Vandelay Website Design & Blog Customization

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you’ll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it’s important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

A few months ago I posted a collection of beautifully colorful websites, and I wanted to follow up with 25 more sites that provide excellent inspiration when working with colors. The 25 sites displayed here use a wide variety of design styles, but all make effective use of color to create a fabulous look that leaves an impact on visitors.

Global Oneness Project

Flickr is of course the most popular photo hosting and sharing service online. Many Flickr users also want to display their photos on their website or blog. Fortunately there are a number of different options for users. Here we’ll take a look at some of the best choices.

Official Flickr Badge - Flickr allows you to choose between two types of badges - HTML or Flash. Photos can be selected by using tags. (You’ll need to be logged in to Flickr to access this page).

Building a complete and effective website truly is a process. In this post we’ll take a brief look at the various steps that lead to a successful project. Of course, this will vary from case-to-case, but this is a pretty standard order of events.

1. Needs Analysis

I believe that it’s important to have a good idea of what you want or need from your website before you really get into the process. Some business owners that decide to have a website built or redesigned simply don’t consider exactly why they are doing it, and what they need to get out of the final product. This is a critical first step, because without knowing exactly where you want the project to go, it will come up short in one way or another.

Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.

Having your website go down is not only frustrating to you, it can also be an inconvenience for your visitors and customers. Most of us aren’t on our sites all day long in order to know when it is down and how often it happens. Fortunately there are a number of tools and online services to accomplish this task for you. There are some basic free tools that will get the job done for most of us who simply want to know the status of our website. However, there are also much more advanced services for larger companies that may want to track downtime for all of their systems. We’ll take a look at several of the options.

AlertSite

About two weeks ago Daniel Scocco released his ebook Killer Domains: Tools and Techniques to Find the Perfect Domain Name. Daniel owns and manages Daily Blog Tips, Daily Writing Tips, and Daily Bits. In Killer Domains he reveals all of the information that he has learned through the past few years of buying domains and building profitable websites.

Because many readers of this blog are actively involved in building websites, I thought that Daniel’s book would be of interest to many of you. Daniel kindly provided me with a copy of the book so that I could review it here.

If you’re looking to improve a website by using Photoshop to enhance a photo to make it clearer, more interesting, or more exciting, here are 45 of the best tutorials to show you some of the possibilities.

Telling stories with shadows

This post was written by Jacob Gube of Six Revisions.

Flash is unparalleled when it comes to providing users a highly rich, memorable, and interactive experience. For developers, nothing matches Flash’s relative ease in allowing them to develop dynamic, complex web-based applications. For a vast majority of users, the required Flash Player plug-in is already installed, making it the most popular choice when it comes to animation and effects on the web.

It’s hard to believe that April is almost over. Here is a collection of the best design-related articles of the month.

Celebration of Vintage and Retro Design from Smashing Magazine.
Smashing Magazine always provides great resources for inspiration, and this one is no exception.

60+ Unusual WordPress Blog Designs from Noupe.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for creating something unique with WordPress, Noura has put together an excellent categorized collection.