Design

When you’re trying to knock together a decent looking website and short on time, open source templates and tools can be a real godsend. This list of 100 great tools, templates and resources is a great start for any simple web project, and could even provide a framework for larger projects where you don’t have time for design.

Chock full o’goodies like template directories, open source tools, complete templates, CSS layouts and even a few blog themes, you’ll surely find something here you can use.

We love contests, and that goes double for contests that take skill and effort to pull off. Macthemes2 is sponsoring an all out battle to the death over Mac Themes, and they’re inviting you to throw your well-Photoshopped hat in the ring.

They write, “So without further ado, we’re ecstatic to announce the MacThemes Theme For a Week Contest. With over 13,000 elements to theme in OSX the grueling task of creating and producing a theme takes the right kind of artist. That’s why we decided to shake things up a bit. Instead of a long, drawn out development period, with little interaction from users and meager rewards at the end, the Theme For a Week Contest, as its name implies, lasts a week, with a (mock-up) development process as clear as glass and rewards fit for a king”
They’re giving away a ton of cool gizmos and chotchkys for the skillful designer with a flare for all things desktop.

Those wonderful folks over at DAZ 3D are doing it again by making Bryce 5.5, a 3D landscape and animation tool, available as a free download. The latest version of their software is at 6.1, but with version 5.5 you get a free, fully functional version of the software with no time-limit or disabled features to worry about. If you’ve been itching to play around in the 3D world you should check this out. The software is available for both Mac and PC platforms.

[via Creative Cow]

Pimptastic icons can really make a highly customized desktop environment feel, well, cozy. If you’re the sort of person who gets all squiggly inside over rendered 3d icon love, Iconfinder is a definite must see.

Just back online after an unspecified absence, Iconfinder lets you search for all sorts of icons just like you’d search for any other web content. You won’t find everything you’re looking for, but hopefully as they work to relaunch the site we’ll see more icons for common tools we all know and love.

Ubuntu comes with loads of fonts pre-installed, and if you’ve goosed the power of your Ubuntu install with Automatix, you’ve already added several more. For the casual graphic designer though, more fonts are always welcome. Ubuntu Blog has compiled an incredible roundup of easily installable and freely available fonts for Ubuntu; all of which can be downloaded and installed with just a quick cut and paste at the command line.

[via Digg]

Looking for vector art to use for a project? Vecteezy is a brand new repository of free vector art, licensed under variants of the Creative Commons, ready to browse, download, open in Adobe Illustrator and go.

The selection isn’t enormous but, what is there is mighty useful. Also worth a look is Vecteezy’s sister-site, Brusheezy, which hosts a large selection of free Photoshop brushes.

Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people’s shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like “our customer is not typically price sensitive” don’t help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn’t have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn’t stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we’re sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader…

Shouldn’t all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

Windows keeps the Start button, taskbar and system tray at the bottom of the display and a menubar in every window. Mac OS X keeps one main menubar at the top of the display, with a ‘dock’ of larger icons that take the place of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the display. Linux, for the most part, seems to prefer the Windows UI, typically using a taskbar-like system with menubars again in every window, but through the power of Open Source, you can do just about anything you want to the Linux UI to make it feel more like home. Some people find one approach more useful, while others prefer a different side of the fence. While the debate surrounding one’s OS preference isn’t showing any signs of subsiding, we thought it might be useful to offer at least a little insight and theory into why some fundamentals of Mac OS X are designed so differently.

One of the basic principles that informs the Mac OS X menubar is something called Fitts’ Law, which I first learned about from John Gruber of Daring Fireball in a post here. To keep things brief, however, I’ll just quote a short introduction from the Wikipedia:

In ergonomics, Fitts’ law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts’ law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse.

To summarize: Fitts’ Law is about how far you have to travel to hit a target, and how easy that target is to hit. Apple implemented these concepts (and I’m sure plenty of others) when designing their menubar by pinning it to the very top of the display, not only from a hierarchal standpoint (you can always look to the very top left of your display to find out exactly which app you’re in), but also from a ‘make it easy as possible to hit this’ perspective. You can simply fling your mouse ‘up’ and you’re at the menubar; even if you click on the very top-most pixel above File, Edit or Help, you’ll still hit that menu item and activate it. It’s a seemingly minor detail, but one that can help quite a bit during one’s daily computing.

This concept is also present in other major OS interfaces, such as the Windows Start button; fling your mouse ‘down and left’, click and you’ll hit the One Button to Rule Them All. Mac OS X’s Apple and Spotlight menus also function the same way: fling your mouse ‘up and to the left’, click in the furthest pixel up there and you’ll activate the Apple menu; ‘up and to the right’, and you’re in Spotlight.

If anything, the main point we want to get across is that there is typically a lot of theory that goes into the design of an OS and how users interact with it. We might not always agree with the approach taken by one camp or another, but at least people are thinking about this stuff, because even in 2007, computers still aren’t that intuitive to some users who have yet to hop on board the digital train. The more thought, consistency and intuitiveness OS engineers design into our software, the easier it will be for everyone to come along for the ride, no matter what side of the car they’re sitting on.

“And we want to be on the first page of Google,” another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

“What are your stats now?” I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don’t review their site stats, don’t know how to view them online and can’t really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let’s try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the “search keyphrases” and “search keywords” that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between “hits” and “visits” is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines’ results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

1. Be Compliant - Make sure your Web site is W3C compliant [http://www.w3.org/] and search-engine friendly. That’s a starting point that involves a careful Web audit and repair. If you’re using FrontPage for a business site, it’s time to stop. Develop a quality site that meets the rules.
2. Get a Google sitemap added to your site and submitted to Google.
3. Drive traffic to your site with quality links from important other Web sites. This means that you have to contact the Webmaster at another site that you think has great traffic that you want and get a quality link from them (and give them one in return).
   
   

   “If you want to know more about this, click here.” – This is an example of a bad link. Hyperlinked “click here” needs to disappear from Web sites.

   “Contact Sue’s Bakery to order custom wedding cakes in North Carolina.” – That’s a better link. Write your own link with the URL you want and send it to the other Webmaster. Like I said, it’s human-intensive.

4. Pictures are secondary. Make sure that you have content-rich text on all your site pages; that your page titles use quality keywords; that you use quality meta tags. In short, get a quality Web designer.
5. SEO v SEM Learn the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimization, more technical) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Check out SEMPO, the professional organization of SEM firms and look for a quality firm using SEMPO’s search tool (check the firm’s references, too).
6. Marketing - not IT Raising your ranking on any search engine is a marketing, not a technology, expense. Budget for it. Be open to buying keywords. Understand if you want a regional or national campaign.

THE COST OF PAGE RANKING
You might find that quality SEM is more costly than a site overhaul but you’ll certainly find that good SEM firms don’t send spam and promise to submit your site to 400 search engines (you can do that yourself). Sample URL submission pages:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft Live
• Dmoz

PAGE RANK BOTTOM LINE

• Review your statistics regularly and learn what they mean.
• Make sure your business’s Web site meets (or greets) W3C recommendations.
• Get quality link exchanges from quality sites.
• Use content-rich text all over your site.
• Develop realistic goals for your page ranking effort.
• Talk to a reputable SEM firm (and get referrals) before embarking on a marketing campaign for your Web site.
• Ignore the page-rank shysters.

Creative Suite 3 Web Premium arrived, and boy is it packing a punch. Before we get to dissecting the intricacies of this major upgrade, we thought it would be fun to step it up a notch in the ‘I got a new [thing]‘ space on the internets with an unboxing video. Yep - the days of unboxing pictures are numbered, as video is the inarguable craze these days. Granted, CS3 isn’t quite as hot as some new imported gadget, but you can consider this a sort of test run with the format.

We will of course have more on CS3 once it’s actually installed, so enjoy the unboxing video for now, and let us know what you think.