Posts to Check out

Here’s a list of a couple posts I’d recommend checking out:

• Fundamentals of Minimalist Web Design
• Getting Good With GIT Free eBook
• Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design

Rockstar Personal Branding

Anyone who is serious about blogging, or building an online brand for themselves, needs to read this book. A great free read from the people at rockablepress.com.

The Django Book

This is a great place to start if you’re interested in getting into the Django programming language. Super thorough and great for beginners. djangobook.com

Getting Real

This is a great book for anyone thinking about creating a web app or online business. The good people at 37signals will not steer you wrong. gettingreal.37signals.com

JQuery Fundamentals

If you’re looking to get into javascript and JQuery, this is a great place to start. jqfundamentals.com/book

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

This is an awesome book that teaches you how to build iPhone apps only using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It was my main source for the coding of my first iPhone app. building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com

PHP For Absolute Beginners

A great place to start if you want to learn how to code PHP, from zillr.org.

Designing For The Web

A great overview of design for the web from Five Simple Steps. designfortheweb.co.uk

Practical PHP Programming

Another great resource for PHP programming from tuxradar.com.

Eloquent Javascript

This is a great resource for beginners at javascript programming. eloquentjavascript.com

Star Wars, Lost Tribe of the Sith, Precipice

Ok this isn’t a web design book, but I like Star Wars and this book is awesome, go get it from starwars.com!

The rules for each province are slightly different, so from this point forward, I’m only going to refer to the BC tax (that’s where I live).

Taxes up until now

Up until July 1, 2010, web designers have been required to charge 5% GST on their web work, but not 7% PST. Why no PST? Because we are not providing a tangible product to our clients. An example of a tangible product would be business cards – not the design for the business cards, the actual printed cards. Therefore, on all your jobs, you should be charging 5% GST and remitting it to Revenue Canada when you do your taxes each year. To learn more about registering for a GST/HST number, please visit GST/HST Registry.

The $30,000 rule

There is a loop hole to avoid charging GST, which will carry over to the HST. If you’re company makes less than $30,000 a year, you are classified as a small supplier, and you do not have to collect GST/HST. However, the catch is, you’re not allowed to write off any GST/HST you have paid on any business expenses (ie: a laptop). Therefore, this has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

The unfortunate reality of HST

I prefer to think of the HST as the GST turning into the HST. All the same rules apply. Basically, you now have to charge your clients 12% tax instead of 5%. This definitely sucks and has the potential to make your estimates less competitive with designers who live out of province or country.

A small convenience of the change over is, apparently if you have a GST number, you don’t need to apply for an HST number. It will simply transfer over. However, you might want to look a little deeper into that subject as I’m only going off what I have heard from other designers. Our fabulous provincial government has done an amazing job of not informing us of any of the details. Everything I’ve learned has been mostly through research on the internet. There’s a discussion over at redflagdeals.com worth checking out for more info.

Summary

In the end, this pretty much sucks for all parties involved (designer & client), as we have to start charging an additional 7% tax. However, even if you are making under $30,000 a year, I’d suggest registering, as the tax write-off benefits are generally worth it. If you have any questions on this subject, please feel free to post them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Disclaimer: I am a web designer not an accountant. All of the above info is a result of research I have done on the internet. Each business is potentially a special case. Therefore, you should talk to an accountant about your specific situation.

What’s Your Question? Hit Me!

Feel free to ask anything CSS3 related. There are no stupid questions, so don’t feel intimidated to ask something you think might have a simple answer. Chances are, someone else has the same question. Simply post your question in the comments below, and I’ll reply asap.

A free job board for Vancouver web and tech heads

For a few months now, I’ve been working on a little side project named vancouverwebjobs.com. The basic premise was to create a free job board service for Vancouver web designers and techies. I played around with the idea of making it a pay board, but after some consideration I decided to go the ad supported route, and keep the actual board free. Some Vancouverites may remember the old lotusmodern.com job board from earlier in the decade. That board has been dead for awhile, so I thought I would step in and try and fill the void.

Free job postings for employers

Like I mentioned above, it will always be free for employers to post jobs at vancouverwebjobs.com. The board offers the following job categories: web design, web development, flash, web producers, open source, social media, mobile, and gaming.

Post a Job

Even more jobs on the blog

Along with the job board, I’ve launched a blog which will feature additional Vancouver jobs that don’t appear on the board. I also hope to provide some tips on finding a job, formatting a portfolio, and maybe even some resume templates. What else would you like to see from the blog?

Checkout the Blog

Want to get involved?

Vancouver is hub for awesome web and tech creatives. Therefore, I decided to include an open source category to, hopefully, promote the creation of new open source project in the community. However, it’s not just for new projects, if you have an existing project you need help with, please feel free to post it on the board. The only condition for the open source category is that all work is done for free, in the spirit of collaboration. Don’t worry, the projects will be monitored closely to make sure there are no craigslist jerks trying to get a full branding package in exchange for dog psychology services (seriously, I’ve seen that on there before). Please feel free to be creative.

Work in progress

The job board is still a work in progress, so please bear with me if you find any bugs. I would appreciate and feedback or feature requests, so please submit them if you have any. Thanks to the good people over at jobberbase.com (an open source project) for providing the job board framework, and I’m using good ol’ WordPress for the blog.

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“In May we announced the Typographic Layout Design Contest that aimed to collect beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by the design community and release them for free as a gift for the web design community. The response was overwhelming and we really had a hard time going through the designs, analyzing them and deciding which templates deserve the awards. Unfortunately, many templates were just copies of the current designer’s blog and some weren’t related to typography at all. So in the end many templates didn’t make it to this post.

However, we did receive a number of brilliant typographic templates that we are happy to release for free download and personal and commerical use as the gift for the web design community. We hope that these templates will help you to improve the quality of typography in your future designs!”

» View the full article over at Smashing Magazine