Freetimers.co.uk works extremely hard to help you build and grow your business. It offers more than just web design. It helps you improve your website, grow your business and provide practical assistance on how to help your business maximise the benefits of the internet. Freetimers main principle is to give an outstanding service to its clients and to work with them as their internet partner.

Freetimers.co.uk offer the following range of services:

Web Design and Development

Having constructed some 1000 websites since its inception, the web designers have unique skills and experience that sets it apart from other web design agencies. They are not just programmers, graphic designers and marketers; they also have experience in business management. Web design includes the following graphic design and logo creation, branding and corporate identity, content managed website design, blog design, Ecommerce web design and PowerPoint design.

Online Marketing and Promotion

Using search engine optimization is one way to market your business. Freetimers have been doing SEO even before Google came into place. SEO marketing is not expensive. If you want to take your business forward then internet marketing is a must do. Some of the online marketing and promotion services include Pay Per Click, Link Building, Content and Articles marketing, Keyword research and visitor tracking.

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Reading & Learning

If you can’t see the UXer in the room, writes Russell Brown, you are the UXer.

Mary Lou wrote a tutorial on responsive full-width tabbed content.

Max Vujovic explores how browsers handle CSS Animations and CSS Transitions.

Elijah Manor published his recommended Atom packages for web developers.

The team behind the Guardian’s Scribe CMS talk about how & why they built it.

Did you read the Jonathan Ive interview on Time.com?

Dmitriy Akulov wrote about the advanced & open-source public CDN jsDelivr.

Obinwanne Hill disussed building a responsive site with less code.

O’Reilly released a free HTML version of their ebook Speaking JavaScript.

Resources & Freebies

Flexbox Grid – A grid system based on the flex display property.

Fluidity – A lightweight, fully-responsive CSS framework.
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jquery.matchHeight.js – A more robust equal heights plugin for jQuery.
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Pesticide – A small tool for faster CSS layout debugging.
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CurvedText – A jQuery plugin that will align text on a curve.
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Wireframe App UI Mockup Templates (Multiple Formats).
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New 2014 Twitter GUI (PSD).
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Android Wear GUI Elements (AI).
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Payment Method Vector Icons (PNG & EPS).
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20 High Resolution Texture Pack.
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…and finally…

Pixelomics – A gif-animated series of pixel art superheroes.
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Designing, whether for print or the web, has never been a more diverse career. Generally speaking, the more you can do for a client, the better and the more work you’ll be able to accept.

But what exactly should you focus your attention on when it comes to learning new skills? You probably want to pick skills to learn that have universal appeal and can be applied to many different types of client projects.

Here are 5 exciting design specialties to broaden your skill set.

Photography

This is an obvious one. Taking your own photos has many advantages, both creative and legal. Learning about lighting, camera angles, and photo composition can improve your designs immensely. Many designers are already being expected to perform the work of a photographer, so why not take a few classes and practice to build some genuine professional experience in the field?

When you take a photo, you own it. It’s your intellectual property, and you don’t need anyone else’s permission to use it for client work. Having this power can speed up your design process, and, if your photos are good enough, can also help you get noticed by relevant media channels. If you or your client has something to promote, it will be an enormous help to have professional-looking photographs ready to be plugged into a blog or print publication.

Video Editing

An extension of photography, only with “moving parts,” so to speak. Video is a field with tons of opportunities, that is growing with popularity even as you read this. There are over 4 billion hits on YouTube alone… every day! People have long since decided that they enjoy watching videos online, and your clients are waiting for someone with the expertise to take advantage of this huge market.

If there’s an opportunity for your clients to take advantage of the medium of video, it’s your duty as a service provider to make them aware of that and communicate the possibilities to them. You will have clients begging you to incorporate video into their businesses, once they see how simple it can be to do so. You can learn the basics of video editing for free (ironically) on YouTube. The best part about learning video? You can double the amount you currently charge your clients for design, and perhaps event triple or quadruple it.

Motion Graphics

Long used in the advertising industry, motion graphics are making their way onto the web as well. Motion graphics can be applied to everything from animated typography to responsive mobile app design.

Software such as Adobe After Effects can help turn you into a motion graphics pro. Of course, motion graphics software is not cheap, but the percentage increase of what you can charge for your work will more than make up for it.

3D Effects

3D is absolutely exploding right now in the design world. Especially with the advances in 3D CAD technology, which is taking the craft from the esoteric realm of product designers and animators and placing the power in the hands of the common people to create virtually anything they can dream up. The rise of 3D printing is also helping to generate more interest in 3D. Free software like Blender and SketchUp can get you started in this exciting field.

If you’re thinking that 3D design is difficult or complicated, think again. Simplified, free software made for 3D printing can nearly eliminate the learning curve, and the growing library of free 3D base models to use even lowers the amount of modeling you need to do to create something cool.

Mobile Web Design

More and more, companies want to take their web applications to mobile devices. It’s estimated that, as of 2013, 91% of all people on earth use a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device to access the web, communicate with others, and organize their lives.

Yes, that’s right: over 4 billion people currently use a mobile device. That’s a lot of potential customers that your clients want to reach. The more you know about mobile design, the more valuable you will be to a wide variety of clients.

Just The Beginning

As you can see, there are many exciting design specialties to explore. You can broaden your client base and make more money the more you know how to do. Of course, these are just five of the most popular and potentially useful skills, but the possibilities are endless if you know how to dominate a design niche. Things like calligraphy, origami, or even knitting and basket weaving can help your career take off. You just have to know where and how to apply an expertise.

It is that time of the week again, a chance for you to sit back and enjoy some of our favorite web and mobile designs from this past week.

You may also like to browse the Web & Mobile Creativity Archives.

Late last year, Dusan Cezek created an amazing and hugely popular gif-animated series of pixel art movie moments called Pixelwood. You probably seen them.

A few months on, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Pixelwood, he has created a new series of 8-bit characters, but this time he has focused on superheros. The new collection is called Pixelomics, and features popular heroes such as Wolverine, Iron Man, Hellboy, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many more… Strangely, there is no Batman! Hey Dusan, what gives? Where is the Dark Knight?

Pixelomics – Pixel Art Superheroes

Wolverine

Wonder Woman & Superman

Iron Man, Captain America & The Hulk

Judge Dredd

Abe Sapien & Hellboy

View the entire Pixelomics project on Behance

GavickPro have been in the web-design game for a while, but it’s only in the last 2 years that they’ve started applying their knowledge to creating WordPress themes and widgets. To celebrate the upcoming release of their 24th WordPress theme, GavickPro are offering a massive 30% discount on their Business, Lifetime and Developer WordPress subscriptions from now until 28th March; simply enter the discount code ‘speckyboy_GK30‘ (case-sensitive!) before checkout.

What does this mean? It means you can get access to GavickPro’s robust WordPress theme collection for one whole year for under €49, along with expert forum support from the developers themselves and frequent updates and new theme releases. Want the best deal possible? Get unlimited support, unlimited downloads, access to all themes and updates including any future releases for use on unlimited domains with the WordPress Lifetime subscription, which is under €70 with this discount!

All of GavickPro’s WordPress themes are built on their own Gavern Framework, that shift many useful customisation and management features to the theme options. Add social media buttons to posts, adjust layouts, switch colours, backgrounds and menus, and more. GavickPro also provide an extensive collection of widgets all freely available from their GitHub repository for all to use and contribute to, like News Show Pro, the robust, feature-packed content showcase with multiple portal modes, and Image Show, for crafting an elegant slider.

Their themes are wide-ranging, with news-heavy portals like Game, that uses multiple modules to achieve an information-packed frontpage…

…to restrained, minimalist app themes like MO, that keeps things clean, relying not on densely-packed modules, but simple flat-design icons and animations to give a smooth experience to your users.

GavickPro also provides themes built specifically to support popular WordPress ecommerce and social extensions, such as WooCommerce, which is elegantly represented in our sophisticated inStyle theme:

Or BuddyPress, the free social-network builder, which was infused with our stunning (M)Social theme. This theme acted as the showcase for our GK Grid widget, that creates configurable tile-based layouts made up of other widgets:

GavickPro’s developers and designers strive to ensure all their themes and widgets follow W3C and WordPress standards and incorporate current web trends, such as parallax effects, flat-design, full-screen headers. All their latest themes are responsive too, so your users will receive the full experience no matter what device they use, and with new themes released monthly, there always something new on the horizon. Take a look at the rest of their WordPress themes collection if you still need a bit of convincing, then take advantage of the discount and get started!

Starting out as a freelance web designer often means taking whatever projects come our way. After all, we need to eat too (and a drink every now and then isn’t a bad idea).

But, as both your business and skill set evolves, you may come to a crossroads. Do you keep on taking on just any old project that comes along? Or, do you instead narrow your focus and take on more specialized projects? For example, perhaps you only want to work with sites powered by WordPress, or just e-commerce or even projects that fall within a certain price range.

There’s certainly a bright side to working on a variety of projects, especially early in your career. For one, you’ll gain valuable experience. You’re also likely to find out which types of projects you love and some you’re not so crazy about. This is a perfect time to expand your horizons.

Making the Choice to be Choosy

For many years, I would indeed take just about any project that was offered to me.  In recent times, I’ve found that I’m at a point in my career where I want to be a little more particular. Over time I have found that there are certain things that, for one reason or another, I don’t want to do anymore.

One task that I have tired of is the “5 minute update”. You know it. It’s that message in your inbox from a client asking you to just change some text around, or something else very minor. I love making my clients happy. That’s one of the cornerstones of my business. But when I have an inbox full of these types of requests, it takes me away from more enjoyable (and lucrative) pursuits.

Image Source: Vector Flat Illustration Website Development via Shutterstock

This doesn’t mean that I’m simply cutting off clients from this type of work. It also doesn’t mean that I’m going to charge a premium for it. Instead, my solution is to no longer take on “update only” clients. Meaning, if I didn’t design and/or build your site, I’m not going to offer update service. This allows me to keep current clients happy, while at the same time limiting the amount of this type of work I’ll have to do.

I’m also implementing a similar policy with certain types of software. My primary expertise these days is with WordPress. Therefore, I’m not going to attempt a redesign in Joomla!, Drupal or some random CMS powered by GoDaddy. I’ve come to realize that working with unfamiliar software is kind of like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It’s very time inefficient for both my client and myself. In the end, neither of us wins.

Sweet Freedom

It has actually felt very freeing to implement these policies in my business. I feel like I have more time to work on the things that I love doing, without being saddled with an endless array of things I can’t stand. The result has been quite interesting in that doing this has actually allowed my business to grow.

There are still times when I’m stuck doing things I’d rather not be doing. However, I’ve found that I can outsource some of it. If that’s not possible at the moment, I just make the best of it. At least I know it’s not going to dominate my time day after day like it used to.

Image Source: Flat Vector Illustration Mobile Application via Shutterstock

One bit of advice I have for those of you thinking of narrowing the focus of your business is to still maintain some flexibility. After all, your goal here shouldn’t be to drive clients away by implementing an iron-fisted policy. It’s rather difficult, and maybe even impossible, to just impose your will on everyone else. This won’t happen overnight.

Instead, gradually make the changes you that you want to see in your business. Establish a goal of spending no more than (x) hours a week working on projects that don’t fit within your core services. Sure, there will be times when this simply isn’t possible. But little by little you can get yourself to a place of comfortable balance.

You might just find that, over time, your business will go in the direction you want. The best part is that you’ll be the one in control of guiding it there.

We have something completely different for this weeks freebie, you’ll love it. Courtesy of Sam from Mercurycode on DeviantArt, we have a huge pack of 20 high resolution textures just waiting to be used in your designs. Each texture comes in JPEG format and are sized at either 3456x5184px or 3456x3456px. The actual ZIP download weighs in at a huge 194mb, so please remember that before you start the download.

You are allowed to use these textures in both your personal and commercial and projects, but no redistribution allowed. Please give credit to the designer (mercurycode.deviantart.com).

Free High Resolution Textures

Click the screenshot below to view the maxi-size.

File DownloadAbout the Designer

These textures have been created by Sam from Mercurycode. If you are looking for more high-res textures you should visit her DeviantArt page, or her Facebook page.

This is our popular weekly design news post where we share our favorite design related articles, resources and freebies from the past week. You can sign-up to our awesome weekly newsletter for some more amazing…

The post Weekly Design News (N.227) appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.