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How to take your PDF to the next level

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Upgrade your PDF and wow your clients. Ideally, you will have Adobe Indesign and Adobe Acrobat to make most of the suggestions here, but I have some alternative ways to do them too. Here are five ways to make your PDF more professional without further ado.

Make your PDF fillable.

If your PDF has fields to fill in, make it interactive and allow them to be fillable. Oftentimes, and usually in the past, people would print the form, fill it by hand, scan it, and then send it. Making a PDF fillable makes it easier to type and save information. Here is an example of a fillable PDF.

Here is a youtube tutorial to make a fillable PDF in Adobe Indesign and how to add checkmarks.

If you don’t have Adobe Indesign, you can add editable PDF online at https://smallpdf.com/edit-pdf.

Add Bookmarks

If you have a long PDF and include a table of contents, you can make it clickable and add bookmarks to decrease scrolling.

How to add bookmarks in Adobe Indesign

How to add bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat

Add Videos

You can add embedded videos in PDFs, it does make the file bigger. However, if it’s relevant and enriches your content, go for it! There is a cavet you have to direct or point out that the video is playable. There is not stop or play options.

There is an alternate way here:

Add GIFS

GIFs are a fun way to add dynamic elements to your PDF.

Add Links

Links are always super helpful in a PDF.

Hope that helps and happy creating!

The Top AI Programs Right Now (2023)

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AI is progressing at a scary rate. I’ve never thought it would reach to the level it is now, but we may not be far from having an AI that can interact with us on a Human level or even better.

Here are the current hottest AI Programs to use right now by category:

Writing

ChatGPT

This company has blown up due to how good it is. Companies right now are following them in their footsteps. Simply write a prompt and then it generates a response. You can refine through further prompting. It is predicted future job is writing prompts, who knows where we’ll go. Right now it is free, but there is a waitlist. There is also a premium option.

Personally, I love ChatGPT. It helps me save mental anguish, pain, frustration and road blocks when it comes to writing.

Bard

Google’s chatbot! Similar to ChatGPT it works through prompts too, however it is not available in every country.

Quillbot

It checks your grammar, paraphrases and fluency. When paired with a Chat Bot it makes writing far more efficient.

Art

Midjourney

It is not easy to use, you will have to sign up for Discord, and everyone can see what you are promoting. That is a two edge sword. There may be things you don’t want others to see. However, seeing what people are creating helps you become a better creator.

DALL-E

Much easier to use than Midjourney. You can prompt the AI to create images. You have to be very specific in your prompts. There is a waitlist, but I prefer this over Midjourney for ease of use.

Canva

They do have an AI component that is pretty great but is kind of buried. Canva, though, I think is great to have in your toolbox. They have so many templates, images, etc., that have made me much more efficient.

Music

Boomy

I like this as it immediately allows you to play with it intuitively. Also, if you have a screen recording program like OBS, you can rip the audio without creating an account.

AIVA

They have a free option with presets like Boomy.

Video

Synthesia

Think of those training videos where a person talks to you on the screen. This is what they specialize in. It is very corporate but very good. It’s not free, but it does save money for companies who are looking for this type of style.

CapCut

If you are on social media, especially TikTok, you have run into this program. They have so many templates to create different styles and types of videos it amazes me how good it looks.

I look forward to seeing how AI grows and how I can incorporate them into my life.

How to hit the ground running with Hubspot for Sales & Marketing (2023)

Blog, Marketing / By

Now that I’m out of the private sector, here are some things I wish I had known before using Hubspot to make the most of it.

Define your persona.

In Hubspot, you can define scoring your contacts. Here is the HubSpot article on how to access it.

You have to decide what is important to your company or you. Common ones are:

  • Open email
    • # of times they open in an email
  • Click on the link in the email
  • Specific contact characteristics:
    • Company size
    • Company Revenue
    • Title
  • Website visits
  • Etc.

There is also a persona tool you can use in HubSpot to use as a guide for onboarding.

Customized your Dashboard on what matters the most

Their predetermined boards are good and are one of the things I enjoyed about HubSpot. Specifically for Marketing, I would suggest a Lead Gen Dashboard. Business is all about how much money you can generate. The marketing part of that is generating Leads/MQLs.

HubSpot offers predefined dashboards which you can explore. It gives you a good baseline to start.

Customized the View

You can choose what view to show for email and contacts. Choose what is best for you. For emails generally have:

  • Open Rate
  • Click through rate
  • Numer sent
  • Unsubscribe

Clean up your Properties

I guess this is the nature of the beast, but this kind of grinds my gears. When you create a form for a specific event, you have unique fields that you may only use once. Like “What’s your favourite drink” or something similar. HubSpot will create a unique contact property and attach it to the contact. You only need it for a specific amount of time. What are the chances of you using it again? Perhaps you would like to keep it, but this can become a little unmanageable.

When you are exporting the list, all of the fields you have ever created will show up. You can unclick these options when exporting or deleting them, but it gets a little annoying. So, do a routine cleanup of your contact proprieties.

Of course, that’s not to say you want to keep items for historical data like previous landing pages or emails.

Automate cleaning your list

When people unsubscribe, have them automatically removed from your main marketing list and move to a do not email list or similar. The toughest part of email marketing, I find, is maintaining your list from getting too messy.

That’s it for now, and I am still learning the monster that is HubSpot. They are constantly improving, growing and changing things. That’s one of the reasons I like using HubSpot.

My gripe with WordPress

Blog, Marketing / By

WordPress has grown over the years, and I even use it for this page. However, over the years, I have had some gripes with the platform. Here are some of them below.

Incompatibility with Themes and Plugins

I will say this gripe is the nature of the beast. When you have so many creators making Plugins and Themes, this was destined to happen. There are incompatibilities with plugins and themes when you install them. Often, you don’t know they will break something until you install them. That’s the risk you take. This sucks because I find a cool plugin to use it, and it doesn’t work with a theme or vice versa. Even extensions will slow down Word Press. This is the major gripe I have.

Too Reliant on Plugins

If you are looking for extra functionality, forget it with Word Press. The company is reliant heavily on its Plugin Creators to create it. This creates an ecosystem where there a pressure from creators not to add any native functionality because they will lose out on revenue. I get these are businesses that rely on Word Press users for a living. This is a foregone conclusion. You will have add a bunch of plugins if you are looking to level up your site. Once you are in it, it’s hard to move away from it.

Security

I had my Word Press hacked twice. I have never experienced this with other platforms, such as WebFlow, and Site Infinity, and that’s just to name a few. WordPress seems to attract the worse and the best. Being hacked was an unpleasant experience, and I lost one of my sites’ data. You have to have a security plugin and make backups if you can. That’s the only advice I can give you.

I’m not knocking on WordPress; it is super easy to use. That’s why I continue to use it. I also have a soft spot for it. However, for future client projects, I recommend another web site builder.

How to hide static titles for CMS items in Webflow

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Let’s say. For example, you have a CMS of products. There might be some empty fields. However, when you start building the product page, and you have an empty field instead of it hiding, you’ll get a line that says, “This field is empty.” That doesn’t look good. Well, you can hide it!

It takes a little bit of a workaround. To start for each field, you must put it in a separate DIV. This way, you have more control.

Click the gear icon at the top. Then scroll down until you see the conditional visibility section. Then you would choose the field you want to hide when empty under “Name,” then choose “Equals,” And the value would be “Set.”

So, it is telling Webflow to show this DIV when the field is filled; if it isn’t, hide it.

This can work for Titles, or any other part of CMS.

That’s it! I hope that helps you.

Happy Creating

Known Glitches and Minor Pain Points in Webflow

Blog, Business, Marketing / By

These are the common glitches, complaints and pain points I’ve seen so far in the forums and social media. They range from minor things to bigger problems.

Current State Glitch

You can see my post on to fix this. This a known glitch where a specific link state shows up in WebFlow that isn’t easy to find in WebFlow. It is not intuitive at all.

Break points in Pagination Items for CMS Collection

Webflow has a standard function, like many web design platform, to design how a page look at different sizes. Unfortunately, you cannot do that with CMS. Let’s say that you want only 20 items to show per page on a desktop, but on mobile, you just want 4 items to show. Nope, not possible. There are workarounds, but it is annoying not to have this function built in.

Pagination Next Button Sends you back to the top

When you enable CMS pagination, or pagination in general, when you click next, it will send you back to the top. This is especially annoying when you have the CMS near the bottom of the page. There are workarounds for this. You can find it on youtube.

No Slider Option for CMS

CMS is undoubtedly one of the key features of WebFlow. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have an option for a slider. There are workarounds to this, too by making it overflow and making it draggable.

The lacking retail and product features in WebFlow

This is one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard on Reddit and the forums. It does not compare to Shopify. Webflow is good for portfolios, agencies, and small businesses. However, if you have lots of products, don’t use them.

Form Submission Collection

This has mixed reviews from what I’ve seen across the web. Some didn’t get notified of any form submissions, while others did. The vast majority suggested getting a 3rd party app to ensure you get every form submission.

Multi-language is not possible in WebFlow

Webflow has said they were bringing this in 2022. However, many don’t know the progress on this feature that is very much wanted. It’s 2023, and still nothing. There is a 3rd party vendor called Weglot, and I think that’s why WebFlow stalled on this feature. This is a feature I saw on other competitors’ products years ago.

Hyper personalized Posts Body Text for Blogs

If you want your page to have a unique look, a la McKinsey, for example. You can’t do that; the blog relies on CMS. Which only allows rich text body.

The limit for Multi Reference Field

Being able to reference other CMS gives customization that isn’t possible with other CMS. However, WebFlow does impose a limit of a max of 10 with their paid, maybe a bit more with their corporate accounts. This limits my creativity and possibilities.

No Native Filtering Lists

When you start having a huge CMS list, you will want to filter it to give the user a better experience. Nope, you can’t do that. There are third-party codes to work around this. My favourite is Finsweet.

No Native Lightbox Captions

The Lightbox gallery lacks captions. I think that this should have been added way earlier. There is, again, a workaround, and I made a post about it here.

Let me know if you have any more, and I will add them to the list.

I’m not knocking WebFlow. It is still an amazing platform I use personally and professionally. I’m impressed with what they have done. I just want to blow off a little steam.

What to do when working with an International Photographer

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*Note: This is my anonymous interview with a friend.

Here are some top things I wish I had known before working with an International Vendor. We hired a wedding photographer in another country, which is our experience.

Define the terms of the contract clearly – Especially the Currency

What happened to me was that I didn’t specify what currency we were paying in. It caused a bit of an argument when we wanted to pay USD as it would save us money vs paying in Euros. It caused tension in the relationship, and I wish I had nipped in the bud way earlier.

Get someone local if you can – or start studying the local culture deeply

Although we hired an international photographer, where we were shooting isn’t their home country. They just live close and could drive there. I thought they would have at least looked up the local culture and customs, but they didn’t. They directed us to do certain poses and actions that were not in line with the local custom and were offensive. This is a general good rule thumb to do when you are travelling.

Have your own vision

The photographer might have their own vision or storyboard. You can ask about their process, and understand how much you need to prepare. I wish we looked up places where we would like to take photos at, and what we wanted to do.

Look up the International Holidays

This should have been a non brainer but it totally slipped our mines. A lot of rentals were closed (Do this ahead of time if you can), and locations were too. Which was a bummer.

I hope these few tips helped! Have a wonderful week!

How to create a custom order in CMS lists for Webflow

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This is the only method I found so far that works.

Go to the CMS settings and add a new “Custom Field,” then choose the plain text option.

Call it “Order #” or whatever you like. Save the field, then save your changes.

Go into your CMS item, and it should show up like this. You would then put the order with 01 being the first item you want them to see. Then moving down 02, 03, 04 etc., in descending order. Note: You have to be 01, not 1, or it won’t read correctly.

Do your thing, and place the CMS collection list wherever you want on your page. Then go to the “Element Settings”/gear icon. Go to the “Sort Order” section. Click the “plus sign.”

Then choose sort by “Order # (Plain Text)”, and by alphabetical (A-Z).

And that’s it! Happy creating!

How to Change the background color in Figma

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You may have put your settings to dark mode and tried to change it, but sometimes it doesn’t change the background.

Here’s how to fix it.

Make sure nothing is selected. Go to the “Design Panel” On the left side, and under the “Background” section, change the colour there.

That’s it! Happy Creating!

How to change the colour of flat icons PNGS in Figma

Art, Blog, Tutorials / By

If you downloaded the transparent flat icon in a png format and want to change the colour in Figma. Well, that’s what we are going to do today.

First, insert the icon and then select it.

Then go to the effects section in the right side panel, and choose the “Inner Shadow” effect.

Open the “Inner Shadow” panel by clicking the sun icon. These are the default options.

I’m changing it to red. So these are my settings. What you need to focus on are the spread, colour and opacity. You want to kick the spread as much as possible until the entire icon is filled.

This is the finished icon! Hope that helps. Happy creating!