There are a lot of ways to create traffic for your blog, one of the best ways that I have found to generate interest and traffic is through social media. Not just digg, newsvine or reddit but through some of the smaller niche social media sites. Such as designfloat, tutorialized and dzone. All of these sites are design and development related web sites that don’t get quite as much traffic as digg and company. But it does raise the chance that your site will get noticed by the digg community once your site becomes popular on some of the more niche social media sites.
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Popularity: 13%

Giving good customer service as a freelance web designer is paramount to the lively hood involved with being your own business. Providing that invaluable level of intimacy with your clients is what distinguishes you from the larger ad agencies. The bigger some companies get the more attractive a freelance web designer can be. In order to be good at what you do, it takes more than great design or meticulous CSS abilities, or even explaining to the client why web standards are so important.

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Popularity: 11%

There are several well known bugs that affect only Internet Explorer 6 that can wreak havoc on your websites. One of the most annoying is the double margin float bug in IE6, simply if you float a block level element to the left it will double the margin you have applied to the element and most of the time break your site entirely in a strange way.

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Popularity: 18%

There are a lot of benefits to being a freelance web designer. The freedom to work your own hours (all of them) and the ability to choose what web projects you take on (how much you charge) and which you decline. However, with as much responsibility that a freelance web designer takes on there is a need for a lot of tools to manage it all. Being a freelance web designer is a lot of being an entire design firm, you have to take control of the sales, customer service, project management, design layout, web development and programming. There are a lot of these tasks that we can outsource but for the most part, a lot of our projects can consist of all of the above and so choosing the right tools for the job is a task that we don’t take lightly.

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Popularity: 15%

I got several emails when I had published my new site design about how to style only the first post of the blog in Wordpress. This tactic can be handy to call out the very first post so that the readers attention is on the most recent topic for your blog. It is actually very easy, and may not be the best PHP in the world but it works perfectly.

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Popularity: 11%

There are a lot of different attempts that we have all made over the years to master the quirky art of creating an aesthetically pleasing form. The trouble is being able to control the form and have your labels and inputs match up nicely without going to too much work. We’ve all made a form in tables, regrettably. For some this has been the only option due to restraints from CSS or frustration with cross-browser compatibility.

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Popularity: 15%

I have finally published my new site design, it is somewhat similar in layout to the old design but it has quite a bit more details to it. It is also much cleaner than the last design when it comes to over all look and feel. I’ve pushed some typographic styles on to the site to increase the readability of the whole site as well.

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Popularity: 10%

I have been busy working on projects outside of the blog lately and had to set several things on the side burner. I have created a new design for this site which is about half way styled out and should be a huge improvement once it is implemented into Wordpress. It may take a little focus away from the blog and focus a little more on my freelance web design here in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and elsewhere. However, the blog will still be the primary focus of this site.

I’m also working on developing out articles for when the new version of the site launches. I know content has been lacking recently but I have some great stuff coming out soon. I’m also working on a few projects that I may be releasing before too long. Similar to designer text, my lorem ipsum generator for designers. Which is still in beta, and I plan to never put advertisements on it— unlike many of the other solutions available. I’ll also be implementing a very customizable generator to the site soon.

At any rate, keep your dial tuned to this site. As I have said before, you can follow me on Twitter to stay up-to-date on everything.

Popularity: 13%

CSS Naked day is the day that sites shed their CSS that makes our sites look good to show how seperatation of presentation and structure is so important in web design. To find out more about CSS Naked Day visit http://naked.dustindiaz.com

Popularity: 14%