Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

I’ve been quite a mouse potato (Definition: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato) the last couple days. I’m just absolutely amazed by this 4mb broadband internet! Sorry to rub that in again to all of you back in South Africa.

I’ve managed to watch a couple episodes of PhotoshopTV, and learn even more fascinating tips and tricks Photoshop is capable of. No waiting for downloads, perfect streaming quality!

I also stumbled across a great website link in a photoshop magazine I was reading whilst in WHSmith yesterday. I’m too cheap ass to buy a 6 quid magazine, I’ve still got the bad habit of converting back to rands. Eeek. Rather read the mags in-store for now :) No wonder us South Africans stick out over here.

Anyways the link is to 25 of the best quality, license free, downloadable fonts. No catches. Check it out.

Lately I have had quite a few requests for logo/header designs from fellow South African bloggers. Unfortunately, time is a scare resource at the moment, and I have bills to pay. This means my paying clients have to take preference, and my pro bono work has to take a back seat. Of course I’d rather be creating designs for you guys, and I’ll still try to do the occasional one from time to time :)

This brings me to my question I have for you? In my blog review over at Domkop, the dudes suggest I post some tutorials on Photoshop, sharing my pretty limited skills. Do you think this is a good idea? Or are they horribly off track? Comment and let me know.

If you are eager to learn some basic design skills, I can start by pointing you in the direction of some great sources of creative inspiration. Pixel2life is a tutorial search engine that covers just about every creative application. So if you “own” a copy of Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Corel Draw, or Flash, but don’t know how to use it, get on over there and see if you can get some help. I have published a couple tutorials on this site in the past, and might I add, recieved some great website traffic to our company website.

Computer Arts is a best selling magazine that is subscribed to by just about anyone in the creative industry. It is avaliable in CNA at a whopping price of around 130 bucks per issue. Luckily for you, loads of their published stories and designs are avaliable on their website. And their tutorial section is great! Most of their tutorials are downloadable pdf files, averaging around 5mb. They are very detailed.

The promised analysis of this template design is almost complete and I’ll publish it soon. Promise.

It’s finally here, the new site design that is. If you are reading this through your RSS Reader, venture out of it, and view it in your web browser. The site was designed for Firefox use, but is fully compatible with IE, although there might be some small bugs which I’ll iron out in the next couple days. In fact, wait a minute, I can confidently say there are bugs, so please be patient.

A detailed article will follow, which will include why I chose this design layout, what fonts I chose, the colours I used, etc. I’m too snowed under with work to explain it now.

The links and archives pages must still be designed properly, but they are still usuable.

Please comment and let me know what you think. I can take criticism pretty well, as long as it’s not too harsh. You don’t want to make me cry do you?

A few weeks ago I promised my faithful readers that a revamp of the Digital Farm was in order. Don’t worry I haven’t forgotten, it is on its way, it’s just taking a little bit longer than I first expected.

When I first decided to re-design my site I thought it would be a quick job: a few pretty, photoshop-edited jpegs, a little tweak of the CSS stylesheet, and a few extra buttons. Easy!

I then started doing some research, I studied some sites that had been revamped for the CSS Reboot, and found some creative inspiration. Some pretty imagery just wasn’t going to do it. A complete revamp of not only the design, but also the usuability was in order.

Google Analytics has proven to be very helpful, and well worth the installation a few months back. With my statisitics I get I have been able to really research the usuability of my site. It has so much functionality that informs me of just about anything I need to know about my visitors, their location, their likes and dislikes, where they are coming from, and where they leave my site to go.

The picture below for example informs me that the “Login” button is not used at all, and is best described as a waste of space. A very small number of readers have actually registered as a subscriber to my site, in fact only one person has! I don’t blame any of you either, a “subscriber” does not benefit at all from registering, he/she cannot view anything more than you can as a website visitor. Therefore this button is going to be replaced with a more usuable button, that entices the reader to venture deeper into my site.

The “Contact me” button gets a few hits each day, but could probably be replaced with something a little more attractive, a little more appealing to the readers. The “Contact” button will be moved to the sidebar.

Google also helps me establish where exactly my visitors are from. Not what country, but what city. I can even see your IP address. I’m watching you… just kidding, but it is quite scary to see how much information is avaliable to the webmaster.

This information helps me decide on what articles to publish. Seeing my visitors are mainly South African I can get away with local articles on the pitfalls of Telkom and Capetonians despise Eskom.

The stats also show me that linking to my previous articles in similar current articles, like I have just done, keeps my visitors interested in my site, lengthening their time on this site, and reducing their exit points. Pretty neat hey?

I can also see that my archive menu in the sidebar is seldomly used. Today, for example, only 1 person has clicked on one of the archive buttons. Why? Because people would far rather click on a category, for example with the name “Digital Art”, then click on a button called “May 2006″. By clicking on “Digital Art” they know what they are going to get articles about, with the archive button “May 2006″ they are not enticed to visit it by some attractive label.The archive is therefore going to be replaced with a single “Archive” button, where they can navigate and manipulate their search from a single dynamic page.

That brings to an end my two cents worth about the Digital Farm site usuability thus far. As you can read this site revamp should hopefully be an exciting one.

This usuability study has been a great learning experience for me, I now plan to use the knowledge I have gained here on some of our client’s websites and hope to see some great results.

Should you wish to read about the design aspect of this revamp, then let me know by commenting, otherwise I don’t wish to bore you all with infomation you don’t really want.

Expect to see the new site up and running soon :)