With unemployment currently sky high, competition for jobs is tougher than ever. Anywhere from 10 to 10,000 people can apply for the most hotly contested places. Your resume is the greatest marketing tool you’ve got at your disposal. If you’re going to stand out from the crowd and get that all-important interview, you need to make sure that your resume’s saying the right things about you.
HR managers spend much of their days trawling through resumes. It’s a laborious, often boring process and few managers spend more than a minute or so reading through each one. You need to get inside the mind of your potential employer- find out what makes them tick and be the answer to their business problems. You’ve got 60 seconds to shine. Follow the 10 tips below for resume success.
Read the full article at: http://www.mostinspired.com/blog/2010/02/05/10-tips-to-distinguish-your-resume-from-the-rest/
The iPad’s coming and it promises to transform the way we, as readers, consume books, newspapers and magazines. Its 9.7in, LED-backlit IPS display will make the iPad the first ever device that’s actually pleasurable to read on. It’s never going to be as good-looking as paper (a screen has 70 to 100 dots per inch, compared with paper’s 300 to 1,000 dots), but as a media platform, it offers so much more.
Traditional print media have taken a battering in recent years at the hands of the vast array of free content available online. Sales of newspapers and magazines have been in steady decline. The iPad offers publishers new ways to reach and engage with readers. Far from ringing their death knell, it’s hoped that the iPad will revitalise a floundering industry, offering premium content to users, converting online readers into paying customers. Read on to discover how the iPad could change the print industry beyond all recognition, forever.
Read the full article at: http://www.anewmorning.com/2010/02/26/10-ways-the-ipad-could-change-the-print-industry-forever/
84% of Americans currently own a mobile phone. Sadly, there are no figures showing how many of these devices are ageing bricks without internet capabilities, but you can bet that, within a few years, the majority of mobile phone users will be able to browse the internet, wherever they are.
Right now, most websites are completely unsuitable for mobile viewing, taking 60 or more seconds to load and looking jumbled and confused as they’re squashed onto smaller screens.
Every day, however, thousands of people are releasing mobile versions of their websites and seeing greatly increased levels of traffic as a result. Unless you optimize your website for mobile phone users soon, you could be left behind by the competition. Creating a mobile-friendly version of your site sounds like a daunting task, but it couldn’t be easier to do. Using one of the excellent tools below, you’ll be able to build, host and launch your mobile site with absolutely no coding knowledge whatsoever.
Read the full article at: http://spyrestudios.com/10-great-tools-to-create-a-mobile-version-of-your-site/
These days, you can quite easily buy a brand-spanking-new computer and install all the software you need for free, using applications offered under the Open Software License. You can get a free image editor, a free sound editor, a free word processor, media player, file archiver, PDF creator… the list goes on and on and on.
While some of these free apps do not offer quite the same level of polished functionality as their commercial rivals, others far exceed the capabilities of everything else on the market. Below, we take a close look at the cream of the crop: 20 invaluable and indispensable open source applications that you really should be using, if you’re not already. The vast majority of them are cross-platform and absolutely 100% free! You’re bound to find several that are perfectly suited to your needs.
Read the full article at: http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2010/03/20-most-popular-open-source-software-ever-2.html
To stay ahead in the web development game, it’s utterly vital that you’re up-to-date with advancements in your chosen field. As we all know, the best way to get current information is from blogs, but which ones to look at? There are loads of great web development blogs out there and tons of terrible ones too. If you were to read them all, you’d have absolutely no time left for building websites or anything else for that matter.
We’ve whittled the best web development blogs down to a top 25. By adding these great blogs to your RSS reader, you’ll be able to get all the industry information, tips, tutorials and, very importantly, freebies, that you could ever need. Sit back, read and let your knowledge grow!
Read the full article at: http://www.designyourway.net/blog/resources/25-web-development-blogs-you-should-be-reading/
Despite what many people will tell you, there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to call-to-action buttons. Yes, it’s true that large, colorful buttons, surrounded by plenty of space are usually the most successful, but it’s important that you tailor each button to the primary task of the web page in question, whether it’s to Signup, Checkout, Register or anything else. As a designer, it’s your job to make it as easy as possible for visitors to achieve these tasks and call-to-action buttons are the most powerful tools at your disposal, so use them wisely.
Generally speaking, call-to-action buttons should be simple and clear. They must stand out and grab a user’s attention. Everything must be carefully considered, from the trigger words used to colors, sizes, shapes and positioning. These buttons must be highly visible, but not so garish that they render your site ugly or unbalanced.
Below, we take a closer look at 25 of the most convincing call-to-action buttons found on the web. We examine why each individual button is so successful. Hopefully, they’ll give you an idea of some basic does and don’ts and help inspire your own designs.
Read the full article at: http://designshack.co.uk/articles/inspiration/25-examples-of-convincing-call-to-action-buttons
There’s nothing more irritating, when surfing the web, than a website which takes ages to load. Slow load times are an instant turnoff to visitors and can impact negatively on your site’s traffic and even affect your Google ranking (although not as heavily as some people might have you believe). Optimizing your website’s images will make your site load more quickly, reduce your bandwidth consumption and save you money in the long-run.
If you want to compress the size of your image files without affecting image quality, you’re going to need a decent image optimizing tool. Photoshop lets you choose the quality of your images and offers a “Save for Web” function, but that’s not enough. The great tools explored below let you squeeze vital extra kB out of your images, keeping you and your website visitors happy.
Read the full article at: http://www.webdeveloperjuice.com/2010/03/04/16-indispensable-tools-to-optimize-photos-for-the-web/
You can find a tool for just about anything online, there’s only one problem: they cost money, and in some cases, lots of it! Many online tools offer a free basic package for anyone to use, but these packages are often strictly limited, rendering these tools practically useless until you stump up the cash. In most cases, however, there are free alternatives available, many of which are very, very good indeed.
Below, you’ll find 15 Best Free Online Tools for Web Design and Development. Rather than narrow our focus, we’ve covered various aspects of the design and development process, to include the admin side of freelancing or running a small business.
No two tools listed below perform the same function; we’ve chosen our favorite tool for doing each job. You’ll find the best free online tool for project management, one for invoicing, one for screen sharing, one for instant messaging, one for mocking up layouts, and much more besides.
Read the full article at: http://www.webappers.com/2010/03/09/15-best-free-online-tools-for-web-design-development/
WordPress is the best and most popular blogging platform around. It’s free, easy to use, endlessly customizable and supported by hundreds of excellent plugins. With WordPress setting such high standards, however, many people have started to question why other types of sites are so much more difficult to set up and manage.
Fortunately, WordPress has become more than simply a blogging tool; it’s now possible to run almost any type of site imaginable using the right mix of plugins and themes. In fact, so many people are now using WordPress to power sites other than blogs that over 50% of today’s WordPress downloaders will use it as a CMS (content management system), according to Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress wizard himself.
Below we explore 10 alternative uses for WordPress, taking a close look at everything from the more common, like shops, forums and photoblogs, to the more unusual, like news aggregators, contact managers and even social networking sites. It will soon become clear that with a bit of ingenuity and creativity, anything’s possible with WordPress!
Read the full article at: http://nikhilmisal.com/2010/02/06/10-alternative-uses-for-wordpress/
Once you’ve built or designed a website, it’s absolutely vital that you perform some degree of usability testing to ensure that it’s functioning as it should. Analyzing conversion rates (the percentage of visitors to your site who perform a desired action) is also a must.
Usability and conversion rates are inextricably linked. If customers are confused, bored or unmotivated by any aspect of your site, you’re going to find it much more difficult to get them to do what you want, whether that’s buy a product, fill out a form or join a mailing list.
Usability and conversion analysis tools, such as the examples listed below, will help you design or redesign your site to make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to navigate around. Such tools can be expensive, but they needn’t be. Amongst the pricier ones below you’ll find many that are cheap or completely free to use.
Don’t feel as though you need to test on hundreds of people, running tests on just five participants can be enough to provide statistically sound results. It’s all about choosing the tools that are best suited to your specific needs and, of course, your budget.
Read the full article at: http://spyrestudios.com/usability-conversion-analysis-tools/
