Linkswitch #61: Presentations, Balanced Life, Too Much Work

22 Tips: Designing an Effective Slide Deck Presentation

Every once in awhile an opportunity arises for freelancers to present their work or expertise to peers and prospective clients. Agreeing to take part is at best a fantastic chance to network, a way to exchange ideas and insights or to pick up contacts that will give you work. At worst, it is a terrifying and overwhelming commitment.

The Pros and Cons of Art-Directed Blogs

Art-directed blogs (sometimes also referred to as "blogazines") are making strides in the blogosphere.

Looking at them, it can be tempting to jump on the bandwagon and start creating your own art-directed posts. But it's not that straightforward.

There are a lot of pros and cons to designing each and every post on your blog.

Below, we've covered the most important advantages and disadvantages to creating custom designs for your blog posts and we also included a collection of some great examples.

5 Steps to Creating a Balanced Life

In today's "hustle and bustle"world, it is getting more difficult to separate our professional lives from our personal time. People in this era (more than in any other time before) find themselves taking work home and spending late hours on their laptops. Most of these hard workers justify their misplaced time with their large salaries. However, they fail to see the costs of such a distorted work-life balance.

Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone?

As Web craftsmen, we are living in exciting times today. The frenetic pace of evolution in our industry has created remarkable opportunities for our work. Our established set of design and coding practices is more comprehensive than it has ever been before. Our designs are becoming more usable, our code more scalable, our layouts more responsive. In fact, just by comparing our design processes to those from a decade ago, it's remarkable to observe how quickly we've developed and honed our craft over all these years.

When You Freelance, How Do You Know You've Been Fired?

It's easy to figure out you've been fired from a staff position. Either your boss or a human resources person has told you to your face, you are met at your desk and walked out, or security guards drag you out, one on each arm and leg. The hints are fairly obvious. When you freelance, it takes time to realize you have been fired and will no longer be working for that client. More often than not, there are no signs.

17 Ways to Grow Your Blog From Top Bloggers

Do you want to grow your blog? Are you looking for new ways to attract and retain more readers? We asked the finalists of our Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest for their best tips on how to grow your list of blog subscribers.

Here are their best tips. I think you'll agree there are some excellent ideas here.

5 Common Blogging Problems, and How to Overcome Them

Blogging provides anyone with the opportunity to publish content and the potential to make money. Because of this, there are hundreds or thousands of new blogs launched every day. Unfortunately, there are some significant challenges that most new bloggers face, and in many cases the challenges are significant enough to lead the blogger to give up.

What to Do When You Have too Much Work

We all strive to be there""we want to have so much work we never really have to advertise or cold call or do much marketing ever again. We want enough clients so that we can pick and choose the best ones with the best projects. But what happens when you actually make it there?

11 Happiness Paradoxes to Contemplate As You Think About Your Happiness Project.

As I've worked on my happiness project, I've been struck by the paradoxes I keep confronting. As physicist Niels Bohr said, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

One of my Secrets of Adulthood is "The opposite of a great truth is also true" "" and I try to embrace these contradictions: