If you’re an aficionado of the web community’s twitter feeds, you probably have seen Arc90 and the @readability crew officially launch their web & mobile app which ‘zaps online clutter and saves web articles in a comfortable reading view’. And If you have read my blog before, you will know my love for minimalism and clean design. Therefore you won’t be surprised if I openly admit I absolutely love that “Imagine a web designed for readers” concept the guys from readability have come up with.

It only takes a glance at services such as Yahoo Local or Google Places to understand the potential benefits of promoting your business at a smaller and more local scale.

I strongly believe that web design is not any different from the rest of the industries out there. Just as people will tend to buy local food to ensure freshness, quality and enjoy the opportunity to meet farmers and other local artisans, some people will be looking for a more local approach when on the lookout for a web designer.

There are many examples of people having a go at animations without the use of video editing techniques, or flash on the web. And recreational activities being part of my daily schedule, I decided to challenge myself with a little one of those animation attempts, hoping to be able to recreate the well-known James Bond Intro with nothing but:

• a bit of Photoshop
• some CSS
• a few basic jQuery effects (no extra plugin needed, but the standard library)

Portfolios are not only the (supposedly-frequently-updated!) collection of your achievements and skills. They are your best and cheapest salesperson ever. When a customer is looking for a designer, web or other as a matter of fact, he/she is more than likely to check out your work before making an appropriate judgment on your designing skills and his/her potential will to work with you.

Customers are bound to follow a number of sources in order to find you. Word of mouth, publications, effective social marketing campaigns, and other targeted advertisements should get you to the front stage, making you a noticeable service provider, but the chance is this may not be enough in striking deals if your portfolio is neither up to date, nor the most attractive one.

As already stated during one of my previous posts (Push the minimalist approach one step further by hiding site navigation), I am (like many of you out there) a huge fan of the minimalism concept in web design, being convinced that too much information or content has a tendency to overwhelm our web site visitors to a point that they will lose interest, miss the point, and most likely turn around and never look back.