Loopie World is a website which houses a collection of free children’s stories that are based on the cute and crazy little characters called the Loopies. The free kid’s stories are updated every month and are 100% original. Each story comes along with a great illustration and a downloadable PDF version.

We initially created the Loopie World website three years ago, and yes since it is one of our own initiatives and not one for a client, it has taken that long to evelve into something from the top shelf. I guess it just seems to happen that way in business, you tend to place all of your focus on paying clients and your own projects have to take second place.

So what exactly have we done to improve Loopie World:

Well the site started out as 3 static pages and a mailing list sign-up. That’s it.
Next it transitioned into a website with more pages and a few links to stories, but still nothing special.
We eventually found the time to re-deign the website from scratch and gave it a much more creative look that would be appealing to kids or parents looking for stories for their kids. We added the stories as we published them – when we got time to publish them. The result was that we had a nice looking website with some good content on it but it never got updated because we just got too busy and alas it was kind of forgotten.

Recently we decided that is was a shame that such a gem of a website would be left on a heap and serve very little purpose, so we decided to pump some jet fuel into the project and take it to the next level. We converted the entire website to work with the Wordpress CMS. This allows us to add new kids stories quickly and easily. Next we added a whole lot of useful plugins to make the site work even better and be more customised for our purpose. We added all of our content and decided that we wanted to make it work for us. While we will always offer free children’s stories at Loopie World, we wanted to create something sustainable, so we created the premium kids story club.

We now offer a membership of just $7 per month. Membership gives you four additional children’s stories every month, each one illustrated and exclusive. Members also get access to special content that is not available to anyone else. We will soon be adding audio versions of all of the premium kids stories as well as interactive books.

An additional feature that we will be integrating is an online store where we will sell all of our great Loopie products. Some nice interactive games will also be added so that kids visiting the site can have a bit of fun as well.

The premium stories are in the process of being completed and will be ready for our members by the end of October 2009.

At present these are the free children’s stories available to download:

• The wobbly car
• The Christmas Star
• A Piratey Adventure
• Granny Goes Away
• Pancake’s Pancake
• The Space Adventure
• The Rainbow Maker
• The Baking Contest
• A Present for Tubblie
• A Loopie Christmas
• Wusky’s Undersea Discovery
• Pilot’s Plane
• The Midnight Feast

Please would you visit Loopie World and add it and / or the stories to your social bookmarking links.

Why we use Fresh Books

As a small creative solutions business specializing in web design, website development, hosting and graphic design – bookkeeping is not on top of our priority list. Although we really do like all of our affairs to be in order, we simply don’t have the time to concentrate all of our energy in this area.

When the time came around for our monthly invoicing it was both a happy & frustrating time. Happy in the sense that we were sending out invoices so we could get paid. Frustrating in the sense that it took several hours to generate invoices for clients, most of which were for very small amounts.

As if this waste of time wasn’t bad enough, sometimes we made mistakes. Since everything was done manually – human error was inevitable and common. On a few occasions clients received invoices meant for other clients and sometimes we forgot to add things to invoices. We lost a lot of money this way.

Another frustration for us was that sometimes clients forgot to pay and until we realized we had no cash to flow, we would be oblivious. Once the realization hit, we would have to manually draft emails (which felt awkward) asking our clients for payment. Sometimes we would have to resend these emails – if we remembered. Keeping tabs of who paid was also a chore…

… Until one day a little ad caught my eye, there it was “Fresh Books – online invoicing made simple.”

I signed up for a free account and set up my profile. I uploaded my logo and customized a few settings. Then I forgot about it. And when I did remember Fresh Books, I thought that it was going to be a task moving my whole way of doing things to their system. I guess my paradigm was in the place of knowing that my system kind of worked for me but this new way might not gel too well.

I carried on painfully sending out manually generated Excel & PDF invoices for a few months until I had absolutely had enough. I made a decision to actually shift my old paradigm and to give Fresh Books a proper try.

I was so serious that I purchased a paid plan. I uploaded all of my clients via a bulk import from a csv file. Exporting this from Excel was a breeze – importing to Fresh Books was just as simple. I setup access details for all and customized my invoice template. The last invoice number I used was inserted as my first invoice number on Fresh Books and away it went. The first invoice was a success!

Doing a bit of exploring I realized that I could set up auto recurring invoices – “wow this is cool,” I thought. What a neat feature since most of the small amounts we invoiced out where recurring fees for website hosting. I setup all of our hosting clients on recurring profiles and forgot about invoicing them again – it all happened automatically from then on.

“What about clients who don’t pay?” Well my question was soon answered with an automatic reminder facility. This feature allows me to set up to three email reminders. All of the text is customizable within the email subject and body. I could also space the reminders to go out on any given number of days from the time of invoice. From now on reminders were all automatic – very, very cool.

Once clients received their invoice notification via email and logged into Fresh Books, I was able to see that they had viewed the invoice. As soon as I received payment notification, I simply marked their invoice as paid and again they received an email message thanking them – all automated!

At a glance I am able to see what we have invoiced for the month, what has been paid and what is still outstanding. There are numerous other reports that can be generated. The Fresh Books system is truly a pleasure to use and I can’t imagine ever going back to my old way of doing things. Fresh Books has saved me valuable hours every month, not to mention the effort.

Check out how Fresh Books can help your business now!

There seems to be a huge mind block when it comes to traditional designers feeling that they are unable to design for the web, when in actual fact it is a rather simple transition.

I have heard several designers tell me that they are clueless when it comes to design for the web.  Some say it is because they were never taught web design in college or that the coding element scares them. Although I do agree that you should stick to what you are good at it doesn’t do any harm trying something you may be great at.

Any great print designer is not only creative, but understands the ins and outs of the print process. Designers understand the need for bleed, crop marks and colour separations.  They know what positives are and how they are used, they also understand the difference between litho, digital, web and screen printing. They know about UV Varnish, spot gloss, embossing and matt lamination. Whether to lay a job out for work and turn or work and tumble. Quality designer also understand their medium, so they know about paper types, grammages, coatings and uses.

If print designers know so much about the print process are they also classified as printers? Absolutely not! The key here is that they understand the next process and this understanding is what gives them the edge over others. Knowing exactly what the print process entails ensures that their jobs get done quickly and properly without any costly mistakes.

The very same principles apply to web design. This is what makes the transition so simple. In web design you are still designing on a page where proper layout and typography rules still apply. The difference is that designers are now free to use some interactivity with this new medium and if mistakes are made they are easily corrected at no great cost.

Great web designers should understand the next process which is development. This doesn’t mean that they have to understand high-level mark-up languages and database integration. Neither does it mean that they need to be able to create dynamic applications from scratch. What it does mean though is that web designers should understand how their design will be implemented and used. They should understand the advantages and limitations of (X)HTML & CSS. The knowledge of exactly how your design will be used will assist you as a designer to ensure that nothing distorts or gets left out in the development procedure.

Most web designers today have a firm understanding of (X)HTML & CSS and some even branch to other areas like Flash, Wordpress & JavaScript. The ability to take your design and create a working template is an advantage that you really want to have. Great web designers are sought after especially since the market is flooded with mediocre and terrible ones.

Be creative, be brilliant, be exceptional, but above all be yourself!