I liked what the author said about this himself:

I consider myself an “Internet Marketing Coach”. I am passionate about helping people create successful online businesses. Whether it be usability (my specialty), search engine rankings, or general website marketing strategy, internet marketing is on my mind all day, every day. When I find precious few hours to sleep, I dream about internet marketing. I realize the internet is a big place, but I have this silly notion that I can make it better and more user-centric by sharing my usability knowledge through my service and my blog. Source

Well, I don’t always dream about internet marketing in my sleep, but I like to read articles by someone who does!

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (January 2007)

• IE7: 13.3%
• IE6: 42.3%
• Firefox: 31.0%
• IE5: 3.0%
• Safari: 1.7%
• Mozilla: 1.5%
• Opera: 1.5%

According to http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html (January 2007)

• IE7: 13.12%
• IE6: 31.37%
• IE5: 1.71%
• Firefox: 28.79%
• Safari: 2.5%
• Mozilla: 2.04%
• Opera: 1.65%

Based on this, IE6 & 7, and Firefox should be in your testing regimen. If you further break down the Firefox users you’ll see that you should probably also test Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 since both have a strong following. On the other hand, the differences in standards support between Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 is not that great.

What do you think should be tested?

First, they make creative use of animation on their cell phone ordering form. This ‘Step by Step Phone Finder’ has an animated character on the left which makes the search feel personal, and takes out some of the otherwise intimidating nature of selecting multiple products and configuring a cell phone order. The animation also catches you eye and makes you stay longer on the page, make it more likely to engage the visitors interest.

Secondly, they make good use of diagrams to show the different cell phone types. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this web form certainly makes creative use of illustrations to aid the user in their buying process.

Visit their ThePhoneSpot.com to see this buying experience in action.

It is often hard to find an affordable website designer, especially if you are a small to medium sized business. Artist’s Cafe specializes in web sites for small businesses, designers, and entrepreneurs.They tout affordable rates in the $2-3k range, and advertise themselves as having very creative, passionate and artistic designers.

One issue will going with low-cost website designs firms, in my experience, is the number of design concepts the firm will produce for you. This firm says they provide 4 unique conceptual designs for every new client so they can choose from the options. Once the the client chooses a design direction, Artist’s Care will iterate 3 times through the design process to produce the desired outcome. I find this to be a refreshing and reasonable process for web design.

Learn more at http://www.artistscafe.com.

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more

Is your page too ‘heavy’ and need help loading faster? Need to measure how your website performs? Try out NetMechanic to diagnose this and other ailments that can drag down the usability of your web site.

Designing a web site and need a color scheme? Try the Color Palette Generator.

Simply provide a link to where your photograph is hosted, and press a button. This tool extracts the “dull” and “vibrant” colors from your photo with corresponding color palatte colors, ready to use for web page design.

Use it at: Color Palette Generator

Use it at ConvertIcon

The ease by which sites can be created and run through blogging software like WordPress allow writers previously without publishers to print their works online. The problem with using a blogging software to manage your website, however, is that the tool defines the character of your site.

Once in a while, I see blogs that seem better off presented as online magazines or news websites rather than as blogs.

WordPress, however, is an extensible website content management system that can be used to run magazine-type websites. Here are steps I took to turn this online magazine on Cebu from a blog into its current presentation. I’m still working on it, though, so you might encounter issues.

Read full article: How to use WordPress to run a magazine, news website

If you’ve never used Photoshop before, you may not appreciate my GIMPshop hack. What I’ve done is renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. Many of the menu options and even whole menus were recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience. After running my GIMPshop hack, you’ll find that Photoshop and the GIMP are strikingly similar.

Longtime Photoshop users should feel very comfortable using GIMPshop.

Read more about GIMPshop.

Read article at Digital Web Magazine