I’ve always been a big fan of corporate websites. The good ones, of course! Not sure why, but I’m just a sucker for their clean look.
My last job was Creative Designer for a multinational company and among my many assignments, I also had to redesign the corporate website. So I had the chance to study the competition, as well as other well designed corporate websites.
Below is a list of some of the best corporate websites out there. La creme de la creme! If you’re looking for some inspiration for your next corporate design, then this is the place to be. If not, you might want to bookmark this page for future reference.
As you can see, there are many similar elements. I will be back with my thought on what I considered “best practices” when designing a big corporate website. Until then… a Digg or a Stumble is always appreciated! 
I’ve been busy these last couple of days with the redesign of my home office. Two months ago I celebrated 1 year of full time freelancing and self-employment. During this year, I didn’t make any major investment in furniture or hardware.
So last week I said goodbye to my old home office and created a brand new IKEA working space. I also retired my old PC and bought a new Dell XPS M1530.
Here are some before and after pictures:
Before
After
I’m glad I finally took the time and made this move. My new home office will help me be better organized, more efficient, more productive.
Just as promised, I’m back with Part 2 of my Building Traffic for Your Blog series. When I wrote Part 1 of this series, this blog had a monthly average of 60 Visits / day and about 20 Subscribers. I also said that my plan was to reach and average of 500 Visits / day in the next 3 months. While I’m still pretty far from achieving that goal, I have to say April was a pretty good month. 
I also drew some conclusions: I have to improve SEO, social networking traffic is just like the sea tide and blog traffic building doesn’t happen over night. They were all confirmed this month:
- While I didn’t put too much effort into SEO just yet, search engine traffic is better. I guess it has more to due with the quantity of content. More content = more chances of being hit. Still gotta work on this.
- I had my share of social networking traffic, which helped reach new people. Like I said: take advantage of your 10 minutes of fame.
- Blog traffic building is a long term commitment. It’s not easy, you often feel like quiting, but if you are persistent, results will start to show.
Here are this blog’s statistics for the month of April:
- In April I more than doubled the traffic: Ireached a total of 4366 Visits, which brings the monthly average to about 145 Visits / day
- The traffic sources pie chart looks like this: 26% search engines, 56% referring sites, 16% direct traffic
- Subscriber count tripled in just 1 month and now shows 62 subscribers (Thanks again!)
One of my goals when I started this blog was to create a free Wordpress theme and reach 100 downloads. I can check that one from the list. Corporate Sandbox has been downloaded 133 times.
Another wish was to find more freelance gigs (mostly blog design) and this is exactly what happened: I usually get 2 or 3 blog design requests each month, from people that stumble across my blog and like my design work. Generating some traffic to this blog is also something I can check from the list.
Now all I have to do is make my first $100 from blogging and be the first Romanian blogger who’s internationally famous, then I will have to come up with a new st of goals. 
Thanks for listening!
As you probably noticed, it’s been more than a week since my last post. I was really, really busy with a couple of new blog designs, as well as some other web design work.
I just wanted you to know that I didn’t abandon the blogging thing and that this month I will be back with more freelance stories, more Wordpress themes and more blog design tips.
Since last month, this blog has grown a lot: more than doubled the traffic and almost tripled the number of subscribers. So I have all the reasons in the world to keep generating great blogging and freelancing related content.
As some of you may know, last month I began a series of posts about this blog’s growth. If you are new, you might want to check Building Traffic for Your Blog - Part 1. Tomorrow I will write Part 2, where I will tell you all about the month of April.
I also want to thank you, my subscribers, for giving me a little piece of your time. I will try to make it worth with every new post. I know time is precious in this crazy world that we live in, so really… Thank you!
