To help get you started, here are some great websites for finding freelance work in design, web development, or other closely related creative fields.

WP Hired

If you are a WordPress guru, WP Hired is an excellent site for finding freelance jobs in a wide variety of WP specialties. You filter your job search by region and job category, and search for gigs by keyword. Job categories include design, SEO, copywriting, migration, plugin development and more.

Redditors for Hire

Redditors for Hire isn’t specifically dedicated to design and development freelancers, but there are many gigs posted there that fall into this category.

One of the most desirable things about this subreddit is that the participants do a great job of policing themselves and one another as far as what listings are appropriate or not. This means fewer bogus jobs to filter through. If you join this subreddit, you can browse freelance jobs or put yourself out there as available for hire.

Krop

Krop is a website that contains listings of permanent, temporary, contract, and freelance positions. They focus primarily on creative, design, and technical. Many of the freelance jobs include user experience design, web development, art direction, graphic design, and other jobs related to marketing and media. Visitors can drill down through the available jobs to find ones that are in their region.

iFreelance

iFreelance lists available jobs in a variety of specialties, not all of them related to design or technology. However, in spite of casting quite a wide net, this website is definitely a serviceable one if you are looking for a creative, tech, or design job.

HexiDesign

If your talent leans more towards the creative side, HexiDesign might be a great resource for you. Businesses and individuals post projects that include logo design, business card design, wedding branding, stationary design, and even the design of small websites.

LocalSolo

Local Solo curates job listings that are in your area. However, you can also search for jobs all over the world. A quick glance at their job board as of this writing shows job openings for WordPress developers, graphic designers, photographers, business analysts, copywriters, web designers, and more.

Guru

Guru is another website that features jobs in a variety of categories. However, like many freelance job boards, most of the work offered is in the areas of web design, software development, design, art, and multimedia. Employers offering jobs may pay by the hour or ask a fixed price for their entire project.

Freelancer

Freelancer is one of the larger and more popular clearinghouses of freelance positions. They offer a wide variety of jobs, and there is almost always something available to people who are seeking design and development jobs. Be sure to sign up for their email newsletters, you’ll get lots of great information including access to premium content.

Working Nomads

A digital nomad or location independent worker is somebody who intentionally seeks out remote positions, usually freelance, for the benefits of lifestyle flexibility. Nomads are able to work virtually anywhere in the world that they want, as long as they have an internet connection. Working Nomads serves up a constantly updated list of freelance jobs in the areas of development and design.

Upwork

It doesn’t matter if you are freelancer looking for a few short term gigs to earn some extra money, or something a bit more ongoing, Upwork is definitely a website to consider. When you get work through Upwork, all pay is calculated, handled, and released to you from the folks at the website. This means that you don’t need to track your hours, other than for auditing purposes.

Craigslist

Depending on where you live, you may find a lot of freelance development, design, and media jobs in and around your city on Craigslist. If not, you have the option of exploring freelance jobs in other cities. Just be sure to stick with jobs that have been recently posted and to do your due diligence in investigating anybody you would be working with.

PeoplePerHour

People Per Hour is a freelance job listing curator that features jobs in a variety of tech and non-tech fields. You simply browse through the listings that interest you and send a proposal for the ones you want to pursue. The jobs available include logo design, app development, writing, and eCommerce.

Project4Hire

If you are a web designer, programmer, writer, graphic artist, or have other related skills, bookmark Project4Hire. You can bid on a variety of gigs, follow the bidding on other gigs, and find collaborative opportunities. This website has a global scope, which means lots of available gigs but also lots of competition.

99Designs

99Designs may not be for everybody. If you need reliable sources of income, and have established a presence as a designer or developer, you may be better off spending your energy elsewhere.

However, if you are new to freelancing, you might want to check 99Designs out. They hold design competitions that are driven by actual project requests they receive from companies. You pick the competitions you want to enter, create your designs, and receive feedback from the company in question. If they choose your design, you win the prize money.

The post 10 Sites for Finding Freelance Design Work appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Unfortunately, there are many design elements that are overused, outdated, offensive, or ineffective that designers still insist on using. Sure, sometimes these poorly thought out design choices are the result of clients pushing for them, but the truth is many designers use these elements voluntarily.

If you are guilty of using, or overusing any of the following design elements, please consider retiring them as soon as possible. Web users everywhere will thank you.

Insulting Pop-Ups

There is nothing inherently wrong with using pop-ups as long as you don’t continually pester your visitors with pop ups that crop up over and over again, and as long as you don’t design your pop ups so it is nearly impossible to click out of them. After all, somebody is coming to your website or reading your blog to view valuable content that you are providing for free.

There’s no shame in popping up a request that they sign up for your newsletter, download your eBook, or take some other action. The problem comes when you decide to insult them for opting out. People don’t need to be made to agree that they:

• Don’t care about learning new ways to generate leads
• Aren’t willing to go the extra mile
• Would rather not lead a healthier life
• Like paying too much for beauty products
• Would rather not see the world become a better place

It’s not cute or clever. It’s just offensive. Besides, the average website visitor is smart enough that they won’t be fooled into opting in. If you want to add a clever message for users who opt out of your call to action, do it by designing proper content strategy and saying something that doesn’t make them the butt of your joke.

Skeuomorphic Design

Skeuomorphism is a design style that involves making digital images resemble real life images as much as possible. It can be used in background textures. You’ve probably seen websites with backgrounds that looked like wood grain, leather, or brick. It can also be used in designing icons and buttons.

For example, if you want to make a phone call, the button you tap on your smartphone might look like an actual phone from the 1980s. Skeuomorphism is also used in the function of buttons. If you’ve been on a website and pressed a button and the button appeared to physically move up and down, that’s another example of skeuomorphism.

At one time, skeuomorphism design added value. It gave people who were new to using computers the representation of a real life object to help them understand the function of a particular button. That’s no longer needed. There are also better ways to design web pages than using realistic background textures to create a certain ‘atmosphere’.

Today, skeuomorphism just seems clunky and outdated. Recent web design trends seem to indicate that it is going out of style. Hopefully that is the case.

Sound & Video That Auto-play

There may not be a single web design element that is more widely hated than the practice of playing sound or video when a visitor enters a website. In fact, you could gather a group of people with starkly opposing political, religious, and cultural values, and they would all agree that this practice is irritating and offensive.

Auto-playing sound and video isn’t just rude and intrusive to the person visiting a website. It is also rude and intrusive to everybody around them. The practice also chews up bandwith that visitors may not have to spare. If there is something that visitors really must see or hear, offer it to them with compelling copy, and then let them decide when and if they want to hit play.

Using Sliders

Unlike other items on this list, sliders don’t stand out as being particularly offensive, clunky, or outdated. They are, however distracting an ineffective. They take away the viewer’s focus from what is important (what you can do for them), by getting them to focus on the images in your slider.

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This is not to say that what you are communicating in your slider is not relevant. It’s just that it is not relevant to the visitor who has come to your page in search of specific information. At best, website visitors will ignore the slider altogether and simply complete the action they came to do in the first place. At worst, they will become distracted by the slider and end up taking no action whatsoever. The chances of a visitor consuming all of the images and messages included in a slider, and then answering the CTA that they were led to take to begin with is pretty low.

There are also technical issues that can be problematic when using sliders. The large images and JavaScript used to create sliders can result in slow loading time. For mobile users, this can be a real problem. Since most visitors are mobile users, at least some of the time, it makes sense not of irritate them.

Separate Mobile Web Sites

These are problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, they waste time and bug users, especially if you have to ask them if they are using a mobile device. Second, if you use responsive web design, Google will reward you with better search engine results page rankings.

If you design a separate website for mobile users, not only will you lose that reward, you may also be penalized under Google’s new rules against duplicate content. Finally, mobile-only websites are a turn off to visitors because they associate them with lack of functionality and design that is less than intuitive.

The post The 5 Most Overused Design Elements You Should Retire appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.