Smartlife

If you’ve got a design project in mind, going directly to a freelancer is often the best choice. While other options, such as crowdsourcing, are available, a good freelancer will be able to work with the ideas you have for your project and can meet the exact specifications you need. Furthermore, the act of choosing a freelance designer and the tasks that go with it can help you clarify what you want from you project — just looking through a portfolio can offer a wealth of ideas.…

If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of crowdsourcing design work, check out this post and then zip on back.

Since first reading Sean Johnson’s excellent post on how to crowdsource designs last April, I’ve had the experience of running several design contests. 99designs has been my preferred venue, but there are others out there such as crowdSPRING and LogoTournament.com.

So what has my experience taught me? Here I share:

1. Talent hub. If you need…

When you’re putting together a blog, outsourcing some of the writing is a good place to start. But you can outsource far more — from the actual setup and design of your blog, to SEO and marketing, there are a wide range of blogging professionals ready to help you. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of 50+ blog service providers — browse through their sites, look at their portfolios, and see which professional fits your blog’s needs.

If you’re trying to build an online presence for yourself or for your business, you almost certainly have asked this question: “Who will make the website?” Often one of the most difficult parts about building a website is quite simply finding someone to build it. There are definitely a lot of web developers on the Internet. So many of them in fact it’s actually quite difficult to figure out whom to hire.

Last week, Smartlife wrote a review of CSSRockstars and found that there are plenty of other HTML/CSS conversion companies out there worth a look — for example, XHTMLizers, XhtmlMagic, PSDChopstick, W3 <MARKUP/>, and many others.

Given the large number of companies who perform HTML/CSS conversion as a service (i.e., transform website designs into hand-coded markup), it’d be a challenge to narrow the playing field down to just one that meets everyone’s unique requirements across the board.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a review of 99designs, which hosts an online designer marketplace where you can crowdsource your design needs such as logos, graphics, website designs, and business cards. One question that came to mind while reviewing 99designs was, after you receive your new website design, then what? I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to spend the time coding it myself. Thankfully, this is where HTML/CSS conversion companies come in handy — they take your web design and transform it into a static, hand-coded HTML/CSS markup.