Start blogging the right way
Many people dream of earning some extra income through the internet, whether as a side business or as a full time income. There is much to learn and the process can take years of trial and error. For this reason six figure blogger Yaro Starak has but together some free training videos that take you through the beginning stages of blogging, all the way from installing the software to creating RSS feeds. I find Yaro’s style of teaching very easy to follow and watching these videos is a great way to skip the learning curve of becoming a blogger.
For those of you who are already familiar with the process but would love to learn some methods to earn a better income, Yaro also has material that is worth seeing. The conversion blogging video is a good explanation of the steps needed to help your blog convert readers into buyers (with some videos which show how he makes his money here).
Lastly for those who are ready to really get things moving, Yaro has a coaching program, which has only just opened it’s doors again after many months of being full. Chances are no matter which internet related blog you visit this week someone will be raving about this mentoring program. If you watch any of Yaro’s videos you will probably see why, so head over to his site.
Colour palettes by topic
For this article I have decided to do a little research and find some popular colour palettes being used across web sites of various topics. Some of the sites I looked at are the most popular in their field while others are just personal favorites. Basically these are not exactly scientific findings, instead simply some colour combinations that I enjoyed and found effective for their topics. So without further ado, here’s my list.
| Subject | Palette |
|---|---|
| Art & Illustration |    |
| Education |    |
| Technology |    |
| Photography |    |
| Business |    |
| Interior/home design |    |
| News |    |
| Celebrity/gossip |    |
| Food |    |
| Travel |    |
| Web design |    |
Thanks to Colourlovers for the help with the palette generation. Hover your mouse over each colour palette strip to see which web site the palette comes from.
Web templates
Every day I get emails asking for help and explanations of terms and processes in web design. This is why I have decided to create a series of articles aimed at beginners. This article is the first in the series.
Web templates - why use them
Web templates are ideal to use when building a professional looking website in a small amount of time and on a lower budget then when hiring someone to do a custom design. With templates you simply need to do edit the ready made page rather then having to start from scratch. Web templates can be used to set up any type of website and are often used by a wide audience ranging from web designers to people building their first site. Web templates offer webmasters a great opportunity to minimize development time and get new sites on the web sooner rather than later. Read more
Free web template - Squick Design
This is a web template, featuring 3 separate pages: Home, contact and portfolio. There’s no need to link back to this site when using it but it is always appreciated should you choose to!
The top squigly arrow is removable without any problems. Simply remove the arrow.jpg reference from the html documents.
You can see a preview of the page here or you can download the template in a zip file squick.zip
If you need the PSD file you can download it here. If you download it please consider a small donation either through TipJoy in the sidebar or Paypal to help cover running costs of this site. Thank you.
Design Inspiration of the week - nemstudio
This week’s design inspiration comes from blog.nemstudio.com. As well as the beautiful header, the right hand side bar also has a fantastic design with careful attention to detail. I love the downlights!
New premium wordpress theme: One Theme
One Theme is the latest premium wordpress theme available with many fantastic features. These include:
Custom Control Panel
Widget Ready
Adsense Ready
FREE Updates forever
Unique “Hot Conversation” Plugin
Featured Homepage Article
Search engine optimised
And lots more. It is an advanced, feature packed, attractive wordpress theme that will give any blog a professional look without costing a fortune in custom design costs. Easy to customize to make it unique to your site.
Click here to view more details
Monotone wordpress theme
Monotone is a rather unique theme which changes colour depending on the image attached to a post. It was created for photoblogs in mind (or at least blogs who use an image in every post) as the theme changes it’s colour automatically from a sampling of the image used in the post. The theme is available for Wordpress.com or self hosted .org wordpress blogs. You can download it from this link.
Found via here
Weekly design inspiration and trends
I would like to make this a regular feature on this blog, a short article or a few images about interesting design related articles or well designed sites from which we can get inspired.
So without further ado: This week’s inspiring articles:
2008 design trends - Webdesigner Wall has compiled this nice list of sites which set the trends of 2008 which is along the lines of the hand crafted, hand drawn, artistic design.
FreelanceSwitch has a post titled 33 new places to get inspiration from with some fantastic new sites to visit (My feed reader is filled to the brim now, thanks!).
Outlaw Design Blog has a post called 80 graphic design links you can’t live without.
That’s it this week, there is enough to visit there to keep us busy for a while. Hopefully the next installment of this feature will be published around this time next week again.