Andy Boyd

Designmeltdown.com posted a group of free scripts/tools to make your website more “web 2.0″.  I don’t really need the scripts for any projects I am currently working on, but it was really entertaining to see what people are doing these days… best of all, they are all free!

http://www.designmeltdown.com/chapters/FreeScripts/

Freelanceswitch.com is a great resource for any aspiring freelancer… They have developed a great little web-app to help you calculate what you should charge for your hourly rate.  Check it out:

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

Peter Freitag gave me a little SEO little tip I was not aware of…..

http://www.petefreitag.com/item/636.cfm

“Just a quick tip for those of you that are building XML sitemaps for your web sites. You can now add a line to your robots.txt file to include a pointer to your sitemap file, it would look like this:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This will allow your sitemap to be picked up by several search engines automatically. I first noticed this about a month ago, not sure how long this feature has been around.”

Thomas Baekdal wrote a fantastic article about understanding design trends  and knowing how to design/act according to the current trend. This article is a must read…

Thomas also offered the following trends to watch for… very insightful!

• Simple vs. Complex
• Colorful vs. low on color
• Visible vs. hidden technology
• Ordinary text/images vs. Rich Media presentations
• Efficiency vs. Exploration
• Manual vs. Automatic
• Big vs. small
• Rounded vs. edgy
• One-page vs. many pages
• No effects vs. fanciness
• Social vs. isolated
• Work vs. fun
• Long vs. short
• Sporty vs. comfortable
• Strong vs. fragile
• Masculine vs. feminine
• Independent vs. company
• Etc.

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/management/design-secret-unveiled/

Yoav Ezer, from Codswallop, provided a fantastic list of web apps that are essential to a freelancer for managing his/her busines..From invoicing to marketing, these are tools that freelancers need to know about.

100 essential web apps for freelancers

Interested to know what your customers (or potential customers) expect when they enter your site?  Read this study to learn more…

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/41/web_object-ecom.htm

The SEO Playbook (below) serves as a great reference for how to balance web-design/usability with SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/04/18/seo-playbook/

Check out this great article on CSS Positioning…

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_positioning/

Marc Wandschneider has created, and released, a PHP / Ajax framework. Pretty cool..
http://chipmunkninja.com/article/payjacks020

Website Optimizer, Google’s free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/