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.

I have been working with CSS for many years now, and although it is relatively easy to learn, there are always some tips and tricks that you don’t know about, and new stuff to be learnt all the time. I wanted to take a moment to give you some tips and tricks that I wish I knew when I first started using CSS.

Resets & Browser Inconsistencies

It’s not big secret that not all browsers are created equal. Internet Explorer may show something completely different than Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox may show something completely different to Apple Safari.

We also don’t know what the default margin, padding, font-size, etc. are for these browsers. To handle these differences, many CSS developers like to level the playing field by creating a CSS Reset. In the early stages, we would have just used a global reset, which would look like the following:

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

It soon became clear that resetting only the margin & padding wasn’t really enough. Developers started to created a CSS Reset.  Eric Meyer created a widely accepted and comprehensive set of reset rules.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-weight: inherit;
font-style: inherit;
font-size: 100%;
font-family: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}

/* remember to define focus styles! */

:focus {

outline: 0;

}

body {

line-height: 1;

color: black;

background: white;

}

ol, ul {

list-style: none;

}

/* tables still need ‘cellspacing=”0″‘ in the markup */

table {

border-collapse: separate;

border-spacing: 0;

}

caption, th, td {

text-align: left;

font-weight: normal;

}

blockquote:before, blockquote:after,

q:before, q:after {

content: “”;

}

blockquote, q {

quotes: “” “”;

}

This has become the most popular CSS reset available today. It is also important to note that some elements have been deliberately excluded from the list, including Input, Button and HR.

User ‘Overflow: Hidden’ to clear floats

I always used to use a clearing div to clear any floating divs I was using. This would always look like the following:

.clear { clear:both; }
<div>
<div></div>
<div></div>
<div></div>
</div>

Although this does work perfectly fine, it can make your code look messy. Instead you can use overflow: hidden on your container div tag. So you could use the following:

#contain { overflow: hidden; }
<div>
<div></div>
<div></div>
</div>

Grouping elements together

One of the rules of keeping good coding is to keep your code simple, clean and easy to read. This technique helps with readability as well as performance. In the early days, I used to do two or three elements that are doing the same thing, until I found out you can group these elements together.

So instead of writing:

h1 { color: #444; }
h2{ color: #444; }

You can group these elements like so:

h1, h2 { color:#444; }

Use CSS Shorthand

Using CSS Shorthand has two beneficial aspects to it, the first one being less code. The second is improving the performance. So instead of writing the following:

body {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: .7em;
line-height: 1.4em;
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-top: 10px;
}

You can write the same thing with less lines and less coding:

body {
font: normal .7em/1.4em verdana,;
margin: 10px 0;
}

Box Model – Margin, Padding & Borders

The box model is the basis for all layouts. If you use CSS, you need to take the box model into account. It governs the dimensions & spacing of the elements on a page.

All box models have five spacing properties: width, height, padding, margin and border. Width and height are tricky attributes, as they require a bit of calculation. When measuring an element’s width, designers must consider the entire box.

Using the example above, the box has a total width of 260px. The margin, padding, and border are 30px each (remember, that’s 30px on top, 30 on bottom, 30 right, and 30 left). So, in this example, the margin takes up 60 pixels of the box’s width. Likewise, the border and padding consume 60px each. All together, the margin, border, and padding amount to 180 pixels of the box’s total width.

We know that the box’s total width is 260px, but in CSS the width attribute refers to the content area on the inside of the box. So, for this example, we have to subtract 180 pixels (for margin, border, and padding) from 260 (total box width), leaving us with a content area of 80px. Therefore, our CSS looks like this:

div {
margin:30px;
border:30px solid yellow;
padding:30px;
width:80px;
height:80px;
}

Conditional Comments

IE is one of the worst browsers to develop CSS for, while most browsers show the same thing about 80% of the time, IE will not. Therefore you will be doing a lot of IE Hacks to make sure your website shows the same in all browsers.

This can take a lot of CSS to accomplish, making your main style sheet larger than it really needs to be. So the easiest way to accomplish this is to use the HTML conditional comments to detect IE browsers and display the CSS.:

<!–[if IE]>
Target All versions of IE
<![endif]–>

Using conditional comments to target IE and cut out your hacks will slim down your main style sheet, and help load the page quicker in browsers that don’t need the correction code.

That’s it

That’s it for now. I am always learning new stuff, and with CSS3 making its way through, there will more than likely be another tutorial on the way.

By the end of 2000, many European and American business companies offered their services through the internet. Since then people began to associate the word, “e-commerce” with the ability of purchasing various goods through the internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services. The biggest e-commerce sites are such sites like Amazon and eBay, but today we’ll be taking a look at some of the best e-commerce designs on the net.

Martique

Serene Order

Nike Store

Cellar Thief

Unformal Wear

Hunter’s Wineshop

Heartbreaker

Adorn

Candy Direct

Tropikalny Ogród

Better Closet

Perfume Point

4-rth

Equip Your Trip

Under Armour

Code Canyon

Hello Themes

Bonjour Mon Coussin

Galante

Bridge55

Dripping in Fat

Free People

Perfect Order

Doorstep Dairy

This is Nation

Caribou Coffee

Chocomize

Novica

Design by Humans

Sena

Perspective general Stock Icons

Fliraneo icon pack

This is Art Icon Pack

High Detail Social Icons

Office Dock Icons

Upojenie Icon Set

Touchscreen Icons

iMac Icons

Officina Digitale

Travel Icons

Global Warning Icons

Super Vista Multimedia Icons

Web Browser Icons

Xmac General Icons

Super Apple Pack

Pm Icons

3d Icons

Deli Pack

Desktop Icons

Mac Osx Style

More Mac Icons

Designer Portfolio Icons

Secure Icons

Gift Icons

Soccer Icons

Flat For Linux

Modern Hardware Icons

Yoritsuki Icons

Website Icons Pack 2

Construction Icons

Original Vista SP1 Icons

Archigraphs-Collection-Icons

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.

If you have ever used WordPress as a CMS, then I am sure you are going to love this new flash CMS that is Flashmoto. Flashmoto is your ideal solution for building your own flash sites without having much knowledge of coding, or buying the expensive Adobe Flash application to build your site. I am extremely excited today as I was chosen to test drive Flashmoto. In this Flashmoto review, I will state my honest opinion on the program, and also give some positive and negative features of this CMS.

Introduction

If you are unfamiliar with flash based websites, they are visually beautiful, and create a rich-filled experience for a visitor. Examples of companies using flash based websites include Sony,  CarlsJr , Hbo, etc. After purchasing your Flashmoto license, or trying out the demo, you will be impressed by the simplicity of using Flashmoto. It is suited for beginners and experts alike to create your own flash-based websites, because of their extensive customization features. You do not need to worry about code, and instead drag and drop features you want, which color you want for your texture, or what videos you want to appear on your homepage.

Features

Some features I will briefly mention show how robust and simple Flashmoto is.

-No installation required! ( Update the files and your ready to go) Not even wordpress is that simple, although it is just a 5 minute install!

-WYSIWYG Editor ( A convenient WYSIWYG Editor gives you an ability to visualize what you are producing. )

-Video, MP3 players Component ( You can easily embed videos on your site, and also play its own music)

-SEO optimized ( Although flash sites are notoriously criticized in many blogs and forums or not ranking well in search engines, Flashmoto has a built in SEO feature that will help you rank in search engines better)

-Custom modules and widgets integration ( Modules allow you to customize your website visually, adding content boxes and other elements  anywhere on your site)

When first setting up and configuring your site, you will be greeted by a very friendly admin panel, and a help page that link to very comprehensive and useful tutorials on making your first website. To the left of your admin panel is the basic features you can attempt to add toy our site, and on the left is where your sites really begins to take form. You can customize your site in every way possible without coding,  changing the font, and position on the page, to the effects of the element. You can double click an item to get more options on customizing. They also having a fabulous image and video manger, where you can easily upload new photos and videos toy our site.

If you are having difficulty in creating your site, or do not have the time or motivation to create your own site, they have a variety of ready made Flash CMS templates that will allow you to create your site that faster. The templates are allow 100% customizable, and are each uniquely stunning. They have a section on their site , Flash Templates, where they have  a variety of themes, from $100-250 range.

Conclusion

Flashmoto is a very comprehensive and feature filled flash CMS. Although I personally am not a fan of creating flash websites, this would be the program I would use to create my own, with their easy to use admin panel, and amazing amounts of customizable options. Flashmoto designed and created a user friendly website builder, that even  a newbie can pick up this product and begin learning to create his own site.   Some improvements for this flash cms could include offering more competitive prices, as it is $200 for one license for one domain. If you have a lot of projects that you want to create using a flash cms, this is going to put you in the whole for a lot of money. Overall, I was impressed by the demo I experienced and I am sure you will too when you try it out. I hope you enjoyed this flashmoto review, and have a marvelous June!

Demo | Website