Yesterday, I came across a really cool site. He talk about topics I am interested in, such as SEO, web 2.0, blogging, marketing, and business in general. The other articles not pertaining to web design seem a little too opinionated and might scare some people off, but some of the web design articles are right on. Finding ‘Slayerment’ on the Digg home page a few days ago, I browsed the site and found some really great articles about web design to which I can relate. His posts about web design are very easy to read and entertaining most of the time. Check out his article that was featured...

They make your iLife simple. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. ” - Steve Jobs They understand the engineer’s dilemma. Take a normal television remote control. All you really need to use is the power button, channel and volume buttons, and maybe a few others. So why are there 50 more buttons on the remote besides these essential ones? There was too much unused real estate on the remote control of course! When Apple makes a product they strip the functions down to their necessities. Take the iPhone. They took what was already there...

I have written a few articles on CodeIgniter now because it truly has changed the way I develop websites. It has cut the development time in at least half, preventing redundant work by providing great built-in features that I can use in every one of my projects. Plus, CodeIgniter is so easy to pick up. You can start building CI apps in about 10 minutes after watching the CI tutorials and reading my tutorial on getting set up. If you are new to Object Oriented Programming, you can read my introduction to OOP also. The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and...

I use the CodeIgniter and MooTools frameworks for my website projects nowadays. They are far easier to work with and understand if you understand Object Oriented Programming. If you are spaghetti coding your websites line by line, you will be in for a treat when you learn OOP. Here is how it works: Say you want to describe a human being with code. You will create a class called Human: class Human { } Now, you want the human to perform a few functions. This is simple also; you create functions within the class to describe the human’s actions. class Human { function Eat($food) { } ...

CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact...

This looks like it will be good. The challenge starts on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007. So far, I have learned about some great new tools for your website, some I haven’t even heard of before. If you haven’t already, sign up now! Catch up on the blogs, podcasts, video podcasts, and do a little research on the websites he mentions in the videos such as Facebook, Technorati, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious, and Flickr. I don’t know how to use every one of them to their full advantage, but I think everyone’s in for a treat on Wednesday! Thirty Day Challenge Sign Up

CodeIgniter is an awesome tool if you want to learn PHP or start to use object oriented programming (OOP) with your new website. CodeIgniter is flexible with a small footprint and offers tons of features already built in, such as session management, active record use with mysql databases. The best part is it lets you use Model-View-Controller (MVC) programming. This way, your styling (view) is separate from your content (generated by controller) and lets you manipulate your raw data with a model. There are two awesome video tutorials on CodeIgniter to show you how powerful and easy CodeIgniter...

Nowadays, there are so many rules one must follow for a good rank in the top search engines. Search engines are almost as smart as humans reading your page content making sure your site is where search engine visitors want to go. The best way for potential customers to find your site is organically. After all, if someone clicks an ad to your website, and can’t find what they are looking for or the landing page isn’t relevant to what they are looking for, they will bounce (leave your site), leaving you paying for your ad that did no good. If you run an event planning company and someone...

When I went away to college I was only 100 miles away from my hometown, yet I seemed detached from what was happening in the world. I didn’t know what the cool songs on the radio were anymore; I didn’t know the lingo that my younger sister was talking (I felt like the parent in the text messaging commercial with the girl that talks to her BFF jill all the time). I fell behind in my area of expertise: web design! One day I received a call from a friend who wanted to partner up in a new classifieds website he was starting. He asked me what my opinion was on Ruby on Rails, Ajax and Web...

No, You aren’t going to lose any weight on this challenge. Well, maybe you will from the way the guys are talking on the website. The challenge is to make $10 in 30 days online. It starts August 1st, 2007. I haven’t participated in the challenge before, but it sounds interesting and fun! Especially with all my time spent researching SEO, blogging, online marketing, etc., this will be a great challenge and a chance to learn from the pros. Already having some experience building websites and general marketing may help, but I’m a newbie to the online marketing and website monetization...