Creating a catchy logo is not every web developer’s strong point. If you are somebody who struggles each time you try to create a logo and you’re sick and tired of reading and watching tutorials, I strongly encourage you to check out the work of Gary Simon. I have worked with him several times over the years and I can honestly say that for the quality, quickness, and small price there is no better place to go. By small price, I’m talking less than $100. If you have ever shopped around before you’ll know damn well that is dirt cheap for a high quality logo.

Get a logo design now from garysimon.net!

Back in the day, Network Solutions was the only place to go to buy a .com or any other domain name for that matter. Now, however, they are a distant third behind market giants GoDaddy and eNom. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Network Solutions charges over four times as much money as other industry leaders do.

Now comes word that Network Solutions is resorting to scamming people. Site’s like Network Solutions have a tool on their page that allows people to look for available websites to register. Now whenever anybody uses this tool on their site, Network Solutions will do more than report back to you whether the site is available or not. If it’s available, Network Solutions will register the domain automatically. In other words, they will say “Hey, yeah it’s available, and the only way you’re going to get it is if you buy it from me.”

Stay away from Network Solutions. You do not want to have to pay $35 for what you can get for $8 or less from other sites that provide the exact same thing! Shame on you, Network Solutions. Shame on you…

Thanks goes to TechCrunch for the scoop

SEO is Search Engine Optimization for the unaware. I found a very nice collection of SEO articles that are well worth checking out - especially if you want to improve your site’s search ranking. Covering topics such as “Baiting The Social Crowd” and link building - the standard stuff is here. There are also far more original articles such as “The Simpsons & Great Participatory-Viral Marketing” and “If Harry Potter Did SEO”.

All of this is available from SEO experts at netconcepts.

Matt Cutts of Google confirmed yesterday that the practice of engaging in the buying or selling of text links will hurt your web site’s Page Rank. Page Rank is essentially Google’s measure of a web page’s authority. Although it is arguable how important Page Rank really is with regards to search traffic, it still very much impacts a site’s credibility in the eye of advertisers.

But, as Mashable points out, it is really not possible for Google to track all of the paid linking deals that are going down. Unless paid linking is done through a program like Text Link Ads or some other obvious way it just is not possible for Google to find out. Either way, we’ve all been warned.

How does your site load on the Nintendo Wii and the PSP? You may not give a hoot but chances are good that people will be attempting to view your site with less than typical browsers. My site is only 2 weeks old and already I’ve had visitors using the Wii, PSP, PS3, and, probably most important of all, mobile phones. Here are some resources to help you figure out how your site loads for people besides you:

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If you’re anything like me then you are obsessed with creating a highly usable website. Making your content accessible to the greatest number of people possible may be the single most important task you have as a blogger - or any web site developer for that matter. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Approach to Web Usability advises writers to attempt to write at no more than a 6th grade reading level. I find this difficult to do because frankly I have always taken to writing as an art form and the process of dumbing it down can feel like obeying an anti-creative grade school art teacher. How’s that for an understandable sentence?

Blogger Steven Johnson wrote a very interesting post on writing by numbers. He used Text Stats from Amazon to make interesting observations regarding sentence length. Once again the verdict is obvious: keep it short and simple. Interested in finding out what reading level you are writing at? Try out this Reading Level Calculator.

I uncovered an older but yet still well written ‘guide to getting blog readers’. It starts off with a very appropriate quote by Dylan Hunt: “Every man is the hero of his own story.”

“How do you get people to read your blog? This guide will tell you how to gain readers, how, in effect, to be heard. It discusses how to approach blog content, design, launch, writing your blog, marketing and revisions.”

Read on for my dissection of this informative, albeit lengthy, article.

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Usability guru Jackob Nielsen has added a new article to useit in which discusses how to write proper headings.

“Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.”

Article

Microsoft’s new web application Popfly is now beta. Along the same lines as Yahoo Pipes, and Google Mashups, Popfly allows users to easily build pages by mashing together the content of popular sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Digg, and Virtual Earth. All of this is done through a drag and drop interface but what’s interesting is that it is powered by the Silverlight browser plugin. For those unaware, Silverlight is much like Flash. Check out Flickr Mappings to see Popfly in action.

On September 25, 2007 BlogTalkRadio aired a 30 minute broadcast featuring SEO expert Stephan Spencer titled “The Secrets of Search Revealed”.

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Are you a blogger interested in SEO? Then you can’t pass up the opportunity to watch this very nice video featuring Matt Cutts lecturing on whitehat SEO for bloggers.

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I’m new to the blogosphere. So new, in fact, that until yesterday I could have cared less about Technorati. I’ve decided to publish my learning process so that other people who are thinking about blogging for (high levels of) traffic can learn along with me.

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