A Successful Website In 12 Months

Although Brett Tabke, the head honcho at WebmasterWorld, wrote this article on how to build a successful website in 12 months with Google alone over seven years ago it's still good and relevent advice.

"I know the following system works 100% of the time with Google to attain rankings across a wide range of keywords. This is what I do with clients to build a successful site and it has worked every time. The level of success will depend largely on the subject matter, its potential audience, and its level of competition on the net."

I suggest you copy it to a text file, print it out, and refer to it often.

Read More: Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone

CSS Backgrounds

A good background can transform a website or blog from a boring, also ran into something special. Here's a post from Smashing Magazine that will, through the use of a cascading style sheet, provide both inspiration and instruction.

I just might need to create a category for Smashing Magazine; I'm finding a lot of very useful stuff over there.

Read More: Backgrounds In CSS: Everything You Need To Know

Free Icon Sets

Icons, Icons, Lots of Really Cool Icons.

From Smashing Magazine:
Fresh free high-quality icon sets and 35 incredible free icon sets you can use for your web designs or your desktop. More in SM's Icon Category.

From The Web:
The Icon Archive is a categorized collection of high quality desktop and web icon sets; they have lots of really good stuff there.

SM's Best of 2009

I was reading Smashing Magazine this morning and I decided to check out their "About" page where I found this...

Our Most Popular Stories Of 2009 So Far:
Web Design Trends For 2009
Best Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design

And this...

Our Greatest Story Ever:
53 CSS Techniques You Can’t Live Without

I've got to get me one of those "About" pages, someday.

Clocks for Your Blog

I really like this. I use clocks on a several of my websites, but all I'm really doing is imbedding a bit of javascript that displays the client's computer time. If their clock is wrong, so is the clock on my webpage. This is different. It's...

1. Accurate - Always displays the correct time.
2. Automatic - Automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time.
3. Configurable - Choose colors, borders, fonts, languages, etc.
4. Free - No registration required.

Check it out: Free Clocks for Your Website

Download Free Music

Sorry for not posting for so long. I'd started a new job which, unfortunately, I recently lost. Hard coming, hard going.

Anyway, I find myself in difficult financial times and I need to make some money. I was inspired by this post from Webmaster World to do a little more selling on my websites. Here's the post - Why affiliates refuse to make money.

I've long been a fan of all kinds of music, country, rock, alternative, classical; anything but rap and opera basically, so this was an easy idea.

That said here goes a really soft sell - Free MP3 Music Downloads. Check it out, clicking a freaking link doesn't cost anything. If nothing else, tell me what you think of the page itself. And yes, that was a shameless link drop.

CSS Menus and Liquid Layouts

Almost everything I know about CSS based web design, page layouts and CSS roll-over menus I learned from Max Design, an Australian web design and development business. Although I don’t usually use these techniques on my blogs, you can see examples of some of these techniques on my other web sites like donnapix.com, solamande.com and my main site brucekelly.com.

Max Design offers a series of simple, easy to understand, step-by-step tutorials on creating menus and page layouts. Here are a couple of links that I think you’ll find as useful as I have.

Sample CSS Page Layouts - Free to use and abuse as needed
Listamatic - The power of CSS when applied to a simple list