Building relationship with the prospective client and baiting a project successfully is the first and the foremost thing, which acts as the stepping stone in any business. Therefore, communication is the most effective weapon that is likely to combine excellency in promising, which should not be underestimated. It incorporates within, the art of actually making your clients fall for your company— not just by the technical and technological mixture of conversation that is, either through mails, or phone, but by actually empathizing and understanding needs of the client, and a strategical vision towards the same.

And, we are talking about web design and development agencies that withholds proficiency in multiple arena—business development, designing, development, technology, user-experience, and customer service, which is by far the most important aspect. You can use postcards at trade shows to market prospective clients. The very idea of the post is to deliver you the best methods to be gain the confidence of your clients by actually educating and sharing with them, your experience in a first hand manner. The journey begins—

1. Don’t Ever Try the Trick that You know Everything:

You may know everything of your own field, but it might happen that your client knows much more than you do. Don’t ever try this approach that you know everything. This does not mean that you should be underestimating your knowledge, but at the same time, don’t overestimate as well. Try and listen to the other party. This would actually help you carrying a healthy communicative balance between the client and you.

2. Be Well Prepared:

Usually what happens is that the client is very attached to his/her website, and then, they come up with strange requirements, may be a big logo, or a banner even if there is no need. There are possibilities that you may find them strange and feel that they cannot be fitted anywhere. At that point of time, actually you need to empathize with their requirements in a research based factual manner so that there is a win-win negotiation for you. At the same time, you need to ensure the client is right, but the online market and the prevailing scenario demands. Take active interest in whatever they propose to do, and then, be a smart negotiator.

3. Be All Ears:

Listening is a tool that can actually bring you half of the success in getting the project. And, if you lack patience and the skill of a good listener, you are at loss. This would actually prove to be a negative point on your side if, instead of listening (not just hearing), you jump on to conclusions. Even you have well-researched & rehearsed the actual changes needed to be done with the project, give considerable time to the client and listen to his/her proposals as well. This also builds in the communicative relationship between both the parties.

4. Take Interest:

This is a very general part of the advice wherein the basic human nature and tendencies you tend to take advantage of. Start taking interest in the success of the project. Try and go with the base idea that their success is a part of your success. Show your zeal and vigor for the project by communicating ideas, suggestions and feedback, and appreciations, in whatever manner they want to.

5. Give Your Best Shot:

Put in your best and come up with a logic and a well rehearsed explanation to each and every solution of yours. And, every solution of yours should accompany a reason, leading to a sure shot accomplishment of the goal. Get clear with the concept and the basic integrity of the design.

6. Pre-defined Goals and Vision:

Be it any line of business, there is no doubt to the fact that the client has always an upper hand, but at the same time, one needs to create a balance between the both. You, being the service provider should be clear in your goals, mission and the vision that has been set by the status and condition of the project, accompanied by strict deadlines.

If the deliverable cannot be handed on-time, then, should be done before time. Never try and underestimate or overestimate you limitations as well as the capabilities in setting up any commitments.

7. Make Yourself approachable:

The best way to impress your clients, and to gain their trust is to make yourself available to them. Try and be frequent in conversations so as to not let them feel that you lack interest and point fingers on your capabilities. Telephonic conversations are the best medium and then, comes the electronic mails.

8. Open Up the doors to Criticisms:

“Crticism is what helps to pertain the level of sophistication”

One of the key areas where one really needs to work out is, the area where one needs to be opened up for taking criticisms. Your ultimate goal is to have a quality qork, which is to be appreciated by the client.

“What distinguishes the modern art from the other ages is the criticism.”

And, if they come up with their inputs and the ideas of how they want their website to be, then, obviously it would be directly taking your project in the right direction. This would show your professionalism and interest in their project and building that long-term relationship with the client.

In a nut shell, what you need to do is that you need to stimulate interest of the client, then, induce a dialogue that is, between you and the client and,which would ultimately foster the term of loyalty and prove to be a stepping stone in building long-term relationship with the client.

There is no denial to the fact that at the end of the day, no matter how flourished your creativity is— you tend to fall at the mercy of your client. At the same time, you need to maintain a balance, between the client’s requirements and your core values, terms and conditions. And, that can only be achieved by acquiring a logistic understanding of the actual requirement of the project and the skill to present it in such a way that you endorse client’s knowledge, without hampering your creative inputs.

Social

Wpvote.com

A Digg style bookmarking site focusing purely on WordPress related articles and resources. They have naturally used WordPress as the site’s content and member management system.

Exectweets.com

ExecTweets aggregates the tweets of top business execs and IT pros for you to find and follow

Tweetmydesign.com

Submit your web design related website, article, resource etc for and the site will tweet it to its followers for you (if they think it is worthy)

Wordtaps.com

A web design and development social bookmarking site using WordPress to power its CMS

Ecommerce

Soapandglory.com

A fun and irreverent tone supports their brand values perfectly and their use of WordPress is top notch!

Mojo-themes.com

A premium WordPress developer they have used WordPress as the framework from which to sell their work

Icondock.com

The click and drag basket is worth a visit alone. This is one of the best in its class.

Mailbakery.com

Send you PSD files and get back a working HTML Email/ newsletter to send to your contact list. Granted, the ecommerce function is not fully integrated in the site, but it sure looks good!

Thetypefac.es

One for the fan boys, buy playing cards with images of famous web designers on them.

Resources

Webdosanddonts.com

Short, punchy and to the point web design and development “do’s and don’ts”

Cssgallerysubmission.com

Submit your website to dozens of galleries and showcases quickly and easily

360floridakeys.com

360 degree pictures of the Florida Keys, both underwater and on land.

Parttimepost.com

An incredibly attractive website, this Malaysian part-time job board twists excerpts in the stub description, and blog posts in full job descriptions.

Searchinsidevideo.com

An example of a one page site combined with slick animation. You will probably check the page source before you believe it is using WordPress.

CMS

Appletonestate.com

Appleton Estate Rum’s corporate website built using a mixture of flash and WordPress amongst other things. One of those sites you need to double check the source code a few times to be sure it is using WordPress. Perfect!

8tracks.jp

A Japanese band’s website, offering free MP3 downloads and information about the band. Its an amazing design and shows how less can be more!

101holidays.co.uk

101 holiday destinations chosen by two of the UK’s leading travel writers David Wickers and Mark Hodson. It also comes in ’short breaks’, ‘honeymoon’ and ‘family holiday’ flavours.

Clouds365.com

Since Beginning July 1, 2009, artist Kelly DeLay has shot an image or video of clouds every day with the aim of doing it for 365 days. Here are the results.

Themanyfacesof.com

I’m unsure how to describe this site, it’s probably better just to visit it to be honest.

Portfolio

Svenprim.com

Glossy and beautiful high-res photography, this is a fantastic showcase for this amazing work.

Lindseybreeden.com

Lindsey incorporates a unique way of displaying the sidebar within an oversized iPhone

Mcjdj.com

This is another example of how using just one page combined with creative navigation can create a unique site.

I2g.com.br

Striking colours and a smooth left to right swiping navigation effect all held on one super wide page.

Serj.ca

Striking graphic on the home page with nice clean and clear navigation, plus you wouldn’t know it is WordPress if you didn’t look at the source file.

Stay tuned for future freebies and useful design stuff. Webdesignfan is a Web design blog, and you can follow WebDesignFan on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed here.

1. WpRecipes.com

Wprecipes.com has a huge collection of wordpress tips and is updated frequently. It gives a lot of advice to help you customize and hack your existing theme to its full potential.

2.Themeshaper.com

Themeshaper.com is a great resource for everything about WordPress Themes. They have a great collection of themes to download, and offer great advice on crating your own WordPress theme.

3.Net.tutsplus.com

With the Tutsplus Network, they have a section dedicated to WordPress Tutorials. As always, Envato and the Tutplus.com network always offer innovative and unique tutorials that will make it easy to make your WordPress blog that much better.

4.Themeplayground.com

Themeplayground also offers a great collection of articles that help you design your own WordPress themes, and also offer some wordpress themes.

5.Problogdesign.com

Problogdesign is your destination for the best tips on writing the best articles for your blog, and optimizing your blog with SEO implementations. They have a whole category dedicated to WordPress articles.

6.Hongkiat.com

Hongkiat offers a lot of WordPress tutorial articles,  and showcases many amazing wordpress themes to download.

7.Lorelle.wordpress.com

Lorelle.wordpress.com has an archives of thousands of insightful blogging tips on WordPress. Although not updated frequently, this is still great source of information on WordPress tutorials.

8.Wp-tutorials.org

Wp-tutorials.org, as implied by the name is an rss aggregator on the latest wordpress tutorials and tips from various blogs.

9.Themelab.com

Themelab is a great wordpress design blog, that offers its premium wordpress themes, and also has a tutorial section that will definitely be informational and helpful to readers.

10.WordPress.tv

This is WordPress’ official site, which offers wordpress tutorials in a video format, for those who like viewing than reading info.

11.Wpdesigner.com

Wpdesigner.com is a great resource for those who want to design their own WordPress theme. Here is an example of one of their most helpful posts for me when I wanted to experience designing my own WordPress theme.

12.iThemes.com

iThemes.com offers a variety of interesting wordpress themes you might find of interest. They have a Tutorial Section I was really interested in here.

13.Webdesignerwall.com

Webdesignwall.com is primarily a blog about webdesign, but they also have a useful area about WordPress.

14.Speckyboy.com

Speckyboy is a design magazine that has a section dedicated to WordPress also. Some of the tutorials are very useful in finding a great wordpress theme.

15.DigWp.com

Digwp is an active blog dedicated to wordpress, and created by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr really give some great tips on customizing your blog.

16.Bloggingpro.com

Bloggingpro is your site to find useful articles on blogging effectively, with tips to help communicate your message more effectively.

17.Instantshift.com

Instanshift is another huge and active blog that has a section with great articles on WordPress.

18.Smashingmagazine.com

SmashingMagazine is one of my favorite place to find quality themes , and also checking out their Smashing Netowrk on the latest WordPress articles they have to offer.

19.Noupe.com

Noupe shows us unique ways to take full advantage of the robust WordPress platform, with articles showing us how to fully utilize WordPress more as a CMS then a blogging platform.

20.Wpengineer.com

WpEngineer is a developer’s resource with WordPress Tutorials that help Theme Develops and coders to implement more features into their themes. This is a whole blog dedicated to WordPress, not just a section, so you can be sure to find articles that will help you on everything for adding a metabox, to optimizing your coding.

That is it for today, and I hope you found that these WordPress tutorial blogs were helpful to you, by finding a new theme, finding a way to hack  your own, or finally taking that extra step to develop your first WordPress plugin or Theme.

1.Web Developer

Web developer is a popular Firefox toolbar  that with many feautures, and one of them allows you to view the CSS code of every site. That means an everyday visitor, can view my site, and see my css coding, without ever accessing the file, although we already can see an html file output of a site. You can also easily see what images the website uses, forms, and other valuable info.

2.Window Resizer

This plugin is very useful for any designer, because you want your design to be seen by all different computer resolutions! You can resize your browser to 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200 resolutions.

3.Font Finder

FontFinder is created for designers, developers and typographers. It allows a user to analyze the font information of any element on a page, copy any piece(s) of that information to the clipboard, and perform inline replacements to test new layouts.

4. Pencil

Pencil is a free and opensource plugin that allows you to create simple diagrams and sketches. Some features included are PNG rasterizing, Undo/Redo buttons, Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…

5.Pixel Perfect

Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML. This is a great plugin for a webdesigner who wants to create a graphic exactly where you want, pixel by pixel.

6.Rainbow

Rainbow is a plugin that is a must have if you ever wanted to find out the exact color code on any website.  Colors can be tried out on websites by dragging a color area from the picker, inspector, or library to webpage content, or by selecting an element to paint with the color picker. Color values can be viewed in hex, rgb, and hsl CSS formats.

7.MeasureIt

Measure It is your own virtual ruler, that can be overlayed any website, extracting the details of the dimensions, and again pixel by pixel. This is a neat feature that will can save you a lot of time estimate how wide an image’s dimension should be.

8.Total Validator

Total Validator is a plugin to help all web developers out there easily if there is any errors with validations of html code, broken links, accessibility , spell check, takes screenshots, etc.

9. ScreenGrab

Screengrab is a plugin that makes it easy to save a whole page as an image, and basically is a screenshot capture program in Firefox! You can save it as a jpg, or png file.

10.Dummy Lipsum

This extension generates “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text (the text is taken from the Lorem Ipsum site). A context menu option (“Insert Dummy Lipsum”) is shown in the context menu when the cursor is in a form field (text field or text area). This option automatically fills this field with the dummy text.

I hope you found a new Firefox plugin that will help you when you develop your next project for a client, or when you want to improve your website’s design.

1. Create Smart and Attractive Headlines

Use relevant keywords to your topic, but don’t try to write just for SEO reasons with big amount of popular keywords. Smart headline must have one or two powerful words like Awesome, Incredible or Free. You can find a lot of useful headline formulas here 102 Proven Social Media Headline Formulas by Chris Garrett. These compiled headlines you can use for blog posts, email marketing and tweets.

5 Secrets To Writing Explosive Headlines (The Experts Won’t Tell You) – Very smart and crazy tips.

8 Secrets To Writing Killer Post Titles – Useful tips to help you create killer post titles.

2. Write Interesting First Sentences

Write attractive and interesting first sentences. It’s very important because reader will find useful information and will continue reading. You can start by asking your readers exciting question or you can start by your opinion to concrete topic. If first sentences will be interesting reader will be engaged and don’t leave your post.

3. Get to the Point

Just get to the point, don’t try to write essay or poetry. Blogging isn’t philosophy. Use the K.I.S.S. rule (Keep it simple, short). Readers scan information so don’t try to impress them with big paragraphs or they will go away. Stay away from circle writing.

4. Know What Your Readers Want

When you are posting an article think like reader, that means answer the interesting questions, share your opinion, ideas. Try to write about your interests, for example if can’t understand new trends try to explore them.

5. Use Lists

This easy tip will make your post:

1) Easy to scan

2) Easy to read

3) Easy to understand

4) Easy to remember

6. Write From Your Own Experience

Don’t try to write about other niches or about things that you haven’t met ever. If you are interested in web design don’t write about freelance web designers if you don’t have experience about that. If you are writing from your experience your post will be unique, more attractive and more interesting to read.

7. Use images in posts

If you want to attract more attention to post you must use interesting and related to post topic illustrations. Images in post  helps to reader to imagine and understand  what you’re talking about.

8. Ask the community

Start a discussion with your readers,  stay sociable, friendly and you will make new friends, followers and loyal readers. It’s not difficult to start an interesting discussion, just stay creative and think good topic to discuss. For example Mike as probably all of you knows that content is king so he decided to start a discussion about design connection with design. You can read this interesting article here: If Content is Really King, Then What is Design?

9. Check for Spelling, Grammar Mistakes

This is important action to avoid stupid mistakes and keep your content in highest level. For the spell checking I use SpellJax.

10. Review It

This action is very important, you must review your post 2-3 times to make sure that you have done all the best that you can.

Article illustration by Sancho Papa.