Since June 2011, you may have noticed pictures of authors next to search results for their articles. These authors have linked their work to their Google profiles in an effort to attract more clicks – a picture and byline can draw attention towards a page, and can link to other work by that person.

There are obvious potential benefits to a Google authorship profile – a photo and name are eye-catching and will make a website stand out next to other search results, but some have suggested that it isn’t worth it.

Having your name and picture displayed in search results requires setting up an account on Google plus, the search engine’s answer to Facebook. Authorship has been criticised as just one way for the search engine to use its domination to promote Google plus.

Tying your professional design work to your Google profile can make some people uneasy, especially if you use Google plus in a social capacity – mixing your personal and professional life online can be a concern for some people.

However, there are other benefits to having an authorship profile beyond seeing your picture next to search results. As Google gives better rankings to websites linked to Google profiles, authorship can boost your visibility to potential clients. Perhaps most importantly, a Google profile makes your work more personal – if a client can see who is behind a website, they will feel a more personal connection, and may feel more comfortable hiring you.

Your Google profile can also display a wide range of other design projects you have done, in effect an online portfolio.

A Google authorship profile does require work to set up, and a degree of professionalism on your authorship profile, but the advantage of adding a personal touch to your work will make it worth it for many.

How to set up a Google authorship profile

First, you need to set up a Google plus profile at plus.google.com. Fill in your details, including a professional picture and some of your details. For Google to verify you as a legitimate author, your profile must be fleshed out with some detail about you, but edit your privacy settings to make sure that certain private details, such as your telephone number, are not made public. The more active you are on Google plus, the more Google will trust you, resulting in higher search rankings.

When editing your profile, add the websites where your content is hosted to the ‘contributor to’ box. You must then link your website to your Google plus profile, which can be done by providing an email address that links to your website, or by adding some simple code to your website.

Google will then take some time to verify you as the author of the work, but eventually your authorship profile will show up alongside your search listings.

As potential customers, people come to an exhibition or to your office to find the next diamond in the rough, the designer that will understand their business needs and someone with a creative streak.
In one short meeting, or even if they simply visit your stand and you are too busy to talk, how do you make sure that the opportunity to convert them from potential customer to actual client isn’t wasted?
First impressions are important! Often at product launches or industry conferences and exhibitions you get just one chance to make an impact on that prospective client. Scribbling your name and email address on a tea-stained post-it note will get you remembered, but for the wrong reasons! Always be prepared – carry a few business cards on you and regularly top your wallet up.

Prospective clients will shop around at an exhibition and will end up taking a bagful of brochures, leaflets and business cards home with them. We have all done it. The likelyhood is that they will only contact a small fraction of these so the aim is to be as different and innovative as you can so that you are remembered for the right reasons. Avoid having a typical corporate business cards design – aim for something more unique.

The way people do business has changed and as a consequence, business cards have changed too. They used to be standard, the more raised and gilted the lettering; the more important your role in a business, but then they needed more information on them: A logo, your full address, telephone, cell phone number and normally a hook line. Now that people are used to being sent to a website to view your portfolio, you really need to provide three things:

1. A website address
2. An email address
3. A reason to take a look at your website and contact you

So, how do you get the client to contact you first rather than chasing them up?

Be creative, generate intrigue and interest. Have a point of difference! If you’re a designer, show them what you would be doing for their business. If you can’t do it for yourself, why would they hire you?

MiniCards are a great idea. Half the size of a normal business card, they might be little, but they do pack a mighty punch! With a variety of different uses, it’s sometimes tricky to list them all – event cards, name cards, mini business cards, swing tags, gift tags, save the dates, promotional cards and cards to show off your photography or design. Unique in size and shape MiniCards work well with Printfinity, our option to print a different image on every card in a pack. Fan them out and ask people to pick a favorite, fill a giant wine glass with them, attach them to retro sweets, or place them in with customer orders as a cost effective way to brand your products. Printed on thick paper stock and finished with a matte laminate, the cards have a smooth satin feel. They’re smart enough to promote your brand, and a fun way to open up a conversation. You will find that everyone does a double take when they first see a minicard.

MOO Giveaway With Design Reviver

Design Reviver are pleased to be working with the guys at MOO.com in offering a giveaway to win some of their MiniCards and Business Cards! In case you?ve not come across MOO before, they are business card printing specialists, but also love to print greeting cards, MiniCards, stickers, postcards and labels – MOO do it all!

A Little More About MOO

MOO was born from a passion of beautiful, high-quality print and design – they make creating and printing your own unique visions so easy. You can choose one of their business card templates or upload your own artwork to create truly unique, creative products.

Competition Prizes

Grand Prize Winner – 1 lucky winner will win a set of 100 MOO Business Cards AND 100 MOO MiniCards.
Runners Up Winners – 4 runners up will win a set of 100 MOO MiniCards.

How to win

To be in with a chance of winning one of the MOO prizes, all you have to do is leave a comment below and tell us how you would make your business cards stand out from the crowd. Be creative, fun and most importantly unique! If you make us smile you’re in with a great chance of winning some great prizes.
Winners will be selected from the comments below. Please remember to enter a valid email address so we can send you your free stuff.

As web design matures, so do the tools used for web pages. As with any industry there are standards that are widely accepted and used. There are also trends that become popular over time. Modal boxes have recently become a popular tool for Internet marketing websites.

Trends

Internet, network and MLM marketing is big right now. With the recent recession, more people are either out of work or looking to make extra income. This business model revolves around offering expertise or informational products that are easy and cheap to reproduce – to others for a fee. The way to really make money in this type of business to not only increase traffic to your website, but also to convince people to ‘opt-in’ to your email list. This basically gives Internet marketers permission to advertise, instead of spam, a large group of people.

The main reason modal boxes are such a trend right now is that they offer an easy, fast and in your face way to encourage web page visitors to sign up a site’s marketing list.

Modal Box or Window

So what is a modal box exactly? Basically, it is a mini window that comes up when a user visits a website that requires the user to do something before the main page is accessible. They can be used for a variety of purposes – including asking for the user’s personal information, stating emergency or error messages, or to show an item more closely and with greater detail.

Modal vs Pop Up

Of course, the modal box probably sounds very similar to the dreaded pop up boxes scammers and Internet advertising companies are known for. The pop up is such a dirty word in web design that all the Internet browser companies now include features that will block all of them for you.

So, what is the difference between a modal box and a pop up? Technically, they are both miniature windows that ‘pop up’ when you visit a website. However, annoying pop ups are typically used to force advertising onto web traffic or to keep a person at a website longer than they intended to stay. This is why they are so dreaded – the pop ups are distracting, unwanted, time wasting elements of web design.

A modal box, on the other hand, can be welcoming and effective if planned and used to benefit the visitor and not the site owner. For Internet marketers, it is used as a way to encourage visitors to sign up for their email lists. A great Internet marketer then uses these permission based lists to send valuable information to those who signed up. Or a modal box can be used to better display inventory so that customers shopping online can get a real sense of their purchase before committing. Maybe there is an important part of the website that the owner wants to draw attention to? It can also be used to protect a page by requiring a user ID and password before permitting access. A modal box should not pop up randomly and should have purpose.

Design

In order to create a modal box, many users incorporate Javascript, CSS, XHTML and AJAX programming. This means the new web designer will need to have a bigger understanding of design than just basic HTML to pull off a good modal box.

Drawbacks

Of course, user traffic has a limited time span. With statistics stating that the average Internet surfer spends mere seconds on a web page – incorporating a box that requires interaction to go away could mean the website will lose traffic. No matter how well a web designer and site owner justify the modal box – some people will cruise on instead of interacting with the box to make it go away. Some users argue that the modal box is just a fancy upgrade from the pop up and is still undesirable. This is a drawback to using the modal box in your design.

Also, overuse of the modal box on a website will make users naturally compare them to the annoying pop ups of old. The overuse of any design element is unappealing and will affect your site in a negative manner. On top of that, spammers have caught on to the appeal of the modal box and are increasingly using this tool to trick visitors into believing what they offer is more legitimate or interesting. As time goes on, the modal box will become just as offensive as the pop up and something new will be created to fill this need instead.

How do you feel about modals windows how do your feel they are better or worse than traditional pop-ups, please discuss in the comment we would love to hear your perspective.

If you are thinking about pursuing web design as either a career or a hobby, you must be able to do more than simply design a pretty page. Professional web designers are experts in programming and coding as well. The most talented web designers are those that can adequately balance both their creative and artistic sides with their love of technical coding.

As a web designer, there are plenty of different web design standards one must master. The two most important in the industry today are HTML and CSS. What are these methods all about and how much time and money will you need to invest in order to learn them?

What is HTML?

Since the early days of web design, HTML has been the standard for professional websites. It stands for Hypertext Markup Language and can be quite confusing to someone who has no experience using it. HTML is the language, or code, used to edit and position the text, images, frames and other web page elements. If you go to your web browser and select View and then Source – the code used to design that website is available for anyone to see.

Those who have used HTML will tell you that it is not difficult to learn. There are a few basic tags (codes) a designer has to learn and a simple webpage is at their fingertips. The more complex the HTML, the more you can do with a site.

Efforts have been made to dumb down the process even further so that anyone, even those who have no knowledge of HTML, can create their own website. These are typically called WYSIWYG (What you see if what you get) editors. They allow you to create a webpage without using code and the editor assumes what HTML you need and does the work for you. Some software programs now include an option to convert your document to HTML. These are great tools for newbies. Unfortunately, the processes of guessing what code you need breed mistakes and errors in design that can lead to further frustration.

What is CSS

CSS is a newer animal and is not as familiar to beginning web designers as HTML. CSS was created to allow designers to have even more creativity and control over their designs. Today there is more than just one type of Internet browser to design for and this can be tricky and time consuming for HTML designers. These saves users time, effort and most likely money when they are creating sites. Also, CSS encourages less effort by allowing designers to create style sheets. This means when an edit is made to one page, all other affected changes are automatically made. This keeps designers from having to make multiple edits for large, detailed websites.

HTML vs CSS

CSS is not really taking the place of HTML. It is generally used as an enhancement, not a substitute. HTML is still the perfect type of coding for the main structure of a site.

CSS excels when it comes to how a webpage will look. The outward appearance including backgrounds, colors, content and image placement can all be handled by CSS. Anyone who is familiar with the Microsoft Office version of style sheets has a good handle on the purpose of CSS.

While a webpage can certainly be accomplished still only using HTML, CSS allows designers to do things like set different page margins for all sides of a page, overlap words, better position page elements, and set a font for a whole table instead of just pieces. These make all seem like minor adjustments but these CSS tricks free up time for designers to worry more about overall layout, design and navigation.

Training

There are plenty of places where new designers can go to learn both HTML and CSS. If you are a manual type of student, the library has an abundance of tutorial manuals for these techniques. Any establishment that teaches computers classes will more than likely include these basic web approaches as well for the visual learners.

Of course, many a web designer learned their craft by simply jumping in and messing around. If you have the discipline, this hands-on method of learning is not only effective, but free.

With the popularity of today’s world wide web, it seems like everyone is designing a webpage these days. From the free online editors to full blown ecommerce Internet giants, there is a market and need for web design that is not going away any time soon. Whether you decide to take it slow and target small businesses or get serious and starts designing for large corporations, design fundamentals are the place to start your journey.

With little in the way of fanfare the new Mac App Store launched this morning. Only time will tell if it will ever match the success of its big brother the iOS App store but it is safe to say its going to revolutionize the way software is distributed on the Mac at least.

You will probably already be familiar with much of whats on offer here (many of the launch titles are ported iOS apps) but we thought it would still be useful to compile a list of stand out launch titles.  If you think we have missed any please let us know in the comments and we will get them added.

Twitter

Pixelmator

Autodesk SketchBook Express

TextWrangler

Aperture 3

Pixelruler

iSlice

MiniShadow

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.

Choosing a great domain name for a website is a big decision whether its for a personal blog or a brand new business.  It has been estimated that over 184 million domains have already been registered so its becoming increasingly difficult to find a great original name.

Doing its best to help on this front is PCNames.com a starkly simple site that helps you search and discover available domain names.

Check availability

Getting great ideas for domain names only to find they have already been registered can get really frustrating. PCNames simple search interface makes the process a lot less time consuming by quickly displaying results as you type  just like Google instant.

Simple color coding on the results means you can see at a glance if your domain is available in a selection of the most popular top level domains( .com, .net., .org, .info, .biz, .us, .mobi, .name).  Red denotes the domain is taken, blue that its for sale and green that its available. If you hover over any of these a pop up appears that displays a screen shot and the price if its for sale.

The site also keeps all you recent domain search history right on this page so you can you don’t end up searching for the same domains over and over.

Related name suggestions

In addition to the search functionality the site also has a selection of handy tools to help you on your quest to find the perfect domain. The domain generator tool is particularly useful,  just enter one or more keywords and the site generates a list of alternative related domain names. Like with the search function the availability of each TLD is also displayed.

In the example below I have searched for design, the tool suggested some available domains such as the designblog.mobi, designnow.us and thedesign.name. Another useful feature is the Bulk Lookup Tool that allows you to easily check the availability of multiple domains at once.

The site also has a selection of useful embeddable widgets, the widgets work just like the the domain search tool on the homepage so you can use these to add domain searching to your website see an example below.

Conclusion

To sum up PCNames has great set of free tools which are definitely worth taking advantage of the next time you are registering a domain. The instant search result saves time while the bulk availability check and domain suggestions are useful additions.

Our friends over at BuySellAds.com have produced a pretty cool interactive map of the “The Design Galaxy” which we are happy to say features Design Reviver! if you haven’t seen it already you should definitely go take a look.

If you somehow haven’t heard of BuySellAds they are undoubtedly the most popular advertising platform for blogs in the web design and web development field. If you are looking to advertise to designers and developers you should give them a try.

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.