If your site does not have a mobile version you can bet that you’ll be losing out on big opportunities. For one, shopping sites will definitely lose out on sales as customers are discouraged from completing their transaction due to the impossible check out process on their mobile phones. New sites will also lose out as once loyal readers shift to reading other online publications that offer the news in more mobile-friendly formats. The list just goes on and on.

As a publisher, this means that you really need to look into offering a mobile-friendly version of your site IMMEDIATELY. There are many DIY mobile website tools available that you can use to design and build the mobile version of your website. You can also just hire a web designer/developer to do the job for you.  And even if you just have a blog, there’s no real excuse for not having a mobile version since you only need to use plug-ins or change blog settings on WordPress and Blogger for your blog to have a mobile-friendly version.

So if you don’t have a mobile version of your site yet, what are you waiting for?

Image credit: Omeoo

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Holding graphic design contests has its own benefits and advantages. One of the most important benefits of holding such contests is that you will have a good number of graphic designs at your disposal so that you can start your own business of providing web design and graphic design to other websites as well. All the competitors of the contests will be sufficiently compensated of course. If they are sufficiently compensated for their creations they cannot exercise any sort of right over them anymore. Hence you can conduct your own business of graphic design. It is also for sure that such contests will attract good number of designers from across the globe. The good the designs the better it would be for the blogs or websites. Web design has an active part to play in the positioning of the website in the search pages across the Internet.

As a matter of fact web design along with methods like article marketing, forum posting, link building and other forms of organic traffic building methods is very vital as far as the search engine optimization techniques are concerned. Graphic web design is no exception.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

There are lots of features which are given by web 2.0 and that includes searching for respective keywords. For people who are authorized by the web can make the information dynamic and offering the updated content to the people. Though online option you can share your views and thoughts about any topic via social networking websites. Tags, RSS and extensions are the other characteristics which you will come across. Hence you can get a variety with higher version of web 2.0.

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Apart from this, there are many web hosting companies which hire their own web designers in order to provide services to their clients. These web designers are proficient in their respective web design languages, which in most cases is WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal. Because of these open source web development applications, web hosting service providers can offer their clients free web designing feature either at their own or at clients’ ends. Because of this, chances of Cold War between professional web designers are highly decreased nowadays. However now the competition is about providing web spaces and free e-mail addresses to the clients. This means that different web hosting companies offer different facilities to their clients in order to attract them.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

First and most importantly, value your time and think big – those small gigs that earn you a few extra dollars can be great in the beginning, but they can easily eat into your time too much and prevent you from getting any real work done. Limit those small projects as much as you can and fill up your time with as many large-scaled projects as you can.

Also, you should rely on your clients for references as much as possible – whenever you complete a deal and the client is happy with your work, throw them a line asking them to refer you to their partners who may need similar services – you’d be surprised how well that works and how much extra work it can score you!

Last but not least, don’t be afraid to try out something new – the job of a freelance web designer can be a very varied one if you let it!

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

A company logo is the face of the enterprise. It is one of the most important tools in making a company immediately recognizable. Any marketing professional will tell you that recognizability is a major part of a company’s success. The more unique and perfectly suited the design is to the company’s image, the better the results.

Unfortunately, getting that great, innovative design is also the biggest problem of any company looking to develop their corporate identity. The art of creating a logo or a corporate design is something not everyone can do. Laymen like us can plot the general direction but not the nitty-gritty of the implementation. One can go to design companies to outsource the project. The upside here is that you get professionals to do it for you, but this can be an expensive proposition and you are limited to just a few mockups to choose from.

But a new online enterprise called logomyway.com has developed an innovative way of addressing the needs of companies looking for unique logos and corporate identity designs.

The idea behind logomyway.com is quite simple. By signing up with the service you can hold contests for designing the logo or design that you need. Logomyway has a community of hundreds of designers all over the world who participate in these contests. You will put up the cash prize for the contest and logomyway will get ten percent of the amount for administrative and paypal fees. The logo contest prize starts at a minimum of $200 and up to a $1000.

This system has a number of significant advantages over hiring a design company. The biggest advantage is the sheer number of mockups that you will get. You’d be lucky to get more than five mockups from a design company. But with the Logomyway system, you are guaranteed to get a minimum of 20 mockups submitted within seven days or you get a refund. It is not uncommon to get 70 mockups and up to 400 mockups for a contest! The sheer number alone will surely give you a wealth of designs to choose from.

Another advantage is that you will usually get submissions within a few hours – and not the weeks that design companies usually require. This is the kind of immediate feedback that you will surely appreciate.

Te quality of the designs that are submitted are also of the highest quality and exceptional artistry. The logomyway designer community comprise of seasoned graphic designers from different countries. They offer their experience in the field as well as their unique cultural perspective to bring you truly innovative designs.

All of the submissions are requied to be in industry standard Vector Logo files that makes it immensely scalable for any type of application.

More than this though is that you get full ownership of the logo design. The copyright to the artwork is given to you.

Logomyway.com offers a truly unique way of addressing your logo and artwork needs by offering both high quality submissions from experienced designers at really affordable costs.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

If you have what you consider a beautiful custom design for your site, the rewards of taking time to show it off can be huge if done well.

I recently read a post on Design Reviver about promoting your site on design galleries, and they give some great advice. I used to work on posting sites on CSS Vault, one of the first CSS galleries and also one of the biggest, and highest PageRank ones, and the tips in the article definitely held true when I was working on CSS Vault.

Tips like:

Submitting with a Purpose

You could randomly submit your site to one gallery and more than likely end up on many more. However, if you take a more structured approach to your submitting, you end up getting featured on more sites. There are some galleries that want to be the first to feature you, and probably won’t feature you if you have already been seen on too many other sites. The key is to submit and get listed on these first, then follow with the less picky sites.

If you aren’t sure if your design is gallery worthy or not. It doesn’t hurt to submit it and see what happens. The worst that can happen is you aren’t featured, and have lost a little bit of time, which is not a big deal when you consider the possible rewards.

Even if you just look at the free themes she has released for WordPress, I think you will be amazed at her work. While it isn’t always the most flexible for adding your own personal style, they are all very beautiful themes.

InSense is a two column design with rounded corners and a distinct blue colour scheme. It allows the user to switch from a narrow version to a wider version, but I think the narrow version has the better line width, and thus is easier to read.

Illacrimo is a three column theme with another distinct blue colour scheme, this time the design is very different, though many of the elements are positioned the same. This is by far one of my favourite WordPress themes, though probably the most difficult to shift towards a personal preference design-wise.

Smashing Theme is a three column theme that has many of the same design elements and influence as Illacrimo, but this time with an orange colour scheme, and some very different graphics. It was created for Smashing Magazine, hence its name, and is very nice to look at. I like the way the different content sections in the first sidebar have different colours, and how icons are used very sparingly on this theme.

Gossip City, or really, Gossip City 2, since Elena didn’t like the first theme, and started again from scratch, is a three column, header heavy theme, that is much easier to modify than most of her other themes, as it keeps the content area very clean, using many less graphics than some of her other themes. The theme was created for the growing celebrity blog niche, and has become quite popular in that and other arenas.

Christmas Days was Elena’s first attempt at a seasonal theme with blue, green and red combined, I think she really pulled off the feeling of Christmas. She had some interesting design challenges when finally releasing the theme to make sure that it was easy for anyone to just drop into their themes folder to use it right away without having to customize any images.

Dilectio is her most recent free theme is another one for Smashing Magazine, this time, the design is again mainly orange for its colour scheme, but has a very natural vine-like feel to it, as swirls of colour are everywhere in the design. It is three columns, and has a nice wide first sidebar for putting all sorts of content like your Flickr stream, about details, and recent posts and comments.

Not only has Elena of Design Disease released all of these wonderful free themes, but she has also done numerous blog designs, including this one you see today on eXtra For Every Publisher. Another fine example of the type of WordPress theme design ability that Elena has. I am always amazed at her work, and I highly recommend everyone check out what she’s done.

Maybe you’ve seen all these themes before, but did you know they were all done by one designer? If you look through them, you can see her sense of design and style slowly shifting and evolving as she comes up with new designs. I am at the point now where I can usually tell how old a theme of hers is, just by the placement of certain key elements.

His skill with WordPress, CSS and design is second to none, and now with a team of his colleagues helping him out, I am sure the company will do well.

Even better, I been given a discount code from him for the first people to sign up for his service.

The first 10 people that email him at chris[at]cgmmail.com quoting the promo code “xfeprocks” will get a £50 discount, making the deal even better at £399.

Very impressive work, check out The 449 if you are looking for an excellent WordPress blog design.

The problem starts when you are given the logo to work with. There are various types of logo designs: some are mono-colored, others are multi-colored; some are based on text, some are based on a symbol and finally some are a combination of both.

In some cases, having a pre-established logo can be a God-sent gift because it can save you from the trouble of deciding things such as: what kind of font family to use, or what kind of colors should you use.

But as we all know, things usually don’t always work out so well, and sometimes what the customer wants from the site design can be contradictory to what the logo looks like. Sometimes you might come across a customer that wants a modern looking website while sticking to their “old”, 1970′s looking logo.

A good example of a contradictory design, in terms of logo/design comparison, is the New York Times website, which despite having a logo with a distinct “color”, which is black, doesn’t correspond to the colors used in the website, where black is only used to distinguish some small categories.

I’m not saying that their current design would look better if they were to use style, or colors, of the logo in the rest of the website design, but the contrast between tradition and technology is evident, and for this particular website, having their traditional logo might have been the proper approach to take.

When it comes to using text as a site’s identification, you probably won’t have too many problems trying to create a design that fits it, or the other way around, as text is easier to manipulate and integrate in a design than a logo.

When it comes to using a logo as the foundation, or crucial part of a design, things might seem a bit more complicated in the first approach, but there are several “nays” one might presume which aren’t necessarily true.

“the logo’s color has to be the prominent color of the design”

Wrong. Unless the customer specifically wants this from you, you are not obligated to use color of the logo as main color of the website. A great example of such a case is Bartelme Design’s website. What he did in it was to use a color with good contrast but with the same “strength” as his green logo.

If you are working with a mono-colored logo, you pretty much have the freedom to do “whatever you (or your customer) wants” without many risks. A good example of what kind things you can achieve with different backgrounds and the same logo are the “big” sports brands websites like Nike and Adidas.

When all else fails, or when you can’t quite integrate the logo with the design that your customer loves so much, you may also try suggesting to redesign or revamp their logo to better suit the new website.

Although that might not be an option for most customers, because it involves a bit of investment afterwards in other things that use the logo, it wouldn’t be the first time a web designer created a logo for a company. Just make sure you satisfy the customer with the design first.