A Freelance Web Designer’s Blog

A very interesting WordPress theme design, the girl image weights the most in the overall design layout. The way it’s positioned blends in very well with other elements, from a designer point of view it’s definitely above the good level, however, from the business point of view I can see that there’s a number of issues. The obvious one would be the use of colours, the difference between foreground and background isn’t great enough and this can be tiring reader’s eyes. And to make the matter worst the designer has used a very small font size.

Overall I think it’s very good piece of “art”, perfect for personal use, but it certainly not something that I would consider for business use.

Here’s the live version

The author of this book is asking for XXXX amount of money in return for 20% lifetime ownership of this book. I’ve never read any books in this genre before, after reading the sample chapter I was surprised that I actually found it to be a quite interesting read. One thing I know for sure is that he’s a good writer! So now, the business talk, the question I need to ask is that will this book sell? what’s the ratio of demand and quantity for this type of book at the moment? also, more importantly what’s the maximum I should fork out for that 20%? I think the way I can find out the answer to those questions is go and do some market research….

I don’t know why but I seem to have a good feeling about this book.

Sample Chapter is here

According to this guide 3 Letter .com and .net domain names pricing are going up by about 25% every month! What surprised me is that nnn.com($6700) is now worth more than lll.com($6400), wish I bought 10 of them back in 1997…

It’s almost impossible to find any lll.com or nnn.com today, even if you can find them they’ll be on the 10k mark. So instead of going after the “hot” cakes right now I thought I’d go find the ones that not so hot right now but will be “hot” in a few years from now.

I started looking at ones mixed with letters and numbers, for example – ty5.com. Depending on the combination they’re around $200 for .com and $40 for .net, which is a reasonable amount for investments like this. 4 lettter domains are also worth invest in, if it’s pronounceable it’s almost certain that it will worth more in the future.

The two places I normally go to find high value domains are forums like digitalpoint, NamePros and eBay.

Here’s the list of Godaddy coupons, last time I checked (today) they still valid….

OYH3 – $3 off / $6.95 any .COM (renewals too)

OYH1 – 10% off whatever

BTPS7 – 20% any order of $50 or more

BTPS4 – 10% off anything

OYH2 – $5 off a $30 purchase

chill1 – 10% off

chill2 – $5 off $30

chill3 – $6.95 .coms

hash1 – 10% off

hash2 – $5 off $30

hash3 – $6.95 .com registration

gdd1101c – 10% off any order of $40 or more

Every now and then I would spend some time looking for creative things to spark up my brain. I ran across a few fantastic sites but this one caught my eyes, it’s the one that worth bookmarking.

Link

2Hot Web Directory is a SEO friendly and human edited directory that gives you an easy way to bid on links. Our link directory displays links alphabetically, and lets you bid your way to the top of the list. With a starting bid of $1, you are guaranteed a spot in our directory!

Increase your bid to take a top position, and not only will your link list higher in the directory, but you could join our Top 5 Link Leaders on the homepage.

All links in our directory are guaranteed to be available online for at least 10+ years.

Benefits of Links
Links get results. Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance.

Increasing the number of links to your Web site can get your site listed higher in search engine results, bring more visitors to your site, increase your Google PageRank and improve your site’s overall strength.

Why Buy Links From Us?
This directory will be promoted heavily over the next coming months. We are planning to invest a 4 figure amount on marketing and advertising in the first half of next year!

We are now giving away 50 free $1 links in our directory, if you’re interested in this special one-time offer simply send us your website title, url, your prefered email address and the url that links back to our site.

If the page you link back to us has:
PR0 – you will get a $1 link
PR1 – $10 link
PR2 – $20 link
PR3 – $30 link
and so on .

If you don’t know what Pagerank your site has, you can use this tool. This free offer will end as soon as we reach 50 links!

Email – info[at]2hotdirectory.com
Website – www.2hotdirectory.com

One problem with our complicated lives these days is that many of us never find time to spend alone, in peace, without being bombarded with noise and information. There’s no time for solitude and quiet contemplation, and as a result, we have stress and anxiety and depression and repression.

Find time each day to be alone, for your mental health, by stealing pockets of time from other areas of your life.

Read more

An quick an easy way to create those Google friendly sitemaps…this site can do the followings for you:

• Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

I found this extremely ugly yet creative website when I was looking for turnkey websites on eBay. The first impression is WoW…that is truly a piece of crap, but after reading further I realised that the site is something that will create alot of buzz. However, one thing I find it hard to believe is the seller claimed that he spent over 1 year on this site… if that’s true then 1500 dollar is a very small price to pay.

This is the description from the seller -

“The site is a parody, based on a variety of well-known websites that promote multi-million dollar “get rich quick” schemes – which has taken the Internet by storm over the past few years.”

“The site teaches people how to make money online using creative Internet ads and ugly websites – just like this one. While the site is extremely ugly in design (which is done on purpose), the domain name and sales copy are both very creative, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before!”

Free IQ is the place where you can find tons of video and audio tutorials on marketing, blogging, SEO, and more.. This site is like Youtube but aimed at a more specific area.

http://www.freeiq.com