Weekly Links – January 6th

Published January 6th, 2008 in Links - 3 Comments

16 Effective Strategies to Expand Your Blog’s Reach in 2008 from Dosh Dosh.

WordPress 2.4 Administration Panel Preview from eXtra for Every Publisher.

5 Excellent Monogram Logo Designs by David Airey.

The 5 Best Pro Blogger Job Boards from Blogging Tips.

Building a Successful Niche Social Media Website: An Interview With Andrew Egenes of Design Float

Published January 2nd, 2008 in Social Media - 32 Comments

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you have probably seen that I have an interest in niche social media websites. However, the problem with niche social sites is that most of them have only a handful of users and they provide very little potential for marketing your website or blog. That makes the good ones even more valuable.

If you are a web designer or if you enjoy reading web design-related articles, hopefully you’ve already come across Design Float. Those of us in the web design industry are fortunate that there are several useful design-related social media sites. If you’re looking for a place to promote your own content and find other items of interest, I think you’ll like Design Float.

Unlike many other niche sites, Design Float sends a significant amount of traffic to popular submissions (in fact, today I’ve received well over 300 visitors from Design Float). And as its community grows I only expect it to get better.

I had the opportunity to interview Andrew Egenes, the owner of Design Float, about his experience with creating a successful niche social media site. Andrew has a great deal of insight that many of us can learn from. In just a few months he has accomplished the very daunting task of getting a niche social media website off the ground. I hope you’ll enjoy Andrew’s insight as much as I have.

20 Websites With Unique Layouts

Published January 1st, 2008 in Design - 186 Comments

When you are creating a new website you may be inspired by seeing other sites that feature unique layouts. The 20 sites listed here don’t simply use a typical two or three column layout. Many of them use background images to interact with and control the layout in some unique way. Some of them I really like, and some I’m not sold on, but all are unique in one way or another.

Popmatik – Freelance web designer Rob Leach uses a unique layout for his portfolio site. The site uses a background image of a bottle and the content of the site appears to be on the label of the bottle.