An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run.

And this is where we come in. Back in old days, Smashing Magazine used to publish lists after lists, with plethora of links that covered different topics all somehow related to web design and development. We have undergone quite a development since then, and are now publishing almost only in-depth articles — written by some of the best professionals in the industry. However, useful, carefully prepared and filtered lists are still useful, and therefore we keep publishing them as well.

Below you’ll find 50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers. Among other things, you will find recently released tools, useful reference sheets, articles and further resources. Such posts are prepared over months, each containing resources found, reviewed or bookmarked by the Smashing Editorial Team. We hope that at least some of them will help you improve your workflow!

Typography

Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography (free PDF)
This eBook will help you better understand the foundation of typography and overcome common obstacles and problems when choosing type.

Web Font Specimen
This template lets you check the typography by analyzing the HTML-specimen in your browser. The specimen contains whole paragraphs in various line heights and font sizes, different headings, ordered and unordered lists, as well as italic and bold text. You can analyze the body size comparison that reveals aspects of the typeface that can’t otherwise be seen and study single glyphs, measure, grayscale as well as light on dark and dark on light previews. You may want to check out Good Web Fonts for the actual specimens of various legible screen fonts.

Font Anatomy Wallpaper
This wallpaper (1920×1200) covers the terminology of typography, showcasing indi­vid­ual parts of the char­ac­ters of the alpha­bet.

Web FontFont User Guide (PDF)
This Web FontFont User Guide contains information about typography aimed at different groups of people: web developers, system administrators and website visitors. You may want to consider giving it to your clients or colleagues.

AltFontPrev
This is a simple JavaScript bookmarklet that lets you view the font stack of any website and then deactivate each font with a single click. It makes it easy not only to make sure everything looks okay when certain fonts aren’t installed on a user’s system, but also to view the fonts included in the website’s font stack in a single click, rather than opening the source code. You can even specify a custom font, which makes it handy when you’re considering changing a design’s current font.

Typografix
This tool is an HTML re-processing script for creating beautiful typography. It corrects things like ellipses and smart quotes and adds tags for <script>, <pre> and <code> automatically. The en dash, for example, is created automatically when a hyphen is surrounded by spaces, and the em dash is created when two dashes appear in a row. Typografix is written in C#, requires Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Unicode Codepoint Chart
This chart is broken down neatly by type of character and symbol (and by language in many cases), with a visual reference under each category. From there, just click on the symbol or character you want and you’re brought to a page with detailed information about the character, along with a browser test page, an outline (in SVG format) and a variety of encodings and character sets (HTML entity, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8, etc.).

Bookmarklets

Quix
We have covered Quix several once already, but when one talks about bookmarklets, it is just necessary to mention Quix as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a powerful command line in your browser, some kind of shell that lets you use handy commands and shortcuts for a quicker and more productive workflow? That’s exactly what Quix offers. The tool is a clever extensible bookmarklet that lets you both access your bookmarks and perform various operations on other websites.

WP-Toolbar bookmarklet
This tool will save a lot of clicks as you edit or update posts on your WordPress-powered blog. The bookmarklet gives you quick access to the entire administrative back-end directly in your browser’s window. There is also a GreaseMonkey script that automatically loads the toolbar when you visit a particular website.

Print Friendly Bookmarklet
This bookmarklet strips advertising, navigation and all things that you don’t want to have when you decide to print out a page. It formats the content of an article or a document for great readbility and generates a minimal and clean PDF for printing.

Bookmarklet Combiner
This tool creates a master bookmarklet which can either run all bookmarks at once or display a menu at some area of the page. Nice service for users who wants to avoid using a special folder only to hold all bookmarklets.

The Printliminator
The Printliminator is a bookmarklet with some simple tools you can use to makes websites print better. One click to activate, and then click to remove elements from the page, remove graphics, and apply better print styling.

Bespin Bookmarklet
Using the Bespin Bookmarklet, you can replace any textarea you encounter with a Bespin editor, making editing the text much more pleasant.

CSS, HTML and JavaScript Tools

eCSStender
Extensions built with eCSStender simplify the design process because you can author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and rest assured that your design will work — even in IE6.

CoffeeScript
This is a little programming language that compiles JavaScript while simplifying the code that developers actually have to deal with. It works with current JavaScript libraries and compiles clean code, leaving even comments intact. Once developers familiarize themselves with how CoffeeScript works, they could potentially save themselves a lot of time and headaches with the simplified code.

#grid
#grid is a little tool that inserts a grid onto the Web page. You can hold the grid in place and toggle it between the foreground and background. To display the grid, just press a hot key on your keyboard, and you can set your own short keys to switch views.

Primer CSS
This tiny generator works online and has only one function: it extracts from an HTML page (copying and pasting will do) a framework of classes and IDs that can be used as the foundation of an external style sheet. This can be wonderful if you work by first doing the structure in HTML, and then the forms and colors in the style sheet.

CSS Usage
CSS Coverage is an extension for Firebug which allows you to scan multiple pages of your site to see which CSS rules are actually used in your site. Each time you run a scan, the CSS files that are included in the current page are shown with the number of times the rules has been found applied on your page before it.

JS.Class: Ruby-style JavaScript
JS.Class is a set of tools designed to make it easy to build robust object-oriented programs in JavaScript. It’s based on Ruby, and gives you access to Ruby’s object, module and class systems, some of its reflection and metaprogramming facilities, and a few of the packages from its standard library. It also provides a package manager to help load your applications efficiently.

JS Bin
JS Bin is an application specifically designed to help JavaScript- and CSS-developers to test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively. JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code, new tabs doesn’t). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

jQuery 1.4.2 Visual Cheat Sheet
jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet is a updated version of the useful jQuery Cheat Sheet. It includes all the reference you will need for jQuery 1.4.2 API.

Turbine
Turbine is a collection of PHP-powered tools that decrease CSS development time and help you avoid headaches. Among other things, it has a simple syntax, automatic packing and gzipping of multiple style files, OOP-like inheritance and templating features as well as a shell for experiments and debugging.

Jo: JavaScript Application Framework for HTML5
Jo embraces JavaScript’s object model and leverages CSS3 to handle as much of the presentation and animation as possible. It also provides a consistent and modular event model between objects and plays nicely with other libraries like PhoneGap.

Sencha: HTML5 Mobile App Framework
Sencha Touch allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touch screen devices.

Aloha Editor, The HTML5 Editor
Aloha Editor is an advanced browser-based editor that is faster than other editors and provides you with better and richer formatting in real-time in your browser.

JavaScript Regex Syntax Highlighter
Do you want RegexPal-style regex syntax highlighting on your webpages? This library takes care of it for you, so you can spend more time writing regular expressions and less time deciphering them. Currently, JavaScript regexes only are supported.

OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software
The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers.

sweet-template
Sweet (Simple WEb front-End Template) is a lightweight JavaScript template with high performance. It’s small, fast, easy to use, and, most important, extensible. It also can be integrated with jQuery.

jQuery Deconstructed
The Deconstructed series is designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype and MooTools. It breaks the physical JavaScript into visual blocks that you can easiliy navigate. Each block opens to reveal its internal code. Clickable hyperlinks allow you to follow program flow.

Alloy UI
Alloy is a UI metaframework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across all three levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.

Google JavaScript Style Guide
This document provides a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) that hold the style guidelines used for Google code. It covers general good practices for open-source projects and well-written and well-documented code. It covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.”

gleeBox
Gleebox provides a way to navigate web pages via keyboard. For instance, it allows you to hit the ‘G’-key and every link on the page will be highlighted. This application is available as an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome.

shellinabox
Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator. This emulator is accessible to every browser that supports JavaScript and CSS and does not require any additional browser plugins.

Juicer: a CSS and JavaScript packaging tool
Juicer is a new command line tool that helps by resolving dependencies, merging and compressing files. It can check the syntax, add cache busters to and cycle asset hosts on URLs in CSS files.

Jake: A Build Tool for JavaScript
Jake is a new build tool built entirely in JavaScript that runs on top of the CommonJS. As its name suggests, it is based on the existing and already popular Rake tool and benefits from the same simplicity.

Closure Compiler
The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Useful Online Tools and Services

ComparePSD (Win only)
This tool lets you compare two Photoshop files side by side and see every little difference. Look for differences by layer or by effect. You get a scaled view of the files, so you can see them next to each other and pick out differences more quickly. ComparePSD is available for Windows only and is free to download and use.

Secure Passwords Generator
The tool lets you enter parameters, including the length of the password, whether to include uppercase and/or lowercase letters or numbers or punctuation and whether to eliminate characters that resemble each other (such as i and l, 1 and I, and o and 0). Then, just select the number of passwords to generate, and it returns a list. It even includes phonetics for each password to make it easier to read out loud (in case you’re giving a password to someone over the phone, for example).

SwatchSpot: Random Color Swatch Generator
This tool creates random color swatches to inspire you. Lock in the colors you like and shuffle away the ones you don’t. Once you’re done, grab the color codes or download your palette.

Yuuguu: Instant screen sharing and web conferencing
This tool provides instant web-conferencing, online meetings and collaboration and enables you to work with your cusomers, partners and colleagues right away, without a single download. The free version allows for 100 minutes per month of web conferencing.

Web Form Recovery Firefox Plugin
Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash or server timeout you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Which loads faster?
This tool lets you see two websites load side by side in real time. Then it shows how long each took to load and the percentage difference.

Faary
Faary is an online form builder that operates with the help of text lines, and the form is generated as such. The tool creates an HTML form with CSS, which can be downloaded as a ZIP archive.

Scr.im
Scr.im lets you use a shortened URL to give out your email address safely and securely on forums. Just enter your email address on Scr.im and it will give you a link to a page with your email address, with security to prevent bots from viewing it.

Name Checklist
This tool will help you find out if your brand name, username, domain and vanity url are still available online or they are already taken.

Quora – Web Design
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. You can follow web design, usability and related discussions and ask your questions as well.

Todo.txt Command Line Interface
If you’ve got a file called todo.txt on your computer right now, this script is for you. You probably don’t want to launch a full-blown text editor every time you need to add an item to your to-do list, or mark one that’s already there as complete. With this simple shell script, you can interact with todo.txt at the command line for quick and easy, Unix-y access.

Note and Point
This gallery highlights beautiful Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint-slides on the Web (mostly Web design-related) which is great for inspiration if you are thinking about creating beautiful and attractive slides for your next presentation.

ManyBooks
This site offers a huge collection of public domain e-books, as well as other newer books that have been released in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in a variety of formats.

Tweetment
This service allows you to design sexy web pages for your tweets.

Browser Cover Generator
This simple tool generates a browser preview of an uploaded image and can add address bar URL, window title, shadow, status bar and various browser skins to the image.

Linkification Firefox Plugin
Linkification Converts text links into genuine, clickable links. To view and set options, you can use the Linkification right-click context menu.

Useful References and Guides

Design Is History
This resource showcases the evolution of design through time. It was created as a teaching tool for young designers just beginning to explore graphic design and as a reference tool for all designers. As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.

User Interface Style Guides
This page features some useful links to style guides used by large websites, corporations and news agencies (e.g. the BBC Style Guide), including editorial guidelines, quality guidelines and online standards.

Trademarkia
Trademarkia is a free search engine for U.S. federally registered trademarks on the Internet. They provide up to the minute contextual information about the current use of interesting business names, slogans, and logos through pictures, commercials, and conversations from Flickr, Google, Youtube, and Twitter for each U.S. trademark filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since the year 1870.

Icon Reference Chart
This chart, created by Jon Hicks, was created to collect the sizes, formats and the related information about icons used on different devices. At the moment it covers browsers, Android, iPad, iPhone, iPhone 4, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. And you can also download a template for iPhone and iPad icons. Useful.

OpenWith.org
OpenWith is a directory of existing file extensions and free tools to open them. You’ll find a free program for just about everything you would ever need to open, including source code, data files, disc images, spreadsheets and video files.

ScriptSrc.net
This site puts all the latest versions of script tags from the various JavaScript libraries in one place. Whether you use jQuery, swfobject, Chrome Frame, MooTools, Ext JS, YUI, Prototype, Dojo or Scriptaculous, you’ll find the most recent script tags here.

Colours In Cultures Chart
This map shows how colours are perceived in different cultures and nations across the globe.

Guidelines and standards manuals
Handy examples of guidelines and standards manuals used by companies and brands online. Also check Branding & Corporate Identity Design page.

Code Standards and Front-End Development Best Practices
This document outlines de-facto code standards in professional modern front-end development. The primary motivation of the document is code consistency and best practices. By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and mitigate risk of breakage in the future. Nice and useful overview.

Essential Tools You Always have Handy When Fixing a PC Problem?
This forum thread features must-have tools that you should keep loaded on your thumb drive when asked to deal with a family member of friend’s personal computer issue.

Project Management For Dummies
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. This page provides a nice project management cheat sheet that will help you handle your project management assignments, such as confirming a project’s justification, developing project objectives and schedules, and maintaining commitment for a project.

Expression Engine Reference Chart
A quick and useful reference guide for ExpressionEngine users. A PDF-version is available as well.

Computer Hardware Chart
A detailed and handy hardware chart for notebook RAM, desktop RAM, CPU sockets, hard drives, ports, processor card slots, processor card sockets, peripheral cards, desktop card slots and power connectors.

Corporate Identity / Logo Usage Guides
A collection of documents that illustrate how organizations and companies ensure that their branding remains consistent online and in print.

ASCII: The Pronouncation Guide
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as ‘a’ or ‘@’ or an action of some sort. The non-printing ASCII characters are rarely used for their original purpose. This page features an ASCII character table and includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters and the guide to their pronouncation.

Name Pronunciation Guide
Inogolo is a practical, easy-to-use website devoted to the English pronunciation of the names of people, places, and miscellaneous stuff. The site contains a searchable database of names with both phonetic and audio pronunciations in English.

Usability and User Experience

Hand picked UX related resources
UXMARKZ is a collection of hand picked UX related resources, updated daily. You will find interesting sites, articles, videos, images and slideshows from the field of interaction design, usability, information achitecture, user interface design and other. All submissions are moderated.

UX Myths
This ressource is supposed to help you build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs. UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take their word for it, the site shows you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

User Interface Design Patterns for Ideas and Inspiration
A user interface design pattern library. It is a collection of Web design patterns and best practices which helps you to find inspiration and design interfaces with great user experience. It is also a user interface gallery full of real world examples of our patterns.

Last Click

How Do I Win Rock Paper Scissors Every Time?
Now, that’s a handy resource: have you ever gotten tired of being crushed by Rock, cut to shreds by Scissors, or smothered by Paper? This graphic has information compiled about Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) from the World RPS Society, the masters of Rock, Paper, Scissors, to help you overcome your opponents and understand the strategies needed to win Rock, Paper, Scissors every time.

The Universal Packing List
This tool generates a custom packing list for your journeys. You have to provide some basic information about the journey and a packing list appears immediately.

Ex-blocker
The Ex-blocker is a plugin that hides any information about your ex online. The tool is available as a Firefox and Chrome extension.

Not Beans Again
An online tool that finds a recipe from your ingredients. Enter what you have got in your fridge to the “Ingrediometer” and see if the tool can come up with a recipe for you.

A Coder’s Guide to Coffee
As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance. But did you also know that coffee can be a damn tasty beverage? All you need is the appropriate amount of disrespect for the mainstream coffee industry and a desire to enjoy a better beverage.

Flipboard
Flipboard is a free personalized social magazine for your iPad. It allows you to quickly flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The emergence of tools like this is what will make iPad a truly useful and handy device for many people.

With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.

For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.

1. Have a High-Quality Design for Your Portfolio Site

Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.

When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.

Impressive portfolio sites are great for encouraging visitors to contact you about their project, and they are also more likely to attract links and attention from other designers and bloggers.

2. Get Published in Web Design/CSS Galleries

There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of gallery sites out there that exist for the purpose of showcasing beautiful websites. Having your site featured in a few of the more popular galleries will help it to attract attention from other galleries and design blogs, which can result in a flood of new visitors and a significant number of inbound links.

Getting your site featured in design galleries isn’t easy, but if you’ve done your best work with your portfolio site you’ll probably want to submit it to some galleries. Submitting to galleries can be rather time consuming, so you may want to consider a service like Gallery Rush that submits your site to a bunch of galleries for a relatively small fee of $17.

In addition to general design and CSS galleries, there are several that focus on showcasing the best portfolio sites, including:

• Folio Focus

• Pixel Perfect Portfolios

• Foliostars

3. Start a Blog

Possibly the best way to attract visitors to your portfolio site is to start a blog on the same domain. As you maintain the blog and publish new content your site will benefit from blog subscribers and repeat visitors, more content that can attract search engine traffic, increased ability to attract links, and a platform for showcasing your skills and expertise.

There are a number of different approaches that you can take with your blog. You may simply want to publish blog posts and content that will appeal to designers in attempt to increase your profile, build links, and establish the quality of your domain. You may want to publish case studies about your client work that will appeal to other designers who want to learn, as well as to potential clients who may be interested in knowing more about how you work. In this way you are able to use the blog to put a spotlight on your work, and hopefully the quality will lead to new clients. Or you could write posts that might answer questions that potential clients would have, or that would be optimized to be found in search results for queries of potential clients.

One of the most important benefits of blogging was mentioned briefly, and that is link building. If your portfolio site includes only a few pages of content (for example, a home page, portfolio page, about page, contact info page), it will be pretty difficult to attract any kind of significant search engine traffic. However, with a blog you will be drastically increasing the amount of content on the site, and that content will be much more likely to draw links from other blogs and from social media sites. Having a blog that attracts links will give your site/blog a chance to rank well for long tail search phrases, and in time your site should receive exponentially more search traffic than it would without the blog.

4. Pursue Freelance Blogging

In addition to publishing posts on your own blog, writing for other blogs also presents some great opportunities. Whether you are writing free guest posts or freelancing with larger design blogs that pay for contributions, you’ll usually receive an author bio at the end of the post that can include a link to your own site, and you’ll also be building up your name recognition.

Major design blogs like Smashing Magazine, Webdesigner Depot, and Six Revisions accept articles from designers and developers, and they pay for published articles. Aside from the larger blogs that pay contributors, writing free guest posts for smaller blogs can also be an excellent way to build links and gain exposure.

5. Build it to Be Search Engine Friendly

If you’re just starting your portfolio site it is unlikely that you’ll get more than a handful of search engine visitors for a while. But if you build the site to be friendly to search engines and if you work on publishing quality content on your blog and attracting links from other sites, you will be in a good position to see that search engine traffic rise over a period of time.

Having a search engine friendly website simply means that it is built to make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl the site and to determine what it is about, and to have a chance to rank well. It involves proper coding, use of page titles and headers, proper site structure, etc. (For a more detailed look at the subject see How to Create Search Engine Friendly Websites.)

6. Participate in Social Networking

Social media and social networking sites present opportunities to attract visitors to your portfolio site or blog, as well as to connect with other designers and build your professional network.

For getting visitors to your blog there are a number of niche-specific sites that are excellent alternatives to major social news sites like Digg. If you’re looking to reach a targeted audience of designers and developers try sites like:

• Design Bump

• Design Float

• DZone

• The Web Blend

• Design Related

• FAQ Pal

Aside from news/voting sites, there are excellent opportunities available to showcase work from your portfolio at networking sites like:

• Behance

• deviantART

• Flickr

• Carbonmade

7. Be Active on Twitter

Twitter is extremely popular with designers, so if you are looking for a place to connect with others you really should be active on Twitter (find us at @Vapvarun). In terms of getting visitors from Twitter, you can share tweets with links to your blog posts, or tweet links to recently completed projects, or even projects that are in process when you are looking for feedback. Like any other type of social networking, you must genuinely become a part of the community of users in order to have much impact for yourself. If it seems that you are only there for self promotion and not to interact, users will notice and the positive impacts will be minimal.

8. Distribute Freebies

Everyone love freebies. As a designer you can give away free templates, Photoshop brushes, PSD files, vectors, textures, icons, or just about any other type of resource that can be used for design. Giving items away can help to draw new visitors to your site, and maybe they’ll check out your portfolio while they are there. Freebies are also good for building links from other blogs and social media sites, and just as importantly, it gives you an opportunity to show your quality of work to the world. Just because you are giving it away for free doesn’t me that it can’t help to make you land clients or make money, so be sure that whatever you are giving away is up to your level of quality.

In addition to giving away freebies from your own site, you can also produce items to be given away at other sites and blogs, which may help to give some added exposure to your work. Many design blogs work with various designers to produce freebies to give to their readers. If you’re hoping to get your work noticed by a large audience, this may be a great opportunity.

9. Do Interviews

Designers are frequently asked to do interviews for blogs or for students. Although it will take some of your time to do the interview, they are great for getting exposure to new people and for allowing others to get to know more about you. Most people like to work with others that they know and like, so it can even sometimes lead to new clients. Even if it doesn’t lead to a new client, the interview is likely to include a link to your portfolio site and it may even include some screenshots of your work.

10. Join Flickr Groups for Showcasing Your Work

Flickr groups present an opportunity to showcase your work to others, and to receive feedback on your design. There are plenty of Flickr groups that focus on web and/or graphic design (this post is old but much of it is still relevant – 99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration). While these groups are unlikely to send a rush of traffic to your site, it is a supplementary way to showcase your work and draw a smaller number of visitors.

11. Design for a High-Profile Client

Some designers have been able to get valuable exposure by designing a site for a high-profile client. In situations where the designer is not yet established, the project will often need to be done for a discounted rate or even for free, but the resulting exposure may more than make up for it.

It’s not rare for clients to ask for a free website in exchange for the “exposure” that you’ll get from it, and in 99% of cases it’s not worth it. However, there may be situations, such as designing a custom theme for a very popular blog, where real exposure could justify a discounted or free service. If you agree to this be sure that you know specifically what type of exposure you will be getting. Are they simply giving you a link in the footer or are they publishing a review of your design services on the blog?

12. Run a Pay-Per-Click Ad Campaign

PPC ads are a great option because they can work with just about any budget, they can be highly targeted, and they can be turned on and off at will. When you’re looking for some new projects you can set up a PPC campaign, and you can even target only local clients if you’d like. You set the maximum amount that you are willing to spend on a daily or monthly basis, and you’ll start reaching some potential clients that are looking for what you have to offer. When things pick up and you are not looking for work you can easily pause the campaign and then restart it when you need more work.

13. Have a Memorable Business Card

Although most of the methods that we have covered in this post involve online marketing or promotional efforts, it is still possible to draw visitors to your site from offline methods. Most designers have business cards that they give out to people that they meet here and there, and hopefully they lead to some business. Having a memorable and attractive business card will help you to stand out and give you a better chance of being the designer that is contacted by the potential client.

14. Sell Templates/Themes

More and more designers are generating income by selling premium WordPress themes or HTML/CSS templates. Selling themes or templates doesn’t have to be your only source of income, they are also great for picking up work from customers who want to get some customizations done to the theme or template. Adding some quality themes or templates for sale from your portfolio site can help to generate interest in your services, in addition to making some money from the sales.

15. Leave Comments on Other Blogs

Another way to attract visitors to your site is by leaving comments on other blogs. Instead of leaving links to your site in the body of your comment, which can lead to your comment being marked as spam or deleted, leave a thoughtful, intelligent comment and provide your URL in the proper field when entering the comment (almost all blogs allow you to leave a URL). No one comment is likely to generate a huge amount of traffic to your site, but if you are leaving a lot of comments that provide useful information and are relevant to the posts/blogs where you are commenting, it can result in a decent number of targeted prospects entering your site.

What’s Your Experience?

If you have a portfolio site, what have you found to be especially effective for gaining exposure, visitors, and new clients?

While Google’s payment system, Google Checkout, is not a giant in the online payments space, it is certainly not a failure, especially when compared to some of Google’s other product extensions. Launched in 2006, Google Checkout allows users to pay for an item using a preset log-in, similar to PayPal or Amazon Payments. The company claims that “hundreds of thousands” of merchants currently use Google Checkout. This seems modest compared to PayPal, which is growing by over 40 percent year over year, with total payment volume equaling $13.1 billion in Q2. While Google doesn’t reveal its transaction figures, it’s safe to assume that Checkout isn’t seeing nearly as much money flowing through its payment system as PayPal or even Amazon. But the landscape could look much differently if Google successfully makes three big plays.

First, Google starts pushing Checkout with the launch of Google Games later this year. As we reported earlier in July, Google invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming giant Zynga, with part of the strategic deal including Zynga’s games in Google’s Games portal. And Google just bought Slide in an effort to boost its standing in the social games world. These moves give Checkout a platform to grow. According to an Inside Network report, the U.S. market for virtual goods will reach $1.6 billion in 2010 alone. Social gaming contributes $835 million of that number.

Zynga is making a killing on virtual goods and currently PayPal is reaping the benefits of this by powering payments for the social gaming giant. Zynga has been reported to be PayPal’s second largest merchant, behind eBay. PayPal has processed about $500 million in virtual goods payments in 2009 alone (though it’s unclear how many of the transactions related to Zynga games).

Clearly there is a lot of money to be made here. PayPal had a net income of $817 million in Q2. And with access to a more proven Google Checkout, Zynga could always consider negotiating a lower fee than they currently receive with PayPal (see fees) or make a deal for advertising, as it reportedly did with Facebook Credits.

Gaming is the obvious opportunity for Checkout, but the second is Places which Google has scaled to over 4 million businesses . Places lets local businesses claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, “happy hour tonight”), create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons.

What’s missing here? A transaction. Why not blend Checkout with Places, and allow users to buy directly from the merchant? This seems like a logical and potentially lucrative next step. Yelp is reportedly starting to do this. Imagine if merchants could channel relevant search results to a one-click transaction, of course brokered by Google Checkout.

Finally, the writing is on the wall for Google to attempt to integrate Checkout with media consumption. Google is reportedly building a paid content system for publishers, which would allow online news publishers to take payments for subscriptions and content via Checkout. And it would naturally follow that Checkout is the payments platform of choice for Google’s upcoming cloud-based Music service. We already know that any of this content that is consumed over an Android will most likely have Checkout as the default option.

Each of these three plays relies on execution, and Google has a mixed record with new product development (i.e.Google Wave). But there has never been a more lucrative opportunity for Google’s payments system to become a more viable threat to PayPal or other more popular payments systems. If Google can make Checkout ubiquitous, and loosen PayPal’s kung-fu grip on the payment space, then every opportunity mentioned above will only be the beginning.

YouTube phenom Justin Bieber has succeeded in slaying Lady Gaga’s little monster, the music video for “Bad Romance,” as he has nabbed the honor of having the most-viewed YouTube video of all time.

Last night, YouTube tweeted that Bieber had beat out Gaga, only to be proven wrong, as Ms. Telephone clawed her way back to number one. As I was shuffling off the news desk last night, VEVO informed us via e-mail: “Wanted to alert you that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga have been battling all afternoon. The prize? Whose video is the web’s most-watched!”

YouTube has yet to update its Twitter feed — or rearrange its most-watched list, for that matter — but according to the video-sharing site, the Boy King of Twitter has risen to new ranks, capturing 245,746,720 views for his vid “Baby ft. Ludacris.” Lady Gaga currently has 245,570,952 views on “Bad Romance.” How long will this mighty battle rage on? Only time will tell.

Personally, I’m hoping an adorable baby or kitten comes along to usurp one of these pop parasites — I actually watched Bieber’s vid for the first time yesterday, and was at a loss at understanding its appeal. I mean, if saccharine jams accompanied by early 2000s-esque camera work is your thing, then, by all means, geek out — but I think the viral gods can do better.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum.

Running a small business is filled with unknowns and crash course lessons. You’re always going to have questions about hiring, acquiring customers, raising money, and building viable products.

Nobody expects you to know everything that’s going in. In fact, that’s why you should always find the right advisors for your startup, so that you can benefit from their experience. But they won’t know everything, either.

Luckily, there are several powerful and convenient tools that can help small business owners get their questions answered. While you may not find the silver bullet that shoots your company to the stratosphere, there are thousands of people with the knowledge and experience to help you solve your small business problems.

Here are a few online tools for connecting with experts who may have answers to your small business questions:

1. Quora: This crowdsourcing and collaboration Q&A tool allows users to ask the Quora community questions, most of them technology or startup-related. Not only can you ask questions of its knowledgeable community (it includes some prominent VCs and CEOs), but you can follow topics such as “leadership,” “venture capital,” or “Google” to stay up-to-date on conversation occurring in those areas.

2. OnStartups Answers: This site, powered by the same platform that runs StackOverflow, is focused on answering the burning questions of startup founders. Everything from product pricing to sleep schedules is addressed by this community.

3. Hacker News: This programming and startup-centric community is very open to answering questions from entrepreneurs. Just go to the submit page and start with “Ask HN:” in your title.

4. Twitter: If you’ve been active with other small business owners on Twitter and built up those relationships, there may not be a better place to get your questions answered faster than on this micro-blogging phenomenon.

5. Open Forum: Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but guess what: OPEN Forum has active discussion forums where members can ask their small business questions and get them answered. It can’t hurt to ask.

This list is a jump start for getting on the track to having all of your small business questions (or at least some of them) answered. Are there any online tools that you continuously reference for solving problems and getting advice as a small business owner?

Traditional phone-makers such as Nokia have seen slumping sales and losses in market share as competition in the mobile space has greatly intensified over the last few years, namely with the introduction of the iPhone from Apple and now more recently, Android from Google.

Google specifically has made its Android operating system open source, allowing device makers to use its advanced operating system to power their devices without licensing fees.

Today, Anassi Vanjoki, the top man at Nokia’s Mobile Solutions, confirmed via a blog post that the company has no plans to release any devices powered by Google Android, instead, opting for its now open-source Symbian platform.

Vanjoki made it clear by saying; “there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia (despite rumors to the contrary),”

The markets long rumored Nokia would develop at least one smartphone powered by Google Android, or maybe even a tablet computer, but that reality will not materialize, at least not any time soon.

Nokia, much like every other traditional phone maker, including Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the the BlackBerry smartphone, will have to find a way to make their devices more appealing to the consumer market segment as more people switch to the iPhone that offers more features, including HD video recording, and more than 150,000 applications to choose from.

The news comes as other consumer electronics firms, the latest being South Korean-based LG, have plans to release Android powered devices as soon as by the end of this year.

Vanjoki says he is perfectly aligned with bringing Nokia to the top of the mobile realm once again, and says “We have all the assets at our disposal under one roof – to produce killer smartphones and market-changing mobile computers.”

Browser Comparison – Google Chrome v6 depends on all

other browser producers had no sleep This is to the following browsers compared with various benchmark tests show. Winner of this little comparison, all still in development browser, is the developer version of Google Chrome version 6. This marked, in all the tests that were run through 5 times and each of them then the average value was calculated, the partial distance with the best results.

To illustrate the positive development of each browser based on the values obtained here, in the following, the same comparison of early March this year.

Test the latest browser versions – Download!

Who should have one of you according to these results of interest to also take a look at this part, want to take only two to three days old versions, this is by using the following download links.

· Chrome 6.0.477.0 (Developer Version)

· Opera 10.60 (RC1)

· 5 Safari (Webkit Nightly Build)

· Firefox 4.0 b1 (FTP download)

· Internet Explorer 9 (Platform Preview Version 3)

Conclusion: Although the third preview version of Internet Explorer 9 still in a development phase is always mediated, that regardless of their functional limitations a more positive impression of what might await us in the future. Also positive in the browser versions tested here is the speed of Opera 10.60 RC1. However, the values of the 6 version of the Google Chrome made with, it is likely the Google browser is increasingly easier in the browser market, its claim to rank three or even expand it can be. Unfortunately, it would not be surprised if it also costs of Firefox would do on this, its values really are not outstanding. But each of these statistics is worthless if a new version of the Light of the world beckon.

Browser News – The last few weeks in terms of browser updates, some new, still in development, well-known browser brought to light music. Whether the third of the Internet Explorer Platform Preview 9, the first Release Candidate of the Opera 10.60 or a development version of the Google Chrome browser in version 6 All browser manufacturers praise of course in addition to the implementation of new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, or at least the improved support of this, especially the fast-charging behaviour, due to new or improved rendering engines. One thing is for sure without an optimization in this area is a further merging of Web and PC applications, hard to implement.

Internet Explorer 3 – the third version of Internet Explorer Platform Preview 9 was yesterday released by Microsoft. This new and now third version brings many users upgraded the long-awaited support for HTML5, so that for example the video-, audio-days and the number of long-awaited and in the Platform Preview 2 , not included in canvas element still find support, as well and the embedding of fonts in the use of the WOFF standards. Based on this rather serious news and the resulting improved support for Web standards, the current development of the IE 9 with increasing optimism considered to be an certainly.

IE9 and Web standards – Acid3 test

The now available for download available to third pre-test version of Internet Explorer 9has both new JavaScript engine Chakra to support previous ECMAScript 5 specification, including improved support for Web standards (HTML, CSS, DOM, Canvas, JavaScript) and web fonts (see web fonts Test page ), the results this time in the IE-testing center were summarized and further improvement in the Microsoft browser clearly document the (seerelease notes ). Achieved so the Internet Explorer Platform Preview Version 3 in the Acid3 test now with 83 of 100 points from nine very useful, as compared to the second Platform Preview least an improvement of 15 points in the means.

WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark – Browser Comparison

In the SunSpider benchmark has the third version of the preview version of Internet Explorer 9, as in a recent review of the IEBlog article is to further improve and moves the best browsers in terms of processing JavaScript ever closer, which should not be mentioned that the pre-release version of Firefox from the 3.7er of this third-prerelease IE9 been obsolete already.

Internet Explorer Platform Preview 9 3

If the development in Redmond on this scale continues, likely Safari, Chrome and Opera are the next "targets to be".

What next?

Whether the development of the IE9 continue in the form of the current Preview Platform will continue is unclear, since it is conceivable that Microsoft in the next step to a "usable beta version" changes that rumors will be published once in August.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news by now that Matthew Papakipos, the key architect of Chrome OS, is leaving Google to go to Facebook. While it’s not entirely clear what Papakipos will be doing yet at Facebook beyond joining the engineering team, this is massive news. This is the key component of Chrome OS leaving the company before its launch to join what can perhaps be seen as Google’s most important competitor going forward. So what does Google think about the defection?

“Matt made great contributions to Google and Chrome OS, and we know he’ll do the same in his next endeavors. We wish him the best. We have a deep bench of talent and are very excited about the launch of Chrome OS devices later this year,” a Google spokesperson tells us.

So first of all, Google is confirming that despite the loss, Chrome OS remains on track for release this year. This echoes what Papakipos hinted at in his tweet: “Now that Chrome OS & WebGL are in good shape, it’s time for something new. I’m going to work @ Facebook! Love the product and team. Woot!“

Still, while the product may be in “good shape“, it’s still not released, so it’s just odd that he would leave before he sees his vision come to completion. I can only imagine Facebook made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Second, in their statement, Google refers to their “deep bench of talent.” That’s an interesting way of putting it. Basically, without saying it directly, Google is suggesting that Papakipos was expendable. They’re saying that they’re like a well-built basketball team. Even when they lose a star player, they can survive and keep winning games.

Still, it’s nice to have that star player if you want to win the championship. That appears to be what Facebook is attempting to do.

If your business has a presence on Facebook, then you’ve already taken the first step toward connecting with your current and potential customers on one of the most popular social networking sites to date. But to fully benefit from having a fan page on Facebook, you’ll need to actively engage your fans to maintain their interest and keep the momentum going for your business.

So how can you accomplish that? Let’s look at seven ways:

1. Advertise your fan page. To get the most out of your page, you can’t rely on the mantra: “Build it and they will come.” You’ll need to get the message out to your current and potential customers by advertising your new Facebook page. At the very least, you should link to your fan page directly from your website, blog, Twitter page, or other online forum. You’ll want to make sure that the link is at the top of the right or left column on your website, especially in hot spots like the masthead. Including a Facebook icon is the best way to draw attention to your link.

   To boost your advertising even further, try using Facebook ads, blog posts, or other messaging to communicate your page’s existence to future fans.

2. Build your brand. You should mention your Facebook page on all of the elements in your marketing program. One of the quickest ways you can do this is to include a link in your email signature. You can also mention your Facebook page on any fulfillment materials, invoices, packing slips, company brochures, or business cards. To gain popularity, you’ll need to spread the news through every customer contact avenue that’s available to your business.

3. Include company information. On your Facebook fan page, there’s an Info tab that allows you to include information about your business. At a minimum, you should provide an overview of your company, information about your products or services, and a link to your website. But you don’t have to be constrained by the current categories. With a little creativity, you can expand on this part of your page and use it to drive conversion in other areas. For example, in the Company Overview section, you can place links to specific pages on your website, or you can add a sign-up form that lets people subscribe to your email newsletter. This area is also a great place to put links to your other social networking sites, such as Twitter.

4. Create a landing page. One of the greatest aspects of Facebook’s fan page is the ability to create a landing page that leads into your “actual” page. Facebook provides an application called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which allows you to use basic coding to create a small landing page that becomes the first thing people see when they come to your fan site.

   To install this tool, log in to Facebook and add Static FBML to your page. Once you’ve installed it, you can insert your code and adjust your settings on your wall so that people who aren’t yet your fans will land on this particular page first. To get the most out of this technique, you should provide a short description of your business and request that people become a fan of your page. I’ve known businesses that have used this technique and have been highly effective in converting visitors to fans.

5. Provide engaging content. Having a Facebook fan page provides an ideal opportunity to interact with people. The more information you include on your page, the more inclined your fans will be to stay involved. But remember, interaction requires the efforts of both you and your visitors. And when your fans are more involved, they’re more likely to take advantage of special promotions you might be offering or to suggest your fan page to their friends.

   To encourage interaction, you can adjust your wall settings to allow your fans to post comments, links, or videos on your page, and you can host a miniforum by using the Discussions application. If you have videos on YouTube that are related to your products or services, you can educate your fans about your videos by using the Notes application. You can also import an RSS feed through this application, which is an excellent way to provide relevant content to your readers.

6. Make offerings. Besides creating a landing page, you can use Static FBML to create coupons and rewards, promotional announcements, or even a little shopping area. If you can imagine it, you can create it. Start thinking of your Facebook page as an extension of your main website. If you publish an email newsletter, you can use the markup language to create a subscription form for sign-ups. If you use an email marketing program, you’ll need to put the code for your subscription form in FBML to create a tab on your page.

   Above all, make sure that you’re following the Facebook Pages Terms to avoid making mistakes that could inadvertently cause your Facebook fan page to be deactivated.

7. Do your research. Facebook provides the Insights tool that allows you to view certain metrics about your fan base. It’s not extremely robust, but it does provide a snapshot on things such as the number of active fans you have in various age groups, the geographic breakdown of your fans, and the growth of your fan base over time. This is helpful information when you’re deciding which promotions to advertise to your fans or whether you should target your messaging to a specific age group.

   You should also research other businesses on Facebook to see what they’re doing to promote their page or to engage their fans. Pay attention to what features they’re using, what kind of content they frequently post for their fans, and what methods they use to interact with their visitors. There are a lot of very successful Facebook fan pages that offer a number of creative and effective ideas you can try on your own page.