BlogmyQuery – BMQ

We are regulalry collecting useful JavaScript and jQuery snippets, libraries, articles, tools and resources and present them in compact round-ups here, on Noupe. This time we are again covering some useful JavaScript and jQuery techniques, plugins and tools that may help you improve the user experience for your site.

Useful JavaScript and jQuery Techniques

Colorful Sliders With jQuery & CSS3
In this tutorial we are using jQuery and the new transformation features brought by CSS3 to create a three dimensional dynamic slider effect. The techniques presented here – for creating sliders, and CSS dynamic resizable bars, can be used together or in part for powering all sorts of jQuery goodness.

Sponsor Flip Wall With jQuery & CSS
Designing and coding a sponsors page is part of the developer’s life (at least the lucky developer’s life, if it is about a personal site of theirs). It, however, follows different rules than those for the other pages of the site. You have to find a way to fit a lot of information and organize it clearly, so that the emphasis is put on your sponsors, and not on other elements of your design.

TipTip jQuery Plugin
TipTip detects the edges of the browser window and will make sure the tooltip stays within the current window size. As a result the tooltip will adjust itself to be displayed above, below, to the left or to the right of the element with TipTip applied to it, depending on what is necessary to stay within the browser window.
TipTip is a very lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip jQuery plugin. It uses ZERO images and is completely customizable via CSS.

Nivo Slider
The Most Awesome jQuery Image Slider

jQuery.Syntax
jQuery.Syntax is an extremely fast and lightweight syntax highlighter. It has dynamic loading of syntax source files and integrates cleanly using CSS or modelines.

jquery.timepickr.js
This is my humble attempt to enhence web time picking.

Photo Zoom Out Effect with jQuery
Today we will show you how to create a simple image zoom out effect with jQuery. The idea is show some images which are zoomed in initially and when hovering over an image it gets zoomed out. This effect could be used in photography websites or image galleries. Our example uses some black and white images to focus on the effect.

A Fresh Bottom Slide Out Menu with jQuery
In this tutorial we will create a unique bottom slide out menu. This large menu will contain some title and a description of the menu item. It will slide out from the bottom revealing the description text and some icon. We will use some CSS3 properties for some nice shadow effects and jQuery for the interaction.

Making a Mosaic Slideshow With jQuery & CSS
Today we are making a jQuery & CSS mosaic gallery. Mosaic, because it will feature an interesting tile transition effect when moving from one slide to another.

17 jQuery Plugins for Easy and Efficient Reordering and Filtering Page Elements
Having full control of elements on a page and the order they are presented in can be quite useful. jQuery as always is a safe choice to go for. There are several good quality plugins to pick from. This post provides an overview of plugins you can use to provide simple yet powerful functionality to reorder, filter, add drag and drop capabilities etc.

Create an Impressive Content Editing System with jQuery and PHP
I’m going to show you how to use jQuery and PHP to build a content editing system that will allow you or your client to easily edit .html pages visually.

jQuery MegaMenu Plugin

Excellent JQuery Plugins To Enhance Form Validation
Simple jquery plugins can enhance and beautify HTML form elements, these simple jquery scripts turn a simple HTML website to a fantastic look and feel. These plugins can be enabled very easily. In this roundup I have gathered most beautiful Jquery plugins that are related to all kinds of form validation. This list also includes roundups of some blogs. Go ahead and enjoy

gameQuery – a javascript game engine with jQuery
gameQuery is a jQuery plug-in to help make javascript game development easier by adding some simple game-related classes. It’s still in an early stage of development and may change a lot in future versions. The project has a Google Code page where the SVN repository of the project is hosted and a twitter page where you can follow the daily progress of the development.

Getting Buggy CSS Selectors to Work Cross-Browser via jQuery
Below I’ve prepared a simple table that describes a number of CSS selectors that are not cross-browser compatible, along with the jQuery syntax for each. The syntaxes are exactly the same as they would be in CSS, save for the jQuery wrapper (just remove $() and the quotes to get the CSS syntax), so using these selectors in jQuery will provide somewhat of a practice ground to prepare you for when they’re fully supported by all commonly-used browsers.

jqFancyTransitions: jQuery Image Rotator Plugin
jqFancyTransitions is easy-to-use jQuery plugin for displaying your photos as slideshow with fancy transition effects.

A demo of AD Gallery
A highly customizable gallery/showcase plugin for jQuery.

jQuery UI Selectmenu: An ARIA-Accessible Plugin for Styling a Custom HTML Select Element
Our latest contribution to labs is the selectmenu plugin, which is designed to duplicate and extend the functionality of a native HTML select element, and lets you customize the look and feel, add icons, and create hierarchy within the options. Best of all, it’s built with progressive enhancement and accessibility in mind, has all the native mouse and keyboard controls, and is ThemeRoller-ready.

Create a Content Rich Tooltip with JSON and jQuery
Today we’re going to break the mold of the traditional tooltip. This tutorial will demonstrate how to build tooltips that are powered by jQuery, with information pulled from a JSON array.

jQuery image zoom effect
So today I’m going to run through the technique used to zoom the image thumbnails and display the overlay of text.

jQuery Roundabout Shapes
Roundabout Shapes provide even more paths along which your Roundabout can move. The current version of Roundabout Shapes offers eleven additional movements.

Extending jQuery’s selector capabilities

How to show/hide a hidden input form field using jQuery
This past week I was working on a project at work which included building a request form with multiple fields. It was a rather large form that included a dropdown list with an ‘other’ option. I wanted to allow users to select the ‘other’ option which then would show an input field so they can enter a specific description of what that ‘other’ item is. I didn’t want to clutter the form by displaying that additional field by default so I used a little jQuery, thus displaying it dynamically and only when needed.

A Better jQuery In-Field Label Plugin
This is a pretty nice effect, and it can really help to save space on forms. There are a billion different ways to implement this, and I don’t suggest you use the example from above because that was just a quick way to show the effect. So let’s walk through a couple of different implementation approaches and figure out the best way to implement this feature.

Useful JavaScript / jQuery Tools

JavaScriptMVC
JavaScriptMVC is an open-source framework containing the best ideas in enterprise JavaScript development. It guides you to successfully completed projects by promoting best practices, maintainability, and convention over configuration.

PEG.js – Parser Generator for JavaScript
PEG.js is a parser generator for JavaScript based on the parsing expression grammar formalism. It enables you to easily bulid fast parsers which process complex data or computer languages. You can use it as an underlying tool when writing various data processors, transformers, interpreters, or compilers.

PhoneGap
PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.

JavaScript Shell
A command-line interface for JavaScript and DOM.

WireIt – a Javascript Wiring Library
WireIt is an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages, graphical modeling, or graph editors.

JavaScript Programming Patterns
In this article I am trying to present some of the techniques out there that I have discovered. The patterns I would like to mention are the following:
- The Old-School Way
- Singleton
- Module Pattern
- Revealing Module Pattern
- Custom Objects
- Lazy Function Definition

Compare JavaScript frameworks
Modern Web sites and Web applications tend to rely quite heavily on client-side JavaScript to provide rich interactivity, particularly through the advent of asynchronous HTTP requests that do not require page refreshes to return data or responses from a server-side script or database system. In this article, you will discover how JavaScript frameworks make it easier and faster to create highly interactive and responsive Web sites and Web applications.

How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
QUnit, developed by the jQuery team, is a great framework for unit testing your JavaScript. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce what QUnit specifically is, and why you should care about rigorously testing your code.

CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Think of it as JavaScript’s less ostentatious kid brother — the same genes, roughly the same height, but a different sense of style. Apart from a handful of bonus goodies, statements in CoffeeScript correspond one-to-one with their equivalent in JavaScript, it’s just another way of saying it.

Mind-blowing JavaScript Experiments
The following JavaScript experiments demonstrates the amazing capabilities of the modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari. In this post I will showcase to you an array of experiments that will surely blows your mind off.

Online javascript beautifier
This little beautifier will reformat and reindent bookmarklets, ugly javascript, unpack scripts packed by the popular Dean Edward’s packer, as well as deobfuscate scripts processed by javascriptobfuscator.com.

CSS & Javascript Character Entity Calculator
Enter your HTML Entity Character number (such as &#2335 or just 2335 – ?) to get the CSS and JS values for that entity.

Dygraphs: Create interactive graphs from open source Javascript library
Dygraphs is an open source JavaScript library that produces an interactive, zoom-able charts of the present time series. It is mainly designed to display the dense data sets and enable the users to explore and interpret them. It is a JavaScript Visualization Library.

Showdown – Markdown in JavaScript
Showdown – a JavaScript port of Markdown

Copy to Clipboard with ZeroClipboard, Flash 10 and jQuery
With today’s post I will show you a contrived example to get you started. I eventually hope to add this to the contextMenu.js jQuery plugin that I use, but for now this should be pretty straight forward. I do want to note that in the demo and download I am loading the latest version of the jQuery library (1.3.1) from Google’s CDN for the first time in any of my posts. For more information on how to do this see the instructions from Google.

fLABjs
fLABjs is a special API wrapper around LABjs which adapts the code to work properly in a file:// local filesystem environment. There are a number of things with core LABjs does which are not appropriate for local filesystems, such as XHR, special path handling rules, etc.

jQuery LazyLoad Ad : Delays loading of advertising
jQuery LazyLoad Ad is a jQuery plugin that takes advantage of LazyLoad delaying ads loading.

qTip – The jQuery tooltip plugin
qTip is a tooltip plugin for the jQuery framework. It’s cross-browser, customizable and packed full of features!

jQuery Collapsing and Expanding Table Rows

Improving Search Boxes with jQuery
This time we will learn how to improve a little more our sites by adding some additional interactions to our search boxes like autofocus, highlighting, autoreplace default text and more by using jQuery.

jQuery Grid Plugin

Pines Notify jQuery Plugin
Pines Notify’s features include:
- Timed hiding with visual effects.
- Sticky (no automatic hiding) notices.
- Optional hide button.
- Supports dynamically updating text, title, icon, type…
- Stacks allow notice sets to stack independently.
- Control stack direction and push to top or bottom.

jQuery Slider plugin (Safari style)
jQuery Slider is easy to use and multifunctional jQuery plugin.

Google Earth is used when you want to explore rich geographical content, want to see satellite images, maps, landscapes, 3D buildings or view satellite images from galaxies in outer space. It also lets you search the whole planet within seconds without requiring you to leave your comfortable room. You can search for anything on this planet whether it is a building, a landscape or anything else, Google Earth will help you. In this post we have collected some bizarre and interesting Google Earth photos, we hope they will impress you.

Google Earth Photos

Will U Marry Me
Marriage proposal seen on a rooftop via Google Maps.

Google Escher Effect – Paris, France
Stitching together satellite pix and aero pics of cities can result in situations like this where the different aerial vantage points result in buildings’ pictures being taken at different angles. Once stitched together, the taller buildings at the edges of each of the pictures appear to be leaning toward or away from one another at pronounced angles.

Graffiti in Google Maps
Site of an extinct volcano crater, the Cerro Prieto, located near Mexicali in Baja California (Mexico). Apparently, a lot of visitors to the site have decorated it with their graffiti, drawn huge enough to be seen from high above. The graffiti appears to have been drawn with the intention to be seen by people looking down into the crater from the eastern rim of the crater. Here’s a closeup shot of it, taken from the ground.

Mystery Stone Arrow

Auto Antics
Think parking is tough where you live? In Westenbergstraat, Netherlands, drivers apparently have to park on the sides of walls.

Localised Black Hole Discovered
As we all know, the general theory of relativity states that a black hole is a region of space from which nothing can escape – including light. Astronomers have identified lots of places where black holes may exist, but apparently they missed one – about 60km north of Tokyo.

Internet fan says he found the face of Satan using Google Earth

Heart-shaped island highlighted by Google Earth becomes hit with lovers
The 130,000 square yard islet of Galesnjak came to prominence after its unusual shape was highlighted on Google Earth.

Man-Shaped Lake in Brazil

Iraq’s Bloody Lake
This blood-red lake outside Iraq’s Sadr City garnered a fair share of macabre speculation when it was noticed in 2007. One tipster told the tech blog Boing Boing that he was “told by a friend” that slaughterhouses in Iraq sometimes dump blood into canals. No one has offered an official explanation, but it’s more likely that the color comes from sewage, pollution or a water-treatment process.

Issaouane Erg desert – Dunes (Algeria)
The shapes and colors of the dunes in this desert are amazing. Notice that the three dunes have almost identical shapes. And there are tens of throusands just like those all around.

Giant Gulliver from Google Earth, Hunters Hall Park, Craigmillar, Scotland.

Terrain Face in Google Maps
The terrain in Alberta, Canada accidentally forms what looks like a human face when viewed from the air or when viewing the satellite pic in Google Maps.

Osmington White Horse
The Osmington White Horse, outside Sutton Poyntz, UK. This prehistoric figure is carved into the white chalk of the hillside – such horse carved shapes are called “Leucippotomy”.

Google Escher Effect pic from Houston
Here’s another weird satellite pic from Google Maps of some downtown Houston skyscrapers. This effect has become known as the “Escher Effect”, or the “Google Escher Effect”.

Land Art near Munich Airport
Land Art or “Earth Art” appearing in a field near the airport in Munich, Germany.

KFC space logo
Yum! Brands Inc created the logo near Rachel, Nevada, and claimed it’s the first ad that can be seen from space. If you recall, the same company had previously wanted to beam a laser ad up onto the moon for Pizza Hut, but had later scaled back to buying ad placement on the side of a Russian rocket.

Firefox Logo
Crop circle art made in the shape of the iconic Firefox Logo near Portland, Oregon.

Where’s Waldo in Google Maps?
Canadian artist Melanie Coles built a large image of the iconic “Waldo” onto a rooftop at an undisclosed location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Bunny in Google Maps
Giant Pink Bunny created by a group of artists near Artesina, Italy.

Coca Cola Logo in Google Maps
This Coca-Cola logo in Google Maps was apparently created out of coke bottles just outside of Arica in Chile.

Portrait of Ghenghis Khan in Google Maps
Out of some sort of fear that they might forget who he was, the people of Mongolia have carved the likeness of Ghenghis Khan onto a hillside outside of Ulaanbaatar.

The Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – one of the world’s most recognizable illustrations – is rendered here in crop art in Germany.

The Palm Islands of Dubai
The Palm Islands are artificial islands in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on which major commercial and residential infrastructure will be constructed. They are being constructed by Nakheel Properties, a property developer in the United Arab Emirates, who hired Belgian and Dutch dredging and marine contractor Jan De Nul and Van Oord, some of the world’s specialists in land reclamation. The islands are the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Oprah Maze
She’s got a massive syndicated show and a magazine called O, and she was dubbed the most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes. Why shouldn’t Oprah get her own corn maze? An Arizona farmer created this 2004 tribute to the TV talk-show host.

World’s Largest Fingerprint

Guitar-Shaped Mansion

I lOVE u

Crop Circles
Without a doubt, the best thing that ever happened to crop circles is Google Earth. This circle in the desert just outside Beatty, Nevada.

Roof Ad, New York City
Roof ad seen via Google Maps in New York City, apparently for a “Roller Skating” rink.
Likely intended to target LaGuardia Airport passengers, but many rooftop ads like this are starting to provide impressions through users of Google Maps and other popular online mapping systems which include aerial photos and satellite photos.

Show Me a Sign

Ghost Town: Prypiat, Ukraine

Ni Pena Ni Miedo (No Shame Nor Fear)
Written in the sands of the Atacama Desert, Chile, are the words “ni pena ni miedo” which translate more or less as “No shame nor fear”, and together they form what must surely be the world’s largest poem.

Giant of Córdoba takes a bath
Giants have a hard time getting clean. I mean, baths aren’t usually built big enough to fit your average giant, right? Which is the only sensible explanation as to why there’s a giant sitting in the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain.

Google Maps Oddity
This is a very strange picture from Google Maps satellite picture of downtown Dallas. The rounded top building in the upper middle is the JPMorgan Chase Tower. Next to it is the tall rectangular 2100 Ross Avenue building (dead center). Catty-cornered from those two on the left side is the pointy-topped Trammell Crow Center which appears to be leaning at a sharp angle compared with the other buildings.

Brunel 200th Birthday Maze
This maze in the UK was made to celebrate Brunel’s 200th birthday.

Land Art – Bug in Illinois
Effigy Tumuli, by Michael Heizer, are a few different land art pieces built on Buffalo Rock in Buffalo Rock State Park, overlooking the Illinois River. (Built between 1983-1985) The animal shapes are barely visible now from satellite pics, though you can see the beetle or roach shape outline in this screengrab.

Karl’s Maze, Germany
Karl’s Maze in Purkshof, Germany. Since 1921?

By Aquil Akhter

Creativity has no limits and when it comes to photography, you have endless options to showcase your creativity. One of these options is Toy Photography in which you can create nice and appealing compositions with creative lighting and at the same time have some real fun!

Toy Photography if done correctly can bring the life and personality in the lifeless objects being shot. In this post, we have put together some outstanding examples of toy photography that will hopefully amaze you.

Toy Photography

365 Toy Project – Day 56

Dragon Hawk

Kratos 3

SotA_Street Fighter_Sagat

Superman Forever

Ironman

Hide and Go Seek

Broken Heart

McCarty

In a land of mist… listening, observing…

Toy Story .. !

365 Toy Project – Day 15

365 Toy Project – Day 22

SotA_Ken_Ryu

Reed Richards Susan Storm

365 Toy Project – Day 63

365 toy project – Day 220 ~ Pullip

Cupcake – toy – bokeh

Toys . Jouets (Se souvenir …)

McCarty

365 toy project – Day 329 ~ Pullip

Drawing In The Sand

039/365

MikiEtsu3

MikiEtsu2

Don’t worry Emiko, I’ll look after you.

Dol

365 toy project – Day 134 ~ Pullip

Toy

Car

Toy

Street Animals NYC

Barbies live

Something seems to be missing.

365 Toy Project – Day 6

TOYS – GALACTUS : THE WORLD DEVOURER “ALPHA”

Urban Toy

Urban Toy

Urban Toy

Still Tosco Toy

Fairy dreaming

Giorgio and Anastasia

Fighting

Monte Williams

Abandoned Toy Photography

GAME OVER – Abandoned Toy (Santomenna – Sa)

Return Of The Demented Dolls

Doc looks lost

Blue Eyes…

Teletubbies say Eh-Oh

728: Battered Old Toy Bus

lazy eye

Forgotten Toy

Sun Worshipper..

Abandoned Toy Truck

Toy Truck III

You’ve spent years honing your design skills in that corporate cubicle you’ve been living in, hoping for the day when you would finally make the jump to full time freelance. You’ve taken on some side jobs from some friends or friends of friends, but now you are itching to be out on your own. There’s just one glitch…

You know that corporate sales guy that’s been out getting those web and print design orders that land on your desk everyday? He’s not coming with you on your freelance excursion down the yellow brick road. From now on, you’ll be doing his job too.

So you may have become the most talented graphic/web designer in your immediate circle of friends, but unless you can effectively sell those skills to that new business owner, your trip down freelance lane will be short lived. You have to know without fail, what you are going to do to generate new clients once you are out on your own. The big design firms can afford to have full time marketing people out on the street, so you will have to find a way to compete for those business dollars if you are even going to have a chance to make it. There is no such thing as “winging it” in today’s business climate. You need to have a plan and learning how to bring on new clients is a mandatory requirement in your new endeavor.

Most graphic artists and web designers would rather rip their toenails out than do what I do-sell. They conjure up images of being the next Billy Mays style pitchman hawking Ginsu knives at some county fair, when in truth, business to business selling is nothing like that. So let’s look at some ways to prepare to be out on your own without ending up in a bread line.

Time is Money

Any sales professional lives by this credo. You don’t engage in activities that are not related to making sales and bringing on new clients. As a freelance designer you will need to have some simple skill sets related to preparation and presentation that shouldn’t be that painful. The first thing you will to do is know your market.

You can invest a small amount of time each day into developing prospects that you will contact. If you are driving by that same jewelry store every day, then go on the web and look for their website. If they don’t have site, then they have now become a prospect for your services.

Casual contacts are another effective way of offering your services. I have a higher ratio of closing sales through informal contacts than I have through cold calling.

If you’re eating at the local Italian Restaurant, casually ask the waiter, who just might be the owner, who produces their menus. Simple question, non invasive and I don’t know anyone who has ever been killed for asking it. You might just get, “Why, do you design menus?” as a response. I have seen many simple conversations like this turn into sales or appointments.

But what about the cold call? Let’s dissect that fear inducing sales call and learn how you can take the pressure off of you and stack the deck on your side through a few simple steps.

Don’t Walk in Empty Handed

You’re a designer right? Then as part of your preparation you need to have an informative brochure or sell sheet when you are going to approach a new business prospect. Some sales people refer to this as a “leave behind”, but I’d prefer to think of it as your presentation. It doesn’t have to be fancy and printed on the nicest gold-gilded paper, but it does have to tell your story. If you’re great at page layout, but not so great at writing copy, maybe you have a connection or two that can assist you in this area. I’m a big fan of bartering among contemporaries, so maybe you can offer your skills to someone on a future project if they’ll help you write some copy for your sell sheet.

On your sell sheet you need to have some samples of some websites and any other kind of advertising you’ve created. It needs to be neat and professional because it is going to be the best representation of what you are offering. In this “get to the point” society we live in, I recommend letting the pictures tell the story and limit the amount of text. You can actually produce this quite inexpensively and print it on a color printer or save the file on a flash drive and take it down to the local copy center and have a few color copies printed out. When you are starting out on your own, watching expenses should be a top priority as you look for ways to market yourself without spending boatloads of cash.

So now you’ve got your four-color sell sheet in your hand along with your brand new freelance business cards and you are now going to call on that jewelry store owner. I would like to suggest that you go in first thing in the morning. If they open at 9:00 you should try to go in around 9:15 or 9:30. You are much more likely to catch the owner first thing in the morning than you are if you went in at say, 2:00 in the afternoon, when the owner may be in the back making a repair or assisting a customer who deserves the owner’s full attention.

So you walk in to the store and you notice the owner laying out the jewelry displays in the cases like he or she does every morning. The owner looks up and says, “Can I help you?”. You need to smile at this point and then walk over and introduce yourself.

“Hello my name is John Johnson and I own Web and Print Design on a Budget” and you hand the owner your sell sheet. Miraculously, two things will now happen. The first thing is the owner will take your sell sheet from you because that’s what people do when you hand them something and the second thing is they will look at what you just gave them. Simple right? I never said this was rocket science.

Then you will want to point to a few highlights on the sell sheet they are looking at while telling them that you wanted to offer your services should they have a desire to have a presence on the web. “Offering your services” is a very friendly, non threatening, non sales type of language to use in this type of situation.

I would also recommend having packages with pricing right on the sell sheet. This way the prospect can choose between a simple four page website that costs X, versus the deluxe web package that includes up to six pages with forty optimized photographs (or whatever) that costs Y. This is called an “alternate close” as it gives the prospects more than one option to say yes.

Get Them Involved

You have to be aware of how the business owner is responding to your presentation. If they smile at you after you hand them your sell sheet and say,”Thanks, I have a hundred of these from other freelancers”, then you may want to think about moving on, but if they start asking questions, you may just have a new client.

Questions that begin with “How much would it cost if I…” show that the owner is now involving themselves in your product. They are thinking about what life would be like with a new website. Why else would they inquire about the costs associated with adding a “weekly specials” page on top of the four-page package you just showed them. Your conversation with them from that moment on needs to revolve around what is called an “involvement close”.

Basically, an involvement close is the process of speaking to the propsect like they have already signed on to make a purchase. “Which items ARE you going to display on your home page?”, “ARE you going to have a separate page just for watches?” “How did you want to make changes to the content on the weekly specials page?”. All these questions can not be answered by a yes or no, but rather involve the customer in making decisions as if they’ve already purchased your product.

Don’t Sell Websites-Sell What Websites Do!

Effective sales people don’t usually talk about the features of whatever they are selling without talking about how those features benefit the buyer. It can be the best looking, most stylish widget on the planet, but if it doesn’t save the owner time or money or somehow make their life better, then they simply won’t buy it.

The same is true of your web and print designs. How can they benefit the business owner? How can a small mom and pop jewelry store benefit from being on the World Wide Web? All their customers are local and have been for the twenty plus years that they’ve been in business, and they’ve done just fine without any fancy shmanci websites or brochures. Why should they start now?

If you don’t have the answers for those questions when they get asked, and they will get asked, then you’ll be back at your previous employer’s door asking for your old job back right quick.

You can tell yourself that you are a designer or graphic artist and not a trained salesperson, but when you are standing in front of that business owner, they will view you as a salesperson and expect to have their questions answered. So, maybe you develop a “cheat sheet” for each prospect that you will call on that answers those basic questions before you ever walk in their door.

A little bit of preparation in this regard can go a long way. If you are going to call on a jewelry store, then take some time and look at a half dozen or so jewelry websites. How are they laid out, what do they feature? Is there a common denominator among all the jewelry websites you looked at, like a “special sales” section on the site that promotes a certain type of jewelry or service like cleaning or repairing?

Having done this type of homework before you walk in lets the owner know that you took the time to gain some insight into their market and that instills confidence in the owner that doing business with you is the right choice. Know the reasons why having a website can increase traffic in their store. Maybe adding the website address to their sign outside will allow more people passing by to view their current inventory of watches or gold necklaces. Something one of their customers wouldn’t normally be able to do without physically coming into the store.

Explain the trend that many more purchases are made online now as opposed to ten years or even five years ago and that business owners need to have an online presence if they are ever going to take advantage of that trend.

What do you imagine went through the mind of that blacksmith hammering out horseshoes for a living, the first time he saw a Model T Ford drive around the corner? I hope he was thinking about learning how to make fenders for those new cars, otherwise the new technology was going to shutter his business. The same holds true today. Business owners need to market themselves differently and you, as the web designer/graphic artist can assist them in doing just that.

Cake is a sweet, baked dessert. Cakes normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid and leavening agents. A finished cake is often enhanced by covering it with icing, or frosting, and toppings such as sprinkles. Cake makers create unique and creative cakes to attract new customers, and we have collected some unique and creative cakes around world.

Creative and Beautiful Cake Designs

Lost Atlantis Cake by The-EvIl-Plankton

Wedding Cake by RTyson

Crazy Cupcake Cake by babushka bakery

Bodleian Library cake sculpture by sally_monster

large pirate ship by babushka bakery

Palm Tree Cake complete by babushka bakery

Pinocchio cake by amber.mckenney

Madagascar cake by Anita Jamal

nana cake by auroracakes (Dawn)

“The Works of Roald Dahl” Cake by Cake Doctor

Piratenschiff für Jonas by Monivari

Lung Cake by Lioness123

Cake Mushroom Fairy by carrsart

Alaska cake: side view by The-EvIl-Plankton

Kensii’s Birthday Cake 001 by elyobkram

Wedding Cake by iminiyou

Pinapple Cake with Hibiscus by PaleRoots

grandma’s garden by bunchofpants

Baby Frog that likes Cheetos by PaleRoots

hamburger cake by bunchofpants

paula deen cake by bunchofpants

sewing basket cake by bunchofpants

rubik’s cube cake by bunchofpants

mr. wuf cake by bunchofpants

princess cake by bunchofpants

Beer Cake-Canadian by JenLipski

Jordan Shoe cake by donbuciak

Small Football Cake by Cakes by Jordana

NY Mets Cake by Bella-Cakes

Cruising on a sunny afternoon by gabriella’s sweets

army cake 012 by lilsophina

Handbag Cake by Swirek

Mad Hatter Cake from Alice in Wonderland by KupKake Tree

8 ban portable record player by chocmocakes

“NICE” cake by Love to Cake

QVC Sugar Shopper Birthday Cake by EB Cakes

Northern Cake by PaleRoots

Hippo Cake Sculpture by KD Creations

Sugar Art Competition by Redpath Sugar

Titanic by Daniel Zuber

Lily by Meg’s Cake Gallery

Go, Dog. Go! Cake by e-flanagan

Pirates treasure chest cake by chris_hill

Cake by Celebrate With A Cake

Mario mexican style by CAKE Chester

Raiders of the Lost Ark by CAKE Chester

Trains and windmills by CAKE Chester

formular one cake by cake the whole cake and nothing but the cake

CAKE – Sponge Bob by CAKE Chester

Wedding cake for Joy + Chris by CAKE Chester

shark cake by ride4fun

World Cup Soccer Cake by Cupcakes by Design