Here are the winners for the 1st Annual Design Awards and we look forward to seeing more of these in the future! Congratulations to all the winners – awesome job!  :)

Best Website Design (NonFlash)

Congratulations to Petrol!

Best Logo Design

Congratulations to Denis Wong!

Agency of the Year

Congratulations to Petrol, Chief Executive Officer Alan Hunter!

Best Website Design (Flash)

Congratulations to Le Pressing

Best Product Packaging Design

Congratulations to Chykalophia!

Best Book Cover

Congratulations to TL Price Freelance!

Best Self Promotion

Congratulations to TwentySix Digital!

Best Poster/Billboard Design

Congratulations to 19Marks Design!

Best Music Album Cover Design

Congratulations to Debaser!

Best Flyer / Newsletter Design

Congratulations to Nickeline Design!

Best Digital Art

Congratulations to Steve McGhee Freelancer!

Best Movie Poster Design

Congratulations to Empire Design!

Innovation in Design

This one is wicked cool, click the link on the image.  Congratulations to Art Machine!

Recently we’ve been searching out software solutions, tips and research material for successful email campaigns and email marketing.

While doing this, we found some good sites to go to for designing tips, variances across email clients, good testing and test plans etc – and I thought I would share them with you here.

Now this isn’t the be all and end all, but it’s just some of the highlights we wanted to share.

CampaignMonitor

CampaignMonitor has a good resources section.  They not only give you guides to CSS support by email client but also some inspiration as well.  Some of these articles are really good, but seem to be based more around using their service.  So if you are looking for a place to not only get some good tips but also a place where you can send from, you should check out CampaignMonitor.  The prices are reasonable – we use them from time to time and have never had a single problem with this site.  The reporting as well as testing is also well worth the package.

MailChimp

MailChimp is another really good place to go for resources and services.  I personally haven’t used them, but I have heard nothing but good about them.  Their resource section is very detailed and quite handy to have.  They have guides in .pdf format and it’s not just about their services but also about things that you should know as far as “breaking into the business”

JayMail.net

I came across Jay when doing research on this – his site is full of articles, tips and all sorts.  The agency is based in the UK and run by Jay Chambers.  You can sign up for his newsletter (which I would suggest) to get previous posts on really good articles on how to get started and how to continue and build your email marketing and email campaigns.

I can’t tell you how helpful his articles and advice have been and Web Tips Magazine hopes to snag some of his free time to do an article to grab some of his genius-ness for all of our readers.  I highly recommend  Jay as a superb resource of information.

I also came across some specific software solutions that I would like to share, that I think are pretty cool too.

Postmark

Postmark was nice.  You can host your services right there with them and get your tracking statistics and everything.  They offer the hosting with them through RackSpace so it’s an all-in-one stop, depending on the needs of your campaign.

SendGrid

SendGrid was another good one.  This has a little bit more to offer such as incorporating Google Analytics, good reporting on bounces and spam as well as scalability.  Pricing is a little different on this package since you get the extra features, but it is definitely worth a look.  The downfall is that on top of this monthly cost, you also have the cost of your server as well as any emails you send outside of your allowance.

ActiveCampaign

In the end, we decided to go with ActiveCampaign.  They offer 2 different solutions on pricing and that is HOSTED and DOWNLOADED.  With a variety of add-ons such as Spam Filter Checks, RSS Triggered Emails, Subscriber Date Based Emails and Email Templates Bundle. The list of features is very impressive with this software and you can contact them for a link to the demo that shows you in more depth some of the automation, reporting and over-all use of the application.

Other Information

I’ve stumbled on to a few good places on checking on Spam rules and how to avoid getting your emails marked as Spam as well.  Some suggestions from around the web would be

• To make sure that your Image to Text ratio is not too high
• If you are sending an HTML email, make sure the Title of your HTML matches the subject line of your email you are sending
• Avoid too many uses of the words “Click Here”, “Buy Now”, “Free”, “Why Pay More”
• Avoid using the colors Bright Red and/or Green
• Avoid using lots of exclamation points
• Avoid using all caps
• Using the double opt-in is another good way of keeping your emails out of the spam filters (double opt-in is when someone has requested to receive information from your site and receives an email to click to confirm that they in fact want to receive your information)
• Use your company name, address and phone in the body of your email
• Using the AB Testing is another good way to deduce what works for your campaigns (AB testing is where you would come up with 2 concepts of your email and send a percentage of each email to your subscribers to see which email – content included – is your most successful)
• I personally also test by sending my email to my test email clients first to see if they will be picked up (aol, gmail, yahoo, hotmail) – if they show up in your Spam box or marked as Spam, you know there’s some things in there you should work on before sending out your email so you don’t end up black listed
• Make sure that you don’t send out too many emails to the same email client to quickly as this will be sure to get your emails flagged as spam

This is a good web address to find some rules about Spam – some of them are pretty hard to understand for a non-script type person like myself, but I wanted to share it just in case.  If your still unclear about Spam, there is some Spam filtering software you can get to try and help run your emails up against.  Here’s a link to a review site that goes through some of them for you to check out yourself.

A good rule of thumb as well, is to keep checking your IP address hasn’t been black listed.  Here are some of the sites we check on a regular basis

• http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
• http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
• http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup

- you don’t have to use just these, there’s a host of sites out there to check your IP address against.  You can always Google it if you want to find alternatives to the links we’ve listed here.

A general rule to use is that no matter what – 20% to 30% of your emails are going to be picked up as Spam regardless to how clean your content is.  But the majority of the research that I found is that if you use the word “click” in an email – roughly 70% of your emails will end up marked as Spam.

Have any suggestions?  Please feel free to share any others for our readers so they can make the best most informed decision for their Email Marketing solutions and tips.

Summer is finally here and it’s about time! The time of year we’ve all been desperately waiting for – summer fun, friends, family and good times! WebTips Magazine is all about that and we’ve called on our friends from Flickr once more to provide a little inspiration for us and in some cases reflection.

Have a gander and tell us which one is your favorite or you can even send us some of your favorites to include in this post.

The winners of the MOJO-Themes.com giveaway have been announced!

An article posted on April 30th interviewed MOJO-Themes.com, the guys were nice enough to sponsor a contest in which they were giving away $10 free credit to use at their site. A special thanks to them for allow our readers to take part in the contest and another special shout out to all our readers who entered!

Winners will receive their $10 credit to their accounts at Mojo-themes.com today.

Winners are

• Caseycub
• kishoremylavarapu
• WPCool
• vegapunk
• davidould
• jonatanfroes
• unleashedideas
• PsyCore
• tigerthemes
• robbydesigns

  Congratulations to all the winners!

This week we decided to change location of our author interview and so we slid very slowly to the left a little to another Envato marketplace, arguably the largest of their network of websites that sell digital goods, ActiveDen. “FlashDen” as it was previous called (Envato had to change the name due to pressure from Adobe who own the ‘Flash’ trademark) has been a very successful site since launch. Selling every kind of component, pre-made flash websites and animation plus some excellent flash based solutions, ActiveDen is the jewel in Envato’s crown and who better to interview than none other than FlashJunkie. A strong community member, reviewer and author, he provides us with an excellent chance to see the process from both sides of the fence.

FlashJunkie managed to squeeze an interview in to his busy days of writing action script, designing the UI of his next projects and skipped a few reviews (joke!) to sit down for a few moments.

Hey Jonathan, you are very welcome. Well, as we have already established my name is Jay but I am widely known online as ‘FlashJunkie’ a name which I plucked out of the air when signing up to ActiveDen in April 2007 (or FlashDen as it was back then) I chose this name because ever since I opened Flash for the first time, I was hooked.

I found Flash in 2007 when after stumbling from dead end job to dead end job I decided I wanted to do something fun for a living, so without so much as a scrap of knowledge on anything to do with design or programming I applied for a website development position at a local web development firm. I still to this day don’t know how I got the job but I’m glad I did, on my first day I was sat down in front of a PC with Flash 8 installed on it, I was given an hour’s rundown of how flash works from a colleague and a folder full of tutorials, followed swiftly by my first project and a 4 week deadline. I worked hard, hit the deadline and haven’t looked back since.

A few months later I found ActiveDen, I signed up and for a few months I stayed in the shadows, checking how things worked and using existing files to get an idea of what was widely accepted as good design, I started uploading a few truly dreadful files and over time as my knowledge improved so did my files and their designs.

After being given a reviewers position I decided that I could go it alone so in January 2009 I quit my job and became a freelancer, life has never been better.

As for my files and what I have in store for the future, I have 2 files to be released soon, one is quite a generic file but the other is something truly unique and something I hope will really take off!

Red Steel XML Website Template – By FlashJunkie – preview here

Yes indeed there has, well to be perfectly honest Jonathan, I am a Flash developer through and through and I very rarely code any HTML or CSS so I haven’t really been keeping up with the latest other than the nasty goings on between Apple and Adobe with the whole Flash to iPhone thing. I have always been a fan of Apple products because they stand for what most web designers are all about, top quality design and functionality, but my iPhone savings jar just turned into an android phone savings jar, what Apple are doing to the Flash community is wrong.

Thank you, I personally think that there are a lot more authors that could better define the word ‘great’ but I’m not one to refuse a compliment. Yes, I’m a fulltime freelancer and I am one of the longest employed reviewers at Envato, the earnings from this position form the foundations for my income, I try to earn enough from reviewing to cover all the necessities and then any freelance work and commission earnings from sales pay for the fun things in life.

As a few people may know, especially my Skype contacts, my hours are very irregular, you can usually still find me online at around 5am, so I have plenty of time to get things done and still find time to spend with my beautiful girlfriend and my family.

iTweet by FlashJunkie – Preview here

Yes, I’m looking forward to upgrading, I WAS very much looking forward to playing with the iPhone packager but we all know what’s happening there. Instead I’m looking at some of the smaller features, in particular the ‘Code Snippets’ feature. As I am sure is the case with all other web programmers I am forever re-using and adapting code, so having a panel that holds snippets of code for loading XML, creating a menu or aligning objects to the stage etc, will come in very useful.

My inspiration for new projects usually comes from inside my head, I often have ‘eureka’ moments and usually at the most inconvenient of times, I can be out walking my dog or perhaps out shopping and wham I have a great idea for something and have to rush home before I forget about it. As for design I like to try new things, design has been the one thing I have really struggled with as people who have followed my work for some time will know. However I think I am at a point now where I can confidently design something and be happy with it.

I’ll keep this answer short and sweet,

• Learn AS3
• Learn PV3D
• Learn to drive
• Gold ‘Paw’ (note from editor – Envato marketplace authors receive “paws” by colors dependent on their sales)
• Launch my website (3 years building sites for other people and I still haven’t got around to building one for myself!)

XML Slideshow/Banner Rotator (XML Delay + More) by FlashJunkie – Preview here

I think I can safely speak for every single Envato reviewer or employee on this one. Working for Envato is a true pleasure, we are so well looked after and I hope to be able to continue working for Envato for a long time to come.

The only bad thing that comes with being a reviewer is sometimes when we reject files people take it personally. I personally think that authors should take a rejection as a reason to improve. After all the better the file is the better the sales are. Rejection in a strange way, is a good thing.

As we know ActiveDen recruits new authors daily trying to create and sell files. It can be difficult at first to get your files accepted – is there any strong advice or guidelines you can supply that may help them out?:

The first thing new authors should do is read the upload instructions, you would be amazed how many files are uploaded incorrectly.

There are many things that will help a new author get a file approved, I wrote a blog post for ActiveDen a while ago which explains what the reviewers look for and I think it’s really helpful for all authors, not just new ones. Here is a link: http://blog.activeden.net/resources/tips-tricks/get-approved-first-time-every-time/

Jay’s Workstation

Well Jay, we’ll let you get back to your review queue before the mob linches you – thanks so much for taking time out of your day to help inform our readers and fans of your work!

Thank you for the interview Jonathan, it was a pleasure and thanks to everyone who has read this to find out a little more about me. If you like what I do on ActiveDen be sure to follow me there or come and chat to me on twitter – @FlashJunkie.

As the summer holidays are approaching, most people will be sitting down to plan how they want to spend their vacation time. Web Tips Magazine has come up with some of the top vacation past times. Would you like to go on a cruise, take the fishing boat out, get out that classic car and dust her off, or even to the extreme – to travel to Europe and see some of our World’s History. Of course there is always the typical taking the family to Disney, and the not-so-typical ones, like getting out your telescope and seeing how far it will reach. What ever you might decide to do, we hope that these visual aids will give you some ideas – provided by some very talented photographers from Flickr.

The template and theme market isn’t short of some small and big players pushing their goods at discount prices with exceptional quality, in fact it seems that every month we see a new website offering something different. Lately however, we have been following a new start-up company that looks very promising – MOJO-Themes.com.

If you buy or sell HTML templates, wordpress, tumblr or magento themes then you will no doubt be aware of MOJO-Themes.com. With an exciting website design, improved viewing and buying experience than most other marketplaces, and a growing collection of some awesome products at crazy low prices, they are truly placing the MOJO back in to sites on a daily basis!

The MOJO crew managed to sit down with us and go over some insightful questions and then, offered 10 of lucky our readers a FREE $10 credit – read on for details!

First off, we just wanted to say thanks for opportunity to be interviewed on your site. It’s always humbling for us.
MOJO-Themes.com is a buy / sell marketplace for themes and templates. From popular CMS platforms to HTML templates to email templates, our marketplace is growing everyday with new items.

We look forward to adding new, innovative themes for WordPress but we’ve seen great strides in other platforms like Tumblr and Magento. We’d love to set the standard on quality themes in that space.

MOJO Themes is the brainchild of Mojoness, Inc. a startup out of Utah, which was founded by JR Farr and Brady Nord.

Our strengths are rooted in our pasts. We have both been anxiously engaged in the evolution of these online platforms. When it comes to moving forward we’ve actually come up with new ideas that we’ll unveil right out of the gate and some we’re still working out the details.

These ideas are actually what we found by simply contacting designers/developers and asking them what they would like to see in a marketplace setting. I mean after all, our goal is to build a marketplace for them.

One feature we’re most excited about is our brand new collaboration program. Recently, we introduced the very first collaboration program, which will finally unite designers and developers! It’s called JOINT FORCES. We think these features will really open doors for some seriously talented designers and developers.

Another feature we included in our marketplace was making it easier for our sellers to get their money whenever they want it. Not having to wait until the end of the month comes around.

It’s your money; take it when you want it. They would have to have a minimum balance and there is small transaction fee associated to this feature. (*NOTE – If you request money within the first 3 days of the month it’s of course FREE to request payouts. This only relates to requesting money anytime during the month.)

Building Mojo Themes was unlike anything else we have built before. We both have built our own fair share of sites, but we found this to be the most complex by far. For example, there are many security concerns that had to be addressed. The site is unique in its abilities to pull and push cash in a variety of directions.

In addition to that, we really felt it was important when buying items that the user had options. We built in a shopping cart, which is capable of using pre-deposited funds (which will buy the items at a discounted price) or simply using a Buy Now process.

Also, it’s tough to launch a marketplace without having items to sell. We ran the “March Padness” contest to entice sellers to upload with MOJO. The top 3 sellers with the most uploaded items won an Apple iPad. That helped us with our launch and was fun to create some buzz.

In the end, the real challenges were in thinking through every possible outcome that a user may encounter.

Apollo HTML Template – Click to preview and purchase from just $15

What part of your start-up process do you feel has been the most rewarding experience so far?:

Well to be honest, giving away 3 Apple iPads to our users has been very rewarding. As we said ran a contest for the month of March called “March Padness”. The contest was to give away 3 Apple iPads to the top three users with the most accepted items.

Honestly, when people notice the TRUE hard work that went into creating this marketplace. We hope our passion and dedication with MOJO Themes continues to shine through.

In other words, it’s nice to have something to show for all that hard work!

We see Mojo Themes being a real leader among distributors of themes and site templates. The business is built to be very scalable.

Many would answer this question saying that they are going to be the number one in the market or that they are going to kill their competition, or any other over-exuberant rant. Of course we seek to be the best at what we do, beyond that we also seek that Mojo Themes is respected as a leading company in quality design and code.

We also hope to use MOJO Themes as a stepping-stone into new marketplace niches and create new ventures that can add value to current markets that interest us.

Ingenious WordPress Theme – Click to preview and purchase from just $28

The design of MOJO Themes was a crucial element that we felt we had to get perfect! (Literally) In a lot of ways we are perfectionists and therefore the site is constantly “under construction” in our eyes.

For the design, we decided on bringing in Richard Fang as our partner, who we feel has delivered time after time with quality work. For the most part the design began with a blank canvas. We knew we were going to be working with our fuzzy little monsters and that the site should reflect what we interpret as “their” world.

We went through the process of design with revision after revision until we accomplished the look and feel that we absolutely loved! Even our seasoned design partner Richard was overheard as saying, “wow you guys pushed the creativity to whole new level for me!” This is the level of innovation that was and is important to us.

We knew that in order to attract the world’s top designers to upload their work on MOJO Themes the site had better meet or exceed their expectations.

Signal 8 WordPress Theme – Click to preview and purchase from just $26

With other marketplaces there can be a huge waiting time for the review process, do you do things differently when an item is submitted, and how do you gauge quality on the site?:

Yes, we completely understand this problem that most people have. We have worked really hard to make sure that we either accept or reject a theme within 48 hours.

Right now we are young and hungry enough to keep up with the current pace. It is very important to us as we grow that we continue putting our customers first.

Trying to gauge the quality of a uploaded item is the root of why the review process takes time. There are so many elements that come into play. We have a standard process we follow but there’s really no method to our madness. We recently wrote a post on our site to help our sellers get their items approved.

Absolutely, we love to see diversity in our marketplace.

We have noticed that there is a trend of people loving the clean business looks lately, but we strongly encourage a variety of tastes and niches.

We feel that in the design world, what one person may think is beautiful another might not like at all. And obviously, the trendy designs are what are selling so of course we will be more than happy to have them.

Altered Perspective Tumblr Theme – Click to preview and purchase from just $9

How about instead of an elevator pitch we do a cool giveaway to everyone that’s stuck around this long

Here’s how to win:

• Tell us your MOJO Themes username in the comments below.
• Follow @mojo_themes at Twitter
• Then Tweet this:

Win a $10 credit to use at MOJO Themes (@mojo_themes & @webtipsmagazine contest) RT to enter!

10 winners will be randomly selected and listed here next next wednesday! So get Tweeting!

On to our Fifth and final free wallpaper give-away to celebrate Earth Day!. The official Earth Day website lists events going on around the world, lists core issues that we face and action being taken to improve the situation. They also have “Sign the Earth Day 2010 Climate Declaration” which they are hoping will encourage congress to create a far more comprehensive climate bill.

Our fifth and final free wallpaper for iPhone, iPod and iPad is U.S.A. Here’s a scary fact, although the USA accounts for approximately 4% of the total World population, in 1990 is was responsible for over 36% of the greenhouse emissions – the U.S.A. is the World’s biggest polluter. Maybe not a great surprise to many, but something that we all need to take action about and do our best to reduce. Although countries such as China and Mexico have in recent years reduced the number of manufacturing facilities, it’s still a huge issue. The U.S.A. is also still not part of the Kyoto Protocol which was setup and agreed to by many large nations as a policy for reducing waste and emissions because President Bush stated it would harm the US economy – shame really as it’s already not doing great – at least we could of been working towards reducing our harm to the Earth in the same amount of time. Here’s looking towards a more Earth friendly US in the coming years!

The US contains 4% of the world’s population but produces about 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions. By comparison, Britain emits 3% – about the same as India which has 15 times as many people.

- BBC: The US and climate change (2002)2

iPad Wallpaper – Earth Day Wallpaper 5

Click here to download both the iPad and iPhone / iPod Touch wallpapers

iPhone / iPod Touch Wallpaper – Earth Day Wallpaper 5

Click here to download both the iPad and iPhone / iPod Touch wallpapers

On to our fourth free wallpaper give-away to celebrate Earth Day TODAY!. The official Earth Day website lists events going on around the world, lists core issues that we face and action being taken to improve the situation. They also have “Sign the Earth Day 2010 Climate Declaration” which they are hoping will encourage congress to create a far more comprehensive climate bill.

Happy Earth Day! Our fourth free wallpaper for iPhone, iPod and iPad is Britain. Although active in establishing good practices over the past few decades, Britain has in recent history seen an explosion of it’s population which has resulted in more manufacturing, more waste, larger demands for energy production and of course more cars and more road building – to the effect of destroying what has been beautiful countryside, something Britain is famous for. Although Britain has recently introduced good measures for waste recycling from homes, there is so much to do and change before it can truly start to save it’s long heritage of green and pleasant pastures.

Britain risks losing its “fabulous inheritance of landscape and wildlife” as the Government allows developments – including its flagship eco-town projects – to spring up across the countryside, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has warned.

- Telegraph.co.uk

iPad Wallpaper – Earth Day Wallpaper 4

Click here to download both the iPad and iPhone / iPod Touch wallpapers

iPhone / iPod Touch Wallpaper – Earth Day Wallpaper 4

Click here to download both the iPad and iPhone / iPod Touch wallpapers

ThemeForest.net is a wonderful place full of some very talented designers – anyone who has visited or uses the site will be familiar with todays interviewee – Ivor Padilla (AKA ivor / iPad) – Ivor produces some exceptionally clean and usable themes and templates on theme forest but has a very interesting background – he’s a trained lawyer! Yup, you heard that right, we have a designer, coder, lawyer, insurance broker and musician – now that’s a renaissance man if I ever met one.

Yes, I’m a 27 years old guy from Venezuela, I’m a lawyer and an insurance broker besides the Web Designer profession and I play guitar and drums too.

Meedoo WordPress – By Ivor Padilla – preview here

I’ll be honest with this question, I don’t have 10 years of experience or anything like that, before web design I was good in photoshop retouching pictures and stuff, but I was attracted by Nettuts, every single trick of CSS and the way I code my HTML lines was learned from Jeffrey Way’s screencasts, I don’t really know how this guy does it but he’s just a great teacher I’m really grateful for it.

iMaxell Premium Corporate Theme by Ivor Padilla – Preview here

I love to do freelance work, but sometimes the clients may be a real pain in your back nonetheless that’s not considered as a real challenge, as a freelancer you have to learn to deal with that.

vCard Professional Portfolio by Ivor Padilla – Preview here

Well I often see tons and tons of websites before I can start a project I use Little Snapper (Mac App) to catch my favorites parts of every site to inspire my designs, however I never try to copy any element though, I’m quite strict with that.

Stratocaster Tumblr Theme by Ivor Padilla – Preview here

Professional: Increase my sales in ThemeForest, recently Jordan and Drew (Envato’s Support Staff) chose me as one of the ThemeForest Community Moderator (Editor: congrats dude!) and one of my goal is to be as good as possible also I want to get my own office, start my studies to get the specialist in civil law degree.

SleekInColor Business Template by Ivor Padilla – Preview here

Well I’ll be humble with this one I don’t see me as one of the top authors, I need to work harder to achieve this but definitely I’ll try my best to release more quality items.

Meedoo Corporate Template by Ivor Padilla – Preview here

I have an upcoming theme called Boldr, this one will ace a strong focus in the black “color” and with bold elements.

Mac and PC I’m running a 22” iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a Desktop PC Lenovo Dual Core 2.60 GHz 4GB RAM (I’m planning to get a Macbook Pro later this year)

ThemeForest, Twitter, Gmail, Google, PayPal

Ivor’s Workstation

Ivor relaxing by the pool with a friend

Ivor, thanks for the opportunity to find out more about you – great interview and some awesome products – I truly hope this encourages some of our readers – you are a great inspiration!

Keep in contact with Ivor

Twitter
ThemeForest