Corporate posts

When I was a kid, I remember driving with my father during the gas crisis of the early 1970s. We drove past lines of cars that went on for about half a mile or more.

We would stop at a local gas station where he knew the owner. The owner of the station closed his business and sold gas by the tank full only to good customers, by appointment only. God forbid you drove far away from home and needed gas elsewhere and had to wait on line for a couple of hours for the maximum half tank stations would sell while customers shot each other over the precious juice. It was just like The Road Warrior only people were more civil in that movie and the gas they killed each other for cost nothing.

It was a bad time but it forced people and society to change.

If you want to pursue full-time employment in the web design industry but not in an agency, then chances are that you’ll be looking at working as an in-house web designer or developer for an internet based company.

This type of role comes with its own lists of benefits and challenges to consider before throwing yourself headlong down this career path.

Today we’ll be exploring all those areas in detail and we’ll also be asking other people in the industry for their experiences...

We’ve all read countless articles on the reasons you should consider freelancing.

They often make it out like anyone still working in the corporate world is just a schmuck with no ambition. But the truth is, there are plenty of reasons not to start freelancing.

Below are twenty such reasons, all laid out so you can make an informed decision about whether freelancing is really something you want to do in your career.

There’s nothing wrong with staying in a corporate job, just as there’s nothing wrong with setting out on your own. But it’s a choice every designer and developer needs to make...

If you’re like me, you graduated from art school and had dreams of working as an art director at a small agency. You envisioned having your own office on the top floor of a loft with 30-foot ceilings.

Designers would play ping-pong below; people were allowed to drink beer at work; and brilliant ideas would flow effortlessly from your mind into multi-million-dollar campaigns for clients like Nike and Coca-Cola.

In fact, you got a job at a large corporation and were shown to a desk in a sea of light-gray fabric-covered cubicles. Instead of 30-foot ceilings, you have surprisingly low ceilings, covered with a substance that you could swear is asbestos.

You were given a 90-page...

Whether you are a web designer or a copy writer, if you’re going to freelance, you need to learn how to look your best on a job application.

Having worked on both sides of job applications, I’ve seen enough to recognize what gets a person through to the interview and what gets their applications tossed.

I’ve even been able to go back over some applications I’ve sent in the past and determined what may have affected...

Web design is all about conveying information to the users in the most direct, clean and usable manner.

A corporate website also needs to capture the feel of the company and its purpose, while remaining professional in order to attain a solid and lasting impression to its customers.

Graphics, layouts and color palettes are all essential in how the customers perceive a company when visiting their website. Dark color designs, for example,...

Do you ever feel like you are endlessly repeating the same day? I do, every time I attend a kickoff meeting with a new client. Each time I find myself covering the same old issues from explaining the client’s role, to encouraging investment in content. I find it incredibly frustrating and this is what ultimately led me to write the Website Owners Manual.

This is not a criticism of clients, however. There is so little information that clearly defines their role. Sure, there is no shortage of material on usability, accessibility, online marketing and copywriting, but who has the time to read all of it?

The problem is that the client does need to have a very broad understanding (certainly more than can be communicated in a single article),...

Most web design companies are one or two person operations, with little to no free time for items like after-sales service.

You are usually so busy with current projects that answering calls from past customers can seem like an unnecessary and non-profitable chore.

Here is how you...

Although there are lots of posts that evaluate different design blogs, I haven’t seen many that focus specifically on corporate websites.

Therefore, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the homepages of the Top 30 technology companies (the order of this list was determined by the InfoTech 100 from Business Week), and...