Here at Envato we’re pretty famous for building a lot of successful blogs, like this one! We’ve done quite a few now, so last year I decided other people might find our techniques and systems useful. Today I’m really happy to announce my new book How to Build a Successful Blog Business which is a step by step guide to doing what we do, and it comes packed with case studies for our blogs including FreelanceSwitch! Continue Reading

Today we’re launching a redesign and refresh of our popular Creattica gallery of inspirational work. The site features almost six thousand items, many of which are just mind-bogglingly amazing. Anyone can submit work for inclusion to the gallery, and we pick the best of the best for showcasing.

Over the years the site has become the premier gallery for business card design and this post is just a taste of some of the more unusual examples we’ve got in the gallery. Scroll down to check it out, and jump to the end of the article to learn about the redesign and some of the new features now available on Creattica.

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Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs and here on the FreelanceSwitch Forums. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

It’s been a busy year here at Envato and over on our marketplaces, we’re finishing it off with a bang! I’m pretty excited to fill you in on 2 new marketplaces, 3 new types of things you can buy and sell, and a dramatic improvement to how you can purchase on the sites. Read on to learn more!

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It’s hard to believe it’s almost a new decade, and with 2010 just around the corner it’s time to get celebrating the holiday season. There’s plenty happening around the Envato network of sites, read on to find out about it all!

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For just over three fantastic years FlashDen has been the jewel in Envato’s crown. It is our longest running and most active community, and thanks to the amazing authors who showcase their work there, has become the largest marketplace for Adobe Flash files in the world with over 8,500 items for sale.

Last week Adobe asked us to change our name and URL so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. We know that the success of our sites is about the community and content, not the names. So here at Envato HQ we’ve been busy thinking up new names and we think we’ve found a great new home for both our marketplace and our Tuts+ blog on Flash.

As of today the two sites now live at ActiveDen and Activetuts+. Continue Reading

From file management to accounting, invoicing to time tracking, there’s a web app for pretty much everything in a freelancer’s life. Over on our sister blog Web.AppStorm you can find a huge roundup of half a hundred web apps freelancers will find useful!

Amidst all those decisions that have to be made, you also have to choose what tools you’re going to use to actually do your job. And the web is both a blessing and a curse in this regard. It’s a blessing in that it gives you a plethora of choices for the different categories of applications. But it can be a curse because there are so many good options to choose from.

What’s a poor, green-behind-the-ears freelancer to do? Well, you can start by letting us whittle down the list a little for you. Separate some of the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You’ll still have find which of the tools below best fit your needs and style, but this is the right place to start.

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If you’re a Mac user you’ll also enjoy Mac.AppStorm’s much shorter list – 12 Essential Mac Apps for Freelancers. Yep it’s app overdose

In the last three years our Envato Marketplaces (FlashDen, ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle and VideoHive) have grown like gangbusters, with big communities, huge libraries of files and lots of activity. So when we set out to redesign them earlier this year everyone on the team knew it was going to be big. What we didn’t realise was HOW big it would eventually get! Today it gives me great pleasure to show you …

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It’s been a hectic 3 days for us here at Envato. We’ve had a massively successful Birthday Bundle (over 5,000 sales in 3 days), lots of giveaways, a fantastic Tuts+ tutorial set up for free download and our first video interview. Here in the office we’ve also been celebrating today with a big lunch and lots of network gaming! With the birthday all wrapped up now though I thought I’d give you a very quick preview of what’s coming up in September…

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One of the best things about working here at Envato is that we have an awesome team of people building, managing, writing, reviewing and working on our sites. Yep, things have come a long way since the early days when there was just a few of us trying to do everything!

Recently our awesome Tuts+ interviewer Emil asked if I minded being video interviewed with some questions put forward by the Psdtuts+ readers. Since no-one really wants to see my enormous head on screen for too long a period of time, I asked my lovely wife and partner in crime Cyan if she’d be in on the interview and we thought we’d put up the video to help celebrate 3 years of Envato.

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It was back in 2006 that Envato first launched with our very first site FlashDen. That means next week we’ll be turning 3 years old! Since web years are much like dog years, by my count that makes us pretty darn old. Given how we’ve grown, we’ve decided that this year it’s time we really kicked our celebrations up a notch. Next week for 3 days we’re going to have a massive sequence of birthday events, read on to find out what’s happening …

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When we started FreelanceSwitch back in April 2007, the site consisted of just a couple of blog posts and an about page. Over time we upgraded the design to v2, added forums, a job board, podcasts, resources like an hourly rates calculator, spun up a Twitter account and of course boosted the number of blog posts!

Today I’m very happy to unveil the latest iteration of FreelanceSwitch which introduces a bucketload of new features including a directory of freelancers complete with search facilities, profile pages for users, unified logins for the forums and the rest of the site, a resource directory and of course a fresh design for the whole site.

Accounts, Profiles and the Freelance Directory

The biggest change in version 3 is that we’re introducing a much more robust user account system. Previously we used to have forum accounts and job board accounts. We’ve now merged the two into a single FreelanceSwitch account system.

There are two types of accounts:

Free Accounts …

If you sign up to a free FreelanceSwitch account you’ll be able to:

• Chat on the forums
• Create a basic Profile page with contact details, description, external URL and a couple of skills tags
• Appear in the Freelancer Directory

Paid Accounts …

For $7 a month you get to:

• Apply for jobs on the job board
• Additional Profile features including extra URLs, extra tags, testimonials and work samples
• Appear at the top of any searches of the Freelancer Directory and have more details shown with a larger profile image

What the Profile Pages look like

You can see a sample profile page that I’ve made for myself:

The New Design

The new design is an evolution of the previous look and retains many of the same elements, just repackaged with a bit of freshness.

Some things you might be interested to note are:

• The whole site from forums to job board to blog has the same unified design now
• We’re pulling in fresh jobs into the sidebar
• We’ve got a fairly unorthodox comment layout which emphasizes big text for readability
• We’re using sIFR to render out the FreelanceSwitch font in our headings. It means a slight lag in page loads, but it just looks so damn neat!
• We’ve added a welcome panel to the homepage to help clients use the site
• The site is designed so it looks like the old site … but newer!

Here’s a little look at how FreelanceSwitch has evolved over the years:

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