In a previous post, I emphasized the importance of writing great content for your website in order to gain more readers, higher search engine rankings, and more ROI for your web design and development project. It doesn’t matter how great your web design is if the information is of no value to your end user. An essential part of effective copy writing for the web is to understand the uniqueness of the web audience.

We all know that planning is one of the most important steps in the life of a web design and development project. Without establishing goals and objectives early on, the project requirements are either misguided or left until later when changes will be more time consuming and costly. Taking a consultative role starting with the sales process ensures that the project team will have sufficient information to complete a project in the most efficient manner.

As a creative individuals, many freelance web designers have difficulty approaching the sales side of business effectively, but we can use the resources around us to solve the problem. In this case, the resource happens to be another mass communication media, radio.

Many people already utilize filters for their email to categorize, delete, and organize their incoming mail. By using Yahoo Pipes, the same principles can be applied to RSS feeds, ensuring that the items delivered to your feed reader are the most relevant. As a person who used to spend many hours online searching for my next web design project, I developed a need to sort through jobs that weren’t of interest and concentrate more on the jobs that were best suited to my strengths and talents. Yahoo Pipes came to the rescue by allowing me to pre-qualify opportunities coming from job boards around the web.

As a web professional, it is important to work efficiently. Any developer will tell you that re-purposing code is smart practice. This can save precious time and money in the overall development life cycle of a project. Think of it as a toolbox for the web. The more powerful the tools, the quicker the construction time and lower the overall cost.

Part of the creative process is the ability to think outside the box in order to provide a solution to our clients. When beginning a design, the first step after gaining insight to the client’s objectives is to search for inspiration that will help meet the established goal.

Typically this involves going to other websites and referencing the clients logo or marketing material to come up with ideas. However, it may be necessary to pull from unconventional sources in order to find something that works and will provide a fresh and unique solution for the client, especially in cases where their brand may not be established. My site, for example, was inspired by a silhouetted photo of Mt. Kilimanjaro that I found on a stock photo site while working on another project.