Monthly Archives: June 2007

Logo Design, Yeah It’s That Important

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.

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ServerPlace.net

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…

Text Editors

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…

How Many Columns Should You Have?

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:

Webware 100 Winners Announced

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.

Time-Delay Posting

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…

Design Spotlight: June 17, 2007 (Ars Technica)

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…

Google Apps

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…

Script.aculo.us

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…

Tables Aren’t Dead Yet

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.…