Vintage Logos

In a quest to update the Pallian logo and the TIM logos, I stumbled upon this great flickr set of vintage logos from mid-70’s. It’s a great resource for inspiration seekers, shameless design thieves, and vintage graphics hounds alike.

Note: the image above is not a logo - it’s just a modified version of the original to illustrate a shameless design thief :)

Web Design 101

If you’re new to web design and have been looking for good resources to begin learning the art of web design, check out the following sites. Bookmark them, visit them daily and learn from them.

10 SEO Tools and Tips

I’ll be honest with you - I never took SEO seriously. I always figured, provide your audience with quality content and they will just come. Of course, I tried to follow the basic SEO steps like creating meta tags and sitemaps in xml, but I never really did anything more than what was necessary. I thought you just had to submit your site to a million search engines and the job was done. I never realized there was a million other smaller minute details involved that could make a site so much more valuable in the eyes of a search engine and it’s minion spiders.

Last week a guy named James called me. He was a long time advertiser on TIM, but we had never really spoken before. He wanted to help us with our SEO efforts - and of course, I jumped on the idea. I showed him a preview of our new site (still in production) and after a long 2 hour chat, I began my love affair with SEO.

Unofficially, we’ve hired James to come on board and take charge of all search engine optimizations. I say unofficially, because we’re still negotiating the contract.

Check out his company - www.stjohnproductions.com and give him a call at 1.740.994.0373. With James on board, you can expect to see a whole range of little SEO tricks on the TIM Network of sites launching over the next few weeks. I’ll list a few of them over time on this blog as we deploy them and see the results.

In the meantime, if you were wondering what steps I personally took before I met James, here’s 10 SEO (or what I thought was good enough) tools to help you jump start your website rankings:

Google Webmaster Central - Statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission.

Search Engine Submitter - Quick and easy way to get your sites listed on search engines.

SEOToolSet - A bunch of free tools to help with the basic SEO.

Search Engine Spider Simulator - Displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the particular webpage.

Alexa-Ranking - Check and compare your rankings with your competition.

Backlink Summary - This tool will give you a summary of your competitors backlinks.

Compete.com - Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch.

Keyword Density Checker - A visual depiction of keywords used on a website.

Hit Tail - Analyzes and then gives you suggestions on keywords to use for your site based on the hits you receive.

Domain Stats Tool - Get full statistics of your domain the way search engine sees it.

Labor Day Weekender Linkfest

I’m taking an extended long weekend, going away to the valley, and so here’s an early edition of the weekender linkfest for you to feast on:

Extreme X-Rays: Photographer Nick Veasey’s Amazing Portfolio

BEIJING 2008 - Interesting photos of the best moments of the Olympics.

Feeling a little inspired by Obama’s acceptance speech? Then join the Get Out the Vote 2008 campaign.

How Design Can Save Democracy - a demonstration of better ballot design.

Soundtrack To The End Of The World - a cool blog where contributors compile a selection of 13 songs that describe how they feel at the moment. Free to download daily.

40 Free Stock Photo Sites - go nuts!

And finally, 2 pics of my doggie I just snapped 10 minutes ago (click to zoom):

The Art of Navigation

Believe it or not, I spent a good part of the day today trying to figure out a good navigation solution for the new sites we’re building for TIM. It’s one of those things; I’ve created countless websites with countless different navigation solutions - some work great and some just blows (mainly because the client thinks it works, but for the end user, its a nightmare).

When I designed the original site for Wall Street Survivor, we had spent more than a week trying out all sorts of horizontal and vertical navigation solutions to see what works best. In the end, we settled for the horizontal version you see on the site today. I’m not a big fan of the horizontal navs - mainly because it gives you no room to grow. You are limited to the width of the site and over time, it just gets crowded. So with that out of the way, I started experimenting with different examples of vertical navigations.

I did some research (by research, I mean Googling) to see what the latest navigation trends were and stumbled upon this neat little post from Smashing Mag. Armed with new found inspiration, I started coding. And 6 hours and many many iterations later, I think I may have finally found a solution.

Take a look at our testing platform: www.timothyskyes.com. I wanted to put it out there before we go live to get some feedback form you. Let me know your thoughts in the poll below so I can work on improving it. Essentially, we wanted a navigation that can grow over time (vertically) and that would not conflict with all the other javascripts on the site. The code still has room for improvements - so any suggestions you may have is always appreciated.