We wrote about HTML Color Codes in the past and I provided you with a bunch of great resources for finding those codes at Tools for Finding the Right HTML Hex Colors: Color Codes, Charts, Wheels, & Wizards. What I left out was a resource that provides the Triple Hex codes for those of you who need to use them for CSS.

I recently discovered the following site that should be a great help: Hexadecimal Triple Color Codes. This easy to use site allows you to find any 3 digit hex color code by grabbing the x axis information (rg) and following it with the y axis (b).

There are 4 pages to navigate through to see all of the basic triple palettes. I hope you all find this helpful in your designing!

Tags: colors, CSS, hex codes, hex color codes, HTML, web design

I just fired my latest web developer!

Over the years, I’ve worked with quite a few programmers/developers on various projects I’ve wanted to develop. On the smaller projects, I’ve typically been very successful in finding people who can get the job done. Unfortunately, however, on the larger projects, I’ve had more failures than anything else.

The problem I’ve found has been that overall, many developers and programmers don’t live up to the hype. I will use my latest experience as an example that I hope others can learn from.

I recently heard about a website similar to Guru.com and Scriptlance.com called oDesk, where folks can find and hire developers for their projects. The site, in my opinion, is vastly superior to the other sites for a few reasons — primarily because you can track the work of your developer with screen captures and video camera captures, but also because the site has a series of tests for different areas of programming, language, and design, where you can see how skilled someone is.

Recently, I hired someone who I had worked with in the past on a fairly large project. He had demonstrated to me that he was competent and trustworthy in his handling of the initial job. In developing our plan of attack and in the first few days of the job, everything was great and going smoothly. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that he wasn’t someone to be trusted. He disappeared for 2 weeks in the middle of the project, and I was too stupid to fire him. He promised to meet a certain number of weekly hours, but let me down and achieved only a small fraction of that number, and again, I was too stupid to fire him. He then disappeared for 3 and 4 days at a time, 3 more times before I had finally had enough and fired him. He couldn’t explain his disappearances or inability to perform. He was unable to complete in almost 7 weeks that which should have been completed in one.

I realize that I messed up big time with him and let him walk all over me, but in doing so, I learned my lesson. Hopefully the rest of you don’t have to get walked on to learn the same lessons . . .

What Lessons Did I Learn That You Too, Can Learn From?

• References are often somewhat useless! I would have recommended this guy to anyone after he completed the first job with me. He would have gotten glowing reviews across the board, but don’t be fooled. Human nature is unpredictable. Many people have a nasty habit of disappointing you if you give them the chance. You have to take referrals with a grain of salt, knowing that the person may screw up. Just because they come with recommendations doesn’t mean that they will perform for you. Don’t be afraid to deal with the situation if this person doesn’t work out. I also think it is extremely important to let the person who referred the programmer or developer to know whether or not they did a good job. Unless they are aware of problems, they will likely go on recommending them to others. Just because you got screwed, don’t allow others to get harmed as well.
• Use ODesk! One of the other great features of this platform is that your provider is billed weekly. You don’t need to pay anything up front as a deposit. By paying weekly, you only get charged for the work that has been done in that week. If the provider doesn’t work (and you can track this with the screen captures/video cam snaps), he doesn’t get paid. Had I hired him through another site or directly, he would have likely demanded some kind of up-front deposit, which I would likely have never gotten back once I fired him. Using ODesk actually protected me.
• If your developer isn’t performing, fire them! I didn’t want to do so because I’m on a deadline and I know that bringing a new person in takes time, but it is worth the time if the new person is going to perform to your needs.
• Set timetables. The minute I realized that the developer was weeks behind, I should have handled it. I kept hoping that things would change, but learned my lesson. If the developer can’t keep to a timetable that is reasonable, then it is time for them to go bye, bye.
• Don’t get emotionally involved! This was probably my biggest mistake. By getting emotionally involved, I kept allowing myself to will that things would improve. Hope and will aren’t going to make someone do the necessary job for you. Once you let your emotions affect your decision-making, you abandon the ability to make clear-rational decisions.

I could probably cover many more lessons that I learned, but none would be as important as the four I just mentioned. I’m in the midst of searching for a new developer and, although I know that I just wasted 6 weeks of my time, I also know that I’m much more prepared to deal with the next developer I hire.

BTW – If anyone knows of a great Ruby on Rails developer, please let me know!

One of the first things that you’ll need to do when starting a business is to create a logo to represent your company. It seems like this may be a simple thing, but it is often more difficult then you think!

Some Logos Are Timeless

There are certain logos we’ll never forget: Apple, CocaCola, McDonalds, Google, Nike, Target, etc.

I don’t even need to show these, because we all have them imprinted in our minds. Pretty amazing!

I wish I could write a post about what constitutes a great logo. I don’t have any magic formula, but I know one when I see it. Creating a timeless and effective logo is not an easy undertaking. Large corporations often times spend millions of dollars on their brand.

I recently found a great resource to help you out with any logo questions (which actually inspired this post) called the Logo Design Blog. According to the site, the 5 characteristics of a highly successful logo include:

1. Uniqueness
2. Relevancy
3. Appealing
4. Consistency
5. Contrast

For more details, read the post; it goes into detail about each of these characteristics. In another interesting post, the site discusses the various constituents of a logo, which include symbol, sign, emblem, or slogan. It is a great place to start learning more about logos.

What Not to Do in Creating a Logo for Your Company

While I can’t tell you the formula for a great logo, I can talk about what isn’t great. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the real estate world, I have seen countless logos from companies who are all looking to create a brand for themselves. The interesting thing is that at least 90% of these logos have some kind of roof or home as part of the logo. While this seems logical, and we even played with a roof-esque logo, does it differentiate these companies from one another? No.

They all pretty much have the same theme and in my mind, are simply clones of one another. They do nothing to help people recognize the companies.

The Evolution of a Logo Design

I believe that an effective logo is one that instantly provides brand recognition. Lets compare the various iterations of my company, BiggerPockets, Inc.’s logos over the past several years.

This first version of the logo is nothing but disasterous. I thought that because the site was about making money with real estate, that money should be the central theme. This is nothing but an amateurish slapped together logo that does nothing to further our site’s brand.

Here we are making the mistake most companies make when it comes to designing a logo. They shoot for the obvious. Our little blue roof did nothing to differentiate our brand. We were yet another real estate related site . . . nothing more, nothing less.

In the above logo, we started to realize that the roof shouldn’t play as prominent a role. We wanted people to focus on our name, BiggerPockets, which represented what people would get from our site. This began an evolution towards our differentiation.

This logo actually came from one of my high-school students (I taught school for several years). I wanted something fun and unique involving money and a big ‘ole pocket. While this design certainly stood out and let people know more about who we were, it was a bit amateurish as well. We were going in the right direction, but hadn’t quite done it just right.

This final and current logo of the company, I believe, hits the nail on the head. It is certainly unique, and represents who we are. By itself, the iconic man in the pocket, representing how big your pockets can become, is symbolic of our site. I am extremly pleased with this logo, as I feel that it is clean, unique, and expounds a message. Does it have what it takes to become timeless? I suppose that is up to you and everyone else out there!

A Great Resource for Creating Your Logo Design

After I knew that my student was on to something with our logo, I decided to have some professional graphic artists clean it up for me. To do that, I found a great service that everyone should utilize: SitePoint’s Logo Design Contests. All I did was give the brilliant (and not so brilliant) graphic designers on Sitepoint (a huge and amazing webmaster forum) some ideas of what I was looking for, and let them run with it. There were many wonderful ideas put forward, and I was able help the designers modify and clean their logos up until I had somthing I was happy with. The best part about running one of these contests is that it is affordible and you do get many ideas to choose from.

One of the most frustrating thing back when I was a newbie at building websites was figuring out what that little icon was called next to a website’s URL. This little tidbit of information eluded me for the longest time, but I finally figured it out. Back in the day (wow I sound old!) there weren’t 1,000 tutorials to help with everything like that.

A Favicon is the Small Icon that Shows Up Next to Your Web Address in Your Browser

Favicons (a.k.a. favorites icons) help promote your brand and create an identity for your website. They help when you’ve got multiple tabs open on your browser and you can’t read the entire site title, and they are just great for adding a little something extra to your website’s identity.

How Do You Create a Favicon and What is Favicon.ico?

There are tons of online tools to help you create a favicon. My favorite is Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator. Here’s what you do to set up your website’s favicon:

1. Go to the Favicon Generator and upload a file from your computer that you want to become your favicon.
2. Press the “Create Icon” button and then the “Download Favicon” button.
3. The favicon will now be saved to your desktop with the filename favicon.ico
4. Using FTP or some other method of transferring files to your website, upload the favicon.ico file to the /public_html/ directory of your website’s server.
5. Check to be sure the file was properly uploaded by visiting in your browser http://www.your-site.com/favicon.ico (of course, your-site.com will be replaced with the name of your actual site name)
6. Finally, edit the main page of your site (the index.html file) and place in the head the following:
   

   <LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”favicon.ico”>

Your favicon will now be live. Sometimes it takes a little while to start seeing it, but don’t worry, it’s there!

Do Favicons Work in Subdomains?

They do! All you need to do is follow the steps above for the index.html file located in your subdomains and you’ll have a functional favicon for that subdomain.

I hope this helps some people figure out what to do. I know I would have been really happy to read this a decade ago!

Here are some useful and very cool tools and resources for any webbie:

Maki, author of the extremly cool blog (which I just discovered today) Dosh Dosh writes an extremly thorough article aka The Ultimate Guide on How to Get Your Website Listed in Wikipedia which really is what it says. If you’ve ever wondered about getting some link love from the uber-encyclopedia Wikipedia, this is the place to find out how to go about doing it.

Ever wondered how popular your site really is? There are plenty of sites that measure different metrics, but the new Popuri.us (1169 diggs and counting) helps consolidate all that data. Just enter your url and find out: Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Google BackLinks, Yahoo BackLinks, Live Search BackLinks, Technorati Links, del.icio.us Bookmarks, Bloglines subscribers, WHOIS Info, and DNS Info. If possible, I’d somehow find a way to integrate feedburner info to this, as it has become the de-facto metric for measuring a blog’s success.

There must be hundreds of lists on how to get others to link to your website, but Wendy Piersall guest blogging at Darren Rouse’s Problogger finds the best of the best in The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love. Broken down into categories including The Best of the Best, Link Strategy, Linkbaiting, Relationship Building, and Buying Links, the list covers pretty much anything you could ever think of when it comes to getting links. This will surely help newbie webbies!

Lastly, I wanted to share with you a site I learned about from the self-proclaimed evil one, John Chow’s frequent guest blogger Michael Kwan (that was a mouthful!). I have to admit that I no longer use Yahoo or MSN to do any searches, probably out of laziness, but Google has been my SE for a while now. That might change . . . the new search engine / social engine YouAnimous or AfterVote (calls itself both I think) combines the results from Yahoo, MSN, and Google with stats and the ability to vote on results. It is really cool and I believe, has a lot of promise. Search engines use algorithms to calculate ranking, but that ignores simple human logic. By adding the human element, it seems that results should be more relevant. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I’ve been trying to find a new look for my real estate wiki, but have had no luck while searching for templates. I realized I’d have to look for “wiki skins.” After some searching, I found a great resource with a bunch of great ones.

If you’re looking to change your wiki’s look, here is another resource with more styles.