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I just wanted to share a great tool that I recently found, called Balsamiq, used for creating software mockups. This is great for developers, designers, or web-entrepreneurs like myself.
Check out the demo to get a quick walk through.
Tags: balsamiq, development, software
Everyone these days has a webcam, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t really use it too much (outside those of you voyeurs & teenagers out there). I actually use mine almost daily making video phone calls through Skype. It’s great! I keep up with my family, friends, and business associates by making these video calls.
There are, however, other great uses of these cameras. I did some exploring yesterday and found a bunch of cool resources for doing online broadcasting via your webcam. These tools can be used to start your own live online TV show, to create a video blog, or to just make interesting web-videos. All are worth checking out!
Live Web Broadcasting Tools
Scheduled and On-Demand Web Broadcasting Tools
Thanks to Masternewmedia.com for putting out a great web broadcasting guide and list of web broadcasting tools!
While I’ve already begun to set up my e-commerce website (not even close to being complete, BTW) using OSCommerce, I’m still not 100% convinced that I’ve made the right decision. One of my ecommerce mentors Dave Pitlyuk (he doesn’t even know it yet) has suggested that I use ZenCart instead, but that has made the indecision even worse here. With that in mind, I continue looking for quality ecommerce shopping cart solutions while SLOWLY building the framework of my shopping site.
I don’t actually know much about E-Junkie other than what I’ve seen on their site and a few other resources, but their technology looks very promising. Essentially, you can add their shopping cart to any site, including blogs, myspace, etc. Their service provides a pop-up-like cart that is not really a pop-up, which integrates with Paypal and Google checkout. It looks like it is really easy to use and it could make setting up an ecommerce site quite simple. In fact, it seems like it only takes minutes to get things up and running, and to be honest, I am quite tempted to really try it out.
The problem for me is, however, that I haven’t heard very much about the company. In addition, I cannot find any real contact information on the website. Seems like a company offering this kind of service would go out of their way to publicize a phone number or real address. I guess I’d like to see a few more websites using their shopping cart solution.
If anyone out there knows anything about E-Junkie, please let me know. I’ll add any resources regarding the company to this page in an effort to inform other out there who are curious. Here are a few that I’ve been able to scrounge up:
Again, please let me know if you have anything to say about this company, good or bad. Thanks!
Obviously, color is an extremely important aspect of web design and style. Figuring out the right colors to use is not easy for a lot of people. I put together a bunch of helpful resources to make it a bit easier to find colors and different color schemes. In addition, I explain to those who are unfamiliar how exactly to use the colors you find to change the look of your website.
The 4096 Color Wheel is where I go when all I need is the Hex code for certain colors. The site is very simple to navigate; just click a color on the wheel that is close to one you want to use, then use the palette next to it to find the perfect shade. Once you click on the shad you like, you’ll see it show up on the leftmost color chart.
Looking for a site that makes color matching easy? Check out The Color Wizard This site makes picking out color themes for a website a piece of cake! Use the color sliders to pick a color that works for you, and the site will find color variations of similar Hue, Saturation, Tint, & Shade. Once you’ve found the color you’re happy with, go to the bottom right corner of the site and you’ll see SUGGESTED COLOR SCHEMES. These are generated from the color you’ve chosen, and you can look at different choices of schemes including: Monocromatic, Analugus, Triadic, Tetradic, Complimentary, and Split Complimentary. Personally, I think the Monocromatic palettes are the best. This is my favorite of the bunch!
The Color Scheme Chooser is a site I found recently. This site does almost exactly what the Color Wizard does, so there is no need for me to repeat myself. I suppose people might pick one over the other, but it would be soley for personal preference.
If you’re interested in web design or simply jazzing up your blog, you will need to know how to tell your computer what color you want to use. As a result, you will likely need to use something called hex colors. Put simply, hex color codes represent different colors that we can see. They are codes that make it easy for a computer to understand what color you’re referencing.
Without them, we’d need words to describe every color in the spectrum. They simplify things. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but I’ll give an example that demonstrate the use of these codes:
If you wanted to change the color of text to a color of your choice, all you need to do is use the font tag and place a hex color code in it.
e.g. <font color=”#ff0044″>Text Here</font> will make your text a strawberry red. As you can see it is very simple to do once you understand what you’re doing. You can change background colors, table colors, and much more using these hex codes. For more info on different HTML tags, visit this site.
9/24/08 Update: We forgot to add a resource for Triple Hex Color Codes at the time of writing, but the link will take you to a great resource to help with that.
1/30/10 Update: I just learned about another cool color tool called ColorRotate.com. Check it out!
Wondering how to find some new material for your blog? Create a companion forum site to go along with it. Last year, I decided to create a blog for our real estate investing site, BiggerPockets.com. After a few months, I realized that I had lost my motivation and had run out of material. Why? I didn’t know how to come up with ideas for new stories. I’ve since been able to build the real estate blog up into a credible site.
Blogging is not as easy as it seems. To run a successful blog, you need to have a constant stream of ideas. One of my greatest sources for material is our real estate forum.
Use your Forum to Get Ideas for your Blog
Once your forum becomes established (ours is currently ranked #1 for real estate investing forums and #2 for real estate forums), you will have plenty of people to supply you with material or ideas.
How to Use Forum Material on Your Blog
There are many other places you can go for ideas, but there is nothing like the ease of self-supplied blog material.
Building a Wiki Site
Last month I mentioned that I was looking into setting up a Wiki and that I had chosen MediaWiki to do so. Since then, I’ve set up my first wiki (it is a work in progress), a real estate wiki. The set up was really easy – like most scripts, the basic install just required setting up a php/mySQL database, a few configurations, and we were ready. Modifying the script and learning how to run and manage the wiki took a bit longer. I’m still feeling my way around, but I’m pleased with how it is turning out!
Creating My First eCommerce Website
Just to make things a bit more complex for myself, I’ve decided to create an ecommerce site – my first – as a complement to one of my other sites. I’ve made half-hearted attempts in the past to do this, but this time is different. After some initial research, I’ve narrowed my shopping cart script choices to OSCommerce and Zen Cart. I felt like they both had the largest support base and it appears like they are two of the most touted shopping cart solutions.
Now that I’ve got the initial first steps figure out, I’m totally lost when it comes to ecommerce. I’ve explored the forums at both Zen Cart and OS Commerce, and I’ve searched for tutorials / blogs that help walk you through setting up your own ecommerce site, but have failed to find anything halfway decent. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. Regardless, I will do my best to try and explain how to go about doing it, once I’ve got it figured out. Wish me luck!
I found a great little tool earlier today on Modern Life is Rubbish, the AdCalc.
This simple tool allows publishers to calculate approximately they are getting paid per click. It will also let you “find out how much you’re making per week, month, and even per year – assuming your traffic remains steady and the bottom doesn’t fall out.”
The AdCalc is especially good for web publishers who run their own ad networks through programs like phpAdsNew. You can figure out what to charge your advertisers and give them better CTR, CPM numbers.
I’ve gone ahead and added this tool to our webmaster & blogger tools directory, ChartingyourWealth.com.
Joshua Dorkin
I'm the founder of the website BiggerPockets.com, and have been creating websites for over 15 years. The purpose of this blog is to share some things I've learned about the internet, business and life.
