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Who remembers the days in the 1990s, when you would design a website in Photoshop, slice it, then have it fit into a table? In those times it was impressive to have content in an ever expanding box. People who didn’t even know HTML would be amazed when they saw that, and ask how it’s done. Those were the times! You would have to slice a table that would have 5 or 9 cells for that. We’ve moved a long way from that, so we thankfully don’t have to do that any more.

Now we have CSS, people have created CSS frameworks to help us create our layouts. This post is for the people who want to learn how to create layouts using a css grid. We don’t use tables any more for layouts, so every web designer will have to learn this anyway at some point. We use CSS frameworks to create grid layouts.

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I use Gmail,  so I don’t get much spam reaching my inbox. However when it does I quickly mark it as spam. One day I was checking my emails, and I noticed a weird email from Facebook. It was someone I didn’t know. Here’s what I saw in my inbox.

Marie Lopez - Conversation with Marie Lopez and others
Andria Reed – Conversation with Andria Reed and others

I’ve no idea who those people are, and the emails looked strange, but I knew it was a Facebook email by the subject, so I was interested in seeing what it was. Judging by the names and weird email preview, I knew there something dodgy about it. I opened it and it was spam.

I had never seen a Facebook email address being used to send spam before. The spammer must have a high believability rate, as the email had skipped my spam filter. Now that I think about it, Facebook email addresses are much more quicker to get than Gmail and Hotmail ones, and they can be utilised for spamming efficently. I wonder if Facebook knows about this problem.

My email has appeared on a public email scraping list, so because the email was sent to many email addresses beginning with the letter a, should have been enough to flag the profile account as a spammer. I wonder if the account already got flagged, as I got another such email from Andria Reed two days afterwards. The original account must have been banned.

What I like the most about these spam emails is that they’re sent from female names to increase the open rate. This is not the self-proclaimed email killer that Mark Zuckerberg had hoped for.

Some make startups with the initial goal of selling it for crazy amounts of money because they have an exit strategy. Some people are investors who invest and buy established profitable companies. Other people run a business or would like to learn more about economics and that sort of stuff. Continue reading →

I got an email the recently about some sort of competition I could enter by entering the alternative to Facebook. The email was worded so bad, I thought that the website itself was an alternative to Facebook. How I got the email is by my email being leased from another mailing list. Continue reading →

Those affiliate marketers, they’re always stepping up their game aren’t they? Yes I know they are. Google releases all these algorithm changes, yet they always have ways of profiting from niches and doing SEO. I’m on a mailing list of which each email is sent by a different successful affiliate marketers who know what they’re talking about, who sell guides as to how to become successful at it like them. I’m clever enough to know which ones to buy.

I got an email that sold automation software. Automation software apparently earns you money while you sleep by running on auto-pilot. No advertising is required. You know I never brought it. Here’s a quote from the email. Continue reading →

When web developers like me think about SEO, I’m most likely thinking about marking up content with semantic tags. For a SEO expert, they’re thinking about link building, the sort of people you go to, if you want to be number 1 on Google*.

The first 10 results on Bing have less backlinks than the ones on Google. This makes Bing a threat, as Bing is primarily ranking pages on factors other than backlinks, such as the content of the page. This is something that Google cannot do so well. Google is better at long tail searches though.

Knowing that Bing uses less backlinks than Google, I asked a question to SEO expert, Dave Cain. As Bing uses less backlinks on the first 10 results than Google, does that mean that if Bing becomes the dominant search engine, that link building won’t be effective anymore? Continue reading →

There’s a new trend in logos which gives simplistic shapes a sense of depth and movement by using transparent overlays of colour to simulate the effect of 3d glasses. The effect is really clever, as it applies special qualities to the branding that the company is trying to go for. Design Festival has a good article about it. Here are some good examples of Shift logos.

The Shift logo style’s roots lie in print rather than web design  and they appear as transparent overlays of color. The shift look appears  as letters or objects in RGB or CMYK, appearing as though they are  misregistered or printed incorrectly. These logos tend to have limited  colors and a very clean look despite the overlapping layers. In the case  using pastel colors, the logos look gentle and peaceful, while the  logos using reds and dark pinks have a 3D quality about them. That is 3D  without wearing 3D glasses.

While the images in logos are obviously static, the shift look gives  them a sense of movement or motion which is eye-??catching. On first  glance these identities look like several elements blending into one, or  conversely, one element breaking into several pieces.

Now don’t you all see this trend and get on the bandwagon of it. This trend seeping into 99designs would be a catastrophe, or maybe not because all that happens there is plagiarised logos that businesses can’t legally trademark or patent. Logo design is a skill, and it requires you have a design agency make your logo, so they can conduct their research and understand your brand. A fancy logo that doesn’t convey brand values is a wasted logo.

Keeping in with its two-year release cycle, the new version of Mac OS X takes the operating system into a new direction. It involves them getting their thinking from iOS devices, and bringing it to the Mac. A compelling reason for Apple to do so isn’t clear, so Apple is gambling on the future of graphical user interfaces, as point and click interfaces are waning in usage in favour for flick and swipe interfaces. Of course Apple can’t scrap the Mac, but they can bring some of their iOS features to the Mac.

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Microsoft has always been the corporation that’s suffering from an identity crisis. I don’t believe this is the case anymore, but still they’re a company too ashamed to put their name on the Xbox. I don’t hate on Microsoft though. They really are improving their corporate image, and creating a unified design across their products, and improving the design of their products.

Below you will find a video of which despite the Kinect being the quickest selling electronics device, still Microsoft is too ashamed to put their name on their products, hence people not knowing who makes the Xbox.

In an attempt to improve their design, and give their products a consistent design, they are embracing Metro on their home page. Metro is that graphical user interface where text, content, cleaness, and spacing, takes dominance. Take a look at the two designs below and you’ll see an improvement. I just wanted the for work image of the home page to have a woman on it, to make it look nicer.

When I read "Find popular downloads", I just know they'll take long to install. Shouldn't Microsoft products be quick at installing on Windows?

So what do you think of the redesign Microsoft has made to their home page. I think it’s great because it uses Metro for consistency, it removes that awful scrolling before the image headline that happens below the fold, and the navigation bar at the top is simpler. I suppose that people’s frustrations with the home page have been lessened.

This is the year that the Facebook users really protested.Part 1 Continue reading →