10 Steps to a Successful Design Project

Published May 8th, 2008 in Design Process - 20 Comments

Building a complete and effective website truly is a process. In this post we’ll take a brief look at the various steps that lead to a successful project. Of course, this will vary from case-to-case, but this is a pretty standard order of events.

1. Needs Analysis

I believe that it’s important to have a good idea of what you want or need from your website before you really get into the process. Some business owners that decide to have a website built or redesigned simply don’t consider exactly why they are doing it, and what they need to get out of the final product. This is a critical first step, because without knowing exactly where you want the project to go, it will come up short in one way or another.

99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration

Published May 5th, 2008 in Design - 113 Comments

Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.

9 Options for Tracking Downtime

Published in Tools - 23 Comments

Having your website go down is not only frustrating to you, it can also be an inconvenience for your visitors and customers. Most of us aren’t on our sites all day long in order to know when it is down and how often it happens. Fortunately there are a number of tools and online services to accomplish this task for you. There are some basic free tools that will get the job done for most of us who simply want to know the status of our website. However, there are also much more advanced services for larger companies that may want to track downtime for all of their systems. We’ll take a look at several of the options.

AlertSite

Killer Domains: Helping You to Find the Perfect Domain for Your Next Website

Published May 1st, 2008 in Reviews - 11 Comments

About two weeks ago Daniel Scocco released his ebook Killer Domains: Tools and Techniques to Find the Perfect Domain Name. Daniel owns and manages Daily Blog Tips, Daily Writing Tips, and Daily Bits. In Killer Domains he reveals all of the information that he has learned through the past few years of buying domains and building profitable websites.

Because many readers of this blog are actively involved in building websites, I thought that Daniel’s book would be of interest to many of you. Daniel kindly provided me with a copy of the book so that I could review it here.