uberVU’s powerful software automatically analyzes over a billion weekly mentions on social media networks to provide marketers with unique insights and awesome metrics on the conversations that matter most.  Check it out at ubervu.com

Can you feel that? Summer is coming. With Memorial Day right around the corner and summer travel plans on the brain, this week’s Social Media Face Off is a battle between two of the largest travel websites—Expedia and Priceline.

In order to compare the brands on social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform and compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

This post Social Media Face-Off: Expedia vs. Priceline was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Hearing the buzz around Dunked, the new product launched by the WP champion Orman Clark, I was keen to find out more about the project and was lucky enough to sit down for a chat  with the man himself in a new episode of Inspired Talks:

What is Dunked and what does it do?

Dunked is a free, simple-to-use tool which allows creative people to build an online portfolio. You can do so without having to touch a single line of code (unless you want to) and in a matter of mere minutes. Did I mention it was free?

You’re a super successful WP themes ninja, how did you get the idea to expand into such a different direction, as building your own “CMS”?

Needless to say, WordPress has been good to me over the years, and I fully intend to keep on working with the platform going forward. In fact, we’ve got a couple of themes currently in development over at ThemeZilla right now. As for Dunked, I’ve had the itch to build a stand alone product for quite some time – maybe 18 months or so. When it came down to it, I never truly felt I was in a position to dedicate as much time and energy into a new project as I would like. At the end of 2012, I made the deliberate decision to take some time out from WordPress and to finally put my ideas into practice.

In working with WordPress over the years, I have learned some of its strengths and weaknesses. As a blogging platform, WordPress is second to none. However, for a lot of people, WordPress is just too much software. In providing support for my portfolio based themes, I’ve seen a vast amount of customers who would benefit from a simpler, less complex system. I believe that there is a need for a simpler solution to online portfolios, and that’s where Dunked comes into play. Dunked is focused on one thing and one thing only, and that’s showcasing work.

What do you usually tell people who say “yeah but it’s such a busy market”? how are you differentiate yourself etc

A busy market doesn’t faze me in the slightest, it’s competition that drives innovation and ultimately leads to better products. We’re used to heavy competition, we’re in the theme business after all. The theme market is pretty busy its own right, some might even say completely saturated, and I think we have done okay for ourselves.

We recognise that we are entering a busy market with Dunked, however, we felt we could offer an online portfolio solution which would be both beautiful and ridiculously easy to use. I honestly believe that we have delivered on that goal. Simplicity is at the core of everything we do, and as such we’ve got no interest in becoming a Swiss Army knife type application. If you’re into simple, Dunked is for you. We’re also doing a few things that the others aren’t doing just yet, such as having fully responsive and retina ready templates straight out of the box. That being said, we’re not interested in competing on features. We’ll gladly compete on overall user experience.

Do you find it difficult to market a stand alone product vs addons (as WP themes can be viewed)?

Generally speaking, marketing is hard work. You can build a great product, but if no one knows about it, you fail. In most cases, time spent marketing, is time well spent. Sometimes you can get lucky and ride a viral wave to success, however, viral successes are few and far between. For us, marketing has been, and always will be, a constant work in progress. Internally, we are constantly pitching each other ideas or different avenues we can pursue. Personally, I do quite a bit of reading on different marketing techniques/approaches, and am always considering ways to mix new ideas into the way we are currently doing things. The most important part of marketing however, is to have a stellar product.

With themes, we have built up quite a bit of steam, so we don’t market them initially as much as we probably should. With Dunked we cannot take anything for granted. We’re starting from scratch, so there is a lot more initial marketing work that has to be done. We have got to build an audience again. We’ve been doing an okay job so far, but we have got quite a bit of work ahead of us. So I would have to say right now, marketing Dunked is much more difficult.

How big is your development team?

Currently, there are three of us working on Dunked. I’m designer, support guy, administrator, marketer, and budding developer. Gilbert Pellegrom is the architect. He’s responsible for the majority of the code within the Dunked ecosystem. Without Gilbert, Dunked wouldn’t be in its current state. Mark Southard is the builder and general glue guy taking on support, admin, and marketing tasks. He builds the templates, making sure they work regardless of user content.

What advice would you offer to young wantrepreneurs in the web design / dev space?

I would say first of all that working for someone or in a company is incredibly beneficial. You’re going to learn a lot of valuable lessons, even if you don’t realise it at the time. Don’t be too eager to plot off on your own right away. Having someone else worrying about getting customers/clients so that you can focus on honing your skills is a great luxury. Not having to worry about money is also a great luxury as it’s unlikely you’re going to make a huge amount of income from a young product.

However, if you are lucky enough to be in a position where you can create and build your own product, even if that’s just in the evenings and at weekends, then you need to do it. You’ve got to recognise that building your own product requires a great deal of work and dedication. And like laundry, it usually takes a lot longer than you expect. Unlike laundry, it’s quite a bit of fun.

I’ve found that you’re going to learn a ton and be better for it, even if the product fails. Building and shipping Dunked has been very enjoyable and rewarding, and the whole team continues to learn something new each and every single day.

What are some of the portfolios on dunked that you like best? (links / comments)

My current favourites are on the Dunked homepage, I pick out some of my personal favourites and add them there. It’s a surreal feeling seeing the quality of work on top of a template/app that I’ve had a hand in crafting. We’re still young, and we’re looking forward to seeing users really push the boundaries of what can be done through CSS. It’s a bit like CSS Zen Garden, and we’re eager to see what users can do.

What’s next for Dunked?

We’re continuing to build out new features, whilst smoothing out any rough edges. Right now we’re working on adding a new template which should be available very soon. Once we’re out of beta, we’ll be looking at some of our more popular feature requests such as custom domain support.

Follow Orman on Twitter and give Dunked a spin!

This post Inspired Talks: Orman Clark was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

There are a lot of printing companies out there and if you’re looking to obtain printed marketing materials for your business, you’ll literally be spoilt for choice. Not only are there likely a number of local printing companies in your area, but a quick Google search will reveal hundreds, if not thousands of them offering online ordering which can be a great option for a lot of businesses.

However, when you’re looking through these printing companies, you’ll more than likely just end up confused about which one you should choose. In a lot of cases, these companies offer similar products, at similar prices and therefore, choosing the right company for the job can be a difficult task.

Luckily, there are a few factors that you can look at in order to choose the printing company most suited to your project. So what are these factors? I go into detail about the ones that I consider to be the most important below, so read on.

Compare Prices

source: Tab.co.uk

Obviously, one of the most important things to consider when you’re looking to pick the perfect printing company is the price that they actually offer their products for. Strangely, prices can vary throughout the industry, even for products that are of the same quality; it really depends on the company that you order them from. Personally, I’d recommend checking the prices of the printing company you’re considering in the early stages as clearly, even if they offer the best service in the world, they won’t be any use to you if they’re out of your budgeted price range.

Comparing prices is pretty easy when it comes to the online printing companies as most of them have their price lists available at the touch of a button. It gets a little more difficult if you’re also considering using a local company as generally, they don’t always have price lists available on their website. However, if you know what you want and you’re happy to pick up the phone, you can usually get a customised quote for your project in just a few minutes. Sure, it isn’t as easily as clicking a price list online but it might be worth it as a lot of local companies can be cheaper than the online sites.

Check If They Offer Free Delivery

source: www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk

Another thing that you really should take into account when you’re looking for a printing company is whether or not they offer free delivery. Now, you might not think that this would be so important as surely, delivery will only cost a few pounds, right? Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. A lot of printing companies charge a lot of money for delivery, especially if you’re placing a big order that is likely going to be pretty heavy and cost a lot of money for them to post/ship.

Because of this, it’s important that you take into account the cost of delivery (along with whether or not the company offers free delivery) when you’re looking into pricing. There’s nothing worse than finding the perfect printing company that appears to be cheaper than the rest, only to find that when you get to the checkout (after uploading all your artwork and going through a lot of effort), they’ve added on another £20 for delivery.

You can usually tell whether or not free delivery is offered as soon as you visit a printing companies website as you can see from the screenshot above. Because free delivery is a USP for most businesses, it will be prominent in the design of the website and is often displayed at the top of the page.

Check Reviews

source: Freeindex

If you were going to hire a plumber, electrician, go to a restaurant or even a hotel, you’d likely check the internet for reviews before you hired them or booked your table/room, wouldn’t you? So, why should it be any different for a printing company. There will be printing companies that have consistently disappointed their clients and there will be printing companies that consistency satisfy them; reviews can tell you which company is which.

Finding printing company reviews is no more difficult than finding restaurant reviews. A quick Google search will likely bring up a number of pages that tell you whether or not a printing company is perceived as good. You can also utilise the popular business directories (e.g. Freeindex pictured above) to check the reviews that have been given to companies. FreeIndex is a good place to start as the reviews tend to be genuine.

source: TheBestOf

If you’re looking for reviews of a local printing company, you can also check out local business directories and see what people have said (such as the one above). If you attend local networking events, you can also ask fellow business associates which printing company they use and whether or not they offer a great service.

Conclusion

Although finding a great printing company might take a bit of time, it’s important to remember that you only have to find it once and therefore, it’s well worth the effort. Once you’ve found a printing company that you’re happy with, you can simply order from it time and time again.

Another thing to take into account when choosing a printing company is the actual quality of the products on offer. It might be worth ordering a sample pack of products from a number of printing companies (this can usually be done on their websites free of charge) to ensure that they offer quality products. Some of the cheaper ones can often offer a lower quality, inferior product.

header image source: punkle / 123RF Stock Photo

This post The ultimate guide to choosing a printing company was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Because the post on music discovery is one of our most popular articles ever, I thought this beautiful infographic from IndigoBoom would be of interest. Selling music beyond first became possible in 1877 with the introduction of the phonograph cylinder. Since then media formats have developed and radically changed the way we listen, and recently even where we can listen to music. They have looked at the last 30 years of music format development and popularity in the IG below:

This post Music media, from vinyl to bitstream was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Every so often, I’ll bring up ThemeForest and trawl through the latest additions to the site’s massive database of ‘HTML-by-numbers’ WordPress themes. I’m usually impressed, but today I’m frustrated. I think I’ve finally spotted a trend in the skin-deep design differences between themes, one that’s summed up by recent development tendencies towards natty page designers featuring very rudimentary drag-and-drop functionality. As the world becomes more technically literate, and moves away from supermarket digital goods, I think we’re bound for a boutique, creative and hand-crafted digital revival. What we’re seeing at the moment is a curious blend of Henry Ford and Modernism – but the web will soon, I feel, move beyond that.

What’s a WordPress page builder?

In the loosest possible terms, WordPress page builders allow you to use pre-designed, ‘kind-of-modular’ blocks of HTML and CSS, rearranging them within a page structure as you see fit. As a result, you can put together an attractive site, populate it with media and copy, and host it – all within a few minutes.

That sounds great. What’s the problem?

Head over to ThemeForest and take a peek. There’s a lot of convenience there: flexible layouts, one-click purchase, and integrated hosting.

There’s also a distinct lack of creative innovation.That sort of statement makes theme developers’ hair stand on end. A lack of innovation? Ridiculous. Commercial WordPress themes are beautifully and neatly coded, and designed from the ground up to fit loads of new user scenarios. And a lack of creativity? WordPress designers may well – and rightly so – take umbrage at the notion. The best themes are painstakingly constructed to fit loose and varied client briefs. Making them is an immensely creative exercise.

I’m not quarreling with these points. What I’m saying is that there’s a real lack of ‘creative innovation’ – deviating from established routes, by combining elements from across disciplines, and creating something unique. There can’t be, as WordPress themes aren’t intended to be unique. They’re intended to be useful.

The web’s an information machine. Surely useful is better than unique?

Right now, we live in a browser-based ecosystem. People tend to view the web through a variety of different window sizes, with (essentially) the same kinds of control over what they see. WordPress page builders work well in this world – the pages are designed responsively to flex across smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops. They present information in an optimal and logical way.

But this is changing. The way we consume the internet’s information is already moving away from the browser. Once you discover RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers, you’ll see what I mean.

And the move to ‘local information formatting’ isn’t limited to RSS. Services like Pulse, Newsify, IFFFT, Flipboard, Alternion and Meople represent the bold new face of the internet. These so-called ‘information aggregators’ deliver the web’s nebulous and tendrilous stream of information in a much more consumable form-factor. This isn’t a ‘phase’ – more the ‘next phase’.

How can you be so sure about that?

What’s the fastest-growing internet phenomenon right now? Personalised aggregation. Google know this, which is why they’re pedal-to-the-metal improving the personalisation of their products. Google Glass won’t work unless it’s neatly personalised. Google Now won’t, either. These aren’t just services the company feels have promise: they’re believed to be the media of the future.

So what has this got to do with WordPress?

If information can be distributed more efficiently through personalised aggregation, getting folks to your website is going to need something special. What can you do to get people to hang around on your site, while you advertise to them? Brick-and-mortar retailers went through this problem during the latter half of the twentieth century, and the solution was to build increasingly unique and culturally rich retail environments. Distinguishing yourself by creating a phenomenal environment for your customers was the only way to attract customers in through your doors – something that’s a lot more evident in the New Age of e-Commerce.

I believe that the web is about to hit the same kinds of problems. When there are competitors (personalised aggregators) stealing your market share (unique hits), you need to innovate to survive. Innovation can’t simply be improving on the next guy’s product (though that’s an essential part of it). WordPress Themes offer top-flight products in the fairly limited category of out-of-the-box websites, and Page Builders can extend their flexibility bit-by-bit. But they’re not creatively innovative. They’re not doing anything new. They’re not blending disparate disciplines in exciting or groundbreaking ways. These things are only going to become more obvious as innovative hardware encourages us to consume information in increasingly efficient ways.

So, next time you’re tempted to use a WordPress template as a start point for a client, call yourself up short. Bear in mind your new, and rising, competition. What can you offer visitors beyond nicely-presented information? How can you lure them to the browser? And how can you ensure that your client winds up with a creatively innovative sales environment?

This post The joy and shortcomings of WordPress page builders was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Need a clean, modern font for your latest project? You should definitely check out the Hiruko Font Family then! Inspired by Japanese culture, this font may be minimalistic in approach, but it screams classy fun in execution! And for a limited time only, Hiruko is incredibly marked down in price!

Hiruko Font Family Highlights:

• Full Family of 15 Styles
  Based on the Sans-Serif font, the Hiruko Family includes 15 different styles. There’s Extra Light, Extra Light Alternate, Extra Light Italic, Light, Light Alternate, Light Italic, Regular, Regular Alternate, Regular Italic, Black, Black Alternate, Black Italic, Outline, Outline Alternate, and Outline Italic.
• Fully Compatible
  The Desktop files are delivered in .OTF format and are compatible with both Windows and Mac.
• Multiple Languages
  This cutting-edge modern font family supports over 40 languages, so whatever country you’re working with, you’re sure to find the appropriate way to express yourself.
• Full Character Set
  Each type weight includes a full 255 character set, as well as manual kerning, pairs, and tracking.
• Attention Getting
  Hiruko is a fabulous font that’s just perfect for any trendsetting-type projects. It works beautifully on its own, whether decked out on a T-shirt, poster, menu, sign and more!
• Royalty Free License
  Your license with the Hiruko Font Family allows you to use these modern fonts on any personal or commercial project, without the need for any attribution.

Pricing:

The Hiruko Font Family normally sells for $300, but for a limited time only, you can get this hip, modern collection for just $9 for either the Desktop or Web Font (@font-face) version - Yes, you read that right… $9! OR get both the Desktop and Web fonts together for just $18! - That’s a massive 97% off the regular price!

This post Hiruko: Japanese inspired font family – 97% discount was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Almost every business has a web presence these days; from single page ‘business card’ style sites, to million+ product e-commerce hubs, owning a website is as universal as taxes. Of course, there are new startups, but even in those cases entrepreneurs tend to have bought a domain name, or thrown up a template.

It’s no surprise then that the bread and butter for most web designers is not site design, but redesign. On the surface, redesign looks easy; you have a starting point, with some real world data on what is and isn’t working for your client. Once you dive a little deeper you’ll find redesigns are a minefield of competing ideas. It will take all of your skill to exploit the current site’s successes and identify its failings.

Moreover, there is no room for error in a redesign. Clients have often been burned by poor results in the past and are more cautious. They’re more likely to have spent a long time analyzing their site themselves. They’re probably frustrated by the need for a redesign, or what is sometimes worse, they’re so excited by it that they’re spilling over with ideas, many of which aren’t appropriate.

Happily, there’s a lot of great advice available on how to tackle this tricky task and one of the best sources is Smashing Magazine’s current set of eBooks. Worth nearly $40, MightyDeals.com has arranged a 40% discount on this great set:

Smashing Book #3: Redesign The Web is 340 pages of advice on vital subjects like: the business aspects of redesigning a site; platform considerations; upgrading code to HTML5 and CSS3; important considerations of mobile design; and of course, going responsive.

Smashing Book #3 1/3 takes redesigns to the next level: insert ‘story’ into your redesign to engage users; rethink and repurpose navigation to improve UX; make the site’s content work harder; and there’s even a detailed case study of Smashing’s own redesign.

Essentials of Mobile Design, Mobile Design Patterns, Designing For Android and Designing For iPhone cover the essentials of the biggest reason clients cite for redesigning their site: mobile compatibility. Learn the difference between mobile sites and apps, marketing, and the all important responsive techniques you’ll need.

The set of six books comes in DRM-free format, as PDFs, ePUBs and MOBIs, so you can study them however and wherever you like. Head over to MightyDeals now to take advantage of this great offer.

This post Inspired Deal: Smashing Web & Mobile Design eBook Bundle – 6 eBooks for only $24! was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

The curators of our sister siter WebDesignGoodies picked 1o beautiful  graphic elements and resources for you (some of them are free). Check them out, save them for your future projects and feel free to submit some new links for the next week’s roundup. Cheers

1,600+ Awesome Photoshop Presets | $27 | Details

If you’re a regular user of Photoshop (or even a semi-regular user), you might find yourself a little bored. After using the powerful photo-editing program for so long, you sometimes need to give it a little juice. With PsDefaults, you’ll suddenly feel like you just discovered Photoshop for the first time! This full set of modern, handcrafted replacement graphics give your copy of Photoshop a sweet upgrade with all-new brushes, patterns, shapes and more! In short, if you use Photoshop this collection will make your life easier and your projects even cooler looking.

Smashing Web & Mobile Design eBook Bundle | $24 | Details

One of the best things about the Web is that it is always changing. Websites, unlike magazines or books, are not finite, they’re organic. It’s not just content that’s constantly changing, though. Many website owners are updating the look, feel and even functionality of their site. If you’re looking to do a professional redesign, this collection of Smashing Books is for you.  Redesign The Web (340 pages), Smashing Book #3⅓ (160 pages), Essentials of Mobile Design (235 pages), Mobile Design Patterns (124 pages), Designing For Android (228 pages), Designing For iPhone (234 pages)

Flat Design Icons Set | free | Details

Hiruko: Japanese Inspired Font Family | $9 | Details

Need a clean, modern font for your latest project? You should definitely check out the Hiruko Font Family then! Inspired by Japanese culture, this font may be minimalistic in approach, but it screams classy fun in execution! And for a limited time only, Hiruko is incredibly marked down in price!

Vector Mania! 4400 vectors | S49 | Details

Got website? Well, have we got images for you. Thousands of images in fact. And they’re all 100% royalty-free vectors so you and the Internet can have one rocking picture party!
From the graphic gurus at Vectorain, you can now get 4,400 vectors for just $49 in this mightiest of Mighty Deals! Plus, for an extra $8 only, you can also get 100 Stock Images added in.
All graphics are completely royalty-free so you’re free to use them as you wish on any personal or commercial project. All vector files are provided in EPS10.

iPhone 5 Psd Flat Design Mockup | free | Details

This is our take on a flat design iPhone 5 vector mockup template. We have created 3 flat design version with front, horizontal and 3D view to let you drag and drop your design with smart object. This is the ideal companion to any flat design project where you need to present mobile screenshots.

Beautiful Solomon Font Family (12 fonts) | $9 | Details

Fonts can be so much fun to work with. Whether you’re creating a logo, a T-shirt or a funky poster, having the right font can make all the difference. If you’re looking for something new, something clean, and something fun, you’ve come to the right place. This Mighty Deal offers up the Solomon Font Family, from Fontfabric, at a ridiculously reduced price.

Streamified: Full Social Media Management | $11 | Details

Some people merely pick their poison. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or FourSquare, lots of users pick one network and stick with it. But just as many mix and match a number of different networks. If you copy and paste the same update across mutiple networks, you know how frustrating and time consuming that can be. What you need is a social media management tool. What you need is Streamified, our most social deal yet.

eStudeo WordPress Theme | free | Details

A responsive creative portfolio theme tailored for professional creative and agency, it has simple and clean design yet contains all necessary features you need with none of the bloat you don’t and what’s best of all is that this theme is free to download.

WordPress Shortcodes Plugin + 3 Premium WP Themes | $19 | Details

Easy to install, this lightweight, cross-browser plugin is jam packed with over 5,000 shortcodesthat are simple to integrate into your site. The shortcodes are even mixed in seamlessly with your WordPress WYSIWYG, so you can spice up your content with just the click of a button. PLUS – This new version is 100% responsive and it also includes several new features such as: filterable portfolios as well as 3D Animated jQuery buttons and accordions.

This post Web design goodies of the week #12 was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

From time to time, we all need a little pick-me-up. Eight hours straight spent grappling with code is enough to make anyone question the sanity of their existence. So, I’ve written this article to remind web developers why you’re important, why you matter, and why you’re part of a global movement that’s going to shape human history forever. Because, you know, you’re all lovely.

Web developers occupy a strange halfway-house between the world of consumer-focused innovation and the land of computer science. Living there seems to incur the derision of two parties: ‘real-world’ programmers laugh at the notion that the world of the browser could ever approach the complexity of the kind of stuff they do (despite the fact that Facebook is now as code-rich as Windows 7, and Chromium offers a bona fide native experience via a browser), and the real world’s never really broken free of the image of web development geeks as code-monkey (although it can be one of the most creative, intellectual professions in the world).

Let them have their say. Because, right now, being a web developer is about more than pushing out code. It’s about more than making good websites. I’m not unusual, for a web dev – in my spare time, I’ll contribute to open-source projects that are going to wind up powering mind-blowing technology in years to come; I’ll vote in polls to define and declare what technologies the graphical interfaces of the future should and should not use. But we’re not even scratching the surface.

The web is, hands-down, the most efficient way to disseminate information to a huge audience. It’s a great acid test of what matters to people, with discovery and personalisation services competing to bring less prominent material to attention. It’s a (relatively) flat playing field, too: if you’ve got good content, you’ll get an audience (assuming that you’re reasonably operationally competent).

This has propelled the Internet to become a – maybe the – globally dominant force in little over two decades. It is at once the ultimate communication technology, sharing portal, and discovery device. And it was built by web developers – people who, together, built and maintain the technologies that power the whole thing. It’s a rare career that you get to contribute, daily, to the most powerful product in the world.

Thanks to the fact that we’re all in essence refining the world’s most effective communication tool, it’s not surprising that web developers have a wider collaborative circle than any other profession I can think of. Take a look at Stack Overflow, GitHub, CodePen: these are custom-built tools that allow highly-skilled people to collaborate on projects without ever needing to meet face-to-face. They’re the places where the technologies that will power the internet of tomorrow are made. And, in the most part, the only qualification you need is your ability.

Global connection, a real and practical purpose, and a direct impact on outcomes that will affect untold billions around the world for years to come: there are few jobs that can offer this kind of satisfaction. All this, before we even consider that individual web designers, developers and managers get to use – as a matter of necessity – the best laptops money can buy.

In years to come, web developers will be able to look back at current events and not only say ‘I was there’, but ‘I made that happen’. Is there anything more self-affirming than that?

image courtesy of: wired

This post Why being in web development is the best job in the world right now was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

In the past few years, there’s been an explosion of online website builders offering a fast and affordable solution to anyone making their first steps in the www. Suddenly, the entire process of searching for a webdesigner and a webdeveloper, getting a brief together, negotiating a price and a deadline and waiting for the results has reduced to a few clicks and some plain old drag and drop.

More and more people choose these specialized builders when they decide to put their company or their projects on the online map, saving both time and a lot of money. On the other hand, webdesigners and programmers worry this trend will stick and slowly rob them of their jobs. But are these website builders really endangering the future of good old classic webdesign? Let’s take a look at each side of the story and see what lies beneath the ”noise”.

Target

First of all, webdesigners and webdevelopers are usually targeting a different public. Since they’re more expensive and capable of building complicated customized websites, they target companies that are willing to pay a higher price for better quality.

Website builders mostly target freelancers, artists and small companies that can neither afford to pay a webdesigners, nor need a complex, corporate website that only an expert can develop. All they need is a ”face”, a presentation website where they can show their work and communicate three things to their target market: 1. That they exist 2. How they can be contacted and 3. Where and how they sell their products/work.

Truth be told, these people would probably never hire a webdesigner to build them a website, it would be over their budget and they’d probably put up a blog or go with an in-house offline advertising strategy. So as long as webdesigners and webdevelopers understand that (normally) they’re not going for the same public as website builders, there’s room for everyone. Of course, there will always be a common slice of public they’re both trying to feed off, but this is an exception and should be treated as such.

Pros and cons of website builders

For a webdesigner, the good side of this website builder boom is the chance to sell templates for royalties or a fixed fee. And since these sites usually update their catalogue every month, you can make some good money out of this.

But let’s see why clients choose to use website builders and whether they get what they need or not. Obviously, there are both pros and cons:

Pros

• Easy to use
• No programming skills required
• Fast implementation
• Full service (hosting, software, maintenance)
• Low cost
• Feature-rich
• Support
• Security updates

Cons

• Relying on one provider only
• Limited flexibility
• Control over data
• Installing server-side code
• Only suitable for simple websites

All in all, if you don’t need a complex website, if you’re ok with the limited flexibility and you’re willing to take the risk of having others using your data without your knowledge (although this is a risk you forcibly take when you go online, anyway. I’ve seen hundreds of copy-cats shamelessly stealing from hard working artists), then using a website builder can be an affordable and time-saving solution to your problem.

I was actually curious to try out a recently launched website builder called Imcreator and see if I can build a decent website using this tool. To be honest, I actually liked it. I liked the way they describe the process on their own website and how simple it is for someone who has no clue about programming or web design to make a website for free in a few easy steps.

The whole process takes no more than 3 steps:

• Choose a design (there are thousands of templates to choose from. Takes a bit of patience, but you can find some really nifty designs)
• Customize your website (you insert your content – texts, photos, videos – with just a couple clicks)
• Publish (aka press the Publish button)

If you ask me, these website builders could very well be good news for both clients and webdesigners. Clients can get a ”face” in the virtual world in no time, without shelling out a lot of money, while designers can sell their work to these websites and get some money. Sure, it’s not like working directly with the client, but if you think about the target separation, you can see this as a good opportunity to make some extra-cash.

header image courtesy of the UMF

This post Website creation for dummies was written by Catalin Zorzini and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.