Tutorialized Tutorials

Tutorialized is packed full of good old fashioned, F1 help. Learn how to make hair in Illustrator, or how to get started in Adobe Premiere. There are technical and business tutorials there too, but I'm mostly interested in the free online graphic design education I can give myself. Maybe you simply want to learn more about making animated banners in Flash. Whatever the reason, if you can see past the many blinking ads, this handy web site is your one-stop shopping for freebie online learning.

Browser Usage - Web Statistics & Trends

In my pursuit to update my internet knowledge, I thought it would be important to check out some web stats... but where? And how accurate would those stats be? Would they be up-to-date? I found what I was looking for on the W3Schools web site. Not only am I able to brush up on my coding, but the web site provides a monthly breakdown on web statistics and trends, dating back for the past six years. There's also info about OS Platform statistics. Oh, and being part of W3, it's free.

XML-Sitemaps for Web Page Ranking

Moving right along... The photo in the last fascinating post about the dinosaur discovery looks more like something my dog makes, that I must pick up and dispose of. Time now for a little web technology...

My page ranking had slipped a point, and I am looking for help. The best remedy, I've found, is to actually post every day, but if you've ever tried writing 70-100 words to write, EVERY day, you know it's not that easy.

I realized I needed to submit an XML sitemap for the robots to better crawl my site. I'm a so-so at coding, so for that reason, I sought out an XML sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com. Just plug in the code, and away it goes, generating an XML map to all your pages. Download the new file, then upload it into your site's root folder, and submit it to Google's Webmaster Tools... Voilà! (I'll let you know how my page ranking turns out).

Test JavaScript in IE, on Multiple Platforms

Need to test your JavaScript in Internet Explorer on various platforms? DebugBar has an alpha release of IETester. It's still in the alpha stages of testing, but maybe we're on to a good thing here.

Watch Your Users' Every Move

Watch users navigate through your site, by recording their mouse clicks, with a simple line of JavaScript added to the code, to make it go.

RobotReplay allows you to view your users' activity on your site, and learn where they do and don't go. This could very well take the guesswork out of some usability issues that lead to stagnant marketing efforts. It's anonymous, so Big Brother remains out of the picture, at least for now, and it's relatively effortless... It's like usability research, but without putting in the time.

Check out this nail-biting example.

Dashing Desktop Designs

Are you tired of the same old desktop design, everytime you boot up? Maybe your computer's operating system (Mac only, I'm afraid... sorry, Microsoft users) didn't ship with the right image to make your world turn. Well, if that's the case, you can choose from a multitude of awe-inspiring (and not so awe-inspiring) designs at Desktoptopia. The concept is that one subscribes to a series of desktops, so that your desktop changes regularly. You might find something that tickles your fancy, and for designers, it's a wealth of cool effects to look at.

Flash Cheat Sheet... Coult it Be So?

If you're like me, you love to see fluid creativity in motion, but you may not be so adept at the programming side of things... enter, Sprout, "the quick and easy way to create sophisticated multi-media content". A user-friendly, pre-built WYSIWYG Flash programming claims to make Flash programming easy and breezy. Here's the Youtube video.

The Sprout web site proudly boasts a launch date of January 28, 2008... Well, we know that date is past. Akin to most software companies, I suppose they have run into unforseen delays before their product launch. I thought I'd try clicking on their "Get Started" page, but received a message saying that they're in the closed beta stage (code for: they're testing their software, and they have enough testers already, thank you very much).

From a programming-challenged designer's perspective, it looks like a promising solution, so I've signed up to be notified of their launch... I'll keep you posted!

FEB. 19 UPDATE... Get your Sprout here: www.sproutbuilder.com/friendsofsprout