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5 Tips for Starting a Website

August 11th, 2009

Here are a few quick and easy tips to remember about starting a website, which should make your website more successful.

1. Quality is better than Quantity

This tip can be put in several contexts. Content wise, if you have thousands of pages essentially saying “I’m great” in thousands of ways you have wasted your time creating them. Instead make a single easy to find page, which engages the user quickly and gets to the point.

Traffic wise, it’s better to have a small audience which engages with your content (or will pay for it) then a large audience who do not engage with your content and end up just increasing server costs. A notable example of a Company which has decided to focus on serving the 10% of their audience who will pay for content is News Corp.

2. Start Small

When you start you may want to do everything under the sun. Unfortunately in most cases this leads to websites stalling in development. For example many websites spend years “Under Construction” and when they are finally released their product or service is outdated or uncompetitive.

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Twitter Suspensions – I can’t help but giggle.

July 6th, 2009

Some of you may have noticed several twitter users complaining about their “clients” accounts getting suspended. In some cases the user was doing nothing wrong ( See Mashable: Influx of Twitter Account Suspensions Creating Confusion). But in others the user was clearly not helping the twitter community.

Here is a neat little screen shot of people complaining their account has been suspended:

spammer_on_twitter_gets_suspended

I think the screen shot speaks for itself (Click the picture to see a larger version).

Firefox 3.5 – What it means for Designers and Developers

June 30th, 2009

Most of you may have noticed that Firefox 3.5 has just been released. Here is a quick overview of what new features and improvements it has:


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Key Features

  • HTML 5 – Essentially this means more people will be able to support markup such as the video tag and footer tag, which makes the internet a more indefinable place. We can also stop using those annoying < object> tags to play flash videos (Which normally causes invalid code).
  • TraceMonkey JavaScript Engine – This makes our JavaScript run faster, which means we can use jQuery less sparingly.
  • Geo-Location – We can easily localize our users experience.
  • More CSS Features – Mainly the ability to download fonts, which gives us more freedom with typography.

If you want to read in a bit more detail the new features of Mozilla FireFox 3.5, take a look at Firefox 3.5 for developers.

New 473ml Red Bull Cans – More space, same size

June 29th, 2009

I was recently in Waitrose and I noticed a new Red Bull can (Picture below) which could hold an amazing 473ml while still looking still roughly the same size as a normal Red Bull Can. The best price I could find was £1.79 which is a lot more expensive than its nearest 500ml rival (Coca-Cola’s Relentless).

redbull-big-vs-small
Left to Right: Red Bull (473ml), Alibi Pretox (330ml) and Red Bull (250ml)

How big do you think Red Bull can make their cans until they just don’t look the same as the 250ml can?

Socialize This V1.5 – Coming Soon

June 27th, 2009

Just a quick notice, I’m currently working on Socialize This V1.5 and it’s coming along nicely.

New Features:

  • More pre-bundled icons (More of the new icon sets is made by @KirstyBurgoine)
  • Better Icon Management – More power over the icons on your site.
  • Better Social Networking abilities.

If there is anything you want added put it in the comments.