Recently I have been looking at adding free extras to my own website, and I was recommended the Visualscope.com website as an example of what can be added to help boost the value of your website to your clients. Although they are a Seattle web design team the free webmaster tools and the resources available on their site are useful to not only their clients but to other web designers like myself. I can certainly see myself visiting their site to check out their articles, and to return again to see what other articles they add in future.

The free webmaster tools are easy to find online, but to have a whole group of them in one place makes it so much easier for people like me who prefer to have a single bookmarked website to visit and to get everything done through the one spot rather than having to go to five or six sites to do the same thing.

My intent for this site is to add free things like desktop wallpapers, iphone wallpapers, twitter icons,  icon sets and other useful custom graphics, but I could definitely see how much added value any site could have by incorporating resource tools and articles on website design and development. 

For the most part my website design and development services requirements are done in-house, but after reading through their testimonials I would consider them as a source for overflow work.

To celebrate the new Space Hulk boardgame from Games Workshop, a few of my friends asked for some new iPhone wallpapers for their phones.

They liked the graphics from the game so much, they suggested I share them further.

Disclaimer // None of the images are mine, all intellectual property rights are owned by Games Workshop and this in no way an official release, nor am I purporting to be associated with Games Workshop in any way. It is simply the graphics generated for people to have in a format for their phones.

Over the weekend I hit and surpassed another one of my goals for eBay! The first one was to crack $1,000 in sales, and the latest was to hit the 100 stars. Which now qualifies me for Powerseller status if I can make enough sales in a 3 month period.

I am certainly going to try!

After I hit that goal, I am thinking of writing up a help guide as to how I acheived it, and some tips to selling. Would anyone be interested in that?

Just started switching over to zazzle from cafepress. After some decent results with cafepress, I have found that zazzle offers payments via paypal to its sellers rather than only by cheque like cafepress and that decided it for me. I don’t want to have to wait an extra month for commission payments anymore. So, I intend to switch over most designs to the zazzle store. Any designs that have dropped off cafepress that aren’t in the zazzle store, let me know and I can add them or send out a link for them.

I am still taking custom design jobs for product designs, and can set up private product links for you to them. Just send any requests through to tshirts@bittenbydesign.com

Recently I added a little desciption on all my cafepress storefronts mentioning if anyone had any requests for t-shirt designs to send me an email.

Quite a few emails have come in with positive comments about the tshirt designs.

If anyone has one (or more) of the designs I have available, I would love to get photos of them in use, to put up on the website here, and to put into the catalogue of the designs I am starting to put together.

However crazy the photos are, I am glad to see people enjoying the designs.

But at least make the photos reasonably tasteful, otherwise I won’t be adding them to the site.

Also, if you want model credit, just send me your twitter/web address to add to the photos.

For most people SEO could mean just about anything, and Search Engine Optimisation seems almost as vague. So, what is it, and why should I need to know about it?

Well, it is simply the practise of making sure everything is done to your website so that it has the best chance to be in the results on a search engine search.

And why would you need someone to do that? Today we see an ever increasing reliance on web based search engines for all our information requests. Do you even open your yellow pages or do you simply hop online to do a search through google or yahoo? Now with the iPhone even more people are simply using their phones web connection to do searches.

If you are not in the results, people simply won’t know you are there or be able to find you.

The search engines keep it a secret how their software works for sorting results, so it is an ongoing requirement to keep on top of your search engine optimisation. There is no magic bullet or secret to get to the valued number 1 spot in all the search engines.

Although you can get a book on SEO, the engines change so much and so quickly, even a book that is six months old may be out of date and useless for SEO. (or worse give you a negative result from it’s advice!)

To select a SEO firm, make sure they have a process in place for measuring results, and are able to show positive gains for previous clients. I remember a client coming to me saying the other design agency had simply told the client to ‘make a blog, that’s what the search engines need to rank you highly’ it was a terrible piece of advice they got, and one that didn’t reflect the needs of the client whatsoever. My advice was to find a specialist in Search Engine Optimisation and talk to them about what sort of package they could offer to them. (without the need for the business to generate a blog that they didn’t need, want, or have the time to maintain.)

Having a specialist in the field look over your website can show up simple errors or things that can be fixed to help push up your ranking simply by having it done right whereas your competition may not have it done in the right way for the search engines.

Just discovered the most useful online twitter tool I have ever seen! http://monitter.com/

The bonus is, you can monitor your own sites mentions along with two other keywords that match what you are looking for, all running live and in the current field of posts.

I know I am going to be using this a lot more in the future.

Just an update to say that the archives list is now generated as a dropdown list.

This way you will be able to have everything on the screen and going forward it wont take up as much room on each page. An added bonus is now I have added the amount of posts for each of the month’s.

Hopefully this makes the pages load faster and clears up room for my next enhancement!