Web Design & Development Blog

We’ve joined the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce (northern Virginia / metro DC). We hope to get involved in some committees and start attending networking events. This seems like a great way to meet other local business owners and cross-pollenate, besides the obvious benefit of lead generation.

99designs.com is a crowd-sourcing method for generating web and graphic designs quickly. It is also fairly cost-effective.

99designs.com has some things going for it that are attractive to customers, but I’m a little concerned about how they have designers competing. I wonder what kind of pay the designers get, and where they’re based. My understanding is the designers don’t get paid unless their design won the “contest”. This is spec work, which undermines and devalues this industry in my opinion. Why work with a disgruntled designer or one that doesn’t respect him or herself?

For example, to post a project, a client would pay a flat fee of $39, which should ward off frivolous project requests, and the winner of the design contest would be awarded the project budget via escrow. The trouble I have with this is that the final budgets, while reasonable for one designer (if on the low end), do not pay the “losers” of the design contest. I think this is wrong. In essence, 99designs.com is a competitor to elance.com and odesk.com, but presents its projects as design “contests” when in fact it is a way for clients to procure designs without needing bids. It’s spec work. I don’t think anyone should work for free, even the ones that lose the contest.

While a client might get a bunch of design options for little money this way, this process cut out the whole discovery phase of the project. For example, as a client you might want a new header and logo for your site. You can request this and receive many responses, and there’s a good chance one of them will strike your fancy. Normally there would be at least a small phase of getting to know the customer, their needs, business model, etc. That is entirely missing in the 99designs.com model. It might work in the end, but it’s exploitative. In some cases, designers on there are even under 18 (reference).

It’s a freelance marketplace masquerading as design contests … for little or no pay, and using child labor.

If your business has a physical location that customers can visit, consider getting listed in Google Local. It helps your site get valuable search engine traffic at no extra cost. I have even seen cases of businesses using this to replace their PPC campaign (AdWords).

Of course, there are businesses out there that will use fake addresses just so they can get listed. Google verifies by mail OR by phone … and these days it is possible to order a VOIP number for any location. One can only expect that Google will stop that practice at some point. Even if they don’t, having potential customers go to a non-existent address is not going to make them very happy!

Check out Google Local. It is an underutilized part of SEO.

Have you ever seen news articles that display the first letter in a very large font size? On web sites this is most often achieved using a graphic. That means keeping a library of graphics for all the letters in the alphabet, which I think makes editing a little cumbersome. Luckily, CSS3 offers us the ‘first-child’ pseudo-selector.

Example;

Lorem ipsum ei cetero legendos appellantur per, indoctum iudicabit ei duo, in per ignota persius perfecto. Duo ne alii summo consequuntur, vitae suscipit gloriatur cum ei, augue atomorum vulputate ea eum. Usu eu erant mediocrem, posse bonorum voluptatum et pro. Sea iisque gubergren rationibus cu, ne mea takimata mandamus laboramus. Duo utroque sententiae interesset te, luptatum scripserit suscipiantur et pri. Dicta verear appetere vim ne, nam eu alii ridens, aeque legendos ne mei.

HTML:

<p class=”firstparagraph”>Lorem ipsum ei cetero legendos appellantur per, indoctum iudicabit ei duo, in per ignota persius perfecto. Duo ne alii summo consequuntur, vitae suscipit gloriatur cum ei, augue atomorum vulputate ea eum. Usu eu erant mediocrem, posse bonorum voluptatum et pro. Sea iisque gubergren rationibus cu, ne mea takimata mandamus laboramus. Duo utroque sententiae interesset te, luptatum scripserit suscipiantur et pri. Dicta verear appetere vim ne, nam eu alii ridens, aeque legendos ne mei.</p>

CSS:

p.firstparagraph:first-letter{
color:#000;
font-size:40pt;
line-height:35pt;
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=../images/hIEfix.png,sizingMethod=crop);
zoom:1;
text-shadow: #ccc 2px 2px 1px;
float: left;
position: relative;
padding-right:6px;
vertical-align:text-top;
}

Many of you will have received mailings from these people, which look more like a bill than a promotional mailing. They scare people into transferring their domains to them. They use some very deceptive practices, levy high fees, and are loath to issue refunds. It’s a scam. Avoid them.