Color is hugely important, and at work it is even more so as this is spend most of your day: whether you are asleep or awake is somewhat relevant but whether you snooze in a somnambulistic manner or become rigid with boredom, there must be a way out.  Thinking about what you would do with the office décor given the time, energy, inclination or court order will give you plenty of distraction from that stuff which pays the bills and feeds your children.  This site allows you to discover the importance of color.  And it is really, really important.  Honest.

 The Sun in Motion

This website is a little cerebral, so if you do not know what that means, skip it and go on to the next one! However, you may be a sun worshipper and if so, why not spend some time getting to know all about the big shiny thing that orbits our little blue planet.  Or is that the other way around? Whatever, you can learn all sorts of stuff here that will impress your workmates.  Plus it is available in full screen and Imax version so you can really get to grips with the science in a big way.  This will keep you busy for a long, long time!

Elevator Moods

Do you have an elevator at work? Ever done anything in it?  That's a shame.  Why not give yourself a few ideas by looking in to what other people do when they are in the elevator.  There are fourteen floors to explore (no number thirteen?) and each experience will enable you to learn just that little bit more about your fellow man, while the clock ticks inexorably towards home time.  Waste not, want a lot.

Flower Garden

If you are interested in nature but all the science of the sun in motion makes your head hurt, then you can create your own flower garden instead.  Simply click on the screen and a flower will appear.  Click again and another.  You can even keep your finger down on the mouse button and wave it about (like you're dealing with some really heaving accounts in Excel) and you can get a whole garden immediately.  Once your screen is full, refresh it and start again. And again.  Ad infinitum.  Brainless but compulsive, you will go home knowing that the day at work was good.

Office Party Invitation

If you want to knock up a quick but effective logo for that rather drunken congregation of colleagues you are planning, then this site is the perfect one.  You can choose from a variety of famous brands, pop in your own words and hey presto, an image you can then paste on to that invite to give it a professional look.  This may not be classy, but it will get the message across that your party is going to me much more trailer than condo.  There are lots of other brilliant ideas at this website - so this will definitely kill some time - and make you hugely popular at the same time.  Ahem.

Make your own Peace Crane

Work can be tiresome.  Interminably.  The good thing about offices though is that there is always heaps and heaps of paper around.  Paperless offices were a good idea, but what a flash in the digital pan they proved to be!  Talking of flash, this animated website may be just enough for you to fend of those 'boredom bends' at work.  So enough griping from me, go put some of that paper to good use and make yourself an origami peace crane (only one of a number you can choose from here).  As well as doing something useful at work (for once?) you will discover an inner peace you thought impossible in the workplace.  Plus the animation is step by step and you can pause it so your clumsy fingers can catch up!  You can even go on to make a zillion of them and surprise everyone the next day by displaying your handiwork throughout the workplace. You will be adored! Especially by  the boss.  Beware though - promotion and defenestration are words that managers sometimes confuse with each other.

The Weather

The weather!  You need to know if you are going to need to carry that umbrella all the way back home and lose it - again.  Well, not that you would lose the same one again, of course, you would lose another umbrella because the other one is lost. Already.  Never mind.  You type in your location and you will be told the likelihood of rain in your area.  That won't waste much time I hear you sneer with a harrumph.  Well, you have friends in other places, don't you?  All over the world I expect.  Go ahead.  You know you want to!

Forget the Rain, Nuke Your Town

If your idea of rain is rather more apocalyptic than a little aqueous precipitation, why not let the fallout fall instead?  With a little help from Google Maps and a teensy weensy bit of JavaScript you can see what the effects of a nuclear bomb would be in your neighborhood - or anywhere else for that matter.  Plus, you get to choose the bomb too!  Here, I chose ‘Fat Man' to destroy Birmingham in the United Kingdom.  Not because I have anything against the cit, you understand; just, no-one would notice it was gone.  On this site, you can choose a variety of bombs, up to one hundred and forty kilotons.  If that isn't enough you can also see what a meteor would do with your place of choice.  Bliss for those of you who think Jericho should never have been cancelled..

Unnecessary Knowledge

You may love trivia and if so you need to acquire it in the laziest way possible.  All this site requires you to do is to press the refresh button and you have some wonderful wisdom to impart to your colleagues on your coffee break (you know, the time between nine and five).  The knowledge is, as it says on the label, completely unnecessary, which of course makes it all the more desirable. 

Last but Not Least... Zombo

If all of the above involve using way too much energy then simply c lick on the link above to take you to a place on the net where you have to do nothing.  Welcome to Zombocom!  Sit back, listen and watch that clock!  It will soon be time to go home and log in and, well, you know the rest!

A final note to those readers who did not find every site mentioned in this article 'wondrous'.  Many tastes must be catered for at every banquet!  Plus, did you see that alliteration in the title? Did you see it? Hey, hey! Click the 'liked it' button! Darn it, they've gone...

This is a really fun thing to do on your sites, as well as a nice program to get paid for. Who doesn't enjoy making their websites a little friendlier with some videos or pictures of the things your talking about on your sites. I know it brings me a lot of comments, visitors, return visitors, and it just brings your website alive. No one likes a website to be just plain Jane.

There are two major programs you can join for this type of "work." One program has a lot of videos and the other program has videos, pictures, articles etc. Of course both of these sites do have TOS so be sure you check them out. Id hate for you to get deleted before you even start. Here are the two websites and a little bit of information on them.

Revver - This site only offers one thing. And that's videos. But on Revver you can get paid two ways. The first way is by putting content on your site. The second way is by uploading your own videos and having other people use them. I haven't done the second option yet, still working on the first!

TheNewsRoom - I was first introduced to this site when I was making a joke site. This joke site didn't have a shop so I wasn't selling anything to make profits. And I'm not really into the whole AdSense thing, not for this site anyway. So I wanted a little way to make some extra money while the value of the site was building. So, I put a couple humor type videos on my site. Now every time someone views my website I get paid. TheNewsRoom offers a variety of content. They have videos, text, articles, pictures and some other things for you to check out.

Both of these sites work by CPM or Cost Per Thousand. So you can make a few cents before your thousand views, but for every thousand views you get you will make the default amount of money. I know this doesn't seem like a lot, but once you configure some higher numbers it gets a little better. So say Revver pays X amount of dollars per 1,000 views. So if you have 1,000 visits you will make X amount of dollars. But if you have 50,000 visits or 100,000 visits, you will make X amount of dollars per thousand. Lets make this a little easier for you visually. Say Revver charges $1.50 per 1,000 views. So if you have 10,000 views with ONLY one piece of content on your site, then you will make $15.00.

With both of these sites however, you can have (i think) 3 pieces of content on each page of your site. Check the TOS! I can promise you that both of these sites DO payout. So you wont be disappointed once you are going to get paid, and then never do. I always research all sites I join extensively beforehand! I'm sure there's more sites like this somewhere out there unfortunately I haven't been able to find any more that are legit. I did find another one, but it turned out NOT being what I wanted at all. Lets just say it was a little more "adult" than I had anticipated!

Revver and TheNewsRoom are the best ways to go when your searching for content to put on your site and get paid for it!

Paypal plugins are tiny pieces of software that are added on websites so that visitors and buyers (website users) can pay for goods and services they would like to buy from the website. These plugins will literally turn your webpage or blog into some kind of a shopping website. This is done by inserting Paypal buttons on which people can click to pay for products and services on sale on the site or blog. They are easy to ‘plug-in' (download and install) into your website and they make your site fetch money for you, even without your presence.

There are various Paypal plugins that help you to incorporate the buying and selling features on your website. These are Paypal API (Name-Value Pair Interface), Paypal API: SOAP Interface, Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition, Payflow Pro and Website Payments Pro, UK edition. There are also Paypal Supported Plugins and the Website Payments Standard.

The Paypal (Name-Value Pair Interface) works best with Express Checkout, while Paypal API: SOAP Interface is an enhancement that require experience with SOAP web services. Website Payments Standard is a set of toolkits with the software programming code that shows how payment - sending and receiving - that goes on in the background on your website, including acknowledgements for money in and money sent out. Paypal Supported Plugins were those made by Paypal developers and are easily supported by the system. They include Paypal plugin for Quickbooks for sending invoices via Quickbooks, Paypal plugin for Outlook and Outlook Express as well as osCommerce Modules (available in US and UK versions). One version requires the creation of a store account on the osCommerce store by any person buying products and services from a website while the other doesn't.

Paypal has also moved to integrate its plugins in popular internet browsers like Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The main focus in this is the Secure Card feature for handling card transactions online.

All these plugins help integrate Paypal, the internationally-preferred online payment method, onto your website. Users can buy securely using their cards without the risk of exposing their private payment details. Paypal plugins are a great advancement in necessitating online payment only that as of now, they're not available in all countries.

When you create a blog you tend to set it up with a trusted website such as Blogspot and others that are very similar. Use this to your advantage as the website that your blog would be associated with is already trusted by the users.

By starting a blog you start your own profile and get your comments and thoughts out there.

A blog is quicker and easier to upload, maintain and keep fresh as all you have to do is write the content and click "upload". Where as with a website you may have to create the web page, this means that you may get more pages on the web because the webpage will be created for you. This may lead to you making more money because you have more content which means there is more chance of you blog being found.

By creating a blog this makes it a lot easier for your content to be added to a search engine because it is associated with a well known website. This means that your content will get on the most popular search engines quicker than a normal website.

The main reasons for a blog are because they are a lot easier to update and maintain than a website.

Blogs take time to grow and become established. They can take months or years before they are getting constant hits. They way to make sure that your blog doesn't take that long to start getting hits is to promote it.

Blogs require content being added daily preferably because the content needs to be fresh to attract a bigger number of hits. By adding content to your blog or website daily you may encourage people to come back, because they have something different to look at.

Hope this helped make up your mind on whether you want a blog or a website.

Make sure that your website/blog is added to the most popular Search Engines for example Google, Yahoo and Live are the most popular ones that I would be aiming for. Also make sure that you keep on updating and uploading content. This means that you will end up with a lot of for you website which then means that the chance of somebody finding your website or blog is more likely.

When writing emails make sure that you have you website link in a signature. This means that the person who receives the email may look at your website or blog. The same can be done when using forums, make sure that you keep to the terms and conditions of the forum. Join forums that is related to your subject and let people know about the website, don't spam, just tell people.

Use social networking website like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo to share your website with people you know. This is a useful tool because they may pass it on to other people and so on.

Offer a referral links service on your website. This is were somebody adds your link to their website in return for you adding theirs to yours. This will help you because you may get hits because of the other person's website.

Hope this helps you get more hits to your website/blog.

Alright, want to make your web pages look better? Well, first of all, I recommend that you have a good program for making web pages, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, and have a fairly decent knowledge of HTML, the language in which we construct web pages, and be able to write some CSS (cascading stylesheets) and JavaScript. However, we will not be dealing with that at the moment, but instead focusing on the conceptual part of web design.

Good Planning is Essential

When you are planning on making a web page, the first thing you should do is visualize. What elements will your page have? Think of a layout, and make sketches of your ideas while they are still fresh. Never erase, for ideas that you may not think are good right now may be invaluable when coming up with new designs later. Once you have found a design that you like, you can start manifesting it in the form of actual pages. Once you have done that, you can check it with the following guidelines:

Level of Organization

Basically this is organizing things based on their importance. More important things should be larger, and less important things should be smaller. Simple, no? But it is amazing how many people fail to understand even this simple concept. You should also place more important things farther up top. So bigger and further up top = more important, and smaller and further down = less important.

Cuttoff Point

You should also take into account that most people do not want to scroll down in order to see vital information. If it is important, then it should be further up. Placing content below the cutoff point is a surefire way to not get it read by anybody. Take Google for example. Its homepage is very sparse, yet is an excellent example of good web design practice. Only the essentials are on the homepage, and even having such a sparse page, Google has tons of content, tucked away into the corners. One thing that can help a lot is having a drop-down horizontal menu, with folders. This can help you cram as much stuff as possible onto the page, while still having it look neat, organized, and easy to navigate.

Kill the clutter

As much as you may think it looks cool, having a bunch of flashy images on your home page is not the best way to go about designing a page. It simply adds to the noise. Noise is when people's attention is diverted to multiple places at once. Things that add to noise are large blocks of text, multiple large images scattered across the page, and forms. For the home page, you should have preferably only a few focal points, else the reader will be distracted.

Visual Appeal

Yes, it is also quite necessary that you have a good looking template to start with, including a good banner/logo at the top, a a background that isn't a color that obstructs readability and visibility. If you are using a tab menu system, the user should be able to cleanly differentiate which page they are on. You should keep the pages as clean cut as possible, while, making it also look professional.

You should avoid harsh contrasting colours, such as yellow on black, or even white on black obstructs visibility. Clean cut pages are mostly white, and you can add some light tints as well.

Your banner should flow, and it should complement the rest of your page as well. A smooth flow is the most key element to looking professional.

Don't make me think

Your pages should require as little thought as possible to navigate. Users like to have the work already done out for them. You should not complicate things needlessly, and making up your own terms for common phrases, eg. using Submit Query instead of Search, is just another mistake that many users tend to make.

Usability

Last but not least, your design must also be practical. Pages should not take more than 3-5 seconds to load under a broadband connection, and less is preferable. Placing 3rd party javascript scripts at the bottom of your code can boost your load time significantly, and so can cutting back on large images and embedded videos that must preload. The important functions of your product or whatever it is you are making your website for must be in plain sight, and nothing should be hard to find.

Good luck, and I hope I helped!

Coming soon: Web Design 201- Stylesheets

The first "Big Brother" for most people is their employer. More and more, companies are installing sophisticated snooping software on their networks. The vast majority of employees in modern offices and other computerized settings are connected to each other and the internet via a server. The server acts as a clearing house for all of the traffic generated on the network whether it is staying in house or accessing the internet.

Because of this, it become relatively easy for companies simply record all of the computer activity company wide. This data can then be sorted and categorized by user id, time and date stamps, and type of transmission through the network. If an employee is using instant messaging to find dates or chat with friends, the company will learn of it eventually and have all of the history needed to take disciplinary action.

The same is true if improper websites are being visited or ugly emails are being sent. Too much online shopping or visiting porn sites may land you in the unemployment line. Showing that you are not a loyal employee by badmouthing the company over the network will have similar results.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States government through the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security have begun to do extensive snooping on the internet. Under the mantle of national security, private citizens are being monitored more than ever when they go online. Various types of websites have been targeted for government scrutiny. If you like to visit these sites, you will be watched. If you go too far in what you do while visiting, you may find visitors at your door.

Besides national security issues, the government is constantly searching for pornographers who cross the line into child and other illegal forms of pornography. Even looking at these sites will leave fingerprints on your hard drive that can be used to prosecute those who do not post but do too much looking and downloading. Even a few dozen pictures of underage pornography on your computer can land you in prison and label you as a child sex offender.

State and local law enforcement agencies join in the fun of internet monitoring. There is a considerable amount of handshaking between the federal agencies and those lower on the food chain. While a lot of this is good for our society, the concept of tapping the internet is a lot like illegal search and seizure. The courts are siding with law enforcement.

This means that you need to protect yourself when online. Much of the data recovered by these agencies is up for interpretation by those who do the snooping. If they have some reason to want to make a splash, or you have a history of bumps and nicks with the law, it could spell trouble for you even if your activity is relatively innocent. You may eventually win in court, but it could easily drain your life savings to do it.

The third tier of "Big Brother" is in the domain of parents and school systems. Neither of these two are usually looking to arrest you unless you are doing something dangerous or making serious threats to others. However, teens are often heavily monitored in the name of protecting them from internet predators. Mostly, this is a good thing.

Again, it can become problematic depending on the interpretation of those looking at the data. Students can be suspended or expelled from the school. Parents can mete out harsh punishments for youthful offenders. Teens have very few rights to protect them in this area.

Those who are going to do extensive surfing in the shady areas of the internet or use company equipment for non-business purposes need to learn how to protect themselves. Employees have few ways to defend against this if they continue to do forbidden activity on the company network. Citizens can and should learn ways to surf the web far more anonymously than many do now.

There is software available that will scrub your hard drive of files in ways that does not allow others to recover the data later. Other software can be purchased to hide the identity of the user and even disguise the service provider information. Online, you can find websites that work as jump sites to block others from tracking you all of the way back to your locality. A little research and diligence can go a long way.

            MySpace.com is one such entity. This website essentially allows a person to open his/her personal life to anyone who wants to see it. Great, this allows people to open up and let others in, right? Wrong.

            First off, you do not know if the person you are contacting is anything like they say they are. This should make a person a bit leery, and it does. This can cause trust issues and raises doubt about people you meet. If a person has these types of issues with people they ‘talk’ to on the computer; you can believe this mistrust will extend to the real world.

            This leads us not to trust each other and to withdraw within our own worlds. Which in turn will damage our self confidence, and for those that overcome this, will become more self centered.

            Communication is needed on a person-to-person level and as our communication age continues we will continue to become less communicative.

            Myspace.com is an addiction for many, and like any addiction it must be controlled. This control must come from each as an individual. It must be used responsibly as a tool for communication. Your sister in Germany can use MySpace.com as a great way to keep in touch through blogs, pictures, and even video. When set to private and utilized as a tool MySpace.com can be an effective way to communicate. Otherwise, you must ask yourself, who are you really talking to?

Now that we’ve covered making your page URL sound professional, we can focus on the actual content.

First of all, there are 2 options- the easy page builder and the HTML mode. I would recommend the easy site builder, especially to beginners, because you can always upgrade to HTML mode later, whereas if you start off with HTML mode, you can’t go back down to the easy page builder. The HTML mode is only for people who know HTML, and who can write a webpage code from scratch. If that’s not you, then go for the page builder. You won’t need any knowledge whatsoever of HTML. This is a lot like a blog template which you can pick out, except it’s not a blog!

Freewebs offers many gadgets for your site, like web polls, web forms, tag/chat boxes, hit counters etc. I personally love the web forms. They’re so professional!

I really hope this guide provided you with enough info to start up a webpage! Good Luck!