been an essential piece of my daily routine. It looks after all my job estimates, client briefs, time tracking, invoicing and accounting. It’s a very powerful little tool for small business and something that I could not do without.

Things
I’ve been using the GTD method for a few years now to manage my tasks and Things is a neat little app for iPhone and mac that facilitates all my todo lists and syncs across both devices seamlessly. I no longer have to worry about forgetting anything either with ChillyBin or in my personal life. I’ve recently integrated it with Mail.app so I can send new items to it effortsly from my email.

Textmate
I’ve recently just upgraded to Textmate after running BBedit for a number of years. Textmate now looks after all my text editing across my systems, it opens, reads and edits any file I throw at it. Since I spend most of my day writing and editing XHTML & CSS this is one tool I could not do without, it also has a set of really strong bundles inbuilt which allow textmate to be extended easily.

Adium
I use chat for business and for pleasure and Adium is my multiple protocol application of choice, there are tons of community developed plugins, icons, message lists and contact lists themes available which makes this app a constant on any system I run.

Transmit
I love Transmit, it’s been my SFTP/FTP application since i first migrated to mac and it’s developed my the Panic team who really make some great software. I use this religiously to get web content around to both client and personal websites.

Transmission
I don’t tend to download much through bittorrent anymore but when I do it’s with Transmission. It also monitors a folder hooked up to Dropbox so I can download even when I’m out of the office or on my iPhone.

Speed Download 5
Multiple threaded download management application which I use to download and sort anything downloaded through the web, it also allows me to connect it up with my rapidshare account.

Adobe Creative Suite
Photoshop, Illustrator, & Dreamweaver are my tools of choice out of this suite which has been the main tool of any creative project I’ve undertaken.

Pixelmator
For those little image edits which I can’t be bothered opening up Photoshop for.

VMWare Fusion
Alas, there are still times we need to run windows software, especially when testing and checking a new website design across multiple browsers, helps with streaming and decoding any files specifically written for windows too (I’m looking at you WMV!) I highly recommend checking it out and the new Unity mode in v3 is fantastic.

Parachute
Backups are important, I use this little app in conjunction with Time Machine to keep backups of my hard disk content across on my 2TB NAS storage device.

1Password
Strong Password generator and managment application that keeps all my passwords synced, strong and secure. Helps when I am setting up new passwords and websites for clients as it allows me a quick and simple way to archive these very strong passwords and bring them up when I need them very quickly. Oh, and it syncs across to my iPhone too.

Balsamiq Mockups
Prototyping tool developed in Air which allows me to quickly send clients a basic mockup of their project quickly without having to worry about colours and/or opening up Photoshop at the first stage of a project. A real lifesaver!

Sequel Pro
Helps me manage online and offline database content for client websites.

Bowtie
iTunes notifier and last.fm scrobbler that sits alongside my dock and allows me to quickly see what track in playing in iTunes and either rate it or skip it, has a strong set of keyboard shortcuts too.

CandyBar
I use CandyBar to customise icons & docks across my systems with a little help from the amazing icon designers at macthemes2.net & deviantart.com.

Dropbox
I love my dropbox, it allows me to send files aroundthw web seamlessly and effortleessly. I can sync a new design file easily with a client which will then get downloaded to their dropbox folder on their system. I also use it to share large files over the net via email to clients or friends as I’ve got 2.5GB of storage to play with. I also sync my .torrent files here with Transmission.

iWork Suite
Pages, Numbers & Keynote are all really undervalued applications in my opinion and they take care of all proposals, briefs, spreadsheet and presentation tasks I throw at it. They also all open ad export files in PDF and the Microsoft Office file formats so you can share this with PC users too.

MainMenu
Set of system tools which allows me to clean and maintain my snow leopard installations and keep them running up to spec. I also use it to clean my browser and dns caches when editing and viewing website designs as well As repairing and corrupt file permissions.

iStat
Remote monitoring tool that allows me to check the status of any of my machines my iPhone.

Drive Genius 2
For anything that MainMenu can’t handle I load up Drive Genius, it also helps with defragmentation of my drives (yes, it happens even on a mac), repartitioning, shredding files, scanning & integrity checks.

iLife Suite
If you own a mac you will have at least used these applications, but I really couldn’t do without iMovie, iPhoto & Garageband.

UnRarX & The Unarchiver
For all your unarchiving needs.

Somewhere between the backing-up and restoration of a clients MySQL WordPress database we picked up some strange characters. Rather than having to go through by hand to edit them out, we used a nice SQL snippet to do a full-database search and replace.

update [table_name] set [field_name] =
replace([field_name],'[string_to_find]','[string_to_replace]');

So in this case, to get rid of these weird “” characters, we ran the statement

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'ÂÂ','');

Worked perfectly for us, it should for you as well.