five tips for effective business website design

1) Use an established web design company that knows what they are doing; 2) There’s no one solution for building an effective website; 3) Don’t let budgets determine quality; 4) Leave budget for ongoing development; 5) Build a site that grabs people’s attention. Find out more here.

four web businesses amongst top Kiwi start-ups

To see what is hot in the e-business space right now, check out four of New Zealand’s top start-up companies for 2008 — four web businesses praised for their strong ideas and great execution.

Here’s an article explaining them, and below are links to their websites:

Bookhabit – an online book store with an innovative business model for self-publishers
Endemic world – an online design store for N ew Zealand products
Unimarket – an online (SaaS) multi-tenant eProcurement solution
Celsias – a website that helps people and organisations do practical things to combat climate change.

a glitch in Google’s cloud computing service

Google has made much of its cloud computing or software as a service (SaaS) offerings, hyping them as the new, efficient and cost-effective way to do business.  This blog post from Wired shows Google may still have some SaaS glitches to be ironed out.

It also shows that people’s nervousness about putting confidential documents in the cloud may be around for some time.

make your website more useable to more people

Some tips here to make your website more useable to a wider range of people …

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make websites more accessible to older and disabled people.

Version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2) applies to text, images, audio and video. It also covers web applications and is said to give developers more flexibility than the old guidelines.

WCAG2 focuses on making websites:

• Perceivable: including descriptive text for images, audio captions, flexibility of layout and colour contrast
• Operable: making sites usable with keyboards and improving navigation
• Understandable: making content easier to read and input more logical
• Robust: ensuring content and applications are compatible with assistive technology such as screen readers and magnifiers

Find out more at the WCAG2 site or read this article from the BBC.

redesigning the stop sign

Funny! A good lesson and a good laugh here about keeping design simple to produce the best results. Something to keep in mind for websites.

free online file conversion

Now this really is useful: a free, online file conversion service. Simply load your file into the website, select the type of file you want to convert it to and back comes the new file. Converts .docx (Microsoft 2007) to .doc, .jpg to .tiff and .xls to .csv, along with many, many other conversions.

colour my world, palette generator

Looking for the perfect colour combo for your website? With this tool you load in an image and get a list of colour specifications back that match it. It’s useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.  Pretty clever, huh … a colour palette at the click of a button.

picture in a hurry

Here’s a useful site for online images. It’s a search engine for free photos. It finds them from many sources and many are free to use as you want. Each photos states its licence requirements. More than 4.3 million to choose from!