You read the title right! I can help you stimulate your business trading for just twenty pounds and here’s how.

You may be thinking that you need thousands of pounds to stand a chance and get ahead of your competition, but the truth is, you don’t even need half of a thousand pounds. Direct marketing is something that cleaners, pizza places, corner shops or even large supermarkets such as the Co-Operative employs the use of. Direct marketing is producing some sort of handout whether it be an advertisement card (also known as a postcard), a flyer or even rack cards and then getting someone to design it, print it and distribute it to your target areas.

With me so far?

The trouble is nobody does the designing, printing and distribution all in one place which means it not only costs more, but also takes more time… until now.
Marketing Direct which can be found at www.marketingdirect.org.uk is the new one-stop shop for the design, printing and distribution of handouts. You also get a COMPLETELY FREE & NO-OBLIGATION MOCK-UP of your handout which is professionally designed by in-house creatives that help capture the potential customer’s eye.

Don’t waste any more time surfing the internet for low prices on all of those services that Marketing Direct have to offer because you won’t find a better deal anywhere.

Did you know that there are over 5,000 design agencies that will charge over £50 just for the design?
And that there are numerous printing and distribution companies throughout the UK which makes finding a cheap one harder to find?

Marketing Direct save you all of that hassle so that if you want to get a flyer sent out, we do it easily and at affordable prices.

Head on over to our website at www.marketingdirect.org.uk for your free mock-up.

Marketing Direct are the new and upcoming small business advertising solution which means the smaller firms can save, and in this economy we need all the help we can get.

With prices starting from a one-off fee of just £19.99 these guys offer a range of packages to suit you such as their Ultimate Package which includes 1000 Flyers professionally-designed by their team, printed at very low prices and distributed across selected areas within the UK. Another bonus is that you don’t even pay a diam until you have approved of the design yourself.

Free Mock-Ups are said to take less than 24 hours for you to receive your electronic sample and approve.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over to www.marketingdirect.org.uk to find out how you can benefit from their services.

Firstly, you need to know how, not just Google works, but how every other search engine out there works.

When researching a little bit about how to get to the top, you may find that ‘popularity’ is a word you’ll come across quite regularly. Google ranks your website, blog, YouTube channel, etc. in order of most-popular to least-popular and it sucks being on page ’2097′ of Google when you type in ‘web design’ for example; solutions to this range from spending thousands of pounds (like most large companies do) on special marketing enthusiasts to doing it yourself for free. I’m going to give you a few methods to help you get started.

Link trading
A lot of people stray away from link trading because they think that links have to be added to the main page(s), wrong! Make a site map page and insert links there to avoid cluttering up your web-space.
Link trading is boring, I know, but think of what you could do with the money you’re not spending. Just type in to Google, ‘link trading’, and see which link-trading website suits you, however I recommend linkmarket.net.

Cheap Adverts
Find a few sites that are related to yours to advertise on and find out how much they are going to cost; a quick way is to visit BuySellAds.
You will need to set a budget on the total amount of money you are willing to spend, but look at it this way, for every pound you spend, it could generate more new clients!

Search Engine Optimization
Do you have Meta tags on your website? If you do, well done! If not, go to Addme.com for a free Meta tag generator and guide.

SEO is something Microsoft and many other major corporations spend millions on every year; it’s doing research to find the right keywords that are typed into the search engines to find your website.

Seeing as search engines like Google and Bing are a major part of the Internet today, it is paramount to appear on the first page of the search. There are alternatives, but search engines are the fastest way to find what people want. It’s unfortunate that these large companies can afford to soak up all the ad space, however, no one said it would be easy.

To generate business in hard times like these is very hard but all we can do is make do with what we have. Surely people must be doing something right if they’re still in business; it’s your job as a competitor to find out what that is.

Social Networks
It does seem like a daunting task having to create a page for however many social networking spaces there are, but you don’t need all of them. Twitter, Facebook, and Digg are the main three which I suggest you create pages for. See our Twitter page at http://twitter.com/CreativeShelf.
You can get free icons from around the web; a few are below:

1. Plechi’s Social Media Icon Set

2. Black and White Social Icons

3. 81 Pixel perfect Social Media Icons

1. Marco De Liso – A fine example of CSS creativity

2. Zero Dollar Tools – Beautiful layout, illustration & CSS techniques

3.  Assistly – Nice, clean illustrations with a fresh layout

4. World Cat Show – Amazing colours and excellent use of effects

5. Think Signs – An example of a more modern, professional-looking website

6. Ashan Jay – Nice use of image rollovers and CSS styling

7. Courtside – A simple, grabbing one-page website

8. Wedding Invite Love – An attractive and delightful website to browse

9. IVIPWorld – A unique & polished app website

10. Dear Future Astronaut NY – Simple & effective

Help CreativeShelf and we will give you:

• A finished members area complete with lots of cool, free stuff
• Opportunity to become a writer and suggest changes to CreativeShelf
• Percentage of revenue earned after website is stable will be donated to charity
• A place for you to love coming back to 24/7 and not 0/0

Simply donate any amount you want using the button below and you will help save CreativeShelf.

Chris Spooner’s renowned Blog Spoon Graphics has been featured in the likes of the widely-read Web Designer magazine, numerous appearances on many other websites & blogs such as the popular VectorTuts, and now here on CreativeShelf!

For those of you unfamiliar with Blog Spoon Graphics, it is a blog covering tutorials like (our favorite) How To Create a Dramatic Action Scene in Photoshop, and ‘Question Time’ videos allowing us to know more about Chris Spooner.

Here’s the questions we asked…

What was the very first thing that sparked your creative career or creativity?

Something sparked my creativity at quite a young age as I’ve always been quite a creative person. Maybe it was the gold medal I won in a colouring competition as a wee boy! I discovered the career of Graphic Designer at quite a young age and simply followed this aim since, although back then I saw it more as designing book covers, but I’ll take websites these days instead.

Do you think WordPress is the best of the best?

I haven’t tried too many other CMS systems, but I’m definitely a WordPress fan. I love that you can use it for almost any type of website with the huge range of plugins available, plus the fact that it’s constantly kept up to date by the developers.

What’s next for you and your blog?

Who knows?! I simply just keep working on it and see where it takes me. I would have never imagined what opportunities it has brought me back in the early days, so I just have to keep publishing tutorials and see where it takes me. The path is looking very nice so far though.

Who is your inspiration?

I get inspired by the whole community of designers in general – Any kind of roundup or showcase of work always sparks my creative passion and gives me the motivation to keep practicing and experimenting to create cool things myself.

Why do you love design? or more specifically, why as a freelancer?

Like most designers, the topic of design has simply become my life – Not just a hobby or a job. It’s one of those things you could stay up all night doing if you find a project you have a real passion for. In terms of freelancing or self employment it just enhances the things you love about design, you get to work more on the stuff that interests and motivates you and less on the things that end up being just a chore.

And finally, are you used to the fact you own a successful blog, or do you still get excited every time you see it?

I get excited every day, I always look forward to seeing if a particular post performs well. Sometimes it leads to disappointment but it all adds to the experience and helps me learn what other people enjoy consuming. I don’t think there’s really much difference between a ‘successful’ blog and a blog that’s just updated for fun – I still check stats, subscribers, comments and think of new ideas just like I did when it was half the size.

Be sure to check out our blog for updates on CreativeShelf.

When thinking about CMS (a platform used to edit your website), generally the question asked a lot, in terms of WordPress, – is it a blog? Or is it a website?

If the answer is ‘blog‘, the CMS will be quite straightforward to use since most of it is purely writing essays to impress the readers; however, you may need to purchase something like FireWorks to make images and bring life to your site.

Answer ‘website‘ and you could be having to encounter a variety of problems involving  the WordPress platform:

• Agitating HTML editor
  The built-in HTML editor is designed that to replace ‘div’ tags with ‘<p>’ tags which, unfortunately, brings about confusion and aggravation; as a result, WordPress becomes known as difficult to use to build websites.
  I will tell you why this happens and how to work around the pressing problem in just a moment.
• Time consuming
  I can write a lot on WordPress being time consuming; it took, when WordPress first released, around 2 months for web designers to learn the anatomy and coding involved with WP but was it worth it? The answer is…yes! The easy-to-edit platform is what makes the whole thing special as well as the obvious advantage – it’s free. I have seen CMS software cost £80 per month and WP puts them to shame.
• WordPress updates
  Everytime the software is updated, parts of the code are re-written and what you have spent weeks learning, some of it goes down the drain due to the the altered structure of WordPress and other little changes that have taken place.

Now, building a website in WordPress isn’t exactly climbing Everest, but you need to have a firm understanding of CSS, HTML, XHTML, and a little bit of PHP; you will be clueless otherewise.

Going on from the annoying code within WordPress, here’s what you should know: WordPress is specifically designed for people with no knowledge of coding and the only reason you would need to code is if you want your own design. WordPress comes standard with thousands of templates for you to choose from and many hundreds of thousands of easy-to-install plugins. Yes, there is a HTML editor, but that is for very light use.

How to get around the coding problem: All you have to do is write the code up in any HTML editor (I suggest NotePad) and then copying and pasting the code in to the HTML editor section; once you switch to visual mode before saving, you will see your changes.

Once you know how to get around the coding problem, WordPress does, in fact, become a very good CMS which would be more than suitable for your clients.

Food for thought: WordPress is what everybody is doing. Dive in, learn the code and provide an excellent CMS solution for your clients

Before we get in to all the mechanics & features, what exactly is a blog? It can be both personal and commercial, plain & simple, funny or interesting; it’s a web-space from which an individual can broadcast his/her/their opinion or feelings on any topic they find necessary to talk about. Blogs are useful to create an awareness of a person or company while establishing a broad visitor base allowing somebody to express themselves directly to all the billions of beings on this planet.

How did blogs revolutionize? Before the year 2000, web-spaces where people posted content existed; however, the term ‘blog’ and the modern technology of blogs took a little while to flourish. It was around 2004-06 when the ‘blogging boom’ took off – the time when blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress were first being experimented with and used – resulting in hundreds of thousands of new blogs with people sharing their thoughts and feelings.

From 2009, according to pingdom.com, over 126 million blogs were live and active for everyone to see; clearly it caught on.

Companies discovered that, besides newsletters, creating a blog to keep customers up to date with the latest news and promotions seemed to have it’s advantages of encouraging more sales; it was also a subtle way of generating some revenue from selling ad space without cluttering up the main website.
The advantages of blogging became apparent and so employers employed blogs.

Below are some of the most popular blogs on the internet:

1) Web Designer Wall
This is truly a great site to visit for inspiration.

2) Blog.Spoongraphics
Another great tutorial website.

3) Line25
A very nice website for more tutorials and freebies.

This technique works with all browsers on any device across the web. Switch it up a little by using a different font. Try to limit the number of web fonts to two or three.

1) First, take a trip to www.dafont.com and select a font that is completely free to use and be sure to research the licensing just in case.

2) Now extract the font file, drag it to your desktop and put it on your web server (or folder on your hosting account) using file transfer software from FileZilla for example.

3) Open your stylesheet for your website and insert the following CSS: (I used one of my header styles, ‘h4′)

Code:

h4 {
font-family: ‘BebasNeue’ , Helvetica, Arial;  /* Make sure you put extra fonts in your CSS code just in case it doesn’t work in some browsers */
src: url(‘http://yourwebsitehere.co.uk/BebasNeue.otf’) format(“opentypefont”);  /* Change the format to suit the type of font */
}

4) Next insert the HTML:

<p><h4 style=”font-size: 25px; color: black;”>Hello World!</h4></p>

5) And that’s it! Here’s my result below:

I used the Myriad Pro font because it’s easy-to-read plus it’s what I wanted for my site to give it that overall professional feel.

Web design; where can I begin? Being in the business for around 7 years now, I have obtained a wealth of knowledge and experience. Throughout my whole career, I have discovered that an aesthetically-pleasing website is essential, but why? The look and feel of a website has been thoroughly mastered (especially by major companies) to enhance a user’s experience and, if need be, use the right colours to make the visitor feel warm and cosy, the right images to entertain, or even just the overall look to ensure that a potential-customer can trust you instantly.

Software
Adobe Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash,  Dreamweaver, and Photoshop are the industry’s favorite software to use. Although the Adobe products are expensive, the cost is nothing to what you can gain; yes the Adobe CS5 suite costs over £1,000 which is quite unaffordable for most, but without them and older versions, it seems there are not that many other decent alternatives that designers can depend on.

Being Driven
Web design is hard at times, and it is no use backing out when the going gets tough; being naturally driven is vital to maintain a positive attitude towards the profession of web design so don’t make it a choar, make it a hobby!
If you do find yourself with the temptation to throw your computer to the moon and beyond, first take a nice deep breath and a 15 minute break and then see how you feel.

Designing Effectively
It’s no use making a building company look like a flower shop; to design well, first find out who your target audience is, choose the relevant colours, then get out a notepad and start scribbling ideas down – click here to learn more.

Food for thought: If you are stuck with a design, simply search for competitors websites and see how they have designed theirs; but DO NOT COPY! Your work is more appreciated and more valuable if it’s the original.