Daily Web Design Inspiration & Ideas
For all those times when you need a little logo design inspiration, look at all the logos on this site. LogoPond.com, they have a collection of logos, they are rated from Top Floats to Best Typography, from Best Mark to Best Layout. Lots to sift through. A great find.
Oohhh!! Look at that nav-bar! Yahoo’s designers created a sweet looking navigation bar. If I was to give out the Best Navigation Bar On The Net Award it would go to YahooMusic. First all you see is the simple beveled gray bar, when you hover over a button, it turns a subtle green color but once you hit it and land on a page associated with one of them the button becomes about a pixel larger on top and bottom, turns a nice green color and gets an outer-glow or a shadow effect around it. Man, it looks so nice, it makes me want to copy it for one of my web sites.
Visit the site: http://new.music.yahoo.com
It’s hard to come up with goot catchy titles or headlines when trying to put together a nice piece of content. From reading a lot of blogs online I see that many suggest using the headlines on the cover of the Cosmopolitan magazine as examples. Take the title they have and modify it to apply to your article. Well actually I guess you’re suppose to do this the other way, create a catchy title first and then write the article accordingly. Many cases however, don’t turn out this way. I, many times, already have the article and need to create the title afterwards, so it becomes a bit harder.
Today I went through a handfull of Cosmopolitan magazine covers and picked out these headlines that can be modified to fit your content. Just fill in the blank.
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5 Things Never To _____ |
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The ____ That Can Cost You Your _____ |
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Feel-good Tricks for Totally _____ |
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What Makes ________ |
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4 Things _____ Keep Private |
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5 Places ________ |
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6 Instant _____ Boosters |
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A New Kind Of ________ You Must Know About |
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16 New ________ |
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50 Ways To Be __________ |
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How To ________ More __________ Every Day |
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Questions You Must Ask Before: _______ |
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What Even Experienced _____ Forget To Do In ______ |
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Are You Accidentally Making Yourself _________ |
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75 ____ Tricks |
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The thing Every ____ Needs to _____ |
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What Your _____ Forgot To Tell You About The _______ |
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99 ____ Facts You’ve Never Heard Before |
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Tricks That Curb Your Urge To _______ |
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7 ____ Truths Every _____ Must Learn |
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The “Harmless” Habit That ______ |
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9 ____ Lies _____ Tell |
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Hot New _____ Tricks |
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10 Shocking Truths About _____ |
Nice clean logo with a chrome look effect on one of the words. I like the nice custom icon, a good example for if you ever need to design an icon like this. It has a high rise buildings background and a residential house in the front.
I also like the simple navigation bar. The subtle hover to yellow adds to the design. Very nicely done.
Sourse: http://www.neighborcity.com/
Extensive list of resources for web designers (and other creative types). Inspirational, tools, ideas, examples, all that and more.
It appears that Amazon.com isn’t happy with just being the largest online retailer. So, what’s their plan? They’re now going after the web services market. That’s right…Amazon Web Services is now selling storage, computing power and other data center services.
Their idea is to slash how much Internet startup companies have to spend on infrastructure. Their system, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allows customers to quickly start up a virtual computer in the “cloud” (industry slang for worldwide data centers), use it as a web server or for processing data, and have the ability to shut it down quickly. The system is billed out “utility” style, similar to your electricity bill. The more data that is sent and received, the higher your bill will be at the end of the month.
So, the obvious question here is: What does all this mean to you and me? The answer…is complicated. In the short term, it means unfortunate “big box style” competition from a company with huge name/brand recognition in a field that many of us have spent a lot of painstaking time in refining our skills. Their foray into this market sector is going to create headaches for many web designers, IT staffers, and system/network administrators. Are people going to lose their jobs? Probably. At the least, there will be fewer jobs available.
When I first read about Amazon’s plan, my first reaction was, “why?”. They aren’t satisfied with reporting billions of dollars in sales each quarter? For a long time now, Amazon.com has been touted as a “niche” market leader and a company founded on The Long Tail economic principle (we’ve even written about it here in this blog). Now though, it looks as if they are trying to cover every niche they can possibly find. Why? The only answer I keep coming back to is comprised of one word: greed. Nothing else really makes sense other than sheer greed. The fat cat just wants to get fatter. CNN.com had a story about Amazon’s plan and used a quote which I think sums it up fittingly: “It is hard to get your head around: ‘Why is this retailer that ships me toys for my kids for Christmas … also my supplier of IT services?” Does not compute…
To add more fuel to the fire, Wal-Mart has also announced that it is now providing SEO and SEM services. Oy Vey! Cut-rate SEO and SEM? Yep, $25/month and $50/month packages are what they are promoting. What exactly is a business owner hoping to achieve by enlisting Wal-mart to optimize and promote their website? In the long run, this might prove advantageous to good, qualified SEO and SEM companies and individuals. One approach might be, “So, you tried the budget approach to promoting your website with Wal-Mart and it didn’t yield results, huh? Well, why don’t you give us a shot and see how REAL SEO/SEM works.” Good grief.
After reading about these two giants entering into the web services industry, my mind started to wander off, words such as ‘monopoly’ and ‘antitrust’ began emerging. What force drives these two companies to enter into a market sector that lies completely out of their normal scope of business? Well, again, greed comes to mind along with control, manipulation, and power. Keep in mind that none of those words are real consumer friendly.
In my opinion, this is a trend pointing us toward an oligopoly, in which four or five large companies compete against each other in an individual market – that market being the Internet. Right now, we have three…maybe four big players (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Yahoo!, and Google).
While doing some research about oligopolies, I came across an article that was written about the Microsoft antitrust suit and thought it contained some nuggets of relevance for what is taking place with Amazon and Wal-Mart.
“The economy is so much bigger today that even its largest companies play a smaller role than U.S. Steel, Standard Oil or AT&T did a century ago. The Microsoft case cannot have as much economy-shaking impact. Technology also seems to be moving sufficiently rapidly to make whatever antitrust remedy is reached in that case of doubtful relevance: The market and the industry will have changed too much. The smaller impact of any single case and the difficulty of keeping pace with changing technology may end up making judicial antitrust remedies irrelevant. Perhaps courts and prosecutors will try to maintain the standard pattern: Tolerate oligopoly, break up monopoly. If so, antitrust authorities will have a busy time as they watch economies of scale create a dominant natural monopoly in sector after sector, then move to break up the monopoly and restore competition. Will such a pattern lead to an efficient and productive economy? We are not sure.
A second possible direction would be to have greater tolerance for monopolies that played fair: to focus on establishing and monitoring a code of conduct for information-age natural monopolies that allows us to reap all the efficiency benefits of bigness and still maintain a degree of virtual, if not real, competition. But can such a code of standard-setting friendliness be specified and enforced? We are not sure.” (http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TotW/microsoft_history.html)
For now, my suggestion is this: network hard with everyone you know and develop a strong, happy core of customers who are pleased with your services. Get out in your local community and let people know about your services. On the local level, there is fortunately still an element of loyalty in working with other local service providers. Use this to your advantage! Encourage word of mouth referrals, join your local Chamber of Commerce if necessary and get the word out to potential customers. Promote your business and services as much as possible. The bottom line in all of this too is that you need to do your job well, thoroughly, and honestly. Your reputation will be about the only edge you will be able to use to battle these two companies.
Let me know your thoughts on the announcements from Amazon.com and Wal-Mart. I’d like to hear other suggestions on how you plan to handle their ‘intrusion’ into a highly targeted, customer specific (SEO and SEM), labor intensive, technical field that doesn’t lend itself to flat rate pricing and impersonal handling.
TwoSpots website design company - Website Design, Web Develop, VRML, Flash and Graphic Design Company
Great color scheme website, the blog is full of different color schemes that you can pick from. The website it self is an inspiration. It’s clean, airy even. I think it’s the combination of white, green and blue together that gives me the airy or free feeling. Simple logo, nice boxy navigation buttons, the color boxes in the right sidebar. Very nicely done.
Visit ColorSchemer.com
As you may have noticed, the site looks different. One of the reasons I had to do this is because the old blog was operating on the Serendipity platform and it has been very uncomfortable to run and do things I wanted to do with it. I am used to using WordPress as a blog platform and I decided to migrate this blog there too, - to a WordPress platform.
The design of this blog is based on the Big-Blue WordPress template and was customized by me. I hope you like the new design.
I am still in progress of moving some of the elements of the previous site so if you can’t find something, please check back in a day or two.
You have a project to do, a new website. It has to be done quick. Designing a new one from scratch can take a long time and can rack up costs that will shoot through the budget in no time. Now a days, there are lots of solutions for this problem, Content Management Software like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., which are easy to install and configure. Once it is up and functioning there are loads of WordPress, Drupal and Joomla templates that you can apply to it for a custom look. There are plenty of free templates out on the Internet that you can find but you will also notice that most of them will require you to link back to the original designer and that most of them will look generic and to stand out they will need to be customized after anyway.
There are groups of web designers that design custom templates that are for sale, and are selling at very affordable prices. Groups like at BuyTemplates.net. They have a nice selection of templates to choose from for CMS websites and for just standard websites. All the designs that I have seen are very professional looking. The templates can be browsed or searched by category which is very convenient. Here are a few things from their website:
Template Features
- Five page templates (homepage and five internal pages)
- Affordable at only $29
- Membership package (access to 1000’s of templates)
- Flash and Joomla templates
- Great for web designers
- Live chat support 24 hours
Other services that they offer
- Complete customization of template
- Custom web design service
- Hosting
Check their templates out, maybe they are what you’ve been looking for. 
Even though this blog is about web design and not business card design I had wanted to post this anyway. This is a great example of cool business card designs. I am sure that most of us will probably, at some point in time, need to design a business card for our self. So enjoy this collection - the ones you see here are just a hint of what’s on the post at AllGraphicDesign.com. Make sure you check it out and bookmark it for your self.
The source site for this is: http://allgraphicdesign.com
