This week, I had to work with a team for a study project. We had to build the promotional campaign of our study and the end results have turned out absolutely amazing.

Usually, I work on my projects as a one-man team. However, working in a group or team is an other situation and works completely different. I enjoyed working with this large group, but it also caused some management problems. A lot of files were needed by everyone working on the project, and that wasn’t easy to organize with 16 people in one team.

Until I remembered Dropbox.

Dropbox works like this:

1. Download the Dropbox app
2. Create a folder
3. Invite team-members to your folder via email
4. Your whole team can access/modify/add project files.

You can see the advantages, right? Everyone has full access to the folder, so your whole team can add, modify, download and manage the project files. It works fast and is very useful for any team-project.

Dropbox is the ideal solution. Check it out!

This is a guestpost from Joanna from Webhosting Search.

When you are a web designer and you are really devoted to your profession, you live on the Web. This is quite normal – pros are like that. If you want your life on the Net to be comfortable, you need to find a nice place for you – i.e. a good web site hosting offer where to host your and your clients’ sites.

With tons of offers for business website hosting and for web site hosting in general, there is no reason to complain about not having alternatives to choose between. However, when there are so many options to choose from, the choice isn’t easy.

Sure, you can pick one type of web site hosting with a provider you randomly choose but if you make the wrong choice, migrating your sites later won’t be much fun. This is why it is much better to do some research before you sign up for a web host as you will become aware of what web hosting options that are good for you as a designer.

What are our Options?

Basically, the options for web site hosting are shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, and reseller hosting. In theory, you could choose any of these but in reality shared hosting and reseller hosting are really the best alternatives for you. Dedicated hosting and VPS hosting aren’t to be totally excluded but for a web designer they often aren’t the best alternatives.

Picture by LBhosting

For a Web Designer, Shared Hosting Is a Cheap Alternative

Shared hosting is the most popular type of web site hosting and there is for a reason this. This form of hosting is especially good for personal hosting but for it could also be considered for small business website hosting. Here are some of the features of shared hosting you as a designer can benefit from:

1. Shared hosting is cheap. The low price is obviously one of the great advantages with shared hosting. With monthly fees in the low single digits (i.e. $3-5 dollars a month or even less), shared hosting is pretty much unbeatable in regards to how much, or little, money you will have to spend.
2. Shared hosting is hassle-free. Unlike unmanaged dedicated hosting and reseller hosting, where you are in charge of the administration of your server, with shared hosting you don’t have to deal with configuration of the operating system or the web server. The only thing you administer is your account and your sites.
3. Shared hosting gives you all you need. The fact that shared hosting is cheap doesn’t mean that it is of no use. For a small business site and for almost any personal site (i.e. a portfolio one or a blog) shared hosting is exactly what you need.

You can start with shared hosting. If you notice that shared hosting is a limitation for you, you could consider VPS, which is also a form of shared web site hosting but it offers more (and costs much, much more than shared hosting). However, if you plan to get really serious and if you have clients whom you can resell business website hosting, reseller hosting is a much better option for you.

Reseller Hosting Is Business Website Hosting for Web Designers

Reseller hosting is the best option for web designers that have a large clientele. Reseller hosting is dedicated hosting plus the right to resell the space and bandwidth, making it possible to offer clients a complete package. Here are the advantages of reseller hosting for web designers:

1. Reseller hosting gives you freedom. You get the whole server and administer it the way you like to. Well, if you aren’t willing to be a webmaster on a large scale, this kind of freedom can be a burden.
2. Reseller hosting makes it easier to administer client sites. When your clients’ sites are hosted on your server and you have full control over them, these sites are much easier to administer because you don’t have to deal with third parties (i.e. another web site hosting provider where your clients host their sites).
3. Reseller hosting is a chance for an additional income. With reseller hosting you pay for the whole server and then you sell space and bandwidth to your clients. This is really a way to make $100-200 or more a month from one server. The money might not be a fortune but everything counts.

Reseller hosting is a much better option for a web designer, especially if he or she will use it as business hosting. Still, the risk you need to be aware of is that if you can’t find clients to whom you will be able to sell the web hosting space and bandwidth, you might get stuck with lots of it and you will be paying for something you don’t need.

Grids are used in newspapers and book design, but also on the web. On the web however, grids are used differently. Web designers have a lot of possibilities to use the grid for ordering information and content.

For this reason, I have gathered 9 websites with grids used out-of-the-box to show you what is possible and what works best. Enjoy these websites!

1. Form+Logic is an identity studio whose website uses a nice grid to display their latest clients. By using enough space between the different projects, the layout appeals quiet and relaxing.

2. Max Voltar – the personal blog of Tim van Damme – just had a re-design. The new design features a sleek grid design for the homepage and a very smart sidebar.

3. Ate Bits is the home of three important products. These products are pushed forward by the great use of the grid in this layout.

4. Swish Life Magazine offers a somewhat classical grid, with a lot of content. The colors and whitespace used are perfect for an online magazine.

5. Art in my Coffee features a collection of “Coffee Art” in a graphical rich grid layout. The colors are well chosen and the listed photographs are beautifully designed.

6. These Software developers did structure their website correctly and know the way grids work on the web.

7. Kari Jobe is an Christian singer. The website features a grungy look fitting perfectly in the 3-column grid, which makes the site structured and clear.

8. The Versions website is there to sell the Versions app. All the information needed for potential clients is fit in a black and lovely-looking grid.

9. TracerMedia offers one product, and that’s featured before the fold. Under that, they explain a lot of information about their company in a lovely 5-column grid.

10. Great Works is a webdesign studio located at four locations, and that’s why the 4-column grid really works for this website.

My Communication & Multimedia Design study brings me in contact with a lot of design-related books. Numerous books are ugly, uninteresting and just plain boring. A few however, are interesting enough to tell you about.

Thinking with Type is such book. This book is a critical guide for designers, writers, editors and students who would like something about typography.

Thinking with Type

This book is written by Ellen Lupton, a typography teacher on the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She wanted handbook explaining typography for her students. That is exactly what this book has turned into, a practical design handbook.

The Cover

When my school books arrived, my eye was directly drawn to that small, robust and compact book. The cover is beautifully designed, it’s clear that this book is about typography. Just awesome.

Thanks to ethanbodnar.com for the picture. My camera is broken..

Book Design

Thinking with Type is organized in three main subjects namely letter, text and grid. They both explain different aspects of typography and they do that in style. The typefaces Scala and Thesis are used to put the theory thought in the book in practice right away.

The light shades of yellow, blue and orange makes the design really stand out from the crowd and is really enjoyable. Combine that with the excellent examples, photographs and typefaces that this book is rich and you have one of the best typography books around.

The Content

You can see that Ellen Lupton has gained enough experience from her teacher job to explain all typography aspects in an easy and understandable way. You don’t have to be an experienced typographer to understand what is explained.

After reading this book you will know all the basics about typography. Don’t expect going too deep into the matter, but that is not a problem.

Conclusion

For me, this book is a must have. I browse the book numerous times a week to gain typography knowledge, examples or photographs. The Thinking with Type website is also filled with powerful information and tips.

Purchase the book from the Thinking with Type website. No affiliate link – just a typography book that deserves a spot on your bookshelf.

Just recently, I start picking up posting and writing for DivitoDesign again. The blog has still a large number of unique visitors each day coming from Google, but I am not sure what they are looking for now. Back in the day, that was mainly HTML/CSS related people, but I have the feeling that audience has changed a little.

For this reason, I added a new poll to the sidebar. This poll is about your skillset, mainly because I am interested to see what the visitors of DivitoDesign are looking for on the blog.

If you are browsing the blog, please take the time to vote on the poll. For the RSS readers, please take a moment and drop by on the blog! =)

On my Windows machine I have been working with for the last two years, I have had a program installed that ran all the Internet Explorer browsers on one single machine. I used that to see if my websites were rendering correctly in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.

Today I am rocking a Apple MacBook Pro. Works awesome. When I was searching for a good alternative for browser compatibility on the Mac however, I couldn’t find a good program. So, I decided to go with an online tool.

BrowserShots.org and IPinfo’s NetRender wouldn’t help me out here, because it takes a lot of time to reload the screenshots, which made it hard to solve any layout issues. You don’t want to wait 5 minutes between each change, before you can actually see what happens, right?

That’s when I found out about Adobe’s BrowserLab. BrowserLab allows you to view your layout in different browsers fast and accurate. When you made a change to your website, just hit reload and your website is reloaded in a second.The BrowserLab currently let you check these browsers:

• Chrome 3.0 (Windows XP)
• Firefox 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 (Windows XP & Mac OSX)
• Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 (Windows XP)
• Safari 3.0, 4.0 (Mac OSX)

The only disadvantage is that you need to have an account on Adobe’s website, but registering is free.

So, if you are building websites and have some compatibility problems, please check Adobe’s BrowserLab because it can help you a lot.

Currently, I am up to my ears in the PSD to HTML/CSS conversion work. The client supplies a design that needs to be converted to a valid and cross browser friendly website.

The HTML/CSS template that I have been using has been a success for me; my conversion time is faster than before and the code quality is higher. I’ve released the resource on DivitoDesign for free as well, but that version was a little bit outdated.

All the new and better coding practices I have been experimenting with to create a HTML/CSS template that works properly for any kind of website, have been build in. Time to release the updated version to the crowd.

You can find all the information and explanation regarding the HTML/CSS template by clicking here. To give you a summery:

• Copy the map and use that as your root-folder of your website.
• The CSS, Images and JavaScript folder are already there,
• Open the index and build your website.
• Template uses Blueprint CSS, jQuery, IE7 JS.

Try customizing the template layout, CSS and images to your likings and save a couple backups. When you are used to this system, your HTML/CSS skills will increase and be a lot faster and better.

Version 1.0 has improvements in the following area’s:

• Better CSS commenting
• Added a Favicon
• More basic CSS tags
• Other footer structure

You can download version 1.0 of the HTML/CSS Template by DivitoDesign for free by clicking on the following link.

HTML/CSS Template by DivitoDesign.

Wallpapers are used to display art on your computer’s desktop. This wallpaper is used to give you inspiration, or just a nice design to look at when you start up your computer.

Over the last couple of months, I have been switching between a few wallpapers. They all look beautiful. I have gathered all these wallpapers in an inspirational post by DivitoDesign.

Take a look at the copyright licenses the designers gave to the wallpaper over at the DeviantArt page. Enjoy these wallpapers, but don’t steal.

A new, fresh and free WordPress theme has been one thing I want to develop for DivitoDesign. For a long time, I wanted to re-launch my personal blog, so why not combine these two things? The WordPress theme online on my personal blog stefanvervoort.com will be launched on DivitoDesign pretty soon.

There are still a few things I need to fix for the theme to go public, but expect the theme to go live in a few days.

WordPress theme by DivitoDesign: Sharp Waves

What do you think about the theme?

The most webhosts I have been with were pretty sloppy and did just suck. During the time I was facing problems with my webhost, roughly two years ago, WPWebhost showed up on my radar. They emailed me asking if I was interested to move my sites to their servers. Initially, I thought they were just another new webhosting company, but after doing some research I was convinced in their mission and took the jump anyway.

In the time I have been hosted with WPwebhost, I have tried many aspects of their hosting to see if they are really any good. I’ve always wanted a solid webhost and WPwebhost proved to succeed in any aspect of my wishlist.

In this article, I will explain what you should look at when choosing a webhost yourself.

The Wishlist when choosing a Webhost

Webhosts always promote the hundreds of features that you will receive when ordering a plan with them. Many of these features however, are not needed and necessary for your website(s). For this reason, choosing the host with the largest plans and features will not always benefit you. That’s why you need to make a good selection of those features that you need. Let’s list them.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the number of bytes your have that ‘you can transfer’. Meaning that all bytes transferred from pages, images, videos or anything else to the computer of your visitor is bandwidth. Some hosts try to seduce you with terabytes or unmetered bandwidth, but that is not needed: you will never use it. Of course, when you have a websites that push those numbers of bandwidth you should not choose a shared hosting plan, but look for dedicated hosting.

Recommended is to choose a plan with enough bandwidth that gives you the possibility to grow. A normal blog or website (with around 500 pageviews a day) usually only push a couple gigabytes a month. Try choosing something that is around 30 to 50 gigabytes transfer, as that will allow you to start other websites in the future.

Recommended: 50 GB

Web Space

You can see webspace as the hard-disk space you have available on your computer. Usually, not more than a few gigabytes are needed to provide you with enough space to host multiple websites. For example, 10 websites generally only cost you 1 gigabytes of space, so don’t get seduced by hosts offering you 100+ gigabytes. You just don’t need that.

Recommended: 5 GB

Add-on Domains

Many plans out there try to limit the number of sites, and therefore only allow one (or very few) domain names. If you are looking to publish multiple sites, the number of domains you can add to your plan is important. Depending on the number of domain names, usually 10 add-on domains per account is plenty to deal with.

Recommended: 10+ Add-on Domains

Control Panel

A control panel for shared plans is where you can control anything that happens on your website. Usually, you can add MySQL databases, add email addresses, add domains and a lot more, so it’s important to have a control panel that is easy to work with. Cpanel is the control panel I feel most comfortable with. Most webhosts give you the possibility to sneak peak in the control panel, so be sure to check it out before ordering.

Recommended: Cpanel

Other important features

How many email addresses are you looking to use? Usually, the maximum is around 10, however, many hosts offer unlimited email addresses. That way you can create plenty of email addresses for every site you build.
Same goes with MySQL databases, you can never have enough. It is recommended to use a new database each time you build a new website, so try to find a host that – at least – offer you 10 databases.

Recommended: unlimited email addresses
Recommended: 10+ MySQL databases

What about service and support?

There comes something that is very important also. What service do they offer when you get stuck? What about the time they need to reply to your email? Do they have a phone number that you can call anytime?

When something happens (like a server fail), it is important that your webhost help you out immediately. Your website is your business, so getting back online is needed as soon as possible. Your webhost should help you with that right when something happens. Before you can see how the support team react if something happens (you aren’t signed up yet, right?), you should test them.

“Your-host Sucks”

When people are not satisfied with the services of a webhost, they will comment about that. Google will help you search for these reactions. Try searching for “the-name-of-your-potential-host Sucks”. Don’t forget the quotes (“”). The number of results you will get will indicate the number of people that have bad experiences with your potential webhost.

Servers Status

To see if your webhost is accurate and is fair about the 99.999% uptime guarantee, look for a servers status page. This page will give you a direct look at the status of the servers and how long they have been online.

Support Forums

Browsing the support forums of your webhost will give you a good indication of how fast and how accurate the support team answers questions from (potential) clients. You can also ask them a few questions yourself, to see how fast and good they are.

Money Back Guarantee

You should always pick a webhost that offers – at least – 30 days of money back guarantee. In this time, you can check the performance, the quality of the support and everything in general. If you don’t like their services, just ask for your money back.

DivitoDesign’s Recommendation

Like I’ve told you in the intro of this article, DivitoDesign (along with my other sites) are hosted on WPWebhost for two years now. During this time, I have tested many aspects of their hosting to see if I could recommended their plans to you.

I believe I can recommend you WPWebhost. Remember, my experiences will not always be an indication of how happy you will be with WPWebhost, as each situation will be different.

The “freedom” plan that powers DivitoDesign offers 50GB of webspace, 500 GBs of monthly bandwidth, 50 add-on domains, unlimited email and MySQL databases and a 100 days money back guarantee for only 5$ a month. With the coupon code divito30, you will receive an additional 30% discount on any plan, which will get you the plan for only $3,50 per month (yearly payment).

WPWebhost is not only a WordPress related hosting website, but their plans can be used for almost any kind of site. Their support team can help you with a lot more. I’ve asked questions on PHP errors and databases problems and they answered them accurate.

For all of these reasons, I highly recommend WPWebhost.