Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Free Downloads for 1001 Winamp Skins

  We were just talking about the place to go to find fonts, and of course stumbled upon a sister site, 1001 Winamp Skins .  Now this site is not necessarily going to help you get a web project done, it won’t help your websites look better, but it at least might amuse you a bit while you listen to music doing all those things.

I tend to be a 2 or 3 skin type of guy, but if you wanted to get into a new Winamp skin on a regular basis, this would be the place to go.

They have skins on lots of themes.  Some seem to be created by people doing this out of the goodness of their heart and some seem to be a little bit branded.  It might make sense to get a skin that looks like your stereo system with the same brand and everything, or you may be really happy about your acne treatment or dermatologist or something and want to show off a clear faced winamp skin, or then again maybe you don’t.

Either way you can probably find what you are looking for here, and maybe even kick off a goofy conversation in your cubicle for 5-10 minutes before you have to re-apply your nose to the grind stone.

Website Review of WholesaleInsurance.net

We looked at a website that focuses on term life insurance.   The site is located at http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net.

The things that we like

1. We like that the site has valid XHTML and uses Cascading Style Sheets to separate the content from the presentation.
2. The website has a lot of keyword links relevant to the information on the site.
3. We also like that the main content is presented in short paragraphs and that you don’t have to read back and forth across the entire page. Only the relevant information is contained in each page and the navigation is consistent.
4. On the whole, the site is laid out nicely.

The things that we don’t like

1. We don’t like that the colors may be a problem for some individuals with visual deficiencies. They may have trouble differentiating between the colors especially in the navigation.
2. We don’t like the fact that the site uses pixels for text size rather than em&’s or percentages. The text does size larger in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is the predominant browser for less advanced internet users since it comes preloaded in most computer packages, so I would advise to be sure it resizes in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
3. This site could possibly benefit from more keywords in the head of the document, although there are several in the navigation.
4. This site also lacks the “Skip to Content” links for text readers. Users that use text readers, will have to go through the long list of navigation links before they can get to the content on each page and may likely go to another site.

Website Review Category Kick Off

We are going to kick off a new segment on top 10 Tech Web Tip’s. It’s a new category were we will review websites and identified the three things that we like about the website and its design and the three things that we think could use improvement.

We will support some of our findings with their own assessments or reasons for why we like or dislike things as well as why we think certain things will work on the web and some won’t. A major component of learning how to run a better website is understanding what works and what doesn’t and to do that you have to review and look at hundreds if not thousands of websites.

Tonight we’ll kick it off by looking at a website that focuses on Las Vegas luxury homes. The website is located at www.lasvegasluxuryproperties.com.

The three things that we like

1. For search engine ranking purposes we like the fact that this website has lots of actual hyperlinks as opposed to flash buttons in its sidebar
2. We also like the rotating pictures that display luxury Las Vegas properties
3. We like the color scheme for the site in general

The three things that we don’t like

1. I like the fact that the website provides both an e-mail address and a phone number, but I think those phone numbers and the e-mail address should be moved into its own section somewhere lower on the page area is real estate website is detracting from the valuable webpage real estate by putting a phone number and e-mail address at the top
2. this website has 20 errors and its validation, for website of this nature that’s attempting to attract attention through natural Google search this is a basic mistake that needs to be corrected. It’s not that difficult to validate a site especially when you only have 20 errors.
3. The keyword density for this particular website is not bad, but is not especially good either. Each page covers too many keywords in that reduces the overall all density. They should focus more on individual keywords on individual pages that should help their overall results.