I was chatting with a friend on MSN last night and we had the kicks showing each other our past websites. I gotta tell you some of my best works are burried in my archives, forever hidden to the outside world. Sometimes we work too hard to make things better only to derail ourselves from our original purpose. Sometimes we begin to lose our touch and trying too hard isn’t exactly the best we could do. We need to sit back from time to time and let things shape on its own. Looking back I see my work like audio spikes. There were times I was damn good and there were times I sucked.

This is for those of you web designers and developers out there who have been making websites since the dawn of time. I would like to encourage you to take a quick trip to the past. Put your past in a kaleidoscope and look through the tube. You might surprise yourself and you might learn something from your past to help improve your current and/or future work.

If you’re one of those people who trash everything after you’re done with something, you can use the Wayback Machine to retrieve some of your old sites.

But we live in a modern world, who cares about the past? Well history repeats itself baby!! So unless you make peace with your past you will eventually repeat your old mistakes again.

Learn from your past. Recycle your brilliant ideas and don’t repeat the same mistakes. And always remember to have fun!

While the subject of heatmaps are still hot around the blogosphere, I thought I’d mention it here too. This is to follow Lee’s post on AdSense Optimization Tips for your forum as Google has some tips for blogs and regular websites too. Here’s Google’s very own heatmap for effective AdSense placement. It’s been proven to work many many times, so throw your doubt in the back burners and start following the heatmap if you want to increase your CTR. I know, I know, we’re not very compliant when it comes to layout and design, but sooner or later we’ll learn to swallow our egos and settle with what works.

So next time your blog is ready for a redesign, keep the heatmap in mind. Happy blogging!

Just found this great Google AdSense Heat Map for Forums posted over at adsense.blogspot.com

Optimising Google AdSense for use on your forum is as simple as using Google’s Heat Map for Forums displayed on the left.

Research shows that the sidebar on the right doesn’t get as much attention as the sidebar on the left, so you may want to ignore placing Google AdSense on the right altogether. Placing a Skyscraper ad on the left of your forum and placing a leaderboard ad before and after the first post works best. Repeat visitors will not bother so much with the header, choosing instead to go straight for the main thread. You might consider placing a horizontal link unit just below the header though, these provide relevant topics for your users to browse.

Remember not to clutter your forum with Google AdSense. Find a layout that blends in with your forum and one that doesn’t distract your users too much from the main threads. Keep it simple, keep it unobtrusive!

If you have a web company and you need to send your customers invoices, consider Blinksale.

With Blinksale, it’s a breeze to…

• Send elegantly formatted invoices to your customers’ email
• Send payment reminders when an invoice is past-due
• Send thank-you messages when an invoice is closed
• Track open, past-due, and closed invoices
• Add PayPal payment links to your invoices
• Customize the look and feel of your invoices with CSS
• Subscribe to your invoices with iCal & RSS

So forget those sub-par invoices you’ve been sending your customers. With Blinksale make them feel that paying you is a good experience. Everybody wins.

Children are the webmasters of the future and as responsible adults it’s our duty to equip them with the right knowledge by ensuring that they learn the basics of designing and building a web-site. It’s also extremely important that they learn good manners, wash their hands before every meal and clean their teath before bedtime… Sorry about that, got carried away in parent mode then.

Webmonkey for kids is an excellent online learning tool for the home and at school. There is a planning guide for teachers and parents. Or you can simply let you kids work through the lessons and fun projects on their own initiative. There is also a playground section where kids can take time out from their learning.

Children and adults alike will enjoy the easy to follow lessons and projects available on the Webmonkey for Kids web site. But for the more experienced webmasters out there, why not try webmonkey.wired.com

Design is usually associated with visual representations of things. But when you think about it, it’s more of a psychological approach than anything else. I might sound like I’m talking nonsense so let’s break it down:

Good design starts with a good idea. It should be executed in a simple, functional manner without gimmicks or superfluous detail. It should be memorable. It should be thought provoking. It should deliver a clear point of view.

Good design communicates.
Good design generates action.
Good design pays.

Agree? Maybe not. But there’s a good way to inject your thought with fresh data beyond your regular protocol. I specifically like the last part, good design pays. It sure does.

Stock photography put simply, is a large collection of searchable photographs and other imagery for us in publications such as magazines, press releases and of course web-design. Stock photography eliminates the need to hire a professional photographer in most cases and can save you a small fortune in return. But getting your hands on cheap or even free stock photography is nearly always impossible.

Until now that is. The other day I came across a gem of a site called stock.xchng that offer no strings attached FREE stock photography. To good to be true you may think, yes, but no, it is true.

About stock.xchng:

Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into this massive community you see now - there are about 200.000 registered users and more than 100.000 photos online!

All the photographs I looked at were of high quality and very professionally done. Some of the photographs do have usage agreements so check carefully before you download and use them although nearly all the photographs I looked at had no usage restrictions.

The site can get terribly slow at times and you will need to be registered before you can download any photographs. Registration is also FREE.

If you’re looking for free, quick and easy logos or buttons for your web site then give CoolText a try. Simply choose whether you want to create a logo or button, then input your text, change the colour options and click render. Instant logos or buttons ready to download and use in your web design.

A few days ago I talked about affordable web templates as a mean to facelift your website in a professional fashion without choking your budget. Today I’m going to talk about a company called PixelBrick, previously owned by two teenage designers which were later bought (hired) by Ceonex and turned into a multi-million dollar company.

For starters they charge somewhere up to $40k for a website, maybe more. This keeps ordinary clients out, leaving their market to the big players, mostly those in the hosting business such as HostRocket, One World Hosting and EZ Web Hosting to name a few. Their portfolio page boasts these big clients.

I gotta give it to their professionality. They help you with every single aspect of your site, including extras like SEO and powerful backend capabilities such as client management and billing systems. They’re probably the greatest in the business, or at least the greatest that I know of.

Their mission overview reads:

We are shaping the digital future by providing unique online functional and presen tati onal development for the global business community through turnkey web strategy, design and technology solutions.

PixelBrick has successfully assembled a dynamic pool of creative and technological resources to achieve what some reviewers call “phenomenal results”. We invite you to take a look at our extensive portfolio.

No tech talk and sales mumbo jumbo - just facts, case studies and rock-solid references in plain English. You be the judge if we are the right company to take your internet presence to the next level.

Phenomenal results. Quite a treat for their high paying customers and in the world of serious business corporate image is mission-critical. If you drop by their portfolio you’ll agree that their work is indeed phenomenal.

So folks, just a brief peek at the high-end design market that exists between our blogs and the corporate world.

Until next time.

Not everyone is a designer, and not everyone can afford to pay a designer to work on their website. These people usually end up with crappy sites that doesn’t attract return traffic. Some go on great lengths to find affordable solutions, but most designers charge quite a bit. Custom design is expensive. But if you’re the kind of person who aren’t worried to wear the same clothes as your neighbor, you might like to take a look at 4Templates. They offer prebuilt web interfaces (templates) starting $4.99. Some of their designs are really impressive. They have thousands to choose from, suitable for almost any kind of website you can think of.

For those of you who can’t afford a cent for a web template, you might want to check out Layouts4Free. Their templates are not as professional looking as those at 4Templates but some are very exceptional.

I hope you find this article helpful and feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.

Good luck with your websites and remember to have fun with it!