What to look for in a Web Designer

I had a meeting today where a business man I met, told me that the web designers that he tried to business with are so ‘flaky’. This isn’t the first time I heard this comment from someone. It seems as if the webdesigners out there are looking for ‘quickie’ projects where they are concerned about making a quick buck rather than truly meeting the client’s needs. Below are some of my thoughts on what to look for in a webdesigner.

1. Portfolio – Seeing at least 3 samples of the designers work can give you a pretty good idea of the quality of work that they are able to produce. Ask how involved they were in their projects. You want to make sure the webdesigner can do what you are looking for. Look for diversity in the designs. Are the designs the same for each client or unique to each client? You want to have a designer who can pay attention to every detail of what you are about and can truly express the nature of what you are trying to do.
2. Testimonials – These are very important as they give you an idea of the experience prior clients had with the webdesigner. What do they have to say about the webdesigner and his work?
3. Accessibility – I’ve heard of webdesigners that are hard to get in contact with. Sometimes people have to wait weeks before they get a response. Make sure when choosing a designer that you find out how easily accessible they are in case they need to be reached.
4. Reliability – Very Important. You want to choose a designer who has integrity, is honest and takes your project as serious as you are about it. One way of finding out the reliability of a designer is from testimonials or by talking to former clients of the designer.
5. Ability to meet deadlines – If your project has to be completed by a certain date. It is imperative that the designer is aware of these expectations and communicate his ability to do complete it in time.
6. Business Process – How does the designer do business? Does he work with contracts. If a designer agrees to do a project for you without a contract involved. Beware! This can turn out to be bad in the long run.
7. How much? – Make sure the designer can give you upfront pricing, and always ask about domain and hosting.
8. Web Standards – Does the designer build websites according to the latest web standards? Most designers in an effort to do ‘quickie’ projects, build sites that are table based, which means that they are using code that’s outdated and will turn up with tons of errors when validated. This results in pages loading slower than they should and can cause errors across multiple browsers.

Cropping tutorial using the pen tool

Hey It’s andrew, and I’m here to show you how to crop a person out of a picture and put them into another picture or on a different background! Here is an example:

Before:

After:

Step 1: Open your image into photoshop.

Step 3: Select the pen tool in your tools plate

Step 4: Zoom in and click somewhere along the edge of the person or object you are going to crop with the pen tool. A little dot will appear there.

Step 5: Click somewhere else along the edges and another dot will appear there, plus you will see a line in between the dots.

Step 6: Now click somewhere on the line to add an anchor point. You can hold ctrl and drag it around to make a curved line, so drag it to the edge of the person.

Step 7: now to get rid of the black because it is in the way, set opacity to 0%

Step 8: You can add more than one anchor point to a line. To add another regular point just repeat step 5. Continue this until you see a line completely around him and click the first point you made to complete it.

Step 9: Hold ctrl and click on the icon of the line(the colored square next to shape 1)

Step 10: Click the layer your picture is on and press ctrl+c then ctrl+v.

Now then layer you just created is it! Good job! For an even more detailed tutorial, wait for the video download, Coming Soon!