BlogmyQuery – BMQ

As you take on more clients it becomes increasingly difficult to keep accurate track of costs and the hours you should be billing for.  Keeping poor records will ultimately start to cost you money, thankfully there are a great selection of tools available to help.

There are more to benefits to these apps than just staying organized. Some of these apps enable small businesses to take the kind of control of their finance that was once just the preserve of big businesses with dedicated accounting departments.

Below we’ve compiled a list showcasing what we believe are the best 20 invoicing tools for web designers/developers in no particular order. However a word of warning’ be sure to choose your app with caution, once you have started using one it can be difficult to migrate if you later encounter limitations. Always sign up to free trials where available and compare a few alternatives before making a decision.

Billing Boss

Billing Boss allows anyone from freelancers to a small businesses to quickly and efficiently bill clients with an unlimited number of invoices. This app lets you add as many clients as you need to your database and help you stay organized by instantly saving and cataloging you invoices.  Billing Boss seamlessly integrates with Paypal so you can reach clients worldwide with its great support for multiple currencies.

Simple Invoices

Simple Invoices, a static web-based invoicing application that allows itself to be installed on a web-sever or a Windows PC. It can also be hosted by one of the following service providers as well.

LessAccounting

Not only can you invoice but you can easily keep track all of your business expenses with LessAccounting. You can put organize your expenses into categories, add notes and even upload a pictures of your receipts for each expense.

FreshBooks

Streamline your business with recurring invoices. Set up auto-billing to automatically charge your client’s credit card. Quickly and easily invoice clients in any currency. Create your invoice, select your currency and you’re done.

Blinksale

Blinksale is a great looking web application that has a powerful feature set. Blinksale has a quaint option that allows you to send invoices via snail-mail, whatever that is!  You can also customize your invoices by uploading your very own logo or if you have some time on you hands design your own invoices with CSS.

Billing Manager by Intuit

Billing Manager is a web-based invoicing solution that lets you create invoices, send professional estimates, and helps you get paid online.

In addition to online invoicing and estimates, Billing Manager lets you send PDFs of your invoices, send reminders to your customers, process eChecks, accept all major credit cards online and choose currencies.

Simply Invoices

SimplyInvoices integrates seamlessly with Basecamp so you can easily invoice clients the exact amount of time you have spent on a project..

Cashboard

Quickly invoice for time logged against a project, materials, or other goods. Create invoices for your projects with one mouse click, or set up recurring invoices to bill your customers automatically.

Bill My Clients

BillMyClients is a hassle-free way for businesses to quickly & easily create and print invoices and bills online. It makes it a breeze to send those same invoices via e-mail and the United States Postal Service – all without leaving your desk.

The Invoice Machine

The Invoice Machine takes a new clever approach to online invoicing. It’s beautiful and simple-to-use interface makes producing professional looking invoices a very pleasant experience. Create new invoices in a snap. Set options like currency, taxes, shipping, discounts, language, notes and more.

InvoTrak

Invotrak is a full-featured online invoicing and timesheet tracking application that can save you time and money. It’s also includes many of the features you need to speed up your billing tasks.

BillingOrchard

BillingOrchard provides enterprise electronic billing solutions through a simple, secure interface, supported by top notch service and priced for small businesses.

Invoice Journal

Use the client list to enter your customers into the Invoice Journal system and easily retrieve them later when you need them. When its time to create a new invoice simply type your clients name, company name or email address and Invoice Journal will show you which clients match your criteria.

Browse, sort and search all of you invoices quickly and seamlessly. Since there are no limits or restrictions on the invoices you create there is never a need to delete or archive invoices.

SmartInvoice

Smart Invoice is an easy to use, full featured, web based billing and time tracking system designed specifically for small businesses, freelancers, and other independent contractors. Use the recurring billing feature to send regular invoices to clients automatically – no extra effort required.

MarketCircle

Billings powerful application for the Mac features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box. Choose from any of the customizable templates, or create your own with the built-in WYSIWYG designer. Either way you’ll send polished professional invoices in seconds. Billings also has a fantastic looking iPhone App.

InvoicePlace

Manage your billing and quotes from the office, home or on the road. Create invoices and quotes for any type of product or service. Use Invoiceplace no matter what you sell be it paint, jumping castles, hardware supplies, or cell phones.

Time 59

Time59 is web-based software that let’s you track billable time and expenses, create and e-mail invoices, and record payments. Time59 keeps everything perfectly organized. Critical details and totals are instantly available. Time59 on your mobile device is included FREE with your account.

PaySimple

With PaySimple billing and receiving payments is safe for you and your customers, all information is securely stored with 256-bit encryption and SSL protection.

ProfitTrain

With ProfitTrain you’ll easily be able to keep contact information up to date, store reoccurring services and products, send estimates and export to spreadsheet for more exotic totaling.

Harvest

Harvest lets you and your staff track time and send invoices from one integrated application. Use Harvest’s visual reports to see the distribution of your company’s resources at a glance. Create an online invoice and easily bill your client. Get paid faster by collecting online payments from your clients instantly and securely via the web.

Do you know of any other invoicing tools that work great for designers/developers? or have any good or bad experiences with any of these apps?  Please contribute and share with us what you’ve found.

There are many new web design methods or techniques out there in the world today. Many designers choose a method, style, or technique and stick to it to master it and put their name on it.

However, others try to hop from trend to trend to keep up with the industries needs, which is indeed, a great idea for freelance designers. Minimalist design is becoming ever popular in the web design industry, and because of such, we discuss several key points that favor that designers should adapt to minimalistic design in order to keep up with the trending or evolving industry.

What is Minimalist Design?

Minimalist design is a new design style or technique that is based on the usage of web technologies and content. The minimalistic designing process involves less use of web technologies such as JavaScript and less use of images, icons, and the likes including the way the elements fit onto the grid or layout.

The point to it is to keep the design as simple yet as elegant as possible. For example, minimalistic design can include a great lightweight illustration that blends in with extensive whitespace with little use of JavaScript. Add a nice mixture of colors and well laid out content across the grid, and you come up with a great minimalistic design.

To grasp the idea of minimalistic design, have a look at the two sites below:

Dbushell

Dbushell is a great example of the use of web technologies in minimalistic design. It has a nice lightweight header with a great illustration right below while utilizing the hierarchy method for the content and typography.

Ah-Studio

Ah Studio has an interesting touch with the way it utilizes minimalist design. While there may be a lot of scrolling to do to get through the content, it handles the illustrations and navigation quite well throughout. It is a great example to show you that minimalist design really has no borders to how lightweight it can actually be.

Now that you have a general idea of what minimalist design is all about, you can quite see that why many companies in a plethora of industries quite desire minimalistic designs for their websites, as they are lightweight but carry a lot of character to them.

The Wow Factor

Minimalist Design provides that wow factor to-many companies as these minimalistic designs are not only lightweight and simple to work with, but they often contain hidden treats waiting to be found. For example, many minimalistic designs out there in the world today scatter the usage of JavaScript, enough to satisfy our cravings but not too much to qualify as heavy use.

With that said, we are often found searching about these websites only to find some great JavaScript use in some features we never imagined to find. This not only increases the wow factor for viewers and clientele alike, but it also keeps them searching or hunting for more of these hidden treats to see what you have for them next.

Heavy Use of Creativity and Ingenuity

Due to minimalist design being so lightweight, it limits how much color, gradients, icons, and the likes you can use throughout the design or layout. However, because of this, it requires a lot of creativity and ingenuity that you would not otherwise put forward when designing fully-fledged websites.

This extra ingenuity or creativity that it requires allows you to expand on its borders or boundaries having you come up with new elements and factors to minimalist design, one of the delicious key features when using this style or method. Think of it as this, if I give you two blocks and two tools including a carving tool and tell you to build scale-sized cave like home, you really do not have all the materials or tools to do it.

However, because I only gave you these tools and materials, you have to use your imagination to become very creative to how you can use the tools with the materials to build the end result, and in the end, the output will generally be better than what you would have done if I gave you all the necessary tools, as you needed to be more creative on how you can reach or obtain the goal.

Many Companies Want It

As freelance designers, we find many small to large companies in search for designers to help redesign their websites. However, when we accept their job, we learn that their entire website is built upon only a few pages. Instead of heading the minimalist or minimalistic route, we decide to build a full-fledged site around these few pages.

Often, our designs are a definite overkill to what these companies offer online and these companies are generally pleased with the end result but not quite as great as they may have imagined their website to look. Therefore, when it comes down to a few pages, the best satisfying route would be to create minimalist or minimalistic designs as they are not only universal, but they are also great pieces that express the content well with great hidden treats between. Leaving these companies more than satisfied and pleased, of who will most definitely return to you for future design work.

To conclude, the minimalistic designing method or style is a great style to adapt to as its demand is constantly increasing as more and more companies and individuals find the need for them. Companies and small business often want websites but have no need for no more than a few pages on that website. Many designs and designers tend to stick to designing for content filled websites despite these sites only having a few pages.

Therefore, the end result is generally not as great is it should be. Moreover, by adapting to minimalistic design, you can maximize on your growth in the industry as well as always “over satisfying” your clientele by reaching or exceeding what they would have imagined their website to look like or be.

As a starter or a seasoned web developer, we usually tend to skip out on some great practices that we should be using merely because we have never heard about them. To reduce this gap of missing goodies, we cover several practices no developer should live without.

Doctype Declaration

Many do it, others choose to not. However, it is in your best interest to declare the doctype in your HTML files for better standards compliance. Browsers usually have their own ways to fix errors you accidentally or unknowingly left in to get the HTML better interpreted. However, as with most browsers, they all have different ways to interpret things and thus, when it comes to individual browsers trying to fix or “patch” your errors on the fly, things start to get messy and your website will appear different across these different browsers and platforms.

Therefore, by declaring the doctype, you force these browsers to enter standards compliance mode, which cancels out their correction systems. With this, you can easily locate the errors you have made and be able to fix them to get your website to look and work the same across many browsers and platforms. Think of the doctype as a keycard to open all the doors in a building versus a key that may or may not open a few. You would definitely choose the keycard that opens all the doors rather than a key that may or may not work, the same applies to declaring the doctype so definitely use it, you will be glad you did.

Meta Description Attribute

Many search engine optimization radicals always seem to deter us from using the meta description attribute with the argument that search engines do not use them anymore. Actually, they do, but if they are not available, they will use other means to formulate a description about your website. Therefore, as a good practice, always include a meta description attribute with a great description of the website as this is what search engines use to formulate that description right below your title when you search for your website.

To get back to the search engine optimization radicals, they do have a point, especially for those who misuse the meta description attribute. Search engine bots are getting smarter by the day and can detect whether you deliberately misused the attribute or not. Therefore, use it as intended, as this is a gold mind for HTML as well as the key to improved search engine optimization.

Footer Content

This HTML practice is a bit subjective however very useful and vital to keeping your website running smoothly. We all have landed on a website that takes a good several seconds to a minute to load anything that is viewable due to the cause of external scripts bogging down on the load time. The way HTML is loaded is in sequential form, from top to bottom, line after line. What this means is, it will halt on a line of code until it is fully interpreted or executed, and in this case, it will wait until the external JavaScript file is fully loaded before proceeding on to the next line.

Therefore, stick this JavaScript code in the footer to have the content that is important to load first. For example, if you have your analytics code such as Google analytics, stick it in the footer right before the end of your body tag so that your website can load the content quicker and not bog down until it reaches the end of your content where users do not have to actually wait for it to load.

The reason this idea is subjective is that some may disagree with the idea of taking JavaScript code outside of the head tags, however, in such situations, it is a better practice to take upon as it is what keeps your website running more efficiently in such a case.

Using Unordered Lists for Navigation Bits

Many developers whip up all sorts of concoctions to create a navigation bit. So instead of using the accepted and preferred markup they decide to use a set of divs and all sorts to achieve similar results. This technique is not only inefficient, but it is also very tedious and redundant. Therefore, use unordered lists as a basis for your navigations as the code is simple, the functionality is pretty much completed for you already, and all you need to do is give it some style. Remember, reinventing the wheel is not something you want to do, let alone reinventing it and losing efficiency.

Leaving Your Front Door Open

Whenever you are in your home, out of your home, or on your way home, you always have your doors closed and locked. I mean, who would want to leave their home doors unlocked and open when they are not around? Other than the neighbor I once had who left their front door wide open at night, we all know it is a good practice to keep our windows and doors closed when we are not home. Similarly, always close the tags you open for clean and validated markup.

I have seen countless tutorials out there that are available to teach new developers how to code HTML and they almost always leave their tags open such as image tags or break tags. This not only affects the new generation of developers, but it is a terrible practice. Browsers will always attempt to close them for you causing errors and unwanted results, so save yourself from bad practices, and make closing the HTML tags a habit as you do with closing your doors when you leave your home.

Validate Your Code

Validating your code helps you keep your code clean from nasty errors you may have missed or unintentionally thrown in. While having valid code does not indicate you are a great developer or not, it does help eliminate possible errors you may find in the future within many different browsers and platforms. It additionally throws a good image about your practices for your portfolio for future hires.

Technologies evolve quicker than we can imagine. As soon as we think, we have mastered one web technology, a new better, expanded, and more flexible version or technology releases that switches the demand of the market to it, making you start learning the new technology as if you have never known it before. To many of us, including myself, it seems frustrating to have known one technology or version of technology very well to having to relearn most of it over a routinely based time frame.

For example, many have mastered HTML and CSS and felt confident enough to expand out onto new hacks and workaround methods that they completely forgot about the new technology that has recently arisen: HTML5 and CSS3. As HTML5 and CSS3 hit the market, they felt behind as web designers and developers as everyone around them understands the new technology while they have no idea what it may be about, and what is so great about the new versions or updates.

In order to avoid such results and to keep one-step ahead in the ever-evolving industry, we discuss several methods and techniques to keep up with the evolving technologies.

Technology Blogs

One of the easiest ways to keep up with the news on evolving technologies is to follow blogs that cover exactly that. Save the blog as a bookmark, have email notifications or RSS feeds setup, that way whenever new web technologies are announced, you will be one of the first to know about it.

This helps you understand the evolving market better, as well as keeps you in the loop ready to answer any questions clients may have about these new technologies. The worst to happen to you is to have clients ask you about the new web technologies when you have no idea whether they are available or not or how they work or affect the industry. Therefore, staying on top of the game is very important.

Official Sites

If technology blogs do not suit you well and are too slow for you to keep up with the industry, the best method you can follow is to keep updated with the official websites of the technologies you need to follow. This way, whenever any of these web technologies are changed, enhanced, or updated, you will know straight away as well as learn how to work with the new changes immediately by following through with their provided documentation.

Act on It

Keeping up to date with the new evolving web technologies is not enough to understand them and act on it. Instead, as they introduce new elements to these technologies reading about them then diving right into working with the new additions or changes actually helps you improve your skills along the way, and when these evolving technologies release mainstream as a whole, you will have a much better understanding about the changes and additions more than anyone else as you have constantly expanded on your skill set by expanding step by step into the changes and or additions.

For example, taking a look at CSS3, we realize that we were not following it as much as we should have, and we are now understanding what is new to it by following blogs that also just found out about certain additions. What this does is, you will be behind on months of information provided to the industry, and your learning process by expanding into the new version is slowed down greatly, always limiting what you can do and what you know about it. Therefore, always follow new information provided to the industry, and act on it accordingly.

Play with Delicious Samples

When you walk into a candy store or a bakery, you are always surprised by delicious samples they throw at you hoping you would enjoy what you just ate, and become a full time buyer of those products you sampled. Similarly, by not just getting hands on through tutorials or information, but rather by downloading working samples to play with you will be able to understand the technologies used a lot better than just theory.

Take the samples modify them, take them apart, break them, and make them work again. This allows you to fully understand what each element does and how it affects things overall, and what happens when you cause it to fail or break. This not only makes you a better developer, but it also helps you dive head first into the evolving technologies giving you a better understanding of how things actually work, and what type of effect they have, and how effective they are.

Watch Them Evolve

Sometimes getting hands on is not generally what you want but rather something overkill for the current time being. If that is the case for you, a better idea to keep up with the evolving technologies is to watch them evolve and transition into what they are today. Think of it as a bird’s eye view overlooking the landscape, watching animals flock, vehicles cross roads, and masses move. Using that concept, by watching the technologies evolve, you can better understand how they are moving to forecast how they will move in the future to better prepare you for what might be coming rather than what has already arrived.

The advantage of having the bird’s eye view is that you can prepare yourself or your firm for a transition into the future before the future arrives. This provides you and or your firm a running start to what can be done with these new technologies, keeping you and or your firm ahead of competitors in the industry and making you a leader instead of a follower.

To conclude, keeping up with the evolving technologies really depends on your motive and or current career. If you career or business depends on keeping up to date with evolving technologies, then it is in your best interest to acquire the information on new technologies the minute they are available. While there may be other methods out there to keep you following with evolving technologies, we hope the methods mentioned will help you get your ideas and methods formulated to work best for you.

Online communities range from discussion boards to image or video sharing, or to just chatting and messaging. There are plenty of elements that are the key to the success of these online communities, and without them, many of these communities will not be as popular or as successful as they are today.

Despite all these different types of communities, they all generally share many different elements or guidelines or rules that are followed to make them as successful as they are today. We cover ten elements or things that have been determined as ten elements or things that a successful online community cannot live without.

Design, Design, and Design

The design of a community is such a huge element or factor that really makes or breaks a community, and to bring design into example, we discuss Google’s design and its affect on us.

We all have a favorite search engine whether be it Google, Bing, or Cuil. What really keeps us loyal to these services or search engines are many factors, results, relevancy, and many others, however, one key element that hinders our decision despite that mentioned would be design.

Google users love Google for their simplistic and straightforward design, the background color works well with the foreground colors, and what we came for is available straight away and the main focus of the search engine. Similarly, for online communities, you can have the best of people on these communities; however, if the design is unbearable people including ourselves begin to find an alternate community instead.

Design does not just relate to the way things are laid out and what is in focus or not, it additionally relates to the type of design that is provided based on the online community. For example, if you frequent a gaming discussion board , you expect to see a gaming like and exquisite design, but you land to only see a generic design in place, as a viewer, you are less intrigued into staying with that community as it does not express the gaming dedication or feel it tries to purvey.

Therefore, make sure the design layout, color scheme, and theme all fits in with the type of online community and the audience you are trying to target, as it is indeed a key to making an online community successful.

Content

Successful online communities do not begin with a plethora of content available, but instead, it is built with content overtime and on the initial availability of the online community.

With that said, successful online communities’ reach where they are today through their content and by staying focused on the category, topic, or subject matter they have chosen initially. By expanding their subject or core focus to other categories, a community may no longer target its intended audience, but instead trying to target a set of audiences, and in the end, running too thin, reaching failure.

Tools to Make it a Community

An online community cannot live without the tools it needs to be classified as an online community. Eliminate core tools for discussion such as user-to-user communication, or the proper methods of getting discussions posted, the community will quickly fall apart as it becomes difficult for community members to communicate.

Evolution

As a general rule in successful online communities or online communities in general, users or community members love to see the communities they participate in evolve, this includes the addition of new community members, new tools to convey messages, as well as the evolution in the design, always aimed toward improvement and to keep community members satisfied.

Community members always want to feel that the folks behind the community care about the community members rather than for their own benefit, and to show them this, changing and adding new elements to improve the community gives them this satisfaction, and without such actions, a successful online community cannot be where it is today.

Activity

Online communities thrive on activity, without it the communities slowly change, and are used less causing once active members, to begin to find an alternate community. Therefore, assuring your community is active is all in the way you market and reach new potential members, of which should be done often despite how successful an online community may be, as members who may be loyal today, may leave the next.

Response and Feedback

A community is built around response and feedback, and without it, there is no satisfaction provided or given to fulfill community wants and needs. Therefore, many successful online communities constantly respond to user or member feedback to keep them as continued and loyal members to the community rather than search for an alternate that actually responds to user or member feedback.

One Step Ahead

Many successes to online communities are due to communities being one-step ahead from their competitors. Without this step forward and always satisfying their users’ wants and needs before they need it or request it, they keep their users or members at the edge of their seats all the time, and wanting to continue to be part of the community to continue to wait to see what you have next for them. By not being a step ahead in the game, communities risk their continued success rate greatly.

Widgets

In today’s world, every user or community member wants to integrate their other favorite tools or communities or social networking services with your community, and without this connection, users sometimes feel disconnected from the rest of the internet world. With that said, many successful online communities continue to be successful due to having these connections or widgets with other services or social networks their members or users request.

Good Search Engine Optimization

Online communities are generally built around user generated content, and because user generated content is never known until made available, it becomes slightly more difficult to be able to optimize the text for search engines. However, with some good optimization improvements, it can definitely be made possible.

Without good search engine optimization, online communities generally do not expand, and if they do not expand, they do not become as successful as envisioned, or they may lose traffic and community members due to the cause of changing techniques and lesser search engine optimization improvements. With that said, always assure your online community is greatly optimized for search engines, as it is a key to success.

Multi-Platform Availability

Online communities are all about being available across multiple platforms as that is a key to their growth and expansion, which ultimately leads to their success. Without making your online community available across multiple platforms, its success rate is risked greatly as it becomes limited to where it can be accessed and utilized.