What is web-based software anyway?
Web-based software is software you use over the internet with a web browser. It refers to any program that is accessed over an network connection. You don’t have to install any CDs, download any software, or worry about upgrades. Web-based software is safer When you use The Codedesign's web-based software, your data is stored on secure, always-updated and backed-up servers of highly-secure data center. As we all know, with traditional software, employees save data on their laptops, USB drives, or portable hard drives. This is not at all not as safe as it sounds. Computers are rarely backed up properly, Laptops are stolen, and it’s unlikely everyone’s machines are up to date with the latest security patches and updates. Web-Based software is better for your Business When you use web-based software you don’t have to worry about anything technical — you can just do your work. The Codedesign handles all the security, backups, upgrades and “IT guy” stuff. You don't have to waist your time and worry about all this, because we'll handle your IT issues. This is not all, we use our products every day. We store all our sensitive, confidential data on the same servers that our customers use. You, as a client, can feel comfortable that we're keeping an eye on you. All your data is stored in one place A key advantage to web-based software is that all your data is centralized and accessible over the web from any computer at any time. You can get to your data it from anywhere. Safe, secure, and password protected, of course. Your data is automatically backed up daily. Our backups are stored in multiple locations for additional redundancy. You could say our backups have backups. We’ve never lost anyone’s data and we won’t lose yours. You’re always using the latest Unlike traditional software that requires you to download and install updates yourself, our products are updated automatically. Whenever you use our products you’re always using the latest version. Software used to only be available for certain platforms. Our software works on any platform with a web browser and internet connection. Mac, Windows, Linux are all supported. Everyone you trust has access to the data and you can work from home Since everyone you work with logs into the same centralized account, you have a single database with everything in one place. No more worrying about who has the latest information, Everyone has it. When you use web-based software your office is everywhere. At work, at home, a hotel, at a client’s office, even on your mobile phone. You data is accessible anywhere with internet access.
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An important part of our job is staying up to date. Technologies don’t really change that fast — HTML5 and CSS3 take a long time to be specified and implemented. But the ideas surrounding these technologies and the things we can do with them are constantly evolving, and hundreds of blog posts and articles are published every day. There’s no way you can read all of those but you’ll still have to keep up to date. Here are some tips on doing that while still having some time left to work.  Filtering The hardest part of staying up to date is not reading too much. So many articles are published on a daily basis, so you’ll need filters. It’s unfortunately hard to make a living by reading articles all day, so you don’t want to read marginally interesting stuff, and you don’t want to read too much. You only want to read relevant stuff. You could try to automate this filtering, but I found that the best filters are actually people and time. PEOPLE Some people produce lots and lots of ideas. Not all of these ideas are worth your time, but some of them are excellent. If you follow these people directly there’s a lot of noise you have to filter and you need a good sensor to recognize the good stuff. A very easy way to solve this is to not follow them directly but only follow the people surrounding them — they will do the filtering for you. If there’s an excellent idea, they will link to it. So in order to keep your sanity, don’t follow loudmouths (follow their more silent friends).  This tip works very well for Twitter, but it works for blogs as well. Don’t follow overactive sources, follow the people who follow these sources. SOUL MATES A few years ago I noticed that my RSS feeds started to dry up — especially blogs with opinionated articles. Articles where many people would leave their comments were all of a sudden gone. These discussions had moved to Twitter overnight. That’s the reason why I started tweeting (although I have to admit that I was addicted to it within a week). If you tend to your Twitter stream with care, it can become a very valuable source of good and relevant information. But if you follow the wrong people, or too many people, it will be exactly the opposite. My stream consists of mostly people who generally agree with each other. This means that it usually isn’t filled with tedious discussions about irrelevant details that can easily grow to gargantuan proportions. Now, I don’t say you shouldn’t listen to people you don’t agree with, I just think that Twitter is not the right place to follow these people. EMOTION Related to this Twitter-management (where I try to avoid heated discussions) is this other excellent filter I use: time. I almost never read articles the moment they are published, I wait a few days, or weeks or even months. If they are still interesting after a period of time, they are worth reading. You’ll see that lots of stuff is outdated even after a few days. Many articles are written in an emotional state, and many responses to these articles are written with even more emotion. These rows can certainly be entertaining, but they are rarely interesting after a week. I use Pinboard to create this buffer of unread articles, but there are many other handy tools available like Instapaper or Pocket (or you could just use your browser’s bookmark functionality). Being up to date isn’t about knowing the latest trends and keeping track of all the gossip, it’s about knowing the right stuff by reading only the right stuff. But it isn’t just about reading the right stuff, it’s also about remembering it. Backup Your Knowledge The good thing about our current era is that we don’t have to learn everything we read by heart: we have computers these days to do the remembering for us. We just have to make sure that our computer can find the stuff we want it to remember. So create a database of the links to interesting articles that you read. I always write a small comment with these links when I save them to Pinboard, this way I can easily find them when I need them. You could buy the archival option from Pinboard, this makes it even easier to find older articles. I also created someIFTTT rules to backup these links to Evernote and Dropbox. I don’t want to depend on one tool, so I spread my knowledge around. USE YOUR KNOWLEDGE A very important part of understanding a new technique or design trick is by playing with it. You could of course immediately start using it in a big-production website (or you could also just first try it out). There are many tools out there that make it easy to test some snippets of code, like the amazing Dabblet and the incredible JS Bin. Playing around with code snippets that you find in articles will greatly improve your understanding of how things work. Tools There are many tools you can use for gathering and keeping your knowledge (and I already named quite a few). Here are a few more: I use YoruFukurou as my Twitter client. It’s an unobtrusive client with some very handy tools for power-users, like muting certain words. It has some very handy advanced custom filter options as well. Tweetbot is a similar tool which works especially well on iOs devices. I fave every tweet that might have an interesting link (yes, that’s why I fave all of your tweets, but I’m not stalking you). All of these faves are automatically stored as unread items in a Pinboard account. RSS I read my feeds using the excellent self-hosted feed reader Fever. It has a feature that detects what articles are hot by checking how many people link to it. It uses the clever principle of Sparks — feeds that link to interesting things, but are not worth following to determine what’s hot. You can save articles for later (and yes, these articles are also saved as unread items in my Pinboard account, as well).  PINBOARD As I mentioned before, by creating some clever filters you can make sure that your list of unread articles is manageable. But reading the articles and actuallydoing something with that knowledge can be pretty time-consuming. Every now and then I hit one of my two Pinboard bookmarklets that either show me the oldest unread item or a random one. As I said, many articles are outdated after a few days (but still many remain to be read). If an article is small, I read it right away. If it’s very long and very interesting, I either e-mail it to myself or I save it to Instapaper. I save every article that is worth remembering to a second Pinboard accountusing Delibar, with a small comment and a few tags attached to it. There are many more ways to better organize these links, but this system works for me (I usually find a link I need within a few seconds). IFTTT IFTTT is a very handy tool that connects Web services. I use it to store my bookmarks on as many locations as possible. For instance, every article I save to my second Pinboard account is saved to Evernote and Dropbox. This makes it easy to access all these bookmarks from every device I use with specialized tools like nvAlt. TALKING This whole article is just about staying up to date by reading articles, but one of the best ways to stay up to date is by talking to people. In real life you can talk to colleagues or attend conferences and workshops, as there are many regular meet-ups of like-minded people all around the world. You can use things like Twitter or IRC to start discussions or ask questions, or post your question on one of the many online fora out there.  Sources Professionally I am specialized in HTML and CSS, and I have an interest in Web Design and some other areas. Since I have expert knowledge of CSS, it doesn’t make much sense for me to follow websites that offer CSS tutorials for beginners. So on this particular subject I follow the real experts and even the people who write the specs: my knowledge about CSS has to be more than up to date. Bas Poppink, a colleague of mine, calls this principle following the sources of your sources until you found the headspring. I call it the Poppink-principle. So if you’ve outgrown tutorials, ask the authors of these tutorials what websites and which people they follow. What sources are right for you depends on a lot of things, like your experience and your fields of interests. Below you’ll find some of my sources. You might find some interesting stuff in there… MY SOURCES My main source of information comes from people who tweet something that might interest me. Twitter is also great for discussing articles and opinions, or asking for advice. But there is more… Feeds There are some feeds I rely on: the bookmarks saved by Jeremy Keith, Kazuhito Kidachi, Peter van der Zee, and Paul Irish. They usually add a helpful description to their bookmarks. There are a few people who regularly post high qualityreading lists: you should definitely follow a few of those too, if not all. The rest of the links are distilled from a somewhat random collection of ancient and newer RSS feeds that definitely need some weeding. Do you really want to know what they are? Here is the OPML file. But you’ll probably be better served by the excellent collection of Front-End and Web Standards feeds that Paul Irish curates. He also points at these great weekly email newsletters about JavaScript, Web design, CSS and HTML5. Definitely worth a follow if email is more your thing. Your Own Sources Whether you want to be the very best in your profession or someone who isgood enough, staying up to date is essential for every professional. The exact people and feeds to follow depends on your own interests. Just take your time to find and collect them and be sure to critically look at them every now and then. Also, what tools you choose to use in order to stay up to date is totally up to you, as there are many more ways to stay up to date than I described here. I hope that this article somehow helps you in finding the right sources and in creating your own, better, flow of information. Even with the best of intentions, good customer service can slip down the freelancer’s priority list.
Time is often the culprit and when combined with a little procrastination and a healthy measure of freelancing fear, we can soon land with a full inbox. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about running my web development business successfully have come from my own experiences as a customer. I recently moved house and I wanted to get my new place professionally cleaned before I moved in. I called quite a few local companies but ended up cleaning the place myself. My experiences weren’t great and made me think seriously about my own customer service. Be there I worked my way through the phone book. If there was no quick answer, I hung up and moved on to the next supplier. If possible, supply a landline as well as a mobile number, because it shows you have a permanent base, which can help to garner trust among clients. No black holesOne receptionist told me the service I was looking for would require a specialist quote (even though one-off cleans were specified in their ad) and that I would be called back by her manager. I never received the call. Advertise what you sell – no more and no less Another company didn’t cover our area, even though they said they did. It’s important to be clear and honest about the services you offer and know your boundaries. Don’t try and get business you can’t handle, whether it be location, timescales, scope or expertise – even if you are just trying to cast the net as wide as possible, the customer won’t thank you for wasting their time. It’s potential business… don’t play hard to get! No one I spoke to sounded remotely happy that I had called! When I hear from a new customer, there is always lots to think about: how will I plan the development of their site? What features might they need? What’s their brand? What are their expectations? It’s important to show enthusiasm as a part of building a business relationship. Even if it’s not the most exciting project, the paying client deserves to know that they have the benefit of your professional attention and efforts. While you may not want to seem too eager, in my experience, clients are far more responsive when communication is dynamic and upbeat. If you take a week to reply to each phone call or email, it’s hard to keep enthusiasm and momentum going. Be upfront and confident with pricing When I phoned every cleaner within a 10-mile radius, I wanted to know two things: could they do it and how much would it cost? I know that design is a different industry but, offensive it as may be to a designer’s sensibilities, cost is still likely to be a very important consideration for your customer. I found that many companies were cagey about pricing. In many cases, once I had battled through to an actual price, it wasn’t as high as the salesperson’s hesitancy had implied. Rather than being a good thing, I wondered if she thought her prices weren’t justifiable. If you aren’t being greedy, you shouldn’t need to hide behind vagaries. Keep in touch It sounds so obvious, but when speaking to new customers on the phone, spend time taking down phone numbers and email addresses carefully so that you can be proactive about getting back in touch if necessary. Ascertaining how they got your details can help you to find out which kinds of advertising and promotion are working best for you. If you have an ad that’s offering out-of-date services or pricing, it’s important to know that too. Crucially, we are all consumers as well as providers of products and services. If we feel entitled to gold standard customer service, we also ought to be providing it. Your turn to talk… Now it’s your turn to talk. How do you guarantee a good customer experience for your clients? What other tips would you add to the list? Leave a comment on this post and let us know. Social media, although a relatively recent phenomenon, is becoming an increasingly important part of any business’s marketing and client base development platform. The perception of social media marketing has shifted quickly—no longer viewed as a trendy or passing fad, having a flexible and well-managed presence in each of the “big three” (Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) has become a must for any business seeking to secure a place in both the traditional and digital marketplace. What could once be accomplished by a traditional website now needs to be supplemented by a robust and responsive utilization of the tools social media offers. Navigating this strange, new world can be quite confusing at first, so here are some tips for those looking to bring their business up to speed.
Social Media Quick FactsHere are some quick facts about the role social media is currently playing in the business world, courtesy of the2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report:
The “Big Three” There are three primary social media outlets that businesses use. Here is a basic overview of each outlet:
Know Your Business One of the keys to a successful social media marketing platform is knowing your own business. A large corporation is going to have needs and attributes which require a very different approach to social media marketing than a small, local business will need to be successful. Play to your strengths—if you’re a larger company, focus on using social media to connect with a larger audience in order to get national exposure for your brand and products. If you’re a small, local business, use social media to build a dedicated, loyal customer base by offering the personal touch that only a local business can provide. If your business has a product or service that is primarily used or purchased by other businesses, use social media to network with other businesses in order to increase your visibility in the commercial marketplace. If your business offers a product or service which is primarily used or purchased by individual consumers, aim to use social media as a way to develop a pool of customers who see your brand as quality, hip, and available. No matter the size or nature of your business, a knowledge of your company’s strengths, target market, and product or service niche is an essential part of any successful social media marketing platform. Consider Creating a Social Media Marketing Position Lastly, if it is within your company’s financial position to do so, consider creating a position specially designed to create, develop, and maintain your company’s social media marketing presence. More and more colleges are offering degrees specifically tailored to social media marketing, and graduates of these programs are trained and ready to help utilize the powerful marketing tools social media offers to increase the exposure of your brand and the sales of your products. If your company is not able to afford a dedicated in house position for social media management, be sure to hire a third-party service provider that specializes in social media marketing. It is much easier and effective to hire a trained expert in this field instead of attempting to figure it out on your own or task one of your other employees—whose training and expertise are better used elsewhere—to try to manage your social media marketing. 
The start of a new business venture is an exciting and busy time, as well as a labor of love. All successful businesses begin as just an idea, but it takes the right mix of dedication and execution to bring them into the world. If you have an idea for a new business, following these 5 steps will help bring it to life.
1. Put the Concept on Paper Some might call this creating a “business plan” but that term can feel a bit off putting. I prefer to think of it as a big note taking session where you’ll list off all of your ideas for your new business and how you potentially see them coming to life. Seeing your idea spelled out on paper can give you a deeper sense of whether the timing is right or not, and if you are truly willing to put in the hard work required. Be sure to list off all the ideas you have, including the roles everyone involved will play, and who will be responsible for what. When we started Wholesome Chow, my business partner and I never wrote a business plan. We thought we knew what we wanted to offer, but after trial and error our business went on a completely new path then the one we had originally started on. This cost us a lot of time and wasted resources (buying a ton of equipment that we never ended up using - yikes!). If we had really thought through our business before investing so much we would have saved ourselves quite the hassle. 2. Research the Market Market research is the most important step when starting a business. How will you know what your potential customers will want or need if you don't get out there and start asking? If your business has a physical location or storefront, scope out the potential competition, customers, and traffic in the area. If your business is solely online, research the same basics through Google. Be sure to ask your friends, family, and acquaintances if they would use your service or product. Knowing why they would or would not, and how they would make any modifications, will help to guide you. If you research your competition and find there are many other businesses offering what you want to offer, consider modifying your plan to specialize in something more specific to your area of expertise. 3. Invest More Time, Not Money Money is a valuable resource when starting a business. Be sure to make purchases wisely and with thorough research before you pull out your wallet. It’s best to tap into all of your resources which do not require you to spend money before investing actual funds into your business idea. Once your concept has legs, and you feel confident in your idea, then invest finances into equipment, etc. Throwing money at a business does not guarantee success. Time, energy, and research are more sustainable resources for a long lasting and lucrative business. 4. Start with a Small Test Market Test your idea in a small market, preferably in your local area. This will help you work out any kinks before you commit to bigger endeavors. If your test market falters, consider modifying your plan and thinking outside the box to see where you could improve. Before expanding to other regions, it’s best to have a secure presence in a smaller market. Wholesome Chow started off by selling gourmet, organic food at several of our local farmer’s markets. It was at these markets where we noticed our Organic Gluten Free & Vegan Chocolate Cake was a big hit. Customers came weekly to grab a slice and it was here that we realized there was a big need for gluten free products, especially baked goods and baking mixes. Our entire baking mix line was created because of this accidental market research, which cost us nothing! 5. Work as Often as Possible The best time to start a business is when you are ready to fully commit to it. You are the only person who can make your business dreams come true -- no one will do it for you. Get out there and make it happen! Tell the world about your business, brand yourself and make your business one of your top priorities. The first few years after starting Wholesome Chow, my partner and I worked about 8-12 hours almost every single day to get our brand off the ground. This included website development, product research, sales calls, answering emails, finding new customers, talking to store managers, mixing and packaging products, and much, much more. Had we not put in this crucial time and energy, Wholesome Chow would not be as successful as it is today. If we are starting to go crazy in typography style, then let’s continue with typographic and smart logo designs, shall we? Here you’ll find 10 beautiful logos created by talented designers. This showcase just proves the point how much can one/two words, icons tell using correctly white, negative, positive spacing, colors, accents creating interesting associations. Explore and get creative as I did! 1. The Codedesign  Design by: Mona A. El-Hinnawi ©Thecodedesign ©Mona A. El-Hinnawi  Design by: The Codedesign ©Thecodedesign ©Mona A. El-Hinnawi ©conred  Design by: The Codedesign ©Thecodedesign ©Mona A. El-Hinnawi ©kahrama  Design by: Mona A. El-Hinnawi ©Mona A. El-Hinnawi  Design by: The Codedesign ©Thecodedesign ©Mona A. El-Hinnawi ©Artelous      | Favorite LinksAuthorWorks as a Graphic Web Designer. I'm fond of everything that falls under the term "Art." ArchivesNovember 2014 CategoriesAll 
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