How 20 popular websites looked when they launched. 2. facebook.com - launched in 2004 3. myspace.com - launched in 2003 4. yahoo.com - launched in 1994 5. youtube.com - launched in 2005 6. wikipedia.org - launched in 2001 7. msn.com - launched in 1995 8. apple.com - launched in 1987 (screenshot from 1996) 9. drudgereport.com - launched in 1997 10. amazon.com - launched in 1995 11. twitter.com - launched in 2006 12. whitehouse.gov - launched in 1994 13. craigslist.org - launched in 1995 14. nytimes.com - launched in 1995 15. news.bbc.co.uk - launched in 1997 16. dell.com - launched in 1996 17. friendsreunited.com - launched in 2000 18. telegraph.co.uk - launched in 1994 19. blogger.com - launched in 1999 20. flickr.com - launched in 2004.
10 Websites That Help You Discover the Best Web Apps | Inspired. If you’re watching the blogosphere close enough, you can observe a new trend coming along pretty quick – the application blog, whether is focused on iPhone apps, Mac apps, Air apps, web apps, or all of them. Today we’re gonna talk about the best web apps blogs, with daily tools that will save you lots of time or – on the contrary – gonna lose the whole day playing with.
Please feel free to suggest others in the comments. Useful Tools A web magazine for people who love web tools and apps. There are new and exciting applications being developed all the time. We sift through the abundance of technologies available to you, and help you find the most useful tools Feed My App Feedmyapp is a Web 2.0 Directory with the best and latest web 2.0 sites, daily updated. Web Appers WebAppers is a blog dedicated to share top quality open source resources for web developer and web designer daily. Creative Applications Web App Storm The Museum of Modern Betas Ziipa Launchly Lovely Pages Webware. 50 Free High-Quality and “New” (X)HTML/CSS Templates | Noupe. Jul 02 2009 In this post, we’ll showcase 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files).
You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects. You will have to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines before using any template. Shape View Demo | Download 2 Breed This template was fascinated by nature, with attractive and vibrant colors. View Demo | Download Environment Brand Design View Demo | Download DelliStore This is a full px-based, cross-browser-compliant (X)HTML/CSS-template (IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome). View Demo | Download Organic Template Design View Demo | Download The Old Forest View Demo | Download Motion View Demo | Download Package View Demo | Download 101 design blog View Demo | Download ec mania View Demo | Download Fashion Club View Demo | Download Charcoal. The Ultimate Guide to Setting up WordPress after an Install | Pr.
There are a few essential steps that need to be taken with any new wordpress install. Obviously not every wordpress blog will be the same but there are some basics that I feel should be done regardless of what kind of blog you’re creating. Here we’ll go through 10 steps that are essential to preform after any wordpress install including a list of 10 plug-ins that are a must for blogs of any type. Step 1 – Change Permalink Structure When you go to Settings > Permalinks, you’ll notice that the default permalink is I would suggest a custom structure here using only the post title ( which will provide some keywords for search engines as well as giving your readers something to go on. Some people choose to add in the category ( however, if you want to assign multiple categories to a single post, you will have to work out a way to deal with duplicate links.
Step 2 – Set up Authors Step 6 – Set up Feedburner. Mega Menus: the Next Web Design Trend. Mega drop-down menus are a relatively new phenomenon but I predict they will be everywhere within six months. Mega what? Navigating large websites has always been a design problem. You could create a huge sitemap-like menu with links to every page, but it would become impossible to scan and grow increasingly large as more pages are added. In general, designers choose either: a small simple menu that links to pages with additional navigation as you delve deeper (Sitepoint is a good example). (* CSS-only drop-downs are possible, but they do not offer mouse over/out latency or work in every browser … guess which one!)
Mega drop-downs are half-way between the two concepts and similar to the ribbon introduced in Microsoft Office 2007: (example from actionenvelope.com) The features of a mega drop-down menu Typically, a mega menu: is a single drop-down that appears on hovershows all the options in one large panelgroups options into related categoriesuses icons or other graphics to help the user. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This publication has been funded in part with Federal funds from the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) under contract number ED05CO0039. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S.
Department of Education, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Additional information about participation in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) can be found on the Working Group home page. Other previously active WCAG WG participants and other contributors to WCAG 2.0. Library of Web Design Styles at Your Fingertips. The Last Guide to CSS Layout You’ll Ever Need. Usabilility on the cheap. Usability testing is a good idea for any new web site. Increasing the usability of your web site is a good idea because it will increase visitor satisfaction, which in turn increases sales and user loyalty. On the business savings side, usability testing can also save you money in development, maintenance, and support costs. Unfortunately, traditional usability tests is pricey — it can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars to run a usability test. But it doesn’t necessarily have to.
Here are five ideas to get usability testing done on the cheap. The results might not be quite as good, but they won’t hurt your pocketbook nearly as much. As always, if you have any other ideas or have experience with any of the ones we’ve listed, please let us know in the comments. 1. UserTesting.com is a low cost way to get a look at what goes through the minds of average web users as they interact with your web page. We reviewed UserTesting.com in an August issue of the SitePoint Tribune. 2. 3. 4. 5. 10 Steps to a Client Friendly Wordpress CMS. What is not to love about WordPress? It is extremely extendable, an open source project, has a selection of thousands of plugins, in addition to the support community being simply massive. WordPress has proved itself as a great blogging platform and content management system. For us developers and techies the out of the box capabilities is more than we ever need to manage, edit, and add content in any shape or form.
However many of us don’t simply build website for ourselves, and we have to think about our clients as well. While WordPress has a user friendly interface it is still blogging focused, and there are some usability enhancements that could be desired when those who are not technically savvy (which fits the bill for most clients) will be the primary users. In this situation there are a few steps to improving the interface to make it easier for our clients. 1. With icons and a simple sidebar it will likely be more familiar to non techies or journalists. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have. How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients? | How-To | Smash. Advertisement You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community.
Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such circles unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance. You’ll hear ideas being thrown around like “design is a waste of time — we have a really ugly site which outsells our competitors 3 to 1″ or “we are not worried about the design, we’ll outsource it or use a free WordPress theme, let us focus more on the product”. You can almost sense a little bit of pride in how ugly their web-site is, or that they are treating design like a commodity.
However off base these types of thoughts might be, there is clearly a lack of respect for designers in the business community at times. I’d like to address how you can shatter this barrier and talk to business folk in a language they understand. 1. Designers like to show off portfolios. 2. 3. Well, so you looked right? 20 Useful Tools to Make Web Development More Efficient | Six Rev. There are many available tools to help make web development projects quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, testing, and debugging tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently. 1.
CSS Grid Builder CSS Grid Builder is an online GUI for customizing the YUI Grids CSS – a lightweight CSS framework developed by Yahoo! You don’t even have to host the CSS file on your web server (saving you some bandwidth and maintenance hassles), the generated code links to the appropriate stylesheet found on Yahoo!’ 2. 3. Blueprint reduces the amount of CSS code you have to write by including common styles that developers typically use such CSS reset and page layouts. 4. 5. logicss: CSS Framework 6. 7. 8. 9. Planning a Semantic Web site. This article discusses what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web. It starts with a discussion of the problems the Semantic Web tries to solve and then moves to the technologies involved, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL).
You'll see how the Semantic Web is layered on top of the existing Web. It then covers some issues that you want to know about when you plan a new Web site and also gives specific examples of how to use technologies like RDFa and Microformats to enable your existing Web site to become a part of the Semantic Web. Introduction to the Semantic Web The World Wide Web is the largest single information resource humanity has ever produced. Unfortunately, despite its dependence on computers to operate at all, most of the information is only understandable by humans and not by computers. The Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the future of the Web. Is Your Web Site Handicap-Accessible? Making online access easy use for blind and other disabled users is gaining attention because of class actions against companies like Target Amber Grant, 18, eats, sleeps, and breathes the Internet, according to her father, Garry Grant, CEO of Carlsbad (Calif.)
-based technology outfit SEO Inc.. The company, which has 65 employees, often calls on Amber to use her prodigious Web skills to help with a vexing problem: checking to see whether its clients' Web sites are accessible to the blind. "I give her tasks to go onto clients' Web sites, find a particular product, select it, purchase it, and get through checkout securely. If it takes way too long, or it's difficult or impossible, I know we need to do some work," says Garry Grant, whose daughter has been blind since birth. Amber is able to navigate the Internet using a "screen reader.
" But changes to many Web sites over the last half-dozen years can stymie screen-reading software and make Web navigation difficult for the blind. CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch | CSS. Advertisement You don’t have to write the same CSS-code or (X)HTML-Markup over and over again. Whatever project you’re starting to work with, at some point you have to define classes and IDs you’ve already defined in your previous web-projects. To avoid unnecessary mistakes you might want to start not from a blank file, but from an almost “perfect” scratch. The latter might contain some basic definitions you’d write in your code anyway. However, once you’ve decided to create such a scratch, you need to make sure it is really bulletproof — besides, if the stylesheet also sets up optimal typographic rules and basic form styling you manage to kill two birds with one stone.
And this is where CSS Frameworks and CSS Reset are becoming important. Let’s take a look at the idea behind CSS Frameworks, their advantages and disadvantages, most popular CSS frameworks and dozens of default-stylesheets you can use designing a new web-site from scratch. What is a CSS Framework? CSS Frameworks Blueprint. Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist. Excellent Resources for the professional web designer. Free SEO Tools You Should Know About. Learn how to quickly build your own SEO tool belt to achieve search marketing success. Nothing creates more value in the professional search marketing world than useful search engine optimization tools. From the simple "link:" command in Google, which shows how many sites link back to you, to the more advanced search tools at Yahoo!
And browser plug-ins, the industry and engines themselves have a variety of tools available to get you started with SEO. Remember that tools and technology, while powerful, must be used with caution. If you aren't able to translate the resulting data and convert it into meaningful, actionable steps, you might become more frustrated than you were before. Here's a list of personal and feature-rich SEO tools to get you started: 1. To find out if your site is being indexed by the search engines, type in your domain name directly or enter site: www.yourdomain.com. It's important to check for broken links. 2. 3. 4. 5. Great post by Seth Godin about small business on the web. What should my local chiropractor do? Or the acupuncturist? Or the pet store? What about that small church or mosque?
The web has changed the game for a lot of organizations, but for the local business, it's more of a threat and a quandary than an asset. My doctor went to a seminar yesterday ($100+) where the 'expert' was busy selling her on buying a domain name, hiring a designer, using web development software, understanding site maps and navigation and keywords and metatags and servers... These are businesses that have trouble dealing with the Yellow Pages. Too much trouble, too much time, way too expensive. We're talking about people who don't like to tweak. I think there's a third way, one that gets them just about everything they need, takes an hour or two a month and costs about $60 a year. Step one: head on over to Typepad and sign up for their cheapest service. Next step: build a Squidoo lens about your business. Next step: Get a sign featuring your name and phone number. How to Create an Animated, Sliding, Collapsible DIV with Javascr.
Dynamic Drive CSS - Practical CSS codes and examples. CSS Centering - fun for all! Cascading Style Cheatsheet. Top Website Tips. How Do I Drive Traffic To A Brand New Website? Why Small Web Design Firms Should Think Big. How to style a table with css.