Welcome to yet another edition of Friday Focus. Now on week 20, FF has been running strong for months! Enough talk, let’s sum up the week for you.
Sites of the Week
First up this week is Jobpile. I found this via CSSMania, and while the design is fairly average, the service itself is a time saver. Jobpile combines all the most popular job boards into one via the power of RSS.
I love clean and simple store fonts, and Ser-vice is just that. The site is incredibly simple, but it’s how store fronts should be, especially if you’re just some small print shop.
And finally wrapping up this weeks collections of sites is Eurovision. The use of blues is excellent, and while the site has a lot going on compared to many of the “simpler” sites I tend to focus on during Friday Focuses, it all comes together nicely.
Digg Weekly
This week’s hottest (according to AJ) from Digg.
Design – The 14 Point Web Design Checklist
Fun list of how to make price quotes for clients based on what they do and don’t know.
Programming – Google Apps API
From the Digg description: Google Apps and its APIs open up a wide variety of new opportunities to integrate and extend Google’s communication and collaboration services. Domain adminstrators can use the APIs to migrate from and integrate with existing IT infrastructure. Application developers can use the APIs to extend Google’s growing offering of services.
This week’s up and coming (according to Ronalfy) from Digg.
Design
– You Know You’re a Web Developer When…
This is a play off of, “You know you’re a redneck if…” for web developers. My favorite on the list was, “You know you’re a web developer when 1px of margin can make or break your day.” The author should also add in there, “You know you’re a web developer when you use the Web Developer Toolbar to see why a logo’s home link isn’t working correctly.” If you’re confused, visit the site using Firefox.
– Grade Your Startup Website
This is a spiffy little tool that grades your website. It also shows your Google PageRank, Technorati rating, Alexa ranking , the number of inlinks from major search engines, the expected domain expiration point, and much more.
– E-Mail Address Encoder
I actually didn’t find this one on digg, but this thing is too useful not to share. If you ever want to publicize your or a client’s e-mail address, I would recommend using this tool to encode the e-mail address so that spammers can’t easily pick it up. I’ve actually put this to use under this week’s Design Dilemma.
Design Dilemma
The purpose of Design Dilemma is to post one dilemma a week and allow the readers to voice their suggestions and/or opinions. If you have your own dilemma, please send me yours at ronalfy+devlounge@gmail.com.
Your client wants you to incorporate some kind of flash image map on the main page of a site. The flash image map makes up the bulk of the front page navigation, so there needs to be a way to have a non-flash image map just in case flash isn’t available. The image map should also work without JavaScript enabled, and have the image map links visible in text-only browsers. Did I mention that the site has to meet Section 508 requirements? What would your approach be?
WordPress Plugin Spotlight
No WordPress plugins caught my eye this week. Inspiration Bit does have a good list of handy WordPress plugins. One plugin the article mentions is the Subscribe To Comments plugin. Coming from a user’s perspective, this plugin is invaluable. Typically I stumble upon a blog, leave a comment, and never return because I truthfully can’t remember where I left the comment. The Subscribe To Comments helps me keep track of the blog if/when somebody leaves a comment after me. The only drawback to this plugin is the barrage of e-mails I get if the blog is popular. This is where G-mail‘s Conservation View comes in handy.
Announcement
Someone pointed out to me the other day that our “new” contact form on the contact page isn’t working right. I’ll have it figured out within the next day or two. If you’ve attempted to email us over the past few days, we apologize for this inconvenience, but we never received anything. Until further notice, use the contact form on the Advertising page if you wish to get in touch.
