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When designing a website font decisions are always key. Whether you are choosing fonts for typeface in a masthead or styling the CSS for the pages, font decisions are numerous. It’s always good when making decisions to weigh all of your options. With even a small budget you may be able to purchase a unique or interesting font. But don’t be discouraged if you have a limited budget, here’s a great list of professional and FREE fonts for you to peruse. The Web Design Ledger actually has several good lists of font categories. Here’s the extremely elegant serif font list which shows many examples of how serif fonts can be easy-to-read.

Branding is popular topic amongst internet business owners. Whether they’re writing blogs or selling hand-crafted items, most have thought about how to brand themselves online. Here is a great article with tips when branding through web design. The article lists out important factors to consider, why they’re important, and examples of those factors being implemented effectively. Here is a selection from their section about consistency:

Consistency throughout your web design will build on the choices you’ve made earlier regarding selecting the right personality for the brand and evoking the appropriate emotions. Keep consistent colors, visuals and typography throughout to ensure your website projects a uniform image.

It’s a very informative read we highly recommend.

Many website owners are individuals using the internet as a place to promote a freelance business. Whether it’s an online portfolio or a handmade goods storefront, many individuals are running a business online. There are many ways to organize a business in your office, but if you’re running part of it online, technology can often aid you. Here is a great list of resources and reviews of those resources for freelancers. The article runs down a list of budget and planning tools as well as shows screencaptures of many in action. The suggestions are little Mac-heavy, but useful nonetheless.

Marketing via Social Media is a new trend online. People are using blogs/facebook/twitter to market and promote themselves and their businesses. However, this has two sides as can be discovered daily with writeups about rude and irritating marketing strategies. Case and point: How a furniture company used Twitter to market in a non-to-favorable way. (At least not to avid twitter users.) It’s important to keep reading about this area as it’s new and many business are learning the path to success. Here is a great article about the proper way to comment on a blog when you might be promoting yourself or your business.

Add something to the conversation. Often I will read a post and think ‘wow, great post!’ But go past that, highlight issues that the blogger addressed, and add your own take. You don’t have to agree completely, and you don’t have to stick with their point. If one example they mentioned reminds you of another instance from your own experiences, mention that. But try to avoid simply repeating what others have said. And this is easier to do when you…

A great article with commentary that works for business and with individuals simply trying to promote their own blogs.

When you are designing your site, or branding your online presence, there are a lot of things to consider. Functionality and aesthetics always playing a part in every decision. Most of the time we think of things like color choices as part of the aesthetic and design of the site as a whole. But what if the color choices you make for your online brand could mean something more?

Here is an interesting article that talks about what your color choices for your brand could be saying about you. The article discusses a tool in the website Cymbolism for helping someone decide what color choices are good for their product.

It’s a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”

I think everyone hopes to keep improving their website over time. The only problem is…How? Do you focus on the design? The aesthetic? The functionality? The community? The conversation? What should get your attention? Well, if you read this article you’ll find tips to help you with all aspects of improving your website.

This article lists everything from a Bad Link Checker that will, “scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.” To a website grader,

…provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

This is definitely a good foundation of resources to act as a starting point for any webmaster to improve their site.

As CMS options go, Wordpress tends to be the one most written about. Once again, we’ve found another great collection of information regarding Wordpress and the plugins that could save you time. You can read all 10 suggestions here. The favorite we see is the Tweetable Twitter:

Tweetable Twitter is a great plugin if you use Twitter. Tweetable Twitter allows the user to integrate Twitter into your Wordpress blog and automatically Tweets the latest post that you publish. The automatic Tweeting can also be configured to choose the URL shortening service of your choice.

Every website owner gets that dreadful email from a user periodically - the one that tells them that the website is broken in someone’s browser. It’s tough to troubleshoot a website on every version of every browser, so many just wait until someone reports the bug to worry about it. But, once the bug is reported, then what?

Well - if you use Firefox as your browser (and most developers do) - make sure you have the Firebug Extension.

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

We recommend you use it for all of your de-bugging needs!

Wondering why your visitors aren’t doing anything at your site? Submitting a form, leaving a comment, visiting a different page? Here is a great article telling you some things you can do to change that. While the article is from 2007, most of the tips are still very useful today.

Have you ever navigated to a site or were clicking links within a site and were brought to a white screen with black text telling you the page can’t be found? What’s your first response. For most, they would simply to move on and find another site to go to. You can prevent many of those exits simply by customizing your 404 page. Take a look at this one here. Anyone getting a broken link on our site will remain on our site with all of our navigation options to choose from. Instead of bolting for the next site they will likely keep browsing the current site.

Here is a great article about the importance of a good “landing page” along with 11 tips helping you to improve the one you already have. Here is an example of some of the tips passed along in the article:

Place the important stuff (whether it’s your copy or your image) close to the middle, and never distract your user from that focal point. Avoid putting interesting material in sidebars. This pulls the eye away from the main body. If it’s interesting and valuable, keep it close to the center and use it to direct the eye.

This article gives good reasoning behind the importance of a good landing page as well as easy-to-understand tips to make yours as functional and effective as possible.