I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Premier Living. Even though this site is light colored text on a black background, that’s something that I usually don’t like, there is enough spacing around the text so it is still easily readable. There is no doubt what this site is about, the navigation is right up front and easy to see what the links are and I also like the rounded corners.
Plus I’m a sucker for rubber duckies.
More…
Here’s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
This one will drive you nuts!!
The object of the game is to move the red block around without getting hit by the blue blocks or touching the black walls.
If you can go longer than 18 seconds you are phenomenal.
Give it a try!!
SEO (search engine optimization) still seems to be the most popular topic for readers of my blog. It seems many designers either don’t have the resources to hire an SEO company, don’t trust the SEO companies, or just want to learn to do it themselves. In any case here is another resource that will let you learn more.
Back in 2003 Ross Dunn wrote an article called “The Ten Minute Optimization REDUX” it contained many good points about how search engines worked and read your site. He updated it last month and not much has changed, but there are some significant changes.
SearchEngineWatch has published a wonderful article called “An Introduction to SEO Best Practices” and it’s just what it says.
They say “SEO best practices have been constantly evolving since the advent of the search engines themselves. As we enter 2007, this evolution continues, inexorably pushing the Web site owner toward practices that begin to sound much like conventional business plans.”
I think it’s a must read for anyone with a website who wants to rank well in the search engines.
I advise all of my customers to have a blog. I think it one of the best things that you can do to help yourself get better search engine rankings. There are several good reasons for having a blog:
- Having new content on your site if one of the best things that you can do to get your visitors to return on a regular basis. The search engines recognize this as well and will reward you for regularly adding new content.
- If you can get your visitors to add comments to your posts that counts as more new content. So even though your content is written by others, because it is on your site it counts as your content.
There are also some disadvantages:
- If you don’t add content on a regular (or at least semi-regular) basis your site looks stale to both your visitors and search engines.
- Anytime you allow others to add to your site you will get Spam. The scourge of the Internet and if you allow these ads for gambling, porn, or “medicine” on your site it makes you look as bad as them.
I use Word Press for this blog and it’s security settings were pretty good, in that it would hold these junk posts in a file until I could delete them. That wasn’t too bad at first because they tended to come in big blocks that could be pretty easily be tagged and deleted. Unfortunately as this blog grew in popularity so did this crap. I was well over 200 spam posts a day and it was getting very annoying. For some reason my Halloween post tends to be a real magnet for this stuff.
I went looking for help, found Spam Karma 2, tried it out and it has worked wonders. Not only has it made it easier to deal with these posts, my count has gone from over 200 a day to just 5 or 10.
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is a free anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. It works very well, is simple to install and I recommend it highly.
I get many inquires from my customers about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). What it is, why I use it and how it works.
Proper use of CSS can make all of the difference in a web page. Not only does it control how a web page looks and acts you can also move all of these style commands to an external style sheet so you can take this code and move it from the actual page and link to one stylesheet for all (or just some) of your pages.
What this does for you is to make your pages smaller and faster loading, plus since there is just one stylesheet for many pages so you can make a changes on one file and have them change many (or all) of your pages.
There are so many things that you can do with CSS that it’s hard to list them all, but Eric Meyer of meyerweb has put together what I think is one of the best lists of CSS resources that I have seen. Some are his and some are others, but it’s worth a visit.
I love movies. Since I started my own business I don’t get as much time as I would like to watch them, but since I signed up for Blockbuster’s mail order deal I get to see more. So every Saturday I will recommend a movie or two. Do with it what you will.
Eulogy
This is a black comedy about a funeral. Having said that, it’s one of the funniest movies that I have ever seen.
It’s not one that you may have heard anything about and I recommend it highly, but it’s not for children.
Classic movie
Benny and Joon
This is an older movie called Benny and Joon. With Johnny Depp in the movie news so much for his pirate movies I thought I would recommend an older one that I think may be his best. I really like that he does the Buster Keaton stuff himself. It’s a great oddball romantic comedy.
Here’s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Movie Spider, is a free movie and TV site. The company crawls the net looking for the latest movies, tv shows and films. The spider is addng new shows every day.
The site is not designed very well, but offers lots of free full length episodes to watch.
If you would rather use it without the frames which is much easier on the eyes try,
Movies
TV
Cartoons
Comedy
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Own Your C and it is just too cool. This site really caught my attention and I bookmarked it before I knew the site is made in Flash, but this kind of thing is really what Flash is best for. I’m including it in my favorites because they also provide a complete alternate Flash-Free site for people without Flash installed and search engine spiders to find and follow.
The site itself is great, it could also be a “Friday Just For Fun Site”, so I’m posting this on a Friday.
Have you ever tried to place a semi-transparent image or layer on a web page? Because of thy way that different browsers treat transparency it can turn into a real mess. Usually I’ll settle for a picture or just skip it altogether.
Matthew Pennell wrote a post called “Easy cross-browser transparency” which gives a good fix for this issue. There are also some good ideas in the replies to his post.
