This past weekend we launched the redesign of our website webdev2.0. With the new design we wanted to address certain issues and improve upon the existing design. We kept the same color palette and used a very similar layout.

First off we wanted better social networking integration. We put the links to Twitter, Facebook, RSS Feed, and newsletter in the header and footer so it would show up on every page and easy for our readers. We also have the Feedburner reader count near the title of every page. On the website profile pages we used the SexyBookmarks plug-in for WordPress and each page has a Facebook fan box and Twitter widget.

The second issue we wanted to address was placement of ads. We wanted consistent placement that was above the fold, but we didn’t want them to be overly intrusive. We’ve also reduced the number of ads to 3 per page.

We wanted to show more competitors for each site. We now show 9 instead of 3.

For the front page, we wanted to highlight the highest rated sites. On the previous site it was in the sidebar on the individual pages. We think promotion to the front page will showcase the highest rated sites better and it should get more views on that page.

We’ve also included our latest blog posts in the footer of every page and we hope to use that feature of the site more often. In the old site it was mostly hidden away.

So how did we do? Do you like the new design? What could we do to improve the site? Take a look at the site and let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.

I’ve been a fan of nettuts and psdtuts for a while now. Over the years I’ve picked up some good tips from their tutorials and it’s helped me work on some projects and also learn something new along the way.

The company has moved their series of sites into one umbrella called tutsplus. Not only does that include nettuts and psdtuts, but also vectortuts, audiotuts, and aetuts.

While I haven’t really used the last three sites at all, I checked them out this morning and they also offer some cool tutorials on those topics. The new dashboard shows the latest articles from those sites as well as their latest articles on Digg and their tweets on Twitter. All the modules can be arranged like those you would find on your Google or Yahoo home page.

Head over and check it out.

For the most part it’s a good idea to use variable sizes like em or percentages when declaring font-size as opposed to using fixed px when a user resizes the text in a browser. Most browsers now resize px, but I found it to be better practice using em or percentages.

Most of the work we do uses the YUI-CSS library which has a handy chart for determining font-size using percentage when using their library. For those not using a grid/font library, Aloe Studios Blog has a small utility EmChart to help calculate ems from pixels.

It’s worth checking out and hopefully it will alleviate some of the headache in trying to determine how to use ems.

If you have never heard of sIFR it stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. What it does is take plain text and replaces it with a flash object using a font of your choice. When developing websites to look a certain way you’ll want for the most part to use web safe fonts which are fonts that are available across platforms and browsers so that your site will look similar. The problem with that is you are really limited to the number of fonts you can use and limits the way the sites look and feel.

There is a newer updated sIFR implementation which promises to be faster and smaller. With more people wanting more than just the generic web fonts faster is always going to be better as long as it still works.

Personally if possible I like to stay with standard web fonts. Our company website does not use sIFR. I’m satisfied with how the fonts look and I usually don’t try to add additional things to sites unless it improves functionality. I weigh the pros and cons to see if it’s worth it and then implement.

With that being said for those already using sIFR for whatever the reason, trying out sIFR Lite would probably be a good idea to see if it will help speed up your sites.

For those of you in the design/development industry getting started with Twitter, following influential Tweeters will put a wealth of knowledge right at your fingertips. I’ve found that using Twitter and RSS feeds gives me a good solid collection of daily resources that would take me hours to find otherwise. It also takes a lot of my time, but I feel like if I’m reading quality content then it’s productive time and not wasted time.

Colorburned has a great list of people to start following and I’ve been following quite a few of them for some time and they’re a wealth of information. With all the lists like these posted you see a lot of the same people all the time as well as some fresh faces to follow. As always feel free to follow our company and also feel free to follow me personally. Our company will always return the follow. I use my personal account more interactively so don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back there. I can’t keep up with the few followers I have now so I’m a little more selective.

Twitter is a powerful tool. Some say it may be one of the biggest web tools of 2009. I hope you sign up and enjoy the benefits of using the site.

Update: Naldz Graphics posted a list of 300+ active twitter users.