Darren

If you’ve ever had your own website, you probably know that the first thing you need to do in order to promote it is to get traffic. Then you can install Google Analytics and track that traffic, learn more about visitors, where do they come from etc.
The need for getting traffic is emphasized a lot. …

What’s the one single thing that contributed to lowering major complications in surgery by a third and cutting death rates (also in a surgery) in half?
Was it a new drug? Not really. But if it was, there would certainly be an incredible amount of media attention, with the company/organization who invented it receiving incredible recognition.
That single …

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? It’s about the trivial many (80%) and the vital few (20%), the trivial many that bring small results and vital few that bring most of the results. Guess where link building belong in the overall search engine optimization game? Link building a vital thing to do if you want …

In this post I’ll feature some web designs that went viral on StumbleUpon/Digg/other social media sites and the lessons you can learn from them. As you browse the designs, I’m pretty sure you’ll find some common patterns I overlooked. If you see that, let me know in the comments :) For now, let’s get started.
One …

You can use some simple Google tools in very creative ways, as well as use some more advanced ones to:

find high-quality tutorials for any web design software tool, and find them easier and faster
find decent alternatives for the current web design software you’re using
search for what Spanish (or <insert your favorite nation here>) web designers are …

Web design should be all about creativity, right? Free flow of ideas, designing what you want etc…While all of that is important, there are various ways to use objective data to get the most out of your design efforts. In this article, I’ll assume you’re a freelancer and working on someones else project. What steps …

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to get ranked for some competitive keyword terms (like weight loss, credit cards and so on). What about first ranking for your websites name (if you have a new site)? If you create 2ndwebdesigner.com, for example, that doesn’t mean you’ll be #1 for ‘2ndwebdesigner’ or ‘2nd …

According to Wikipedia, a cognitive bias is:
the human tendency to make systematic errors in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence
There are certain things you can do as a web designer to make better decisions by recognizing and thinking twice about these cognitive biases. My attempt here will be to make you …

Most of us treat our web design businesses not as a business but as a hobby. And hobbies are dealt with in a different way than businesses. Most of us don’t know the exact definition of a business; even Wikipedia says: “the exact definition of business, like much else in the philosophy …

You know how important getting new clients is for your business. Getting a constant new stream of clients is often the #1 challenge for most freelancers. Unfortunately, most of the advice provided online on this topic is often filled with ambiguity and doesn’t give you clear tips and instructions you  can use to start getting …

This is a list of free and  beautiful WordPress 3.0 ready themes. They were harder to find than I thought, maybe because Wordpress 3 is so new and theme developers need more time to catch up. There are some early adopters, however, and the best of them are in this list. To see the theme …

The best way to learn how to run a business is to read the stories of successful businesses. So recently, I’ve been reading some books by Harvard Business Press (written by very successful VCs, CEOs or university professors) and learned A LOT of principles that can be taken from them and applied to your web …

I’ve just finished the process of selling one of my sites. It was the first time I ever sold a website and, in the process of doing that, I’ve learned some very important lessons.
One of the hardest parts when you already found a buyer is transferring the website to the buyer with very small downtime. …

I’ve decided my primary focus this year to be on improving my productivity. Almost 4 months have passed. Lots of lessons learned. One of them was: do not make things complex if they can be kept simple. Same with to-do lists. Below you have 5 very simple, yet powerful online to-do tools you might find …