Helping WAHMs Earn Money Online

20 Tools For The Freelance Designer On A Shoestring Budget was a post that caught my eye since I’m a freelancer with a teeny weeny budget. (Freelancers with no money? That’s unheard of!)

I use a few of the tools/services listed like COLOURlovers, Notepad++, and deviantART but some of the other resources listed were new to me.

If you’re a designer/freelancer, you might find something new too. Check it out.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "Freelancers – do you know about these tools?"

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately designing websites (mostly Wordpress themes but some static pages as well) and I’ve been looking at things in a completely new light.

When I read magazines, I pay attention to the layout of the pages, the font used, the images, etc. which inspires me to create new designs. I also get inspired by nature – going for walks always gives me ideas and I can’t wait to get home to draw them.

I also love to look at photography which is always really inspiring. I get all my wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT. They have some amazing photos and the one I downloaded today is particularly crazy cool.

I like to minimize all my windows on my desktop and just sit back and admire my current wallpaper. I usually get a lot of design ideas from them. It’s also like having a piece of ever-changing art on my desk while I’m not working.

I might have to keep this Buddhist Temple wallpaper on my desktop for longer than usual since it goes so well with my Buddha head sitting on my desk.

So take a look around you. Chances are there are many inspiring elements right in front of you, you just have to look at them with open eyes!

RT @cassiegermsheid: "Getting inspired for design ideas"

I’ve been meaning to create video for this blog for years and now I can finally say I achieved that goal!

This is something that I get asked a lot about from my clients so I’ve created a really quick tutorial for anyone who wants to add an image into their Wordpress sidebar. This tutorial gits ‘er done without using an FTP program and without having any knowledge of HTML.

The sound quality is fairly poopy but I promise the next video will be better.

Add an Image to Your Wordpress Sidebar

If you have any questions, please leave a comment!

RT @cassiegermsheid: "How to Add an Image to Your Wordpress Sidebar"

Since I first started blogging, I’ve written my blog posts in Notepad. Notepad is a text editor that comes with Windows. You’ll find it in Accessories. (If you use it regularly, you can “Pin” it to your Start Menu for quick access.)

At first, I used to write my posts in Notepad because I could save them to my computer easily and it was much quicker to open up Notepad than it was a heavy word processor like MS Word. At the time, my computer was a POS.

Now, I use Notepad because it is a text editor, not a word processor. When copying it into the Wordpress editor, it doesn’t bring a bunch of messed up code along with it like word processors do.

I’ve had many clients who use different word processors to write their blog posts only to find that after they paste it into Wordpress and publish it, their blog looks all kinds of messed up.

When I go into the Edit Post page, it’s a nightmare. Open tags everywhere! One client of mine had over 50 posts like that. It’s extremely time consuming to clean it all up so it’s best to avoid that problem right from the beginning.

Here’s what it looks like in the Visual tab:

And here’s what that nasty piece of work looks like in the HTML tab:

See all that weird code in there? We don’t want that.

If you are using Microsoft Word (not to be confused with Works) and you would like to continue using it to write your blog posts in it, please use the “Paste from Word” button in your Wordpress editor.

Just click on the “Kitchen Sink” button:

And hit the “Paste from Word” button:

I would still recommend using Notepad however because I’m one of those untrusting types of people and I think that Word will still sneak in a few open tags.

What is an open tag?

Any time you format text you’re using tags. Let’s take the bold tag for example. To bold the following sentence, the HTML code would look like this:

<strong>I’m a bold sentence.</strong>

The <strong> tag is the open tag, and the </strong> tag is the closing tag.

If you don’t close a word or sentence with the </strong> tag, the rest of your text will end up bold. This won’t look very cool on your blog.

So there you have it. That’s my opinion about writing blog posts in word processors and why I cringe just thinking about it.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "How I Write My Blog Posts and Why"

I wanted to point out a couple resources that two of my excellent readers recommended in the hopes that they will be useful to you.

Chris from AB Web Design says the best tool he has found for color sampling is Pixie. It’s a tiny little program that tells you what the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values are for a particular color. You simply hold your mouse over the color you want.

I do this a lot of times when I see a color in a photo or on a website that I love. Now, instead of opening up Fireworks (which takes an eternity on my piece of crap machine) to find out what the hex value is, I can open up Pixie instantly and find out. Very handy.

Jack from ZedProMarketing.com uses Treepad. I haven’t used it too much yet but I can see it’s like Notepad (for keeping text files) but with a lot more features. Plus it is a much smaller program than OpenOffice or MS Office so it’s much easier to load and keep running while you’re working on other things.

For bloggers and/or web designers who have computers that are lacking in speed and memory (like mine!), these two programs are great options. Thanks for the recommendations guys!

RT @cassiegermsheid: "Two light-weight programs for bloggers and web designers"