Lifehacker also has a “Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features” article on their site.

Apparently it is just about to ship so look out for an automatic update soon.

Though I am based in the UK, the service and value I got from Print 100 was excellent. If you need some designing, give me a shout.

The Google Webmaster Central channel has the following introduction.

This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

I am impressed that Google is continuing in its effort to be more transparent and is becoming more SEO and developer friendly. This comes after Google making their ‘Beginners Guide to SEO’ available back in November last year, I talked about it here.

Here is the first video from Google’s Matt Cutts.

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

Wordpress.tv is an excellent site and since virtually all the non e-commerce sites I create now are Wordpress based, this will become very handy.

Here are a couple of the most common things I get asked about.

Creating New Posts

Adding New Pages

Just a quick tip. I have just designed my new business cards and needed to ensure that the artwork was correctly set to the CMYK colour space needed by my printers.

There are two areas you need to check, ideally before you complete your work else there is probably gonna be some colour correction required.

1. ‘Edit’ -> ‘Color Settings’ and ensure your working spaces and color management settings are setup correctly. If you are not sure about this, contact your printers.
2. ‘Image’ -> ‘Mode’ ->’CMYK Color’.

Easy eh?

If you don’t spend a lot of time searching for or scouting players then it is probably not for you but those that do, it should make life much easier.

Installation

It doesn’t get much easier than this (requires Firefox 2.0+) :

1. Click on the drop downbox to the left of the search box in Firefox.
2. Click on the “Add SoccerManager” option.
3. Done.

Technical Bit

For those who are interested it is written in xml using the Open Search standard and is made available using the Firefox’s autodiscovery feature.

‘Refracted’ is the product of three years experience with commercial clients and the implementation of many of these techniques.

Design

I had the idea of the logo image in my head for a while and was quite determined to go with a light and vibrant design. Contrasting significantly with the previous ‘Satin’ theme, a light text on dark background theme, I wanted ‘Refracted’ to feel like a change from the old.

The layout was sketched out with old fashioned pencil and paper (!) and the design was composed in Photoshop with Illustrator being used for the 3D typeface effect in the logo. Then Photoshop was used again for the rainbow striped effect for the backoground to the logo and the footer.

Coding

Using the Sandbox wordpress theme, I was able to rapidly convert the design into the valid xhtml and css Wordpress theme that you see on the site at the moment. Using Dreamweaver, the code editor is excellent, I began the process of adding the header image, and then working methodically through the design as I got dirty with the CSS, making use of the semantic mark up included with Sandbox.

With the basic design done, I installed and configured the widgets to the preconfigured 2 sidebars and finally did the cross browser compatibility changes requried.

End Result

With the theme 90% finished, I still need to monetise it asap, I have gone live. More information can be found here or take a look at the site itself, benbishop.me.uk

Don’t you just hate Mondays – this has got to be the worst of the year!!

24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.

Previous years have seen first class tutorials and tips from some of the top minds in web development today including Paul Boag, Cameron Moll, Veerle Pieters and Jonathan Snook

It really is beginning to feel like Christmas!

This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines.

Its pretty basic in fact but is a very good primer for people who are trying to understand the concept for the first time. Here’s a direct link to the Google SEO Guide.