The second section in your marketing plan will be a series of written statements on how each of your core services will benefit your potential clients. It is important to write this out so that you’ll have a strong understanding of exactly how your business will help people. Later, when you’re involved in selling, you’ll find these “talking points” helpful.

One marketing plan I wrote had these statements, which I reprint here as examples:

Example One - Web Development Consultant: “My consultations help small business owners learn to make the most of their site on the Internet.”

Example Two - Web Hosting: “My web hosting provides excellent customer service 24/7 for small business owners seeking a professional Internet presence.”

Example Three - Template Developer: “My blog and content management system templates provide an easy and accessible way to make sites look professional and well organized. Some templates will be unique, one-of-a-kind, artist-created works of art while others will be created with a stricter budget in mind. The blogs will be fully loaded with helpful plugins including automatic backups, and will be ready to use as I’ll offer to do template installation for my clients.”

So there you have it.
1. Choose your Core Services - write them down!
2. Write down exactly how each core service will benefit your clients.

We all need the inspiration of new web design ideas from time to time.

If you’re planning a career as a web designer you should start as soon as possible to collect your favorite designs to keep as inspiration. You could start a web design idea gallery as the owners of the following sites did, or just bookmark all the inspiring, beautiful, amazing sites you come across.

Here are twenty web design idea resources to inspire your creativity.

Patrick Haney has collected over 400 web design ideas on his Flickr account: Web Design Inspiration.

A Site A Day intends to give web designers one new inspirational site building idea daily:

Web Creme collects screen shots of inspiring web design ideas:

Web Design File has more than 650 inspirational web design ideas waiting for your perusal:

Only the best: Inspiration King focuses on quality over quantity:

Unmatched Style is a community blog acknowledging designs using CSS and web standards:

At CSS Clip you can submit your CSS site to the gallery and compete with other great web design artists of the internet:

Best Web Gallery defines quality design as “Visual + Technical + Creativity”:

The Best Designs features quality CSS and flash websites:

You’ll find plenty of web design ideas and inspiration at CSSremix:

I Love Blog Design specializes only in (guess what?) …blogs!

The CSS Zen Garden is perhaps one of the most inspiring places on the web:

CSS Mania! Be inspired!

CSS Revue isn’t in English but you don’t need to understand the language to appreciate the beautiful web design ideas.

Design Idol features beautiful CSS and flash sites:

MotionSpire provides a gallery for impressive 3D, 2D and multi-media:

Frequent updates: CSS Envy.

FantastiCSS - a gallery of fantastic CSS web design:

We Love WP - showcasing WordPress sites:

Inspiration Folder requests membership…

If you’ve browsed the web for long, I’m sure you’ve come across sites where, when you click on links, a new browser window opens. If you want an example try this link: Blog Top Sites.

This is done by adding the attribute, target=”_blank”, to the link anchor tag.

How do you feel about having a site designer choose to force you to open a new browser window?

Lots of people don’t like this at all, and in fact I’ve seen it featured in lists of the most annoying things people have seen in web design, along with animated graphics and being caught inside someone’s frames. Many if not most people do not like having a site force the opening of a new browser window. It is intrusive.

Now, with the tabbed browsing used in Firefox and Internet Explorer v.7, I too find it annoying because I like to keep all my sites opened in tabs, in one browser window.

There’s a simple way to get around these types of links. If you realize you’re at a site that is opening browser windows you don’t want, just right-click on the mouse, right over the link you want to explore, and choose “open in new tab”. Voila! No more browser windows opening!

This tip is also very helpful for sites that use frames and force you to stay inside their frames while you explore other sites they’ve linked to. About.Com does this, though it also gives an option to click to get rid of their frame at the top of the page, so it is much better than many other framed sites we’ve seen. In the future if you find you’re at a site that keeps a frame open on the new site you want to see, just hit your back-arrow, and then right-click on the link for the new site you want to see, choosing “open in new tab’.