SpyreStudios

Web-Design and Development Magazine

Keep Scammers & Bad Clients Out of Your Freelancing Business

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You’ve probably heard about them. Clients who won’t pay. Clients who treat freelancers poorly. Clients who pile on more work than the freelancer agreed to.

You may have even had the misfortune of working for one yourself. It’s not uncommon for freelance designers to wind up working for a scammer or a bad client.

Some freelance designers view this as an inevitable part of freelancing, but I say that you can keep many scammers and bad clients out of your freelancing business if you take the proper precautions.

In this post, I’ll share a checklist to help you identify scammers and bad clients. If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Is That Client Legit or Just a Tire Kicker?

Business Relationship Basics for Freelance Designers

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Freelance designers and other freelancers often miss the boat when it comes to finding new customers and building their freelancing business.

That’s because they don’t understand how building healthy long-term business relationships fits into their marketing plan. In the eyes of some freelance designers, a contact is either an immediate prospect or they are not worth pursuing. Often, this means they miss a lot of business opportunities.

In this post, I’ll discuss the importance of building relationships and what it can mean for a freelance designer. I’ll explain why long-term relationships are important and also provide you with five tips for meeting and building business relationships. If you like this post, you may also enjoy reading Why Online Friends are Important to Freelancers.

eCommerce Lessons From Your Favorite Stores

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It wasn’t that long ago that you could only buy products by waiting in line at a store or go through tedious telephone ordering to get the latest and greatest gadget or widget.

eBay and Amazon changed all of that. Now, nearly any person or business can buy or sell products or services online. In this article, we’ll examine what we can learn from observing our favorite stores in action to make the online experience better.

What 8-Bit Video Games Can Teach Us About Design And UX

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The computer sitting at your desk is far more powerful than anything available to all but the largest businesses in the 1980s, enabling us to continue to add layer upon layer without slowing down, and possibly losing focus on why we are here in the first place – to deliver a high quality product.

One possible solution is to this is to artificially limit your design and color options the way Shigeru Miyamoto was limited by technical constraints when designing Zelda and Mario on the NES.

While some of the NES library was filler, there were many standouts that used the limitations of 8 bit technology as strengths, rather than weakness.

Curing the Navigation-itis Syndrome

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More and more content is being published everyday and site owners need to find ways to categorize all this content. And with more content and categories comes greater navigation problems.

Sometimes navigation becomes a problem when there are simply too many options. Thus, it’s of great importance to cure the navigation-itis syndrome and make website navigation user-friendly and easy to navigate.

The User Experience And Psychology Of Colour

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There is a lot of psychology in colour, and while I don’t claim to be an expert, every now and then I come across something that seems to be rather counterintuitive.

I suppose there are some cultural influences on colour as well, and people need to take these sorts of things into account when designing sites, but there also seem to be some ideas that cross over cultural lines.