Web surfers have essentially become blind to the standard 468×60 banner ad, and to a lesser degree to other forms of web advertising. Web ads must avoid the stereotypical “ad” look to be effective. So on the one hand, advertisers and designers integrating ads into websites need to be “sneaky”, but on the other hand, [...]

Every time I see someone selling or trading a link bragging about it coming from a PR4 page, I’m not sure whether to chuckle or boggle. “PR4?” I think. “That’s supposed to be impressive?” I guess it impresses some people, even if it doesn’t impress us all. Which raises the question, what is “good” PageRank? [...]

So, you want your site to show up as high as possible on Google. Join the club. 20 gazillion other websites are clamoring for the same thing. And guess what? Google has its own agenda. They don’t care whose site comes up on top–whose business gets the free advertising. What they want is to give [...]

There are a million ways to make money (or if you’re already making money, there are a million ways to make more money). But none of us has time to do all of them. And few of us have the desire to do all that we have time for. Part of the secret to success [...]

If you’re an AdSense advertiser, there’s an eBook (PDF) that you should consider reading: Google AdSense Secrets or What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense. I considered getting it a few months ago, but decided then not to spend the money. I did some reading online about how to boost my AdSense [...]

Back in June, Blogger busted itself slightly by starting to insert divs at the top and bottom of each entry body to clear floats. I’m guessing they did it to be sure that entries with floated images in them don’t end up stacked next to each other. The problem is that I (and some others, [...]

I just finished a redesign on the homepage for my RSS parser, CaRP. While I liked the general aesthetics of the old design just fine, the page suffered from having too much information crammed into it without sufficient organization. The new design contains almost all of the same information, but is organized in a way [...]

Kenny Graham submitted the first design not created by me to the CSS Trappist Monastery. His design is titled Purity, for reasons you’ll understand from the comments at the top of his stylesheet. The first thing he does in the stylesheet is to override all the default CSS settings that a browser might apply to [...]

Two simple steps to higher search engine placement: “Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to mean paying gobs of money to self-proclaimed professionals with questionable qualifications. Nor does it have to mean hiring an army of copywriters to fill your site with content. Two simple steps will boost your search engine ranking and give visitors a [...]

If your search engine optimization efforts are focused solely and capturing visitors who are searching for products like yours, you may be missing a huge chunk of your market. Don’t forget about those people who are looking for complementary products, services and information.
Over the last six months, some of the things I’ve done that have [...]