*when HiFi is just not an option

IconShock has designed another set of high-quality icons specifically for DesignM.ag readers. This set includes 5 icons that may be useful for your next blog theme design. They can be used for personal or commercial projects, no attribution is necessary.

In this Photoshop web design tutorial, we’re going to create a mock-up of a clean and modern-looking website.

Picture this. You’re in a fancy night club, one of the best in Vegas. You’re drinking free beer and watching 50 or 100 people party to heavy beats and exotic dance tunes. You should be enjoying the mood . . . maybe even letting a dance sneak out every now and then.

But instead, you’re off in the corner talking business. Not just any business either. You’re talking about the business of blogging.

I know . . . pretty lame right?

But hold that thought, because although on the surface it seems like you’re missing the point of the “nightclub experience,” the truth is that you are working feverishly to solve a problem that plagues the blogging world.

It might not be life or death, but the fact that most bloggers don’t see it is cause for great concern. So what’s the problem?

Bloggers make terrible businesspeople

I was at the Bank in the Bellagio hotel earlier this month, talking with my pal Rich Lazzara, and we started talking about something we noticed during the first two days of the Blogworld Expo.

Rich mentioned to me that bloggers were crappy business people (that’s putting it nicely) and proposed that if people like you and I started treating our blog as a business, we’d actually start seeing better results. At first I was a bit surprised by the assumption, but after digesting it this weekend I realized that he was absolutely right.

Over the course of our conversation, we discussed a variety of examples, but I want to share the three “blog killers” that really stood out to me.

1. Business Bloggers Making Hobby Money: These guys (and gals) work like Gary Vaynerchuk, but they aren’t making anything more than hobby money. They want to say that they are probloggers, but they allow the comfort of their job to lull them into a sense of security.

Rather than live up to their inner desire to become a blogging powerhouse, they use “hobby blogging” as an excuse to stay exactly where they are.

2. The Dreamers: These bloggers dream all day about blogging success, but they never get around to actually doing the work required to make it happen. They simply won’t take things seriously. To them, spending four hours on Twitter is just as productive as writing a blog post.

3. The Selfish: These bloggers just don’t see the point in networking or in spreading goodwill. They certainly don’t take the time to foster relationships that can help them reach the next level, including creating a solid relationship with their audience.

For selfish bloggers, everything is about them . . . what they can do, how good their products are, and how much you should want to be like them. They step on everyone else in order to get onto the shoulders of giants.

It’s time to get serious

In my opinion, each of these three maladies hinge on what Chris Brogan said during his Blogworld keynote on Thursday, which is that as bloggers we all need to elevate our game.

If you are serious about blogging, you need to treat your blog like a business. You are the CEO of You Inc., and you’ve got to weigh every single decision as if there were millions of dollars on the line. Yeah, it would be great to blog in your underwear and sleep in every morning, but the reality is that most of us can’t afford to do that.

Measure the day’s work in results, not in hours spent typing on Facebook or Twitter. Absolutely, fostering relationships is important, but every action needs to be treated as an investment of your time.

This is especially important if you are a solo blogger, as there is only so much work that you can get done in a day. You’ve got to be efficient with your time. This means measured action and measured results — not just going with the flow.

Be honest with yourself

If you really don’t care whether or not you make any money as a blogger, then that’s fine. But don’t lie to yourself just so you can feel better about being broke.

Bust your tail

Copyblogger took about four years to get where it is today. Gary V busted his ass for two years before he got the book deal. And Chris Brogan spent 11 years on his “overnight success.”

You’ve got to work hard to become successful. End of story.

Be strategic

Develop a short-, mid-, and long-term plan for your business and follow it to the best of your ability. You can adapt it as you gain knowledge and expertise, but if you go without a plan you’re toast.

Learn how to network

As someone who spends time in sales and marketing, I’m used to shaking hands and saying hello.

It’s important to get out there and meet people, but please don’t be “that guy.” Treat relationships as an investment in your business.

Provide value

Quit worrying about what your customer can do for you and instead worry about what you can do for your customer.

Don’t think about how you can shove a new product down a customer’s throat. Instead, spend your time worrying about whether you can solve a problem or improve their experience. If providing value to your audience isn’t a priority, you’re in for trouble.

There’s no secret to becoming a full-time blogger aside from hard work and adopting the right mentality. Sure, there are nuances that you’ll need to master, but the plan is already laid out there for you. Find your passion, develop a plan, and work your tail off by creating awesome content.

But heck, isn’t that what they’ve been saying here all along?

About the Author: Nathan Hangen writes about web entrepreneurship at NathanHangen.com, and about how to use social media to fuel your brand at Making It Social. Follow him on Twitter @nhangen.

Do you ever think "Ugh" when it is time to update or redesign your site? jQuery has a fantastic library of plugins and tutorials that can speed the benefits of developing your site while demanding less time and improving workflow constraints.
To present a better user experience, we often need to take good care of the [...]

Do you ever think "Ugh" when it is time to update or redesign your site? jQuery has a fantastic library of plugins and tutorials that can speed the benefits of developing your site while demanding less time and improving workflow constraints.
To present a better user experience, we often need to take good care of the [...]

Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.

To participate, just vote for your favorite online resource for graphic designers.

With Halloween coming up now is a great time to add a few grungy and dirty based typefaces to your font collection. Here we have a large A-Z list of some of the best free grungy and dirty fonts to use in your designs from the ever-popular dafont.com!

A is for Ambulance Shotgun

Pricing pages are very common for sites of web apps, web hosting and other types of services. These pages are critical to the success of the company because they will have a significant influence on the visitors who are trying to make a buying decision. Pricing pages typically give the necessary details regarding the various plans and options, and they encourage visitors to take action.

In this post we’ll look at a number of trends in pricing page design, along with several examples for each.

Emphasis on One Option:

Most of the pricing pages that we are looking at in this post include some sort of table or chart that shows the various options that are available for purchase. Obviously, this is helpful for buyers to be able to compare their options and determine which is the best choice for them. However, sometimes having too many possible choices can actually make things more difficult. Some pricing pages are using an emphasis on one option to help it stand out to visitors. In some cases it is listed as the most popular or best value, and in other cases it is simply emphasized in some way.

Aside from attempting to make the decision easier for visitors, emphasis also gives the designer the ability to control which of the options will get the most attention from visitors. In some cases it is used on the most expensive option, but in many cases it is not. Let’s look at some examples.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg emphasizes their basic plan (the lowest-priced option) by using a green background color compared the the gray background of the other plans, plus the column background is also a little bit larger.

What is good writing?

Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).

Not all English teachers abide by this system, but the vast majority do. Just look at the writing of most graduates, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s proper, polite, and just polished enough not to embarrass anyone. Mission accomplished, as far as our schools are concerned.

But let me ask you something:

Is that really good writing?

I think most good writers listen to the way English teachers want them to write and think, “This isn’t real. It has no feeling, no distinctiveness, no oomph. You’re the only person in the world who would willingly read it. Everyone else would rather chew off their own eyelids than read more than three pages of this boring crap.” And they’re right.

Compare an award-winning essay to a best-selling novel, and you’ll notice that they are written in almost completely different languages. Some of it has to do with the audience, sure. It’s natural to write differently for academics than you would for everyday people. But my question is: who are you going to spend more time writing for?

My guess: everyday people — your family and friends, your blog audience, your boss at work, maybe even a Letter to the Editor every now and again. None of them are academics. None of them want to read an essay.

Personally, I think good writing doesn’t have to be educated or well supported or even grammatically correct. It does have to be interesting enough that other people want to read it. Much of what comes out of high schools and universities fails this test, not because our students are incapable of saying anything interesting, but because a well-meaning but flawed academic system has taught them a lot of bad habits.

Let’s go through some of them.

1. Trying to sound like dead people

It’s a sad state of affairs when the youngest writer on your reading list has been dead 100 years, but that’s the way it is in school.

I don’t know who exactly decides what’s worth reading and what’s not, but they (whoever “they” are) believe in reading the “classics,” and most of those classics are centuries old. What’s worse is that many teachers hold up the classics as examples of what good writing is, and they expect you to mimic those writers with your essays.

Sure, Chaucer and Thomas More and Shakespeare were the stud muffins of their day, but you don’t see them on the New York Times Bestseller List now.

Not because they aren’t good (they were freaking great), but because people can’t connect with them. By mimicking their style, you might make a few teachers happy, but you’re essentially handicapping your writing in the eyes of the public.

If you want to make a connection, you’re much better off studying the hot writers of today — like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Seth Godin. Watch what they do, and play with using some of their techniques in your own writing.

Yes, you’ll still be mimicking the work of another writer, but at least you’ll be mimicking something people want to read.

2. Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt

Looking through the eyes of an educator, I can see why telling students what to write about would be useful. You have a bunch of students who couldn’t care less about your curriculum, and making them write a paper about the assigned readings is a great way to force them to read the material.

Makes sense . . . but it doesn’t make it any less damaging.

One of the biggest challenges of writing is figuring out what to write. Whether you’re writing a memo, an article, or a letter to your mother, the process is always the same: you start out with a blank page, and you decide what to put on it.

Sure, that involves considering what your audience will want to read, but no one but you makes the final decision of what to put on the page. That act of deciding is what writing is all about.

3. Writing long paragraphs

Once upon a time, it was acceptable to write paragraphs long enough to fill multiple pages with big blocks of text.

Not surprisingly, that’s the way most of us were taught to write: long paragraphs, topic sentences neatly organized, lots of supporting evidence in between assertions. It was the “correct” way to write.

Not.

Any.

More.

Nowadays, most paragraphs should be a maximum of three sentences. It’s also a good idea to include some shorter paragraphs with only one or two sentences, using them to punctuate powerful ideas.

It’s not so much about having a “correct” length as using paragraphs to give your writing rhythm.

4. Avoiding profanity at all costs

I admit it; this is a controversial one. Many excellent writers still hold that profanity has no place in a professional publication, while others curse like a lovable two-dollar, er, paid companion.

The rest of us sit around feeling uncomfortable and wondering whether it’s okay to express ourselves “that way” or not.

So who’s right? Well, I think Stephen King says it best:

Make yourself a promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip” and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean John stopped long enough to take a shit. If you believe “take a shit” would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say John stopped long enough to move his bowels (or perhaps John stopped long enough to “push”). I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct.

‘Nough said.

5. Leaning on sources

Most kids I knew hated digging up sources and quoting them in their papers, but not me. No, the sneaky little bugger that I was (and still am), I realized that sources were an escape route from creativity. With enough quotations from other writers, I could fill up an entire paper without coming up with a single original thought of my own.

And I was rewarded for it. From kindergarten to getting my degree in English Literature, I got an A on all but like five papers.

Here’s why: a lot of teachers care more about solid research than original ideas. They don’t want to see daring and inventive arguments, challenging the foundation of everything we hold to be true and arguing boldly for a new worldview. To them, it’s much more important that you understand the ideas of others and be able to cite them in MLA format.

But real life is the opposite.

Go around citing the sources of all of your ideas and people will start avoiding you, because it’s boring as hell.

They don’t care who said what, and they aren’t interested in hearing the chronology of an idea. What they want to hear is a new perspective on a favorite topic.

If it comes from you, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.

6. Staying detached

We are taught that good writing puts the focus on the subject, not the writer. It’s unemotional. It gives equal attention to opposing points of view, presenting them all without singling out one as best.

And sometimes, it’s true. If you’re a scientist, engineer, or a doctor, then maintaining your role as a detached observer is a great idea.

For everyone else though, it’s a disaster.

Have you ever read the stuff scientists, engineers, and other so-called “detached observers” write? It’s boring! Outside of their exclusive circles, you couldn’t pay people to read it.

If you want people to want to read what you write, then you should do the opposite. Be more like Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Gary Vaynerchuk. They are opinionated, have a unique style, and are prone to emotional outbursts.

It’s no coincidence. That’s what makes them interesting.

7. Listening to “authorities” more than yourself

Who am I to criticize the writing habits you learned in school?

Well . . . nobody.

Yes, I’m a professional writer. Yes, I have a literature degree. Yes, other writers have paid me up to $200 an hour to edit their work, and they’ve been amazed when all I did was correct the above mistakes.

But that doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, that’s probably the most important lesson you can learn about writing:

No one but you is an authority on your writing.

Not me. Not your English teachers. Not Strunk and White and their highfalutin Elements of Style.

The longer you write, the more you’ll realize that other writers can’t tell you what to do. You should listen to more experienced writers, sure, but never more than you listen to yourself.

Great writers don’t learn how to write by sitting in writing courses, reading writing blogs, or browsing Barnes & Noble for yet more books on writing.

They learn how to write by coming to a blank page, writing something down, and then asking themselves if it works.

If it does, they keep it. If it doesn’t, they don’t. Then they repeat the process until they finish something they feel is worth publishing.

Sadly, most writers don’t know this

They labor under the mistaken assumption that there is an invisible standard of good and bad. And they worry that the Writing Police are going to show up at their door any minute, handcuff them, and haul them off to jail for failing to measure up.

If that was true, you wouldn’t see a single writer walking the street without one of those blinking bracelets around their ankle.

The truth is that you’re in charge. You. The blank page is sitting there, and you can fill it up with whatever the hell you want.

So stop sitting there, silly.

Go for it.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.

Looking for more design inspiration? See our other galleries: CartFrenzy, Folio Focus, Minimal Exhibit, TypeInspire.

We are always attracted to the outstanding design, layout or content when we click in a website, but seldom of us would notice the textures and patterns that are used. If there are only background colors, many websites would not be that eye-catching as they are now.
Patterns can be simply repetition of simple stipes or [...]

WordPress auto download/install is a very nice feature, but sometimes a few problems can appear. One of them is that WordPress don’t manage to download the new version. This happens on slow servers. Here is how to solve it.

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WordPress upgrade : Allow more time for slow servers