Our web and graphic design blog

We started our blog in June 2005 and nearly three years later are still going strong.

You may find this blog intresting if you are looking to hire a web or graphic designer, you are interested in web site usability and search engine optimization or are a web/graphic designer looking for some tips and tricks.

Today I am going to talk a little about the sort of subjects we cover here for any of our new readers. Each of our posts are given one or more label to categorize them so I thought it would make sense to talk about our categories:-

• Design Snippets
  We cover subjects here that are useful to graphic and web designer. For example Meaning and associations of color, What is Ipsum Lorem and Favicons.


• Eye of the St Louis Web Designer
  A picture speaks a thousand words and most of the photographs we feature in this section are of something that has given us inspiration, from a fabulous natural color palette to a great texture or pattern. As mentioned thoughtout these posts a designer's eye never sleeps


• FREE
  Who doesn't like free stuff. We cover everything from free custom i google designs, the free definition phase or our projects to our much visited recipe for a garden deer repellant.


• Graphic Design projects
  A showcase of graphic design projects, from brochures, letterheads, banners, menus, logos, newsletters, greeting cards and packaging.


• Indigo Tips
  Tips to improve your productivity and internet experience


• Internet marketing
  The ever changing world of Search engine optimization.
  
• Logos
  A showcase of our logo design
  
• Project Progress
  We multi task big time and this section illustrates the current projects we are working on


• Random Thoughts
  I think everyblog needs a section like this..a little bit of everything here..and as the title suggests ...random


• STL Marketing executive
  A category written by our guest writer. He shares perspectives drawn from his experience of branding, global business management and marketing in a B2B environment.
  
• Web design Projects
  A showcase of our web design projects


• Web Site Usability
  Considerations for giving your site visitors the experience you want them to have.
  
  

Celebrating a blog milestone

Writing a blog takes commitment. Obviously there is the element of time it takes to write a post but there is also the commitment to deliver quality content and post regularly.

Today we are celebrating our 200th post!

A tool I have recently started using to read blogs is Google Reader Another great free application from Google, Google reader allows you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and then delivers any new posts to your iGoogle page via a widget. (For more information on iGoogle see this post). Using the reader allows you to keep up to date with the blogs that interest you and saves time from actually visiting the blogs.

Eye of St Louis web designer

The shapes and colors found in nature are inspirational to all types of designers, interior designers, graphic designers, web designers, logo designers ...

I love this photograph of a Star fish taken some 1782 miles from St Louis on the Oregon coast. The photograph has a fantastic color palette.


I used Google Maps distance calculator to work out the distance.

Your blog voice

In a post I wrote last week I talked about creating branded blogs and mentioned we were currently creating one for St Louis based Throttlenet.

The blog is now up and running, visit it here>> ThrottleBlog

Throttlenet have their blog set up so various team members can contribute, which is a great approach for a multi faceted corporation. It will give the blog a very rounded "voice".

We have two "voices" on this blog me..St Louis Web Designer and St Louis Marketing Executive

We have very different styles but that is exactly how a blog should be. Each contributor has a unique voice and personality, and brings to the blog something that no one else can.

It takes time to develop a blog voice but the more you write the more your style and voice will evolve.

St Louis Web Designer - tip of the week

Ok this has nothing what so ever to do with designing web sites but a is a tip for all those St Louis gardeners battling with deer infested gardens. This is a nugget of gold found online and provides a very cost effective way of protecting your plants from " deer digestion" Many web designers I know are very keen gardens so I felt I should share

Ingredients:-

2 eggs
1 cup of skimmed milk
1 cup of water
2 tablespoons of dish detergent

Put all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. Pour mixture into a old "409" type spray bottle. Spray all the plants in your garden that the deer like to eat.

The deer are repelled by the smell of rotting eggs... but I have been unable to detect much of a odor. It is cost effective and bio-degradable.

I whip up a batch of this a week and it does the trick

Are you using iGoogle?

As a web designer I spend a lot of time online and Google continues to make those online hours easier.
They have recently introduced iGoogle which allows users to personalise their searching experience and create a talyored interface with user defined content. I have the feeds from my favorite blogs, bookmarks to expediate my work process, St Louis weather forecast and a spell checker. The variety of "stuff" you can add to your home page is huge, tools such as a translator, windows short cutes, a To-Do list, feeds, joke of the day ....the list is endless.

iGoogle also offers the opportunity to add a theme to your home page. I selected beach ...a dynamic theme in which the sun moves throughout the day mirroring the position of the sun at my Zip code! There is also a bus stop theme which matches your local weather.

Email content filters

Back in May, I updated the content filters on my regular email account and as an experiment kept a tally of the number of emails the filters have sucessfully re routed to my junk bin. Today the tally hit 10,000!

The content filters do need tweaking everynow and again but is well worth the time and effort to save me wading through such a huge amount of unwanted rubbish!

St Louis web designer: Tip of the week.

As a web designer I spend many hours online. One of my daily tasks is a quick review of my email spam folder to make sure nothing is there that should be in my inbox. The spam is then deleted..in the last month my deleted spam was 1525 emails!

While this task takes a few minute to complete it is nothing to the task of sorting through the junk that comes via the mail man. In these days of identity theft I shred all "You have been appoved for our fabulous credit card" applications and sometimes I have up to six a day.

..and then I discovered optoutprescreen.com.

Visit this web site and you can opt out of offers from credit and insurance companies. It works!

St Louis web designer: Tip of the week

As a web designer any tool I come across which improves an internet surfing experience, is a good tool.

Take Google ToolBar ..it's features are many including blocking those annoying pop ups and highlighting search terms, just to name two. It goes down in my book as a good tool.

Download it for free at

http://toolbar.google.com/?promo=mor-tb-en

St Louis web designer: online company

As a web and graphic designer I spend many hours in front of my computer. I am passionate about design and my business so on the whole this is a good thing!

I have recently been investigating the wealth of online radio stations for a little company as I work. My favorite are BBC Digital Radio and Virgin radio. BBC digital radio offers a huge range of listening experiences ... my favorite station is radio 4 where I enjoy their Afternoon Play.

Email Hijacking

We have recently been under attack by an email hijackers who are apparently trying to use our contact forms to test for "open doorways " to route their own spam emails.

Their attacks result in us receiving numerous emails with all form fields filled out with email addresses from the domain in which it was sent and a little further checking revealed that the messages also come with a BCC address of jrubin3546@aol.com.

A little research has revealed this to be a wide spread problem with a list of about 10 BBC addresses in use .. intrestingly the hijackers all have AOL email addresses so this is clearly something AOL could sort out.

We are currently installing a fix into the scripts which powers our form to stop this abuse. There should be severe penalties for these people! Spam is one thing, but hijacking form mail scripts and spoofing other people’s domains and email is downright wrong.

St Louis web design company : Money saving tip

Here is an easy way to save money and conserve energy.

Configure your computer to "hibernate" automatically after 30 minute of inactivity and it will turn off in such a way that it does not have to re boot when you resume work.

In Windows Hibernation is activated through the power management tools in the control panel. On a Mac the same thing can be achived using the energy settings under system preferences.

Protect your passwords

I recently had a call from a long standing client asking if I knew anything about a company who had been constantly calling them requesting the user name and password to access their hosting account.

The answer was no and the company in question was obviously up to no good.

My client had the good sense not to give out the user name and password. As a web design client of Indigo Image you will never be asked to give out your user name or pass words.

Protect your computer from "pests".

Is your computer infected with Trojans, spyware or other nasties..do you even know? Is your browser being hijacked?

My browser was being hijacked a few months ago ... automatically taking me to sites seemingly at random. I ran a Norton virus scan but everything was inorder.

A web developer colleague suggest I try Ad-aware ..it worked perfectly, ridding my computer from a load of "pests" and sorting out the browser hijacking problem

It can be downloaded for free.

For more information visit:-

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/