LiveReload is branded as a “Web developer’s wonderland,” it’s a mac application that monitors changes in your file system. As soon as you save a file, the file is preprocessed as needed, and the browser is refreshed. Also, every time you change a CSS file or image, the browser is updated instantly without you having to reload the page.

A great useful time-saver for every Web developer’s toolbox.

Check it out: getfractal.com.

The new Google font directory includes a massive update to the layout including information on impact of page load speed and a updated tool for changing features such as letter-spacing. You can now compare, add multiple fonts and download the final package.

You can find out more about the new interface and fonts at http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2

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.

CSS3 Demos & Experiments

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 sixrevisions.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

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.

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.

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.

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.