So you want to get a website for yourself but you don’t know much about web design and what looks good. Well, a great way to know what’s good is to see what’s bad. If your designer hands you a design that’s anything like one of the worst website designs of 2009 then you need a new designer. This site has been on the go for 15 years showcasing the worst of the web. A word of warning though, some of theses sites may make you queasy or even vomit.
The 100 Paces Blog
Know what sucks
August 3rd, 2010What the font
July 30th, 2010
So your web designer has told you that you can’t use all those fancy fonts you so love. On taste alone he’s probably right but technically there’s no reason you can’t have them on your site, in part at least.
What your designer is probably talking about are web-safe fonts. On a very basic level, the web page you see on screen is made up of 2 separate documents, HTML and CSS. The HTML contains the content for the page, the links, headings and paragraphs. The CSS is the magic that styles it. The problem is that CSS (version 2) only allows us to name the font family we wanted to use. The actual font file (i.e. the document that tells the PC how to ‘draw’ the letters on the screen) is not sent along with, or embedded in, either the HTML or CSS. The reason for this is because font files can be pretty large and back in the early days of the Internet they wanted to keep the amount of information being sent to a minimum. So they decided to use the fonts that already existed on the persons computer.
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Kuler colours
July 29th, 2010
Many designers have off days when they just can’t get colour schemes to work out. I see a lot of them battle through these times alone but I prefer to seek help from the clever bods at Adobe. They have a free online application called Kuler that magic-matically works out what colours work well together. You can also save your swatch masterpiece for others to enjoy. What I do most of the time is browse the saved swatches that others have left. A very handy tool indeed.
Take a look at Adobe Kuler for yourself.
Change of direction
July 28th, 2010
I have been pretty poor at keeping up with any kind of schedule for blog posts. It’s a lot harder than I ever realised and I can see why 90% of social media campaigns fail. So in a new lease of life – similar to when people decide to re-join a gym after Christmas – I have decided to try again and focus my blog efforts. The new 100 Paces “daily” blog will focus on web design but from a client’s perspective. What I mean is that I will try to show clients of web design agencies a few things about our business in the hope that they will better understand what we do. I also hope that it will arm them with enough knowledge so that they don’t get taken for a ride, as I see happen oh so very often.
My blog all about the project management application Realer is going to move over to the RealerHQ.com site in the next week or so. I’m currently in talks with a few social media PR agencies about a structured campaign.
PROMOTE PROMOTE PROMOTE is the new Sell Sell Sell
June 3rd, 2010
I have just published my “sales” site to the world at http://www.realerHQ.com. This is what I need to get in front of as many people as possible. I wouldn’t call it sales exactly, more ‘promotion’. There are so many ways to get your site noticed, for example writing a blog, Google Adwords and even traditional media like the press. If I were honest, the thoughts of this being an overnight Internet phenomenon weren’t far behind. By Christmas I imagined that I would be drinking fancy cocktails in some swish holiday resort counting my millions. But reality has caught up and I know that there is a lot of work ahead. Pah.
So what’s next? Ages ago I decided that while Realer could be used by anyone to replace ‘email project management’ it would be simpler to focus on just one target. Naturally I picked creative folk, like myself. It makes promoting the site a lot easier and I know where these people hang out. I have started to talk with some Internet Marketing agencies to try and get some momentum and I have identified a few niche areas which I will explore myself.
Create an account at http://www.RealerHQ.com and become a Beta Tester.
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