Archive for June, 2007

Your logo represents your site. You should spend a fair bit of time on your logo, perfecting it. You won’t make a very good first impression if you just have plain text at the top of your site reading “MySite.com”. Look at all the successful websites you know of, do you see a logo-less one? Didn’t think so.

Google, Amazon, EBay, Digg, Reddit, Wired… They all have logos. Each one of those companies invested a substantial amount of time (and probably money) designing a logo. Should your site be different? No. Spend a bit of time in Photoshop, designing a logo.

Before we cover a bit more on logo design, here are a few well-designed logos. Click the logos to see how they fit in with the actual site. (more…)

I use ServerPlace.net to host one of my various websites (The Site of Requirement), and it’s a pretty good deal. They offer shared hosting, reseller hosting, and even dedicated servers at competitive prices. You can’t beat their “SP Special” shared hosting plan, which offers the following for only $1.95/month:

• 1GB storage
• 25GB bandwidth (rolls over to next month)
• 5 MySQL Databases
• Host 5 domains
• Park 5 domains
• 5 Email Addresses (or you could just use Google Apps)
• cPanel

I haven’t had any serious reliability problems to date, though the server I’m on has problems with PHP SendMail.

You won’t get very far as a webmaster if you don’t know what a plaintext editor is (Notepad, for example), so I’m not going to waste time explaining. Let’s fast-forward to the good part.

Are you happy with your text editor? Which one do you use? Do you want to try some new ones?

I use Notepad (included with Windows), and EvolvEd (which is no longer available, unfortunately). I mainly use Notepad, but I use EvolvEd if I need line numbers, syntax coloring, or other extra stuff. Notepad is still my favorite text editor (I like It’s simplicity), though I’ve always wanted to try the Mac-only (I want a Mac!!) TextWrangler.

If you want to look around at more advanced text editors than Notepad, check out Wikipedia’s page on text editors.

If you’re designing a layout for your website, somewhere along the line you’ll have to decide how many columns you’re going to have. What do I mean by Columns? Take a look at the diagram below: (more…)

The Webware 100 winners have been announced. Wordpress is the top in the “Publishing” category, as a lot of you have probably heard already (Woot!). Firefox is top in “Browsing”, GMail in communications.

You can see all of the results here.

Wouldn’t it be useful if you could write blog posts ahead of time, and have them post themselves at some arbitrary date? Most blogging software (Wordpress included) can do this.

Why would you want to?

• If you’re going on a trip, you can write posts in advance…and have them post themselves while you’re away.
• Suppose you wrote an amazing post, and then you had a flood of ideas for another post. You wouldn’t want your new post to detract from the other one, would you? Go ahead and write it, but set it to be posted the day after.

(more…)

Welcome to Design Spotlight. What’s Design Spotlight? I’ve decided to highlight sites with cool designs once in a while. Inspire yourself. Today we have Ars Technica.

Ars Technica is one of the biggest Tech News sites on the web. If one of their posts gets submitted to Digg, it’s sure to get at least a hundred diggs.

In addition to their great content, they have a stunning design. Have you ever seen a site that looks like it? I don’t think so. I wonder who their designer is. (more…)

So, you’ve got yourself a domain. Sure, it helps people get to your website, but what else can you use it for? Google’s got the answer. Do you hate your webhost’s webmail program? Do you like GMail? Well, now you can have your own copy of GMail (with 100 free email accounts)….but at your own domain. That’s right, you can have your own mini-GMail with email addresses resembling you@yourdomain.com. You get more than just email, but the email’s the best part. Forget your host’s SquirrelMail system, switch to Google Apps.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily manipulate HTML elements onscreen? Wouldn’t it be nice if AJAX requests could be sent with only one line of code? Take a look at Script.aculo.us.

What is Script.aculo.us? It’s a set of JavaScript files (based off the Prototype JavaScript library) that lets you do numerous cool and/or useful things with ease. Fading, sizing, and movement actions are only a couple lines of JavaScript away. Not to mention easier AJAX techniques.

Rarely does a day go by without someone bashing table-based design. Not long after the HTML <table> element was introduced, people started using it to lay-out their web pages. Before the days of CSS, people used tables so they could have sidebars and such.

Nowadays, we have Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. With CSS, you can make amazing designs like the ones seen on Digg, The Leaky Cauldron, North X East, or Ars Technica. With a lot of effort, you can pull-off designs like that.

Table-based layouts are far from dead however (despite some peoples’ ravings). Take a look at TemplatesBox, one of the largest and most popular places to get free site templates. Notice that all of the pre-sliced ones are done with tables? There’s no doubt that tables are easier to implement, despite the advantages of CSS. There still quite a few major websites still using tables for layouts. Ever heard of Mugglenet? It’s the second-oldest Harry Potter news site. They’re pretty big, but not Yahoo-big. Would you have guessed that the shopping-giant Amazon had a table-based design? They do. (more…)