Your goal: to promote yourself and build your personal and professional brand online. You’ve joined Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and, just to cover your bases, YouTube, Flickr, Posterous and Foursquare, not to mention your blog. But just being on these sites isn’t enough to turn you into an online sensation overnight. Like anything worth having, it requires some work on your part – and the best place to start is with your bio. Your social media bio is a critical component of your personal branding toolbox. It’s the first thing people will read to find out if they should follow you, friend you or do business with you. According to Hubspot, almost two-thirds of Twitter users don’t have bios on their profiles.

Being able to design for mobile devices is a skill that is becoming more and more crucial for any web designer. Gone are the days when having a website for a company or organization is good enough – increasingly, people are looking for information while on the go, and designing for those tiny screens is a whole new ball game. Designing for mobile devices has a different set of rules than designing for the web – and in order to keep up with the way the market is going, you’ve got to be able to do both well.

With every year that passes, the blogosphere gains momentum – becoming the main source of news and information for more and more people – including your customers, members and/or donors. This, of course, begs the question: should your company or organization have a blog? As tempting – or terrifying – as it might be to jump on the blog bandwagon, it’s a decision that requires some careful thought and planning. Just as blogging isn’t for every person, it’s also not for every company or organization. Is it the right thing for yours? Let’s have a look at some key questions you need to ask before you make that decision.

My last two posts (Part 1 and Part 2) discussed various tips and tricks for designing for content management systems (CMS) in Photoshop. So far we’ve covered how to get set up and get started, as well as some of the main components of a CMS website like the background, navigations, columns and content blocks. This week’s post is about how to finish things off and add polish with headings, footers and lots of fine-tuning.