My wife and I, as well as two friends are planning a big trip in the fall to India and Nepal. This is just one of the many places we want to see before we find ourselves six feet under. I started scouring the web for resorts around the world. I came across a lot of beautiful websites and I thought I would share them.

As most would assume, the big selling point of a resort is the location, and the beauty of your environment. That being said, you will notice the majority of sites use large stunning photography to encapsulate the visitor in their environment. For some of the website’s the brand and content feel like it doesn’t matter because you just can’t get better then the images they show. Take a look at the new Marina Bay, Four Seasons and Alantis sites, no doubt the images steal the show. A lot of the sites, also have great interactivity such as the MGM Grand and Surf In Paradise. Has anyone been to any of these resorts, are there other resort websites that would fit in with this group?

The industry of Design-Your-Own / Co-Creation started when big companies like Nike launched NikeID and then Converse let you design your own shoe too. Spreadshirt works to let you design your own t-shirts, and Threadless lets you co-design t-shirts in hopes of both parties profiting.

There are several new businesses sprouting up that are looking to change the way consumers shop, through co-creation, forever.

Blank Label – Custom Dress Shirts

Fully co-create your own dress shirt from top to bottom with prices starting at $45. After customization you can easily get a really awesome dress shirt you co-created for under $80.

Chocri – Custom Chocolate Bars

Pick the chocolate base and all the toppings you want to mix into your personalized chocolate bar. Design your own chocolate bars and throw in those sprinkles, goji berries, jalapeños and gummy bears you always wanted to mix into your white, milk, dark or white and milk chocolate base.

Me&Goji – Custom Cereal and Granola

Mix all your favorite ingredients together into a sweet or salty or sweet-and-salty blend of fruits, nuts, grains and more.

FashionPlaytes – Custom Clothing for Girls

It’s almost every young girl’s dream to become her own fashion designer, and FashionPlaytes makes that incredibly easy. Girls from 5-12 can even design their own label!

LaudiVidni – Custom Handbags

Put your handbag in a pedestal and call it your very own. Design every part of your handbag including the trimmings with this real-life replication of your co-creation.

You need to focus on both getting more people to your site to view your products and you need to find better ways to turn those visitors into paying customers. Here are 5 of the best ways to help you accomplish both goals.

1. Optimize Your Meta Data

This is one of the quickest ways to boost your rankings in the search engines and to get more people to visit your page. This will require you to acquire some basic HTML knowledge, which most e-commerce site owners don’t want to do. However, learning how to optimize your Meta data probably only takes about 15 or 20 minutes, and those minutes could be the difference that gives you an advantage over all your competition. The Meta Tags you most want to pay attention to are the TITLE tag and the DESCRIPTION tag. These are what show up directly in the search engine results. You should word them just like you would word an advertisement to induce people to click on your website’s link.

2. Write More Content

If your website largely consists of 2 or 3 sentences describing each product, then this probably isn’t going to be enough to get your site to show up in the search engines. Although quality content is best, what you really need is more content, period. Even if you write a random story about one of your products, that will cause your site to show up in the search engines more often just because what you happened to write will match up with what someone searched for.

3. Make Your Product Pages Attractive

You want your prospects to see your site as a credible site that offers high quality products. If possible, you should use high resolution photos, and you should use multiple photos for each product. This will undoubtedly increase your conversion rate. If you want to take things a step further, you should be careful about the file-names of your photos. Rather than naming your photos something like image01.jpg, you should give them names that are relevant to your products. This will increase the chances that your site will show up in search engines like Google Image Search.

4. Clean Up Your Navigation

You should make the navigation of your site and your product pages intuitive and easy to understand. This not only benefits the customer, who will be able to more easily find your products, but it helps the search engine spiders find and index all the pages of your site.

5. Speed Up Loading Times

Google and Microsoft have released research that shows that if a site takes more than 2 seconds to load, web surfers begin to click the back button on their browser. The longer your site takes to load, the more customers you will lose before they’ve even had the opportunity to see your products. Google has also indicated that they now take loading time into account when deciding which sites to return for a search query. One thing you might want to consider is to find an affordable e-commerce hosting package that provides a faster speed.

By implementing any of these 5 tips into your e-commerce sites, you can expect to see an increase in traffic and conversions. If you implement all 5, your profits could really go through the roof.

Upon registration attendees received a notebook and a chain of guitar picks, which also had a 2GB USB attached to it. The guitar picks were used for an ingenious social game, each chain had a few picks of each language with some languages missing. The chain was used as a pass to get into the Truce Party, which meant the attendees needed to go around and interact with other attendees to get all 5 language picks. There were some bonus “Make Web Not War FTW” white picks in circulation which were handed out by Microsoft employees for participating in random activities throughout the day.

The Event

This event didn’t feel as if it was a free event, as soon as I walked into the main room it felt as if I was at a major Conference like Microsofts PDC. There was plenty of activities for any attendee to participate in  including, a green screen booth where you could star in your own short, a podcast booth where you could talk with a Microsoft Evangelist, an information booth where you could learn about TechDays a two day conference on Microsoft Technologies, a Xbox lounge with Beattle’s Rock Band, and an area every geek would love a HackFest put on by PHPQuebec and devLAB Montreal. The event also included a catered lunch featuring pasta salads, hamburgers, and hot dogs all of which were incredibly delicious.

The Sessions

The Conference was split out into two tracks, offering up both Lecture, and discussion panel sessions. The sessions and the HackFest started shortly after the keynote.

The Keynote

The keynote entitled “Makers of the Web” by Joël Perras outlined how the web has changed over the years. Joel has worked on Projects including the PHP frameworks CakePHP, and most recently Lithium. Being a blogger for 10 months, I normally take a lot of time to finish my blog posts, but for the Make Web Not War event I decided to try Live Blogging.  Here is my first ever Live Blog on Joël’s Keynote. For a more experienced live blog head on over to NVI Solutions for their blog on Joël Perras’ talk. The main point that should be taken away from Joel’s talk is that “Interoperability is not a feature, it’s a requirement”. This means that regardless of which language you use to develop your solutions, and what operating system it is running on, it should be working the best it possibly can for your users.

CodeFest – With PHP Quebec, devLAB Montreal & Windows Azure

I started the day off at the Code Fest, watching fellow Windows Azure Specialist Colin Melia. Colin gave a great overview of the Azure Platform including how to deploy an ASP.NET and PHP Application into Microsofts Cloud. If you would like to learn more about Windows Azure, check out Colin’s Post on Deploying a PHP Application on Azure. I also have a number of posts on converting, and deploying applications on Windows Azure.

Special Thanks to PHP Quebec, and devLAB Montreal for sponsoring the Code Fest and giving me the ability to talk to attendees about Open Data. One attendee I was speaking with, Louis-Philippe, had this to say about open data.

Winning the Web with Mobile

The session that really caught my interest was the Windows Phone session with Joey DeVilla and Paul LaBerge. Windows Phone which is promised to be released before this holiday season, is turning some heads in the Mobile market. Typically the Mobile Devices that have been released by Microsoft were focused on keeping their branding consistent across platforms. With the new phone, the team has focused on making a more user centric interface keeping the most important features front and center based on Usage. Even more incredible is the fact that Microsoft is releasing all of the tools required for Developing for the phone, free of charge.  For more information on the session check out my live blog on Windows Phone.

For The Web Competition

With over two dozen entries into the competition Microsoft Staff sure had their work cut out for them to come up with the final three entries for the FTW Competition. The finalists had three rounds to compete aginst each other to inform the crowd as to why their application should win.

TaxiCity – A student project from the Centre for Digital Media. Created by – Mohamed El Eryan, Dashan Yue, Seth Marinello, Jordan Braun, Sagar Datta, Dhruv Adhia, and Ryleigh Kostash.

Find-a-Home – Created by – Wicked Code aka Timothy Dalby

Project Tholus -Created by – Fmaz aka Francois Mazerolle

After the three rounds, the audience went to vote and named Timothy Dalby (Front-Centre in Grey) [Find-A-Home] Winner of the Contest! and Dashan Yue (Holding WebNotWar Shirt) [TaxiCity] runner up.

Peace Restored

Now that the dust has settled, and everyone returns to their cities of origin, there are many things that have been taken away from this unique conference.  The knowledge and experience that have been shared between all the attendees that participated in the event is something that people could benefit from. However the real important return from the conference is all the new friends that we take away, everyone has their own unique ability which can complement your skills.  I look forward to reconnecting with all the people I have met at Make Web Not War.

Additional Resources

• NVI Solutions – Make Web Not War Coverage
• SafeKidZone – Make Web Not War Coverage
• Microsoft Canada Interoperability Blog
• Web Not War Photo Coverage on Flickr

With sessions on Cloud Computing, Open Data,  Open Source Software on Windows and HTML 5, Make Web Not War is hitting Technologist on all fronts.

Take to the Skies!

Find out how to rule the skies by ambushing the Cloud Computing & Windows Azure discussion panel “Taking it to the Cloud”. Join the discussion with Joel Quimper, Evan Prodromou, Guy Barrette, and Mark O’Sullivan as they outline the key differences between Traditional IT Infrastructure and the new paradigm known as “The Cloud”.

Reporting from the Front Lines

Our spies Garrett Serack, Christian Beauclair, Julia Stowell and Craig Kitterman have important Intel on OpenData. With the recent release of Government and Municipal datasets, the Government 3.0 initiative is sweeping across the Country and the World. Canadian cities including Mississauga, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa along with The United States Government, NASA and The United Kingdom, there is a need for excitement in the Development Community to building applications that leverage these datasets as outlined in The last mile for Open Data.

The Future of Warfare

Strategize for future battles by attending the session on the upcoming web standard HTML5. Currently in Draft, there is no Radio Silence on this technology, it promises to relieve browsers of the need for third party plug-ins currently required to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Presenter Benoit Piette will be will be deploying flares to highlight key features and new elements in the standard.

Prepare for Battle!

Make Web Not War will wrap up with the ultimate coding competition, FTW. The competition will feature web applications that were submitted by Individuals across Canada which have been narrowed down to the top 3 Submissions. After such a fierce competition, conference attendees are invited out to a Truce Party for a chance to network with presenters, organizers and other attendees.

What are you waiting for? Get clearance from your superior and Enlist for Active Duty today. See you on the Battlefield!

Today we are going in a totally different direction, let’s take a look into the world of really really bad web design. This post is not to make fun of the site or designer, even though I am sure this will be one of the more comical post you see. What you should take from this post is how much technology has changed, how design has grown as well as, how important it is for us designers to raise awareness of good design.

We all know there are designers out there that charge ridiculous amounts of money to do these things, and companies believe them because they don’t know better. I had a good time putting this post together, so I hope you enjoy “When Web Design Goes Wrong”.

Ad Fed

FOWA

Red Interactive Agency

Bobulate

Koko Kaka

IXWA

Diargoogle.com

Full Stop Interactive

Design Can Change

Get Finch

Transmissions Apps

Astheria

To Write Love On Her Arms

Kyle Standing

North Temple

The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off

Jason Santa Maria

Zucchi Architetti

Adam Katz

Trevor Jackson

Typographica

Design Snips

Sofa Made

Ryan Keiser

Trent Walton

Seed Conference

Monty Lounge

Elysium Burns

GOOD

Resources

17 Stimulating Flickr Groups to get you typographically inspired

10 examples of beautiful css typography and how they did it

The Lowdown

This ebook is exactly what it’s title suggests, a guide to online self promotion for creative professionals of all kinds.

The book breaks down many of today’s popular online social media tools and explains everything from how to sign up to how to utilize the tool for maximum impact and exposure.

Hey Rookie Online Creative read this book!

I think this book is most fitting for online creatives that are just getting into the field and are starting to establish their online footprint. It does a great job of breaking down many of the most popular social media and online networking tools (right down to how to sign up) and then touches on ways to maximize the tools.
Now that being said, this book would also be valuable to already established online creatives. It does dive deeper into some social media/networking tools, and may show you better ways to use the tools you are already using, as well as show you a few more that could be beneficial to you. I found myself marking pages on things that I wasn’t aware that some of these tools could do.
In addition to just explaining what these tools do Alex does a great job of providing details and tips on how to actually connect and engage with your online audience. This is something that is extremely vital to the success of an online creative professional.

Gentle Slams

Throughout reading this book I did find myself going over some repetitive content. I understand it is important to touch back on points made earlier in the book / chapter to give context to the point, however I found it a little repetitive.

It would have been interesting to have a bit more interaction with some other freelance designers to get their take on certain social media tools and self promotion techniques.

Overall

Overall, this book acts as a great introduction for innovative professionals that are interested in gaining knowledge about today’s exciting social media and networking tools It is also great for already established creatives who will want to use it as a reference guide to see how they can better utilize the tools they’re already using, as well as get some insight into the tools they are not.

So if you’re new to the game, this quick read can bring you from online promotion zero to hero.

Buy it NOW!

Available for $27 USD for a limited three days until March 13th.
Price will go up to its usual $39 from then on, so act now!
[Buy it Now]

Other Hype

Head over to InspiredMag for a free chapter of the book!

Check out the interview with book author Alex Mathers at Just Creative Design.
eBook: 10 Steps to Powerful Online Self Promotion for Creatives

More Reviews

If you have a new book launch, and it fits within our target market, we would love to do a review. So please send us an email at dertmobile[at]gmaildotcom.

1. Be Intentional

When we design pages we deal with the users’ intentions. It doesn’t matter who they are in terms of demographics, rest assured they have a goal in mind, and therefore an intention. To ignore this intention in exchange for your goals is “website suicide.” Users must feel that their needs are being addressed even if your intent is to introduce them to new (more lucrative) goals. As a designer, you must balance clear messaging that identifies the user’s intentions with direct access to work flows that take a user to their goals.  Naturally, the presentation of the site’s key business goals also needs to be present. Sites like Mint.com make sure to address the user’s needs and provide him/her with the services they are looking for; if you look more closely, it’s clear that Mint’s business objectives are being presented to the user in a “helpful” way as well.

2. Let Them Simplify

When inventory display is the goal and you are allowing users to search through your data, the last thing that you want to do is oversimplify the process. Searches that yield too few results (or even worse, none) will make users think that you have a lack of inventory or inability to meet their needs. DO help them focus in on a manageable result set, DON’T try to wow them with instant access to the right results.  Sites like Kayak and REI allow users to narrow down their results in a way that is easy to understand and flexible. The user is in control. If they “tweak” the search to a point that they are presented with no results, they can understand why that has happened, and simply broaden their search until an acceptable result is returned.

3. Let Them Customize

No user interface that we create is ever going to be perfect for everyone (try as we might).  The more complex a site is or rather, the more potential intentions that we deal with in our user types, the more important it might be to offer some form of customization.  The extreme examples of this, like iGoogle and Netvibes are very customizable and let a user basically create their own UI, but in many cases, this level of customization can lead to confusion and a poor user experience.  Sites like USAA offer excellent and sometime unexpected amounts of control that allow the user to make more sense of the information being presented to them. They also make commonly used functionalities more prominent and group information in a way that is more meaningful to the user, all without compromising the goals of the website.

4. Make it Visual

As designers, we have our own internal struggle to deal with. Design is everything, but should everything be designed? The answer is no…and yes! Everything within a user interface should be laid out with purpose, meaning and detail, but not everything needs to be done graphically. Too much visual stimulation or too much design can leave the user feeling that the graphical “layer” of a site is getting in their way and making them work harder to access information. If this is the case, then we as designers have lost the balance and have probably lost the user. On the other hand, graphics and visual layout can be used very effectively to make mundane tasks easier to understand or to simplify a page that may otherwise feel overwhelming. Wufoo is a perfect example of a site that has used design and visual balance to make the creation and use of forms into a pleasing (and almost fun) experience. Alternatively, Burton uses graphical feedback to convert a traditional form-based experience into a visual one.

Which brings us to the last point…

5. Make it Fun

How dare we lose sight of this one. It is one of the core elements of user interface design. Of course, fun may be a lofty goal. Some sites demand a level of professionalism or seriousness, but we can always make sure that using the interface of a site is enjoyable, pleasing and at the very least, easy to use.  This balance that is very important, as it allows us to keep a user’s interest long enough to connect them to the information that they need, as well present the information that we want them to see. Sites like Burton and Spectra/MSNBC use design and graphical user interfaces to make accessing information intriguing and engaging (and yes, even fun) without losing usefulness.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, it’s is up to the user interface designer to balance the goals that he/she has in mind for creating a great user experience and the goals that the client company has in creating a great customer experience.  So ask yourself  ”Am I sacrificing one or the other in the design I am creating?” If the answer is “yes,” then you need to push your creativity even further, because for every instance where you feel that you are sacrificing, you have identified an opportunity to innovate and use interface design to create a solution that addresses both goals at once.

In my browsing, I found that most of these sites use this effect as a background. This effect rarely was ever the main graphic, even though it might be a very obvious element on any page. I also enjoyed finding out the different types of Bokeh, there is the very subtle blurred version, there is also the sharper and more transparent effect. Throughout all of these sites, the Bokeh effect is a very colourful, and beautiful texture, it adds very interesting subtle details to these examples.

Download 7 Hi-Res Bokeh Textures (22mb zip)