By Design links to various websites, blogs and resources related to blogging, design, analytics, and infographics. This round covers a domain name brainstormer, video search engine, video display widget, AJAX libraries, and a color tool.
- Bust a (domain) name.
Still considering a domain name for your website or blog? Not all the good ones are taken, despite what it might seem like. If you’re looking for the availability of the domains using a combination of words, try Bust A Name [via Randa Clay]. Just type in a few words in the “word combiner” and it’ll give you back a list of available domains using combinations of two words from your list. If a domain is available, you’ll get a drop down list that provides links to registrars.
- Gujam Video Search Engine.
Looking for video content for your website or blog? Gujam searches a number of video sites and returns the results collated for convenience.
- WeShow video widgets.
WeShow is a video sharing site that also offers a widget for displaying videos on a web page. The blog widget comes in one vertical and four horizontal formats, and each displays a snapshot of multiple videos that react when a mouse cursor hovers over them. You can customize the border color and select multiple content channel categories. Videos for selected channels for the widget appear to all come from YouTube, but I haven’t verified that.
- MiniAjax.
If you’ve been thinking about adding some Ajaxified dialogs, demo or info windows, draggable content, lightboxes, contact forms and much more, MiniAjax makes it easier. You can easily add a bit of “wow” to your site without having to code from scratch.
MiniAjax is actually a portal to DHTML and JavaScript code available from several websites. There are snapshots of the use of each piece of code, along with an explanation. As far as I could tell, all of it is free.
- Name That Color.
Chir.ag offers a neat little color tool that can be used to learn color names. Drag the circle in the colorwheel or in the embedded color square, and the rectangular area to the right fills in with the selected color. Alternately, you can use the drop-down list of over 1500 colors. In addition to the RGB and Hex color values, the closest color name is show. There’s also a downloadable JavaScript library that you can use to embed the tool into your site.
By Design links to a variety of articles found online, with topics relating to design, blogging, information interfaces, analysis and more. This round summarizes articles about web surfing, color theory, and data charting.
- Web surfing.
Wisdump shows you how to surf like Tom Cruise. Surf the web that is. Read the article and you’ll understand the connection between the interesting web interfaces profiled there and the science fiction movie Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story. [For another wild information interface, watch Paycheck, another movie based on a PKD story, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman.]
- Home Page: Full Post or Excerpts?
The more websites you surf, the more likely you are to prefer excerpts on each home page. Or will you? I personally don’t. I like full-text on home pages and in RSS feeds. It’s a necessity for me because of the amount of content I have to browse regularly. But some people prefer it.
An alternative is to have full-text on the home page and excerpts on archive pages (page 2, page 3, etc.). If that’s something you like, Daniel and Daily Blog Tips has a free Homepage Excerpts plugin for WordPress blogs. Previously, David at Xfep did the same thing manually and provided some WP PHP code.
- Color harmonies and matching.
EasyRGB offers a set of tools for those of you that work with color:
- Color matching.
- Color harmonies.
- Color calculator.
- Monitor calibration.
- Tint searching.
In addition to these web-based tools, they offer EasyRGB-PC, which runs on Windows computers.
- Browser-safe colors.
Website Tips provides an easy-reference grid of browser-safe colors, organized by hue. These are the colors that are supposedly consistent on any computer monitor, provided they’re calibrated. Also see Design Vitality, who offer the meanings of basic colors, in terms of moods set.
- Charting tools.
Need to create charts from data on the fly? PHP/SWF Charts [via WebAppers] is a tool for PHP scripts that generates Flash charts and graphs. There’s also an XML/SWF version that functions the same way with other scripting languages including ASP, Perl and more. Both have a full complement of standard charting and graphing features – including lines, columns, pie, candlestick, and more – so they can be used for a variety of data.
Links to articles about building trust with readers, improving or protecting your search engine rankings, and buying backinks safely. Note that a few of these articles are for more advance readers, in terms of implementing their advice.
- Building trust.
David Dairey offers some simple ways to build trust with your website readers. While these are easy tips, many blog and site owners have either forgotten to update or don’t know any better. This includes tips such as making contact info easy to find and including a photograph.
- Annoying site design decisions.
It takes more than trust to keep readers coming back. Does your site have design elements that might be annoying your readers? Check out DevLounge’s list of 15 annoying design decisions. To that list I add “low-contrast” pages. That is, colored backgrounds with gray text, and in a small font no less. I find this combo very hard on the eyes, especially at night. The shame of it is, it’s often on the sites of blogs I really like.
- Fix your home page URLs.
Do you know from how many different URLs most blogs’ home page can be accessed. If the number 8 surprises you, then you need to do something. Not doing something can mean that some search engines think you have duplicate content. It’s unfair but true.
Here’s the basis of the variations:
- With or without “www.” in front of your domain name.
- With or without trailing “/” at the end of your URLs.
- With or without “index.php” (only applicable to some blog platforms and CMSes).
- A combination of the above.
A combination of the above results in eight unique URLs. Chris Hooley offers an .htaccess tutorial to canonicalize your URLs. That simply means redirecting them to a single consistent URL. Note that this is a more advanced tutorial. If you don’t understand it, beg a more tech-savvy friend to help you.
- Protect your search engine rankings.
Even if you protect your search engine rankings by canonicalizing your URLs, it’s still possible that someone can steal your rankings. And with your own content on their site. Scary but true. Read SEO Fast Start’s article Google Proxy Hacking [via Sphinn]. While you’re at it, also read Hamlet Batista’s 10 Ways to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO.
- Buying links safely.
So you’ve built trust, improved your design, fixed your URLs, and protected your search engine rankings. Now what? Well, amongst other things, you need to build links.
If you are of the opinion that it’s okay to buy links, then read Aaron Wall’s How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer and Andy Beard’s Paid Links & Reviews are Necessary for Relevant Results. One solution, by the way, is to sponsor weblog themes.
There are always little tweaks you can apply to improve your site’s look and feel and rankings. This includes tweaks to customize a theme, adding a sitemap, using optimum permalink URLs, and deciding on home and archive page post excerpt lengths.
- Minimalist website themes.
Are you looking for a unique WordPress theme? You probably already know that there are thousands of free ones out there, but dozens to hundreds of other bloggers might already have downloaded and used them.
An alternative is to start with a minimalist WordPress theme then customize it with easy tweaks that don’t require a lot of design experience, just a little bit of CSS knowledge and maybe a new blog logo.
- Using sitemaps.
If you’re not good at deep linking archived articles from new articles, you need some other way to ensure that the search engines index your older articles. New sites do not always get indexed with any sort of regularity, resulting in them sometimes being “invisible” in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
One solution is to use a sitemap, which typically has a link to each and every page on your site. Dagon Design has a Sitemap Generator WordPress plugin [via One Man's Goal].
- Better Permalinks.
With all the blog platform options you have, you might some day decide to switch. Make it easy on yourself now, on any new blogs you set up, by using a folder name URL structure.
That is, if you have the option of using permalink URLs that have no file extension – such as .html, .php, etc. – then a move to a new platform will not affect search engine rankings. You will not even need to redirect old URLs to new ones.
- Optimum post excerpts.
Still undedecided whether to use full or partial text posts on your website? Xfep suggests using a combination: full posts on the home page and excerpts for archives. The reasoning is solid. People often want to see full posts on the home page but only want to browse the archives. That makes archive pages load faster, enhancing a quick-browse ability.
- Finding time to blog.
Of course, all these tweaks for an improved blog are pointless if you can’t find time to blog. A number of up and coming bloggers have told me lately that their salaried jobs keep them busy, though their blogs are just starting to earn revenue. Should they quit their jobs?
I’d suggest being conservative, at least until you’ve had consistent and significant blog ad revenue for at least six months. Enough revenue – and all saved up – to warrant quitting.
Here are some (mostly) design-related posts that I came across recently. Take your pick of free fonts, lightboxing of images, an easy-to-use graph visualization application, or a bit of advice to improve and protect your blog.
- Huge font repository.
Looking for some pop culture fonts? Type Now has a massive collection of over 300 fonts covering Movies + TV, Music/ Bands, Games, and Miscellaneous. Most of the downloads are TTF (TrueType Fonts), but there are a few for Mac. Keep in mind that these are only useful for your own computer, not on your website.
- Defeating plagiarism.
Andy Beard takes on the problem of plagiarism with a type of blog judo, suggesting practical ways to stop people from stealing your site content. Keep in mind, of course, that “Judo” means the gentle way. Indignation might feel justified, but it doesn’t always help.
- Blog cliches.
Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror points out thirteen cliched blog elements. There are definitely some items here that I’ve dropped from my own blogs. Visit, and consider this a checklist for your blog. My favorite is the blog calendar. Is it really any good for anything other than to remind you that you haven’t blogged in a few days?
- Site bling: lightbox your images.
If you’re running a site where you’d like to offer a lot of large format images, you might have a problem if your page theme isn’t wide enough. Instead, use a technique referred to as lightboxing, which temporarily floats an image on top of an opaque screen over your web page. [via SEOmoz]
- Graph visualizations.
Graph diagrams are not that commonly found except probably in math books, but if you’re looking for an easy way to generate and display them, check out Graph Gear. The application uses an XML file to describe connections between graph nodes, and flash logo designs to display an interactive graph. Not sure why you need to drag the graph, but if you’re frustrated, it might soothe you.
