Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Chris Pearson, the qualified mechanical engineer turned perfectionist website designer has written a couple of great posts over on his increasingly popular blog, on the subject of SEO.

In the first two articles of his five part series he discusses the importance of sitemaps. To sum up his articles in one sentence:

Sitemaps are vitally important in getting properly indexed by the big search engines.

Both of the articles come with wordpress plugins to generate yummy sitemaps for Google at the click of a button. Another reason to move to wordpress!

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To most people stickiness refers to the result of glue, honey, or chewing gum. To a website owner it resembles something quite different. Website stickiness refers to the amount of time a website visitor spends at your website. The more sticky your website is, the longer people are staying there. Which is a good thing of course!

Recently, I have made a few changes to my weblog, some small and fairly insignifant, others a little more noticeable. In this post I want to share with you the tricks I have learnt, to help increase your site stickiness.

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As promised a couple weeks ago, here is a little explanation of how to customize your wordpress links.php template file. (I would recommend a bit of wordpress & html knowledge).

Many of you may have experimented with the links manager in the backend, but hit the same problem that I did. That issue being around the line break between the link name and it’s description.

Basically, the problem is whatever you put in the form box “Between Link and Description:” in your backend is completely ignored by the standard links.php template file.

It’s all to do with the get_links_list function. This function is used on the links.php page in the default wordpress template theme. Now i’m not a php developer, I only read about this on a wordpress support post, so sue me if i’m wrong.

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Cameron Moll, the Yanky freelance new media designer, author, and speaker, who’s feed I subscribe to, has come up with a beaut of a post for all of you wishing to do a little experimenting with creating some great worn, “been through the washing machine” effects.

If you are too lazy to visit his site, which I strongly recommend you get off your ass and do, I have copied the great links he refers to and pasted them below:

• Jason Gaylor’s Photoshop brushes: Worn I, Worn II, Worn III, Fresh Foliage I, Fresh Foliage II, Grafitti I, Tasty Tattoo
• Misprinted Type: Photoshop brushes
• Veer: Worn typefaces
• MyFonts: Distressed typefaces
• Type Embellishments One
• How-to: Worn + “bulletproof” liquid layout
• How-to: Worn type using CSS
• How-to: Worn/weathered/stamped look
• iStockphoto: “grunge” vector and raster artwork

As you may have noticed I have used a couple of these techniques before :)

Have a look through these links, get inspired, and unleash your creative juices (hmmmm….. ok maybe don’t get that inspired ;)).