David Olsen Consulting » Web Design Articles

Choosing an SEO Firm Can Help Improve Your Business

David Olsen — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:13:02 +0000

If you build websites you know that SEO is very important if you rely on search engines to get readers. But it can take a lot of time and effort on a continuing basis to optimize websites for search engines. So it’s a good idea to look at search engine marketing firms. But there are a few things you should know before you pay them to optimize your site.

Help with SEO

Choosing an SEO Firm Can Help Improve Your Business originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 10:02:04.

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Web Design Software Pick of the Week: ColorBlender

David Olsen — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:00:05 +0000

Finding color palettes can be a lot of fun, and with this tool you can create a palette and then email it to someone else to have them modify it. You can choose each color in the palette directly or have the tool give you a “blend” based on a color you start with.

Color Palettes: ColorBlender
Creating a Web Color Scheme
Color Harmony
Visual Color Symbolism Chart by Culture
See all the Software Picks
Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

Web Design Software Pick of the Week: ColorBlender originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 07:05:16.

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Link Love – Color

David Olsen — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:19:58 +0000

Color is something that most Web designers obsess over. We have tons of color apps to help us pick colors, follow pages of color ideas, and even read articles on color theory like they are the latest best-seller. Here are some links I found this week that are about using color in Web design. If you know of other good color resources, let us know in the comments.

Link Love – Color originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 16:24:54.

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Interesting Web Books – New Books on Web Development

David Olsen — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:00:02 +0000

I love to read. I read over 100 books a year, possibly as many as 200 books. And while most of these books are science fiction, dantasy, or general fiction, I also read a lot of Web development books. These are some of the books that have come out recently that I would like to read.

(Compare Prices)

HTML and JavaScript BASICS by Karl Barksdale and E. Shane Turner (Compare Prices)
Host Your Web Site On The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy: Amazon EC2 Made Easy by Jeff Barr (Compare Prices)
Web Development and Design Foundations with XHTML (5th Edition) by Terry Morris (Compare Prices)
Web 2.0: Making the Web Work for You, Illustrated by Jane Hosie-Bounar and Barbara M. Waxer (Compare Prices)

Link Love: CSS Tricks

David Olsen — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:40:02 +0000

This week I found some sites that teach how to do some nifty things with CSS. So the next time someone tells you that CSS creates boring designs, you can point to one of these sites and correct their perception.

PHPCamp – Toolbar-Pure CSS speech bubbles
4 Ways to Get Rounded Corners Using CSS
Speed Up with CSS3 Gradients
Create a smiley face using only xHTML and CSS
A Fancy Photo Gallery – view the source to see how it was done
Text Shadow Box
CSS Tabs Without JavaScript
CSS3 Menu Without JavaScript
Creating an Image Map using CSS only
Custom radio and checkbox inputs using CSS

Link Love: CSS Tricks originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 14:55:01.

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Are legal pages critical to websites?

David Olsen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:40:02 +0000

I received the following question from a reader:

I have made a community based website… I often see the “accept terms” that you have to check mark to register to a forum. Will it be necessary for my forum?

And while many people put up forums and other websites with no terms or disclaimers or other legal information, this may not be the best way to protect yourself and your business. There are many legal pages you can have on a website. Not all sites need all of them, but many sites could benefit from one or two. Which ones do you use?

More Help with Legal Pages

Are legal pages critical to websites? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 09:58:14.

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Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?

David Olsen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:20:02 +0000

I was thinking about the Reader’s Choice Awards and specifically the Best Web Designs participants when one of my friends was complaining that some of the nominees were (in his words) “downright ugly”. He wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. So I asked him who he nominated for each of my design categories. And he laughed and said “well, I couldn’t think of any for all of them.” And I began to wonder, are beautiful Web pages more or less common on the Web than their ugly brethren? So I devised this completely unscientific test. I went to a random word generator and had it generate 10 words for me. I then went to Google and input those words one at a time into the search engine. I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” to get the first result for that search term. I decided ahead of time that if I got any About.com sites (I didn’t, by the way), I would get a new word – as no matter what I think about About.com sites beauty or lack thereof, my opinion is biased because I work for them. I also decided to only accept one page from any given site, so if a site came up for more than one word, I went back to the word generator and asked for another (this happened three times). Once I had my 10 sites I evaluated them based on principles of design and my own aesthetic. The results are as you see them in my article Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? As you might guess, none of the pages were something I would really consider good looking, although a couple were okay. Most were downright ugly, and one was almost frighteningly ugly.

Bad Web Design

Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 08:53:37.

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Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Stock.Xchng

David Olsen — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:40:03 +0000

Stock.Xchng, while not really software, is a tool I use for my Web design work all the time. It’s a stock photography and images site, and the best thing about most of the images? They are free. You can find standard stock photo iconic images like the ubiquitous handshake signifying a business deal and abstract photos like these lightbulbs and many other types of photos. It’s my favorite stock photo site.

Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Stock.Xchng originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 13:38:54.

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JavaScript Menus Don’t Have to be Hard

David Olsen — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:40:02 +0000

If you’ve ever tried to build a JavaScript drop-down menu from scratch, then you know how hard it can be. They can get very complicated very quickly, and unless you are building menus all day, everyday mistakes will creep in that can be challenging to find and fix. One solution is to use a tool like FlexiMenusJS to design and build your menus.

More About DHTML and DHTML Menus

JavaScript Menus Don’t Have to be Hard originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 14:49:06.

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Poll: With the coming of the iPad, are you going to focus more on HTML5 than Flash?

David Olsen — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:20:02 +0000

There is a lot of hoopla going around the announcement of the Apple iPad. I admit that I’ve been hooked as well, and the complaints that it’s nothing more than a “giant iPod touch” suit me just fine. That’s not a complaint in my book, that’s a benefit. But all swooning aside, I am wondering how the iPad will affect my work as a designer. If you had asked me last December what I thought was going to change in 2010, I would have said that Flash was going to get a lot bigger as more sites started using it for games and features. But then the iPad came out and Apple is beginning to make it fairly clear that Adobe Flash is not going to be present on their devices. It’s not available on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it apparently won’t be on the iPad either. Apple is instead focusing on HTML5 as a way to deliver video an other content that Flash delivers a lot of now. Is this going to change how you build your websites? Are you going to focus more on HTML5 and less on Flash now that the iPad may be a game changer? I know it really depends upon the device itself, but what do you think right now?

IPad image Courtesy of Apple.

Poll: With the coming of the iPad, are you going to focus more on HTML5 than Flash? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 08:34:36.

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