Design

Every once in a while you'll stumble upon a site that really makes you say "wow, that is some great content." Well I found one of those sites yesterday. It's this site http://www.forwebdesigners.com/. It has a boat-load of stuff for anyone who does design work. Everything like:

• Ajax
• Blogs
• Colors
• CSS
• Flash
• Fonts
• Forums
• Generators
• Graphic Sources
• Icons
• Inspiration
• Magazines
• Photoshop Tutorials
• Stock Photos
• Templates
• XHTML

It's basically just a list of links. But there are tons of links. Links to some great design resources. Give it a look, you could spend days checking out some of the cool stuff here.

Sometimes finding images for your site or masthead can be a real challenge. Images are a great way to add impact to your site. Sure, there are plenty of places that you can buy images and sometimes you may need to. But there are also places that offer free images. Or even images you can use, but you must give attribution back to the owner. Most of these images will have some sort of stipulations. Read carefully.

Here's some great places to get images on the web:

• http://www.sxc.hu/
• http://www.morguefile.com/
• http://www.imageafter.com/
• http://www.dreamstime.com/
• http://flickr.com/creativecommons/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images
• http://www.picfindr.com/
• http://yotophoto.com/

Those resources should help you find almost any image. Check there first, if you can't find it on one of these links...then buy it. Remember to check to see what the restrictions are for your image.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it’s just a feed of information that people can subscribe to.

By default, WordPress creates an RSS feed for every post and every comment on your blog. Meaning if someone puts a comment on your blog, they can add the feed to their feed reader and they’ll be notified on any activity on their comment.

The great thing about RSS feeds, is that now days email clients are including feed readers, so you can add your favorite RSS feed to your email client and your feeds come in just like email.  read more »

There are a few situations where you should not use ads. I only use ads on pages that offer information or content.
If you have a page that is selling something. Do not put ads on this page. Think about what the sole purpose of this page is…to sell something. You don’t want users clicking the ads rather than the order button.

The second place is a newsletter sign up page. The purpose of this page is to gain long time visitors. You want them to sign up for the newsletter, not click your ads.  read more »

Does an ugly site make more than an attractive functional site? Search Engine Roundtable did a great post on this topic.

The question is how did the ugly dating site Plenty of Fish make over $10,000 in one day, yes that is DAY. Their site is hideous and hard to use. The philosophy is that, the site is so ugly and hard to use that people immediately want to leave so they click on the first thing they see...which is a Google ad.  read more »

Favicons are those little icons that appear next to the url (web address). Favicons used to be pretty tough to make. But I’ve just discovered Favicons from Pics. Which will let you make a favorite icon out of any picture! No more tweaking the pixels in photoshop to create a mediocre looking favicon.

Check out Favicons from pics. Sure makes things easy.

When you set up your WordPress blog, you will need a header image. You could go with default blue Kubrik, but I’d recommend designing something eye catching.

Think of your header as the cover to a book. Remember the old saying “You can’t judge a blog by it’s header” or something like that?

I found this article which covers everything about making great WordPress headers. I plan on implementing some of this stuff in the very near future.