Blogger Review

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/

1st Web Designer – Web Design Blog is written by Dainis Graveris who is the CEO and founder of the blog.  Graveris has knowledge of writing, programming, designing, freelancing, social marketing, managing, and marketing.  He has six years of experience in the web design field and is only twenty three years old.  He is also is the head of a team of experts who also help work on the blog.

This blog was founded in August 2008 by Graveris and it is geared towards web developers, web designers, bloggers and freelancers.  The blog posts talk about tutorials, inspiration, discussion/opinion type articles, roundups, case studies, interviews and design news.  It also keeps the reader informed about upcoming trends and how to deal with them.

Overall I think the actual blog is well organized and contains posts that talk about useful information.  I like the fact that if you want to read about a certain topic, they have it organized into the navigation at the top of the page.  The writing for each of the posts is easy to read and follow, despite a few spelling errors.  I also like that the posts contain a lot of images which is nice because then you can see examples of what they are blogging about.  However it would be nice for the text size to be a little larger because they use so many images in their posts that both start to compete with one another.  Lastly when reading the posts, I find the advertisements on the right side of the page to be kind of distracting since the images are large and colorful.

As a whole, I think the blog is a great, useful tool for web designers, bloggers and freelancers.

Photoshop - Lecture Blog Post

My entrepreneurial idea is to create a website which would cater to students and professionals in design fields (such as architects, architects, engineers, interior designers etc.) and help them design their own portfolios online, using different templates that can be customized.  The site would also allow users to connect with other users and different companies for prospective job opportunities.

Photoshop is not only a program that is widely used by design professionals, but it is also used by web designers.  Design professionals may use Photoshop to edit or enhance images, create different layouts, or draw images from scratch.   Web designers use it for their website layout and possibly editing images or content.  For my entrepreneurial idea, Photoshop would be a necessity for the design of the overall layout of the website. 

Photoshop would help me decide on the layout, color scheme and would also help me edit any other content I would want to upload as well.  It is important to see how the website reads on the page and with Photoshop you can see almost exactly what will appear in the browser once the coding is completed.  You can see if all the images and text line up the way you would like and check all the proportions.  The splice tool would allow me to cut out certain portions of the overall layout so that I can get the exact size of the images that I need.

Photoshop would also be used for the design of the template layouts that clients will be able to purchase.  The templates will be able to work with different color schemes which I have created, but will also give the option to have the client create their own color scheme through the website once it is purchased.   If the client owns a version of Photoshop, they can edit their own content before uploading to their website.

Competitive Analysis

My entrepreneurial idea is to create a website which would cater to students and professionals in design fields (such as architects, architects, engineers, interior designers etc.) and help them design their own portfolios online, using different templates that can be customized.  These design professions do not have many resources for putting up online portfolios that cater to their specific needs and wants.  The site would also allow users to connect with other users and different companies for prospective job opportunities.

http://www.bigblackbag.com/default.asp

BigBlackBag.com is probably the closest portfolio website that I found to my entrepreneurial idea because it caters to photographers, designers and artists.  It also allows the user to customize their own website and gives them their own unique domain name.  The difference between my idea and this website is that my site as stated previously, allows users to connect with one another and also with other professionals for job opportunities.  Another difference is that my site is geared towards both students and professionals and is specifically for design professions.

http://carbonmade.com/

CarbonMade.com is for anyone who wants to create his or her own portfolio.  It is an easy to use site that allows users to upload all their content and customize parts of their online portfolio.  When I looked at some of the sample portfolios, the layouts looked very similar to one another.  Also, each portfolio had “carbonmade” in the domain name.  My website would allow for more customization and would allow users to pick their own domain name.

Overall I found some websites that are similar to my entrepreneurial idea, but none were exactly the same as mine.  BigBlackBag.com and CarbonMade.com both allow users to create their own custom portfolio websites, but neither is just for design professions.  Also, neither site allows users to connect with one another.  However, these sites did give me some ideas of other things that I can include on my website. 

Computer Hardware - Lecture Blog Post

Design professions such as landscape architects, architects, engineers, interior designers etc. do not have any resources for putting up online portfolios either.  My idea is to create a website which would cater to students and professionals in these design fields and help them design their own portfolios online, using different templates that can be customized.

Computer hardware will definitely be needed in order to create this website or any website for that matter.  Websites, especially ones dealing with a lot of graphics like ours, need computers that will be able to handle a lot of this kind of work.  Computers that cannot handle a lot of processes and programs running at once will not only cause many headaches, but also will not work for this kind of business.  There are three computer hardware components that I think are really important with my website portfolio business.

When designing the website, the computers that we will be using should have a lot of RAM.  They will need to be able to handle a lot of programs running at once.  Graphics programs in particular can slow a computer’s performance down a great deal.  The more gigabytes of RAM on these computers, the better off we will be.

Another piece of hardware that the computers should include is a lot of hard drive space.  When designing the actual website layout, graphics software will most likely be utilized for the overall design.  I know from personal experience that graphics files can take up a lot of space on the hard drive. 

The last component of hardware that our computers will need is a really good graphics cards.  Like I said before, this is a very graphics intensive business so a high quality graphics card will be needed for our computers.   

Social Media – Lecture Blog Post

Originally my entrepreneurial idea was to create a website to help landscape architecture students and professionals to put their portfolios online.  However, I realized that other design professions like architects, engineers, interior designers etc. do not have any resources for putting up online portfolios either.  The new idea for the website would cater to students and professionals in these design fields and help them design their own portfolio online, using different templates that can be customized.

Social media sites like Facebook would help get the word out about the website.  On Facebook, we can create a page that promotes the site.  It would have information on what our website has to offer as well as provide some examples of work that has been done using the site.  We could also use Facebook for advertising and have it show up on pages of people who are pursuing these professions.  Facebook could be used to get suggestions from customers, get current news and post about different trends.

We could use Twitter, to help us promote the website as well.  We could create an account for people to follow us and follow others who are current or could be potential clients. With the Twitter account we would be able to share links to show unique websites that were started by using one of our templates.  We would also tweet about different design shows and conferences related to the design professions.

LinkedIn would benefit our clients so they could post their websites that our site help them create.  Potential employers would then be able to see their entire portfolio online.   Our website could become a member on LinkedIn.  This would allow us to post advertisements to promote what our website has to offer.