Web Design Book - Why search engines matter (and how to make money off them)

About a year ago I designed a site which sells glass jewellery (or glass jewelry - if you’re a yank).

The site’s called Amanda’s Glass Art and it sells very funky looking jewellery made out of a special glass, called dichroic glass, which was developed by NASA to go on the front on astronauts’ visors.

It’s a very attractive site and I’m quite proud of it, but in the first 11 months the site only sold 3 pieces of jewellery.
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I stumbled upon a website called “Can’t Cry a River” a few minutes ago. It’s an OK site, content-wise, but I was amazed at how hard it was to read the content.

The text is in a cursive (or handwriting) script and it’s dark purple on a dark green background (and vice-versa).

This makes it incredibly hard to read.
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I get a lot of emails from people (usually young men) asking me how they can become web designers.

The first step, in my opinion, is to decide what you mean when you say you want to be a “web designer”.

If you think a web designer is “somebody that makes websites” then there are lots of different job that fall under that description. For example, (more…)

Every web designer needs good photos and illustrations to use on their site, but normally you have to pay though the nose to hire a photographer or buy images from a stock image library like Corbis or Getty.

What if you don’t have any money for images?
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Web Design Book’s review of the Married 2 Magic website is currently featured on the Voice Thread homepage.

Voice thread is an interesting new site that allows you to add a voice commentary to images.

We’re using the site to do audio reviews of websites, but there are quite a few other uses for the system. For example, a photographer could comment on their photos or a tourist could produce on online slideshow.

Voice Thread is definitely worth a look.