This is my personal list of some cool places to go to when I have some free time in my hands:
1. Nettus
4. Css-tricks
5. Deviant-Art
6. Woork
8. Abduzeedo
9. StylizedWeb: This guys really seem to know what CSS is all about. At a first glance you can see that they are high level CSS people.
10. Hum, not yet… let’s just leave it at nine for now.
Cheers.
Hi again everybody. This link is probably the most important for people out there doing more than the basics with Google Analytics. In other words, if you are just installing the code and then looking at reports and interpreting the information, this link is of little to no value for you. However, if you are looking into trying some custom segmentation, adding search engines, linking domains and sub-domains and advanced profiling, perhaps you should take a look at this page:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76305
This page has all the information you need about the functions present in both the urchin.js and the ga.js scripts.
Take a look and hope this little tip helps.
Alex
Google Analytics Qualified Professional program! Yeap. I took the test in over an hour. Answered a good amount of very interesting and not-so-upfront questions and got my qualification. After studying for an entire day, even though I felt like I knew GA pretty well, I decided to take the test. I think that the studying really made a huge difference, otherwise I would’ve failed.
It is an in depth analysis into basics, advanced filtering and profiling and even Regex!
Anyways, one thing disappointed me a bit. After getting my qualification I didn’t find the logos anywhere. So I decided to create my own for the time being until they come up with the official ones.
I honestly hope I am not offending anybody by doing it; cause people get offended with anything these days. I think that my clients will appreciate the extra effort to get qualified and therefore “officially” say that you know what you are talking about.
If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to contact us at Merkados.com.
These days I have seen lots of people writing about tips on how-tos. Now there are great tutorials out there for web designers trying to improve their design techniques. Unfortunately what I have found is that most of them start from scratch and explain the techniques from a building perspective. Not that there is anything wrong with that approach. Simply put, I am writing this post but instead of building the techniques I will be analyzing three excellent examples.
TIP 1. Use Color, Position, Distance and Alignment to portrait importance. In figure number one, you can see how the designer decided to use 3 different colors in one paragraph of text! The white color automatically gets less importance, the yellow text gets a nice accent and then finally the call to action is found in red (which is an excellent color for action).
Use of Color to denote difference.
TIP 2. Mantain your number of hues to a minimum. The more color that you use the more time a common user would take to decipher what is important. In order to improve usability you want to color code your actions in a way that becomes automatically intuitive to do something. For the most I would say use 3 hues, then you can add another 3 shades or 3 lights to those shades. My favorite is to keep websites to almost a monochromatic scheme and then create accents with a split complementary or even a complementary hue. Unfortunately as I progress towards finishing the design, I end up adding other hues; I have to force myself to change extra hues for shades of the same hue.
Example of a website using a limited amount of hues.
TIP 3. If you decide to go with sharp angles then go with sharp angles. If you go with rounded corners then be consistent as well. As part of the WEB 2.0 trends we have seen lots and lots of design that use rounded corners. If used properly, rounded corners look really good and make design look softer and more inviting. Unfortunately the entire experience can be thrown to the trash can with just one thing: inconsistency. The secret really is not so much having rounded corners, the secret is to maintain those treatments across the different sections of the design. As a counter-example check out image number 3. This designer decided to only use sharp angles (including the pictures). That makes the design so powerful that it immediately makes a positive impression.
Example of designer using sharp angles with consistency
That is it! I hope you guys enjoy this tutorial and really hope that it helps improve your design and gives you at least another point of view.
Until next time,
Alex A. Centeno MBA.
Digital Media Director
Merkados™
In most of our projects we recommend using Host Gator as the hosting provider. We do so because in our experience so far they have been reliable and we have had good support experiences.
Some of our clients ask us how to go about the setting of their accounts. That is the reason of this post.
1. go to http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml
Host Gator Shared
There you will find a table with the following info:
2. Click where it says “Order Now” in the Hatchling Plan, the Baby or the Business. More often than not, for a starter website the Hatchling plan is more than enough. If you want a unique IP for your site, then Business will do.
Selection of Package
3. In the next page you will see an order wizard. Select the I will use My Existing Domain option. Type in your domain name: example.com and hit NEXT. This applies only if you already have a domain name. If you don’t, or if you want a new domain name, then click where it says “register new domain”.
Host Gator Signup Page 3
4. In the next screen you will enter the coupon code: XXXX. If you don’t have coupon codes, then it is time to go look online. How? Well, just go to Google.com and type something like HostGator Hosting Coupon.
Service Signup 4
5. In the following screen, review that the totals are correct and go to the next screen to pay by entering your credit card info.
6. That is it.
Once they setup your account you will receive an email confirming the information and payment but also with something extremely important— YOUR ACCOUNT INFO—
You are going to need specially three things:
1. The hostnames for your hosting server. They look something like: ns192.serverexample.com
2. The ftp access to your site (server ip, username and password).
3. The cpanel access for your site. (username and password).
Once you have that information in your hands you are set to go.
Make sure that you contact us for more information or if you have any questions. Thanks for using Shark Media Design for all your Website Design needs.
Difficult times don’t bring out the best in people. Is hard to ask a sinking person to think about anybody else other than saving himself. The economical crisis is showing the real character in the people around you, and in myself.
Producing value for others is not an easy task. For most people, their lives are completely tied up to their jobs. Their jobs provide the security of sustainability and affordability of social anesthetics like shopping sprees and Friday’s dine out.
My questions today revolve around: why do we all live so attached to the pursuit of money? why is it that we believe that with more money our life would be easier, safer and better? I have the impression that most people in their death beds don’t look back and say: “I would try to live longer so that I can make more money”.
A life in the pursuit of “more” is a life full of absolutely nothing. If I live my life as if I was awaiting for a destination I would miss my life completely. Because life is really the trip.
The worst part about it is that I pretend that my only problem is lack of money when in reality deep inside I know that the real lack is faith.
If you take two people and send them to a deserted island: To the first one you give a million dollars and to the second you give a reason to live, who do you think that would last longer?
We are like money hungry robots with junk-filled garages. We associate so much pleasure to the act of getting that we have forgotten how does it feel to give something to somebody else.
The paradox:
I want to work hard to get more money. The more money I get, the more things I buy. The more things I buy the less money I end up with. So I have to work more for more money.
In the end, I have neither money nor life. It is a pretty clever distraction.
Summarizing: Our entire lives we sell our time in exchange for money. Money that we plan to use to buy a better life. But at that point we have no time left.
Is like working at Disney World. Waking up every day and working hard. When you retire, somebody asks you if you enjoyed the rides and you reply: “I didn’t have time to enjoy them”.
Google Analytics is a great piece of software that allows you to track your visitors online. Sometimes, however, setting up goals can be a little bit more complicated. Read the rest of this entry »
Many people often ask me how to properly install the Google Analytics javascript tags in their own site.
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