Building Websites

Since signing up to both Technorati and Zimbio yesterday, my skepticism has not decreased regarding how helpful these sites are likely to be for promoting new blogs. Both operate in very different manners, but neither appears to give much space for new blogs. Let us have a look at both sites, what they offer, and what the issues are.TechnoratiThis site is the closest to a combined directory and seach-engine that I have seen so far. Users can sign up an submit their blogs. Each blog has a...Read Full Story

Design is all about psychology. We must understand how people are going to respond to what we show them. We know that a website for a daycare centre that uses only the colours red and black and is covered with pictures of skulls is not going be received well. This is quite obvious but there are more subtle things that we shouldn’t overlook. A simple mistake that I used to make when I first started designing websites was to not use photographs. I used graphical images to add gradients, curved...Read Full Story

The term Web Designer is quite loose. You might be a designer who never codes, a coder who dabbles in design or, more often, someone who is a jack of all trades. Freelance Web Designers can often be a one person band. The client expects you to handle everything to do with their website: domain registration, hosting, email, design, coding, databases, seo, site submissions, promotion, visitor statistics and more. So how do you handle all these extra jobs and keep your clients happy? The trick...Read Full Story

Looking through the log generated by the web-server, I noticed that a user agent called Apple-PubSub has been accessing blog/rss/, which is the RSS feed for this blog. Apple-PubSub is the name of Mac OS-X's built in RSS reader. If you are the Mac user (or one of the Mac users?) that subscribed, welcome; if you are not, welcome too. This is an example of the wealth of information available in the logs. Whilst this may sound a little scary to some, there really is nothing to worry about. There...Read Full Story

Given the millions upon millions of blogs in existence, and the thousands of new ones starting every day, some sort of directory or search-engine for blogs would make sense. Unfortunately, it appears that all too many people agree. A quick search for blog directory or blog search engine brings a mind-blowing number of hits. There is as big an overdose of blog directories and search-engines as there are blogs. This is probably fueled by reports that some people have made money off their blogs...Read Full Story