Financial Best Practices for Web Design Freelancers. A lot of web designers start their careers as employees for larger design firms.
However, it seems inevitable that most designers will at least consider going out on their own as freelancers, either for side jobs or full time. One major key to any successful freelancing career, though, is to stay on top of your finances. Below are fifteen things you need to keep in mind when it comes to your freelance business financials. Follow these simple best practices and you'll be on much more solid financial footing with your freelance web design business. Of course, make sure you speak with an accountant and/or lawyer to make sure you're doing everything you need to for your local area, especially when it comes to contracts and tax responsibilities. 1. Any time you're taking on a project for a client, you need to have a contract or agreement in place before you start any work. Your contract doesn't necessarily need to be filled with legalese and eighteen pages long. 2. 3. 4. 5. Mastering HTML5 Prefetching. What is prefetching, and why it is useful According to whatwg.org, rel=prefetch "indicates that preemptively fetching and caching the specified resource is likely to be beneficial, as it is highly likely that the user will require this resource.
" Search engines sometimes add <link rel=prefetch href="URL of top search result"> to the search results page if they feel that the top result is wildly more popular than any other. For example: using Firefox, search Google for CNN; view source; search for the keyword "prefetch". As loading time is a very important factor of a website quality, prefetching can definitely improve the user experience by loading pages before the user actually requested them.
Of course, you have to be careful (Don’t prefetch your entire website!) Prefetching pages with HTML5 Prefetching pages is super easy to implement. It is also possible to prefetch only an image: Browser support So, should you use it now? Prefetching pages on your WordPress blog <? <? 7 new techniques every web developer should know. CSS3 media queries With the rise of mobile devices, and on the other hand, of very wide displays, creating a website that looks great in both big and small devices is definitely a challenge for web designers and developers.
Happily, the CSS3 specification have a new feature which allow web developers to define styles for a specific display size only. For example, the code below show how to apply a specific style only if the client display is smaller than 767px. More info: Create an adaptable website layout with CSS3 media queries Font resizing with REMs CSS3 introduces a few new units, including the rem unit, which stands for “root em”. The em unit is relative to the font-size of the parent, which causes the compounding issue.
More info: Font resizing with REMs Cache pages for offline usage HTML5 introduces a great feature, offline caching. Caching pages is pretty easy. AddType text/cache-manifest .manifest CACHE MANIFEST CACHE index.html style.css image.jpg Server-side JavaScript CSS animations. Asymmetrical balance in web design. When I first covered the idea of symmetrical design patterns here on Webdesigner Depot I had no intention of digging into the notion of asymmetrical design.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I felt compelled to cover the topic to contrast some of the ideas revolving around symmetrical design patterns. In asymmetrical design we find designs that contain elements that do not create a mirror image. Most often, these asymmetrical designs are in fact balanced, but just not through perfectly similar halves. This sort of design is actually far easier to come by, considering most content doesn’t lend itself to perfect symmetry. Let’s consider a variety of sites that put this design approach to work and perhaps discover some ideas that can impact your own design work. Introduction to the use of asymmetry Bully Entertainment As an introduction to the notion of asymmetrical design this dramatic design provides a rather nice starting point.
Jorge Rigabert Images to balance text Cake Sweet Cake. 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design.