Hard Times Designs: web design and advice

HTD focuses on all aspects of web design, seo and social networking

The launch of Facebook Timeline has allowed users to be more creative when it comes to their profile picture. With a little cropping and positioning we can cleverly blend our small profile photo into our main cover image and give our Facebook page a little va-va-voom! By following the dimensions below you can easily create [...]

What Social network should your business be on? I’m often asked from small businesses what social platforms they should be performing on and furthermore what they should be advertising. My answer to them is that they should be advertising on platforms relevant to their business, and have a different approach to each network. Cue a [...]

Google loves links that hold a lot of purpose, and that purpose is generally ranked on three important factors Relevance, Authority and Trust. Allow me to break these factors down so next time you go hunting for links you find the right ones that aren’t going to damage your website in the long term. Today I will explain [...]

Millions of people are signing into their Google accounts today to see a new arrival to the Google family, Google Play. Google Play,  it seems to be the premature love child of a Ménage à trois between Google, iTunes and Netflix today appeared in our Google accounts to allow us to download apps, books, films and [...]

Offering something a little different never hurt anyone, and when it comes to businesses, that little idea can really turn profit and leave others trailing and wishing they had thought of it first. Now I’m not confessing that this idea for a client (known as clientX from here on in) was ground breaking, but it was something [...]

This morning on my daily commute into the CBD (City Centre for the English folk reading this) I noticed a rather large amount of people tapping away on their iPad’s.

Recently I have been using Google Alerts available on your Google products dashboard. It has sourced great content for me without lifting a finger. Google Alerts scourers the web for the latest content based on the keywords you determine in each alert. For example if I wanted to know about the latest mentions of say [...]

The early bird catcheth the social media worm. I have always loved the quote “The early bird catcheth the worm” by John Ray. Throw in the world ‘social media’ and you have the great title for my most recent success story.

Pretty much everyone has heard of social media, and can probably name a website that falls into this category, but what does it actually mean, and

Today I came across all creative and set about creating my own pixel icons in Photo shop. You can download all 30 of them here!