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...

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

There are a number of SEO (search engine optimization) companies that claim they can help you increase your PR (Google Page Rank) and get you to the top of search rankings. The fact is, you can do this yourself, and the only thing it will cost you is some of your time.

Google PR is a number based system that ranks a website from zero to ten with ten being the highest rank you can receive. The higher the number the higher your website will appear in the rankings for search terms related to the content of your web site.

Google is very content oriented. This means that when it “crawls” (the process by which Google looks at every web page) websites to index them, they look for valued content so that when people search the web they can point searchers directly to this information.

You need to add original and informative content to your web site. In other words if you sell fishing gear, you need to write informative articles about the subject. If you sell fishing gear then chances are you are already an expert at the subject. Just formulate your thoughts, write an article and add it to your website.

Once your article is added to your site then give your site's visitors the ability to comment on it. Comments are added content to your website that others will add for you. Do a search on a subject yourself and you will find in those search results either posts to a message board or comments on an article.

Now that you have the content on your website and comments to add additional content you need to let your visitors share this article with the rest of the world wide web either by posting a link to the article in social networks such as Digg, MySpace and Twitter, or by allowing visitors to use your article on their own sites and blogs, so as long as they post a link back to your website. This link process is known as a one way link and helps increase your PR as well. Indocquent's social bookmark utility gives you the ability to do all of this for free.

Now that you know how you can increase your PR, search engine rankings, and website popularity, just go ahead and do it. The next time Google “crawls” the world wide web to index their database you should see a significant increase in PR and visitors.

I am sure you have read plenty of research on the subject and without a doubt the best way to increase your Google Page Rank is to write clear, concise and informative articles in regards to what your website is about and submit those articles to various article directories such as E-Zine and Article Dashboard.

Now you may be wondering how exactly that increases your Google Page Rank. For starters you are providing quality content about something that you are an expert in. Second by submitting the article to article directories you are giving others an opportunity to place your article on their websites, thereby spreading your knowledge, and finally when you add in a resource box to your article, you provide a link back to your website.

These links in your resource box are called one way links. In other words other websites point to you but your site does not point back. These are the most powerful links you can have as a web owner.

The formula for success in determining your Google Page Rank is simply obtaining as many one way links as possible. So here is your step by step process on how to do just that.

Start by developing a plan where you will write one article each day that is related to the subject content of your website. Each article, although related to your website, should hit a different topic daily. For example, if your website is about food, one day you can write about good books about food, and then on day two write about good food businesses, on day three you can write about recipes to try and so on. The reason is when you submit your articles to these article directories you do not want your articles competing with each other in the same categories. If your website is about fitness, you would not want to submit 5 articles in the nutrition category in the same week. They just won't all get picked up by other websites.

Once you have your article written go ahead and submit them to article directories. It can take anywhere from one to seven days for the article to get published. Just remember you can continue submitting articles even though previous ones aren't published yet. Do not forget to write your resource box with a link back to your website. It should read like this, “John Doe is the executive chef of ABC Restaurants in New York City. You can learn more about his cooking style by visiting his website at…”. You get the point.

So you have written your articles, you have submitted them, so now what? Well you continue to write. It takes anywhere from one to three months to see your results. Google re-indexes websites about every quarter and depending on when you start this process you might not get indexed until the following quarter. Just be patient and follow the plan. You will see your website hits go up along with your Google Page Rank.

Yahoo Babel Fish

It translates text and websites among languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish. You can enter up to 150 words for translation.

Dictionary.com

It translates text among languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish. You can enter up to 800 words for translation. You can translate from American or British English.

Google Translator

It translates text and web pages in more languages than previous translators. The additional languages are: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Dutch, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Swedish, Tagalog, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. I have entered 1500 words, and worked well. It does not show the maximum words you can enter.

Windows Live Translator

You can enter up to 500 words. Translate text and websites among languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Also, it has a translator assistant called Tbot who help you when you are chatting in MSN. To use Tbot add this to your MSN contact: mtbot@hotmail.com

Free Translation Online

It translates text among languages: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Italian and French. It combines translator, spelling checker, voice engine that converts text into a voice, also has multi-languages keyboards. You can enter up to 500 characters. This software is for personal and non-commercial use.

Remember translators programs are not perfect. They cannot replace a human translator. They just help you translate the text. Enter the text to be translated without errors in spelling or grammar. If possible, enter short and simple sentences, without abbreviations. Translate on both sides to verify. For example: If you want to translate English to Spanish, first translated into Spanish, open another window with this translator and do from Spanish to English again. Check to see if you understand this document. Correct this document so that it has the meaning of what you want to convey. Repeat the procedure again with this document. You can repeat this procedure several times, until the document translated from Spanish to English has a pretty rough meaning you want to convey. The information changes every day and too fast. Stay updated with the new appearing on the Internet.

A winning bio page should be a reflection or an extension of the writer's personality, but that does not mean that it is somehow OK to disrespect your audience by using foul and vulgar remarks. Warm and inviting author introductions will always win more favor with your fans than being short and sweet with your audience.

When writing your bio page, write a clear thought using correctly spelled words and avoid using Internet shorthand and Internet slang. Writing using Internet shorthand (example: IMO instead of “In My Opinion”) interrupts the reading flow and usually is a big turn-off to most readers.

Introduce yourself to your audience by telling us about yourself. Share with your audience and fans what you enjoy doing when your not at the computer. Tell us what you like writing about and be specific, unless you write about anything and specializes in nothing.

Add a photo of yourself and not your pet, child or anything that is the replacement image of yourself. Your readers are people and people respond more warmly to a photo of the author than a photo of some other image. Why? Because, using an actual photograph of yourself is sending a sincere message that you want your audience to know who you really are.

Some publishers allows their writers to add at least one personal website that they own or belong to, so if your publisher offers this feature, then that full advantage of the opportunity and use it, if you have or belong to another website. If you write more than one blog or write for other publishers, then make sure to write the website address in the next to the last paragraph, before closing the introduction.

If a writer belongs to any club or social network that is geared towards the content that they write about, then include this information in the introduction. Many times a writer will discover that if they include a shout out to their favorite forum, social community or club, then the members of those places will show some love and visit your site.

If you want your audience to subscribe to your blog or article feed, then ask them to. Don't just expect that they will on their own, because there are still many people who are not aware that they can subscribe to your blog or article feed. When you politely ask or remind your audience to do something, then many times they will respond positively to your request or invitation.

Remember, your bio page grants your audience a little peak into your life and depending how well you write your bio page, it demonstrates a sampling of your writing abilities. If you do not use a dictionary or spellchecker when editing your bio page, then you are in fact damaging your reputation and making a bad first impression on those who you should want to impress.

Your audience and your fans are everything, so it is very smart to think about how your audience and fans will receive you. But, that is another marketing story that we will save for the next article that I will write for you.

1. Another Day, Another Word

   This is quite a weird website that contains only one word, at its center, that changes everyday. So there's a new word for your vocabulary everyday. Apart from that, you could say that this is pretty much a useless website.
   

2. The World's Highest Website

   We've heard of the world's highest building or even the highest monuments, but the world's highest website? Though this website does not contain anything much, it is 18.939 kilometers “high” (that's around 11.77 miles)!
   

3. End of the Internet

   “All good things come to an end.” Really true - even the internet does! Check out this webpage, which is supposedly the “last page of the internet”.
   

4. I Hate Internet Explorer

   For those who hate Microsoft Internet Explorer, this is (perhaps) the ultimate website, which states “….Internet Explorer does NOT follow web standards” and names other web-browsers which are meant to work better than Microsoft Internet Explorer. The strange thing is, the owner(s) of the website wasted money just to convey that small a message?
   

5. Deleted Images

   This website is dedicated to images that weren't meant to exist. If you have taken any photos that you do not need because they did not come out well, then this website welcomes you to donate those photos to them.
   

6. The Longest Website (in Letters)

   So, people even spend their money just to get the world's longest website. We aren't talking about a few thousand dollars here - it's a matter of millions of dollars - all for a name! And Shakespeare actually asked “What's in a name?”
   

7. The Longest Website (in Numerals)

   This website is quite similar to the previously mentioned one, only that this one is based on numerals and not on letters. What is more is that the website contains only two words and the title of the website.

KEEP EVERYTHING OBVIOUS

Do not go out of the general pattern of a web-page when designing it. Take the examples of large companies such as Microsoft, eBay, Google or Yahoo! and understand the general pattern of placing logos, navigation links, etc. Visitors to your web-site expect certain conventions and when they don't find them, you lose valuable visitors.

LIMIT THE USE OF COLORS

Flashy colors look good only when used in small amounts. Emphasize on the headers through bright colors but limit using too many colors on the same page. Software like Color Wheel Pro greatly help in choosing the right color combinations. Limiting the choice of colors to 2 or 3 will not only save designing time, but also save your web-site from looking cheap and tacky. Certain color combinations can also create problems for color-blind people. To get the right combination of colors for them, try out the free software provided by Vischeck.

GET THE RIGHT FONTS

The content on your web-site must be legible to all its visitors. To do this, you need to get the right font for the content. Fonts like Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, Geneva and Georgia may not look very interesting but they make your content, which is the thing required to be interesting, much easier to read. Once again, keep in mind the use of colors for the font, against the color of the background.

MAKE PLANS BEFOREHAND

It gets really irritating when you are almost done with designing a page of your web-site and you forgot to add something in between. Even worse, if you haven't got any space left for additions. Always get a clear-cut idea of what you are going to include in your content and how much space you will need for it. Understanding how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), avoiding unconventional layouts and complicated backgrounds will help a great deal.

MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY

Do not opt for changes in between different pages of your web-site, for the same type of content. For example, if your hyperlinks are in green, keep them green throughout the web-site and do not change the color for every page. If your navigation bar is at the top of the page on the home page, keep it at the top of the page for every other page as well. By using CSS correctly, most of this should happen by default and you can concentrate more on the web-site content.

KEEP IT RELEVANT

They say, “A picture is better than a thousand words” - true, but never post a picture irrelevant to the subject of discussion. Even more, don't paste a picture or a video just because you have space, as these pictures and videos do take up bandwidth. If you are able to remove a picture without negatively affecting your content, then do not hesitate to do so. Remember, focusing on your content will ultimately offer your web-site better search-engine ranks.

SIMPLICITY IS THE BEST

To not confuse your web-site's visitors and to save development time, use the simple, common and popular web-design layouts available online for free. Pushing boundaries usually leads to confused and frustrated visitors, which affects the incoming traffic to your web-site.

TRY AND MASTER CSS

This may not be a necessary step, but is extremely useful when you are designing a web-site intended for a large amount of traffic. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is extremely useful as it makes your site easy to maintain and update for you, and helps visitors and search-engines read your content much more easily. CSS can certainly be called the web-designer's best friend. Two amazing books for learning CSS are “CSS the Missing Manual” - David McFarland and “Bulletproof Web Design” - Dan Cederholm