Trajan

I know, I know, Trajan is horribly overused but I keep using it in my designs time and time again. Trajan was designed by Carol Twombly, a well known font designer and Adobe employee since 1988 (also created Adobe Caslon). Created in 1989, Trajan is a timeless classic great for poster use as well as elegant and corporate designs. Although not a free font, it is shipped with Adobe products such as their Creative Suite.

Geo Sans Light

Geo Sans Light is created by font designer Manfred Klein. Manfred was born in 1932 and worked in a variety of advertising agencies until a serious accident caused him to turn to making fonts. Geo Sans Light is just one of the free fonts he has invented. It has a very modern look and unique design that is a great touch to logos, websites and other design projects. Download it for free here: http://www.dafont.com/geo-sans-light.font

Arial

Arial is one of the most common fonts in the world. Although use is widespread, this font is timeless. It was created in 1990 and has shipped with Windows since 1992. Arial is for large blocks of text, but isn’t much of a title or logo font. I use Arial in one way or another in the majority of my design projects. Arial is not available for free download.

Birth of a Hero

Birth of a Hero is a great grunge font from Last Soundtrack. Not for use in any project, it looks great on a dirty / grungy themed site. Behind the grunge design is a well designed font. Smooth lines, rotated letters and uniform circles make Birth of a Hero a definite keeper. Download it for free here: http://www.dafont.com/birth-of-a-hero.font

Metroscript

Metroscript happens to be one of MyFonts.com’s best sellers in the last year. Designed by Michael Doret, this script mimics hand-lettering and has a decidedly older feel to it. It reminds me of a Coca Cola or athletic uniform font, and is great in antique style designs. Metroscript is free download.

Usability
Web developers can often get so caught up in have a cutting edge, up to the minute design, that they forget about the visitors to the website. Without return visitors, and increased traffic to your website, your product or services won’t sell and your information will not be heard. This is where usability comes in. Usability basically means that your website readers are able to navigate easily through your website to find the item, service or article that they have been looking for. If the pages on your website are not clearly outlined, visitors will often become frustrated, leave your website and search for another website that fits their needs. This is why popular websites generally have an easy to read menu bar at the top or side of the web page, and navigation buttons throughout the graphical columns on the front page.

Fast Downloads
It doesn’t matter how amazing the graphics on your website look if they take too long to download. In this fast paced, microwave society, high-speed downloads are essential for a well designed website. If a video on your website takes so long to download that it bogs up the visitor’s computer, they are unlikely to return to your website, or to refer your website to others. If, on the other hand, the website has excellent graphics, videos, and flash that are quick to load and presented in an effective manner, your visitor retention rate will increase dramatically. Try out Yslow to help your site in this area.

Effective Content
Another important ingredient of a website is the actual wording, known as content, on the web pages. On the front page of your website, the content should be clear, concise and to the point. Visitors should be able to understand the basics of your website by briefly viewing this content. The content should be short stories or paragraphs which lead your visitors to the other pages within your website. Once the visitor has chosen another page on your website to view, this is your opportunity to expand on your information, offer your products or services, or inform your visitors of your contact information. Each page should have content that is limited to the overall theme of the web page, perhaps adding additional links to your other web pages, or related websites. Readers appreciate websites that have contact information, prices, and product or service descriptions clearly outlined. After all, that is why the visitor chose to come to your website in the first place!

Foxmarks – Foxmarks replaces your traditional bookmarking capabilities with synchronized bookmarks. Foxmarks synchronizes your bookmarks with an online account and any computer you install the addon to automatically whenever you close your browser. It takes about two seconds and guarantees that you’ll never be without your bookmarks, whether at a public computer or at home.

Google Toolbar – Google Toolbar is rather simplistic but adds some much needed features to my browser. First, it can replace the standard Firefox search with Google search which is a bit cleaner to look at. Second, it adds a Gmail notifier that lets me know whenever I have new mail with a simple icon. It also adds quick links to some Google services I use often such as Google maps.

Window Resizer – Working as a web developer, it’s important to view my sites in different browsers and different screen resolutions. Window Resizer emulates different screen resolutions be resizing the browser window to different sizes (e.g. 800×600).

Firebug – Firebug is, in my opinion, the most useful addon for a Firefox-based web developer. You can edit your HTML from Firebug, find errors, change your CSS and many more options all from one console. I cannot describe Firebug as well as they can, so please take a look at the Firebug site at http://getfirebug.com/

YSlow – YSlow is not an addition to firebug but is integrated with it for information exchange. YSlow analyzes any web page and generates a grade for each rule and an overall grade. If a page can be improved, YSlow lists the specific changes to be made. YSlow is especially useful on high traffic sites where limiting the number of HTTP requests makes more of a difference but has great suggestions for smaller sites as well.

Colorful Tabs – Colorful tabs doesn’t have any big use in web development but it speeds up my overall surfing. Tabs can be colored by many different options allowing you to find important sites at a glance or just to differentiate between tabs easier.

What addons are indispensable to you?

That brings me to the newest marketing strategy, thought up by a midlevel employee in the Microsoft ranks in early July.  Microsoft brought a large user group of XP users to test their “new” operating system “Mojave”.  The response was amazing.  Microsoft had its brand new, hit operating system, getting rave reviews from nearly every user.

What the user group didn’t know: That “new” OS was actually Windows Vista.  Less than three weeks after the testing, Microsoft has launched a massive image makeover marketing campaign.  Just today, August 2nd, I already have seen video from this user testing popping up in 300×250 banners on webmaster forums.

I think this story has quite a things we, as web developers and internet marketers, can learn.  First, and foremost, a first impression is all most people need.  If a visitor comes to your site and has a terrible first experience, it makes it very hard to bring them back.  Even a company with the reputation of Microsoft can be killed by bad user experience and press. It’s vital that visitors have a great first impression when using your site.

Secondly, a pretty interface doesn’t make an application or website. Even the early releases of Vista look amazing.  The graphics, interface, and “look” of the system were much more impressive than XP.  But looks alone don’t make the package.  It lacked in usability, creating error messages and not having a standard navigation schema.  Users didn’t know if they were to click a button, an image, or text to complete their task.  It is important to create a standardized and intuitive interface, as well as nice looking, so that users can navigate your site or application.

Thirdly, it’s important to test, debug, and never launch something that isn’t prepared. Microsoft was feeling the heat from Apple and felt it was losing ground, so it rushed out Vista and ended up with a huge mess.  The same can be said for your websites and applications.  Spend the time testing and debugging.  You won’t get a second chance to make a great first impression.

And lastly, perception is reality.  Internet marketing is all about creating the allusion that your visitors need your project or service.  It’s about perseverance and finding a new way to present your ideas and products.  Microsoft taught us a valuable lesson:  Even a multi-billion dollar company might not get it right the first time.  It is important to understand that a new way of doing things, a new spin, a new name, new colors, new packaging:  All those things can affect your bottom line.  Don’t be afraid to try new things and never assume that they way you are doing things is the best way.  Always try new things, test your methods, and continue learning.

Six Revisions is a great website with wonderfully simplified collections of resources for web designers and developers. Just to highlight a few, here is a wonderful collection of 30 CSS Techniques and Examples that are certainly worth a bookmark or a link. Web designers and developers are, as a rule, often not particularly efficient – with that in mind here are 20 Tips and Tools to Improve Efficiency. And for when you finish with a design, here are 7 Tools for Evaluating Your Web Design.