I love discovering new blogs to read. I recently started reading a great blog for indie designers called “Try This at Home“. It’s a fabulous little blog with designer interviews, advice on how to build an indie business, and various craft tutorials. While exploring the blog, I found this post called “Build a Better Website” in which the blog author, Maddy lists a couple of suggestions on how artists and designers can better design their websites. I love that this is written from the point of view of a typical web surfer. Advice includes:

3. Don’t use blink or marquee tags, or use a large block of h1, h2, or other headline text…

I remember when the web was crawling with this…yetch!

4. Try to keep your typefaces down to three, maximum…

Unfortunately the web is still crawling with this…

6. Sketch out a clear and concise way to organize your information before you get started, and always consider how YOU would use the site if you were just a visitor, not the owner…

Out of this list, the absolute best piece of advice is #6. So many people just jump right into the process of designing their sites with out even figuring out what pages they really need and how they are supposed to connect to each other. This is just like building a house without putting in a sturdy foundation. Everyone knows that if the foundation isn’t right…the rest of your house is screwed up. It’s easier to create a good structure for your website at the beginning than it is for you to fix a messed up one. Why? Two words…”search engines”. Remember that people aren’t the only visitors to your website. Once search engines find your website and list all of the pages of your site in their databases, any change you make in how you name your pages, how you link to them, and what pages you have on your site can cause confusion when your site comes up in search engine results. So one day when you decide to fix a badly structured website any links you may have from search engines or from other websites may disappear if you’re not careful.

So if you’re building a brand new website…get the foundation right the first time…and stay away from that flashing text.

Be sure to read the read of the “Build a Better Website” post at the “Try This At Home” blog.

In web design, colors are specified by using a special code called a “hex code” If you want some text to be pink, you simply write the hex code for a certain shade of pink which is “#FF7FBF” in your HTML code, like so:

<span style=”#FF7FBF”>PINK</span>.

And you’ll get…

PINK

On the COLOURLovers blog, there is a big list of hex codes for a quick reference. Check this list out if you’re stumped on which code represents which color. You can check out the list here:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/06/30/ultimate-html-color-hex-code-list/

Just stumbled across a great blog post called Colour Inspiration from the Masters of Painting at the COLOURlovers blog. It’s about getting color palette inspiration from old painting masters…Van Gogh, Dalí, Warhol, Monet, da Vinci…that crew. I love that palette inspired by René Magritte’s Les Amants. Beautiful colors…rather creepy story. I knew there was a reason why I loved art history. You can check out the post here.

And be sure to check out the rest of the COLOURlovers web site once you get there. If you’re ever stumped for some kind of color choice for your web site, your next piece, or even for decorating your studio, you’ll find the inspiration at COLOURlovers. There you can search through color palettes, read up on color trends and news…and even talk with other color fiends on the discussion boards. Take a look at: http://www.colourlovers.com/

Whew! I can’t believe it’s already May! I’ve neglected this blog disgracefully while getting the new season of my podcast Crafting Voices up to speed. But I promise to get back to blogging here regularly and I’ll start with another resource I’ve found for picking colors for your web sites. The Daily Slurp compiles a daily list of well designed web sites for design ideas. Now The Daily Slurp has created a new tool that will allow you search through their database of over 10,000 sites by color. Looking for ideas for sites that are predominately orange? Choose your main color, and if you like, you can also choose a secondary color and you get a whole list of examples that use these color combinations. Check out their new Color Search tool here.

Holy crap! StumbleUpon sure is addictive. I’ve heard about this web site for quite a while, but I’ve finally got around to getting an account a couple days ago and I’ve been so unproductive ever since If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon it’s a web site/browser tool that lets you push a button to find web sites that might interest you. So if you would like to find web sites on fly fishing, woodworking, and photography, push the little Stumble button on your web browser and it takes you to sites that deal with those topics.

Fly fishing is not my thing tho’, so I’ve been “stumbling upon” sites that have to do with jewelry, art, web design, and graphic design, and I’ve hit on a bunch of really useful web and graphic design sites, a few of which I’ll mention here:

The first site, BittBox is actually a blog that has very cool tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, so if you have some basic experience with either of these two programs and you want to stretch your skill a bit, you may want to try some of these tutorials. But not only does Bittbox have tutorials, but there are a number of free goodies like graphics and fonts that are available for you to download to use. Amazingly this blog is only about 3 months old, but there’s some good stuff there.

If you haven’t a clue about how the whole process of designing and launching a web site works, you should visit the Beginner’s section of the site Web Design from Scratch and get a quick overview. The site is maintained by web designer Ben Hunt who is in the midst of writing a book “50 Redesigns from Scratch”. Even if you aren’t a rank beginner when it comes to building your place on the web, there are some useful articles on HTML, the design process, copywriting, and other topics.

This next site is more of an online magazine of sorts. Smashing Magazine is focuses on rounding up some of the latest web trends and techniques. While this site is targeted towards web designers and developers, it’s great for finding resources and inspiration. I’m especially fond of their design showcases like the 50 Most Beautiful Web Designs in 2006, 49 Simple Web Designs, and 50 Remarkable Favicons (you know…those little graphics you see on the address bar of your browser). If you are a newbie at Dreamweaver, you should check out yesterday’s roundup, Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials