Welcome to the first “team” edition of Friday Focus, in which Ronald and I will each be contributing our own favorites of the week, adding more variety and more spice to your Fridays.
Sites of the Week
AJ’s Picks:
First up from my choices this week is Contraband. Utterly simple, this design makes the cut thanks to the illustration work in the header.
Next is RadioCinema. This dark design also makes the list because of it’s use of header imagery, in this case, with flash effects.
And finally for my picks of this week there is Silverpoint. Silverpoint designs sites mainly for schools, and they do a good job at it. This clean company site is sleek and efficient, with a good combination of colors.
Ronalfy’s Picks:
This next design is from a web design portfolio/blog called Blue Anvil. The design is highly professional and makes good use of the top-level navigation and sidebar. The footer design is superb as well. While you’re checking out the design, make sure you check out some of the well-written content.
Although I’m not too fond of animals (I do own a cat), this next design captured my attention for its out-of-the-box design. The designer makes excellent use of background images for the layout, and link hover effects for the navigation. The site is for a local store in Minnesota, but it’s definitely worth looking at if for the inspiration alone.
Digg Weekly
AJ:
Design – 83 WordPress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
A large list with thumbnails of 83 WordPress theme that are free (excluding Soxnest). Includes some of ours, and a great resource if you’re looking for the perfect pre-made WordPress theme.
Programming – Add Opensearch to your site is 5 minutes
A quick and easy method for adding Opensearch to any site (IE7 and FF2 compatible) with little work.
Ronalfy:
I didn’t get a chance to get my feet wet with Digg this week, but I did find these links this week:
Design
– 8 bits of Colour Inspirations
A wonderful list of color resources/inspirations for the color-challenged people such as myself.
– Why You Should Create a Wireframe First
The engineer inside of me loves diagrams and charts. This article talks about setting up a wireframe to assist in creating a holistic view of a site’s design. The article also has an Adobe Illustrator wireframe template for you to download. The article assumes the reader has Illustrator available, but you could create a wireframe using any diagramming (or vector) tool.
– Famous Logos Converted to Web 2.0
Also from Inspiration Bit is this hilarious post about popular logos being converted over to Web 2.0. Awesome stuff.
Important Reminder
Remember, we need your questions for our upcoming interview with Digg! Right now we don’t even have enough submissions to formulate the interview. We’d really like to have enough that we can’t take them all, so please submit away and tell your friends to contribute their questions!
