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.

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.