The Free Creatives

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Crystal

As a freelance web designer, the health of my business depends on keeping a steady stream of new projects coming in. When someone inquires about my services, we discuss the details and when I have everything I need, I provide then with my proposal. Proposal writing has been one of my most tedious and time consuming tasks. That’s what led me to create WP Bids.

WP Bids is a specialized WordPress theme for creating (awesome) project proposals. Not only does it help you produce outstanding web-based proposals that will wow your clients and win more projects, it makes your life easier and saves you valuable time in the process!

Brian Casel is a freelance web designer and creator of the WP Bids WordPress theme. You can follow Brian on his personal blog briancasel.com and on Twitter @CasJam.

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Crystal

CSS can be a fun thing, or it can be a daunting thing. It really all depends on how you go about it. Do you end up slowly coding your design, only ending up spending your time fixing error after error? Is getting your design to work nicely in all the top browsers constantly a problem?

If so, you may be going about CSS the wrong way. In this post we’ll discuss a few of my favorite tips and best practices for beginning a new design to code project in XHTML and CSS.

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Crystal

Tutorials on how to specifically create a website design in Photoshop have grown in popularity, and for good reason. While it is also important to learn web design via general design principles and through best practices, sometimes following a good design from start to finish is the most efficient way to pick up on those skills.

This post is the second part of our series: Link Love. While we understand list posts can gain some negative attention (which is why we do them so infrequently, providing you with quality posts most often), we also love to give back links where we find the best quality on the web.

Previous Link Love Posts:

• Link Love 001: For Freelancer Designers Just Starting Out

Now onto some great, high-quality PSD web design tutorials:

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Crystal

Happy Friday everyone, and happy first link love day. This is a series of posts which we’ll try to get out every Friday, or at least once a week on another day, to share useful and interesting posts from around the web — whether they are new or re-discovered.

We realize link love posts are a little all to common among blogs, but we still feel as though we definitely can’t provide all the spectacular content out there, especially not in every niche. Please don’t consider these lazy posts; we’re still wanting to get great, meaty, hand-crafted content out to you guys a few times a week!

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Crystal

Finding work is the most difficult part of being a freelance web designer, and especially a web designer just starting out. It can be tricky figuring out where to start, and how to find clients, no matter how much you’ve got in your portfolio and how experienced you are.

Because I get asked a lot how I personally find clients and maintain a fairly steady stream of work, I’ll share with you today some resources I use or that I’ve found that can be helpful. These resources helped me not only gain my first few valuable clients, but also helped me maintain a steady client base, with very little effort.