Feeds are in no particular order, I just plucked them from my Google Reader.

Beyond Coding

I have only discovered this blog a while ago. Under the category “what’s in a name”, this blog is about: coding. D’uh. Some geeky stuff is being discussed here. Looks promising!

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Webdesigner Depot

This website is pretty new, but already has a ton of great articles. Some non-conventional things (like “Why mood boards matter“) are being covered here.

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Web Design Ledger

A great site with a lot of inspirational posts, freebies and even some give-away contests! Don’t miss out!

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Max Voltar

Blog and portfolio of fellow Belgian Tim Van Damme. This is a great site with a great design. He also often posts links to other very useful articles. This one is a must!

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Michael Wales

Blog and portfolio of Michael Wales. He might not be as known as others, but his recently updated blog has a few very useful articles on CodeIgniter. Especially his CodeIgniter Advent series was really interesting. If you’re into CI, you really should follow this one.

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WPCandy

Founded by an old contact of mine, Michael Castilla, this website has grown to one of the biggest and best WordPress-dedicated websites. There are tons of useful articles, a little gallery and lots more. If you’re using WordPress as a blogging platform, you cannot not follow this blog.

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Usability Post

If you’re designing your own interfaces, this is one blog you cannot go without. Dmitry Fadeyev has a huge amount of knowledge and loves nothing more than sharing and discussing it with the world. “Tips and insights into good design practices” as Dmitry puts it, I couldn’t have said it any better.

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Smashing Magazine

This was probably the first feed I ever subscribed to. Smashing Magazine is maintained by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. They’ve been doing a great job since two years, frequently publishing high quality articles (often guest-written), varying from “simple” inspirational posts to coding tips and ajax tutorials.

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Six Revisions

An excellent for the developper: lots of links to handy tools, video tutorials. But also loads of freebies for the designers among us.

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PSDTuts

PSDTuts is my one-stop-spot for anything Photoshop related. They have awesome tutorials that learn you some pretty nifty Photoshop tricks. They also have a handy freebies section with brushes and textures!

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Pattern Tap

Built on the excellent CodeIgniter framework, Pattern Tap is the place to be when you’re looking for inspiration. Everything is divided into handy categories and what’s even better: sign up and subscribe to your personal RSS feed that notifies you whenever one of your favorite contributors adds something!

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Noupe

Don’t ask me where the name comes from, what I do know is that Noupe is an extremely handy resource for webdeveloppers alike. They have tutorials, resources, freebies, inspirational posts… Everything you need when you’ve hit a design block.

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Nettuts

The seconcd Envato-network website covered in my list. Even the veteran coder is likely to learn something new here. They cover so much, it’s uncanny. Looking for some PHP tips? No problem. Would you rather like to learn a new framework? Don’t worry, they have it covered!

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Just Creative Design

Home of Jacob Cass, a 21 year old Australian designer. He has a great portfolio you should check out. Other than that, he also writes about logo design, the business side of being a designer and much much more.

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Elliot Haughin

Another CodeIgniter enthousiast, Elliot is probably not someone you allready knew, but if you’re looking for some fresh insights into the world of webdevelopping, you really should read his blog.

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Devlounge

Devlounge is a site for people working and enjoying the web. We want to be the online magazine for web designers, web publishers, and web workers overall. They write about lots of things and you’re likely to find something here that suits your taste.

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Design Reviver

Talking about “quality, not quantity”. The people behind Design Reviver don’t post that often, but when they do: boy! They have awesome tutorials on anything from designing to xhtml and css, jquery or even WordPress plugin development.

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David Airey

Home and portfolio of David Airey. He talks about branding your company, logo design and the business of it all. His articles are guaranteed high quality.

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CSSplay

Stu Nicholls’ CSS Play offers tons of CSS menus and demos. If you’re looking for some kind of CSS trick or a nifty little gadget for your CSS menu, you’re bound to find it here.

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CSS Newbie

CSS Newbie is another handy CSS related website. There’s tons of tutorials and demos, even some jQuery love. Their stuff is really worth checking out!

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Abduzeedo

This blog has it all if you’re a designer. There’s inspiration (how about their lengthy “daily inspiration” series?), tutorials on how to achieve some effect in different software programs. They also have some articles that’ll help you get started with your very own Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, you should be ashamed!

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24 ways

For the last three years, 24 ways has been posting ways to impress your friends from december first untill december 24th. This feed might be a bit useless, as we’ll to wait another 11 months before they start again, but you really should check out their previous articles. You’re bound to learn something new!

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Matt

This is the blog of Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, our beloved blogging platform. His posts aren’t that long most of the time, but it’s rather fun reading up on what he’s up to. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily jealous, Matt travels more than anyone I know. Probably richer than anyone I know too…

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Explosm

All work an no play make Jack a dull boy. These last two feeds are pure entertainment. Explosm posts daily comics that are just too funny in their series “Cyanide and Happiness”. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily offended.

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Robotpony

Geek humor. Oh yeah. Robotpony doesn’t update frequently, but you really should have a look at all their previous charts.

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This post was written for the $11,000 Prize Giveaway at Just Creative Design

A while back I decided to set a standard signature in GMail. I got as far as “Bram Van der Sype” and I knew I wanted my URL in it too. But then I was stuck. Do I put webdesigner or webdeveloper below my name? I consider myself a webdesigner. I have designed all my websites myself (unless clients provided a design that only needed coding). I’ve never outsourced my designing. I like the feeling I get when I finally hit that design I like. I love to browse through dozens of blog posts, looking for inspiration and I love experimenting with photoshop.

On the other hand, I don’t like designing as much coding. I love to puzzle images together with HTML and CSS. I love the intricacies of PHP and I certainly love the possibilities the CodeIgniter framework offers me. I like thinking about security measures, passwords salts, complicated foreach loops and database abstraction. The real geeky stuff.

So what to put down there? Designer or developer. The answer is actually a simple one. It includes a slash. I decided to go with webdesigner/developer. I want to promote myself as much as possible, attracting as much clients as possible. So far all the clients I designed for new little to nothing about making websites and whatnot. Those people don’t go looking for developers, they probably don’t even know what that means. And that’s why I promote myself as Webdesigner, to address those clients. But I’d also like to attract bigger projects, bigger clients that need an extensive backend, people who know what they’re looking for. And I’d like to be found by them too.

So what did I end up with?

Bram Van der Sype
Webdesigner/developer

http://www.bramme.net

The e-mail signature is offcourse a small part of a bigger problem. How do you promote yourself? How do you come out to the world? Do you promote yourself with idea of getting as much clients as possible or with the idea of getting clients that need work you love doing? This entire situation relates to one of my previous posts too, about getting a new portfolio. I got some good advice there and made a few decisions since then. I have decided that I’m gonna make a new website: with a very specific portfolio, no blog whatsoever. And I’m getting a new name too. Even though a lot of people have told me that Bramme is a good name, I believe I can attract more clients with another, a better, name.

If you have ever had to ponder these issues, I’d love to know how you handled them!