Webmonkey, around sine 1996, is one of the most well-known and long-running web development sites. Their blog was one of the first blogs I read, and the first one that I subscribed to via RSS. Some changes have been happening lately over at Webmonkey. They’ve been purchased by Condé Nast, the parent company of Wired Magazine, and they’re restructuring their site.

Let’s start with their blog. When it launched, it was known as Monkey Bites. Eventually the blog was moved over to Wired.com, where it ran for awhile before being renamed to “Compiler.” The blog is, once again, known as Monkey Bites, and is now residing at webmonkey.com/blog and it’s integrated more tightly with Webmonkey than ever before.

The WebMonkey site itself is now a wiki. What used to be a repository for tutorials penned by HotWired’s designers and developers is now opening-up and allowing anyone who knows what they’re talking about to submit articles to be included. It looks like WebMonkey is moving forward into the 21st century, making an effort to keep up with today’s technologies, instead of staying a dusty collection of out-of-date tutorials.

Now, let’s move on to the design. (more…)

A tagline is a short line of text that runs underneath your site’s name. It says something about your site, and adds to the first impression. In my opinion, the best taglines are both humorous and descriptive. (Of course, humor may not be appropriate for some sites, but it still pays to be descriptive.) Your tagline should sum-up your blog in one sentence.

Taglines are by no means exclusive to websites. Traditional publications use them, corporations have them, and even movies have taglines. Who hasn’t heard (or heard references to) “Think Different” or “Yo Qiero Taco Bell”? What about “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”? Just run a Google search on “tagline” and you’ll find plenty of corporate taglines. Or look at IMDB.com, and you’ll notice that they list the lagline(s) for all your favorite movies.

If you don’t already have a good tagline for your website, get one. Here are a few noteworthy examples:

• We smash you with the information that will make your life easier. Really. [Smashing Magazine]
• News for nerds. Stuff that matters [Slashdot]
• The Art of Technology [Ars Technica]
• Shoppers Bite Back [The Consumerist]

For more funny taglines, check out The Best Website Taglines Around the Internet.

Consider adding a tagline. Whether you decide to be funny or not, be sure to check out Copyblogger’s guide to writing taglines.

No one actually likes waiting. Some of us are just better at it than others.

The internet seems to be a parallel reality where time passes differently, slow at times, fast at others. Web pages seem to take eons to load, no matter how fast your internet connection is. I remember having to wait more than a minute for most pages to load (that was back when I had dial-up). Nowadays I have a DSL connection that generally runs in the 700k-900k range. It’s a lot faster, but not fast enough. Sure, some pages load lightning-fast, but others still seem to crawl along. While they’re not taking over a minute to load, it sure seems like it.

While you’re using the web, time flies by overly quick. It seemed like it was taking an hour for that video to load, but it was really only five minutes. So why is it four o’clock? Oh yeah, you logged-on to World of Warcraft for a few minutes… But how does that come-out to be an hour?

Do you get what I’m saying? (more…)