Without further ado, let’s begin (in no particular order, as always):

Lovely Website Icon Pack

A great icon pack for your designs that will definitely give it a bit of extra visual flair.

Dark Aurora: A Free & Beautiful Flash Template

We don’t see many Flash templates these days, so if you’re thinking of going the Flash route, this is definitely a good choice.

jQuery Infinite Carousel

A slick little jQuery plugin that will give your site a cool interactive slide element.

A-Z List of Grungy and Dirty Fonts for Commercial Design

Let’s face it, the grunge trend will never die. This huge list of good looking grunge fonts is extremely handy if you are doing the grunge thing.

Adobe Kuler Color Scheme Generator

An invaluable tool for any design, the Adobe Kuler generator let’s you sort through already user submitted color schemes, as well as providing the means to create your own. A well thought out color scheme gives your site a great aesthetic wholeness.

Wordpress Visual Cheat Sheet

Developing a WordPress theme? This cheat sheet is going to reserve a permanent place in your arsenal. A HUGE PDF full of useful information.

247 Web Usability Guidelines

When it comes to web usability, you really can’t have too many resources – this massive list of guidelines will ensure that your site works for everyone. Comes with a great Excel workbook of all the guidelines, free for download.

tabSwitch jQuery Plugin

Another cool jQuery slideshow-ish/tab plugin. Offers several different implementation techniques.

CU3ER – Free Flash 3D Image Slider

This is a really great choice if you want to go for a Flash slideshow over jQuery. Highly customizable to your needs.

80 Stunning Background Patterns for Your Websites

A nice seamless background pattern can make your site stand out above the rest. Noupe put together a giant list of 80 background patterns, totally free.

Goodtheme WordPress Theme

An amazing free WordPress theme.

NEWSPRESS WordPress Theme

A free magazine style WordPress theme. This one is so slick that I’m sure it would be just as popular if it wasn’t free.

Brusheezy Photoshop Brush Database

A gigantic resource for free Photoshop brushes and patterns. The most popular on the Internet for a reason!

49 Free Vector Graphics Resources

Speckyboy (great name!) put together this really useful list of free vector graphics. You may never need to experience the hassles of Adobe Illustrator again…

350dpi Business Card Template

Creating a business card? This template will save you and your print company hours of back and forth by providing a template that’s print ready.

And there you go! 15 awesomely free resources to kickstart the ninja designer inside you. Have a favorite resource that’s not on either part of our list? Post it in the comments for all to enjoy!

Until next time…

Noah

Happy Halloween everybody!

Instead of passing out candy this year, we are switching things up a bit by passing out the Internet equivalent – discounts! Just use the coupon code CASPER09 to receive 10% OFF every order. Hurry though – this special only lasts Friday October 30th through Sunday November 1st.

Also, as a little bonus, here’s the winner of ‘Best Halloween Costume’ in the Midphase office:

MARK AMOS, TECH SUPPORT

However, let’s not forget the employees working from home today…even they partake in Halloween madness!

MATT JAKUBOWSKI, SYS ADMIN

The man behind the mask (and most likely your nightmares, after the above):

Make sure you let him know how awesome his costume is in the comments Feel free to post your own as well!

Until next time…

Noah

Without further ado, here’s my handpicked list of free design resources, in no particular order!

960px Photoshop Grid Template
This is an invaluable resource for checking to make sure that your designs are grid-based for ease of use/visual clarity.

Browser Screens and Website Elements
Really cool vector pack that’s full of browser elements, as well as form elements (drop-down boxes, text fields, etc.). Useful if you are mocking up a form or web-application.


Web Form Elements
A cool collection of form elements to spice up the browser defaults on your site.


iPhone GUI PSD 3.0
Lucky enough to be mocking up/creating an iPhone app? Well this PSD should make your life a little easier!

130 icons for iPhone applications
Speaking of iPhone application design…how about a GIANT collection of totally free icons to use in your app? Seriously, this resource is amazing.

Free iPhone Toolbar Icons
What was that? You want MORE free iPhone icons? Well here you go! The coolest thing about these is that it’s free for commercial use.

Stationery Vector Pack
Creating a business card, stationery, or cd cover? Totally lost on the dimensions you should be using? Well here are some free vector files to get you started.

38 FREE XHTML/CSS Website Templates
That’s right, almost 40 totally free website templates to use as you wish. And they aren’t terribly designed either. That’s a plus!

Deluxive Creative Pack
A huge collection of seemingly random but useful PSD files.

T-Shirt PSD
Have a really cool idea for a t-shirt, but not sure how to make it a reality? Here’s an awesome t-shirt PSD to get you started.

Social Media Icons
Anybody who’s anybody online is on one or more of the major social networking sites. Now you can link them on your website using these beautiful social media icons (free for commercial use!).

Brands of the World
Looking for a particular company logo but you can’t find one that’s usable? Here you go! At Brands of the World, you can find pretty much any company logo in a hi-res vector format.

jQuery/PHP Based Free Live Chat Script
Want an easy way to speak instantly with potential customers that stumble onto your site? This free live chat script makes that possible.

Free High Resolution Textures
Simply the best resource on the web for finding any type of texture you may need.

50 Excellent Image Galleries
A huge list of image galleries that are both free and easy to implement.

There you have it, 15 great (free) resources for all you designers out there. Keep checking back because I’ll be posting a part 2 soon enough with even more freebies. Have your own favorites bookmarked? Share them in the comments below!

Until next time…
Noah

We’ve compiled a list of what we consider to be the quintessential places to turn when you are clean out of ideas. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you’re sure to find something worthwhile.

Without further ado, here we go (in no particular order):

Vandelay Design Blog

If you want to find a great resource for lists, you can’t go wrong with Vandelay Design Blog. There’s no shortage of unique and in-depth lists to get you out of any creative rut you may find yourself in.

Noupe

Noupe is a great all around resource for any type of designer – web, print, and beyond. Recently purchased by Smashing Magazine (one of the leading design blogs on the Internet), you can bet that Noupe will be around for the long haul.

Six Revisions

Six Revisions has a really great mix of topics ranging from tutorials and tips to freebies and general humor.

Outlaw Design Blog

Outlaw Design Blog takes a really interesting approach visually – the cowboy western theme is very rarely seen, and is generally really well done here. Luckily, the originality and quality of the design continues to the content. They even have weekly vidcasts!

Abduzeedo

Abduzeedo is one of the more popular blogs on the web, and rightly so – it’ll be a challenge to find a design blog with better content. The writers are truly in touch with great design and because of that they are able to put together very inspiring collections from artists from all over.

UX Booth

One of the subjects that is very rarely touched upon in design blogs – usability on the web. There simply isn’t a better resource for UX articles – the site features incredibly well-written and, more importantly, relevant posts to help you learn more about how your visitors behave.

GoMediaZine

The GoMediaZine has amassed quite the following over the past 1-2 years due to their insightful posts and their great collection of premium quality freebies.

Web Design Ledger

The selling point of Web Design Ledger is their original content – they seem to always be able to come up with articles that you haven’t seen anywhere else.

Colorburned

Colorburned has all of the usual good stuff – great tutorials, articles, and lists – however, what they really excel at are their interviews with various designers from all corners of the industry. This is something that isn’t seen too often, and is a great look inside the heads of some great designers (an amazing way to defeat designers block!).

Build Internet!

Build Internet has a really interesting collection of posts from the business side of things – from project pricing to general client relations, you’ll be a regular Steve Jobs in no time!

And there you go! Do you know of any other good resources? Post them in the comments are share them with us all!

Until next time…

-Noah

If you move in tech circles or read a lot of blogs you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone in the modern world now uses Twitter, and if they don’t, then they’re not really a part of the Internet.

Stats published earlier this year show that Twitter has grown a phenomenal 1,384% between Feb 08 and Feb 09. But, is this a fair reflection of the Internet population, or is Twitter the reserve of nerds and geeks?

We asked our customers

In August we conducted a huge web hosting survey and asked 3,000 of our customers about their online habits and reasons behind running their website; we also asked them which social networks they use.

All of our customers run a website, so they arguably fit into the ‘geek’ category (this is a compliment). By comparing the data with demographic data courtesy of eMarketer.com, we can see how you guys compare with the rest of the population.

The stats show that our customers (the geeks) are more engaged in social networks than the general population and are quicker to adopt new social networks. With 48.3% of you using twitter – well over double that of any other category.

By contrast, the usage of Myspace by hosting customers is surprisingly low, possibly suggesting that geeks are quicker to move on and drop outdated social networks.

Unsurprisingly, given many of you are involved in online business and ecommerce, many more of you use LinkedIn than the general population.

Tom

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Disclaimer: I am a geek & I quite like twitter.
Should you wish to, you can follow us on twitter at www.twitter.com/midphase

I used to work for a BIG company that had far too many meetings. So, to pass the time, we used to play a game called buzzword bingo.

While writing my post on the death of the meta tag, I was struck by just how many buzzwords there are in SEO (search engine optimization). I plan to write a series of SEO guides for beginners on the Midphase blog, so I thought it might be useful to start by introducing some of the terms.

SEO Dictionary

• Algorithm – the secret mathematical formulas used by search engines to calculate a websites ranking for a given search term.
• Alt attribute or ‘alt text’ – an HTML attribute than can be added to an image tag providing an alternative textual description of the image for visually impaired surfers and web spiders.
• Anchor tag – this is the full name of the <a> tag in HTML that is used to create a link on a web page.
• Anchor text – the exact words or phrase of a text link, or, looking at the HTML code, the exact words or phrase that appears between the <a href="url">anchor tags</a>
• Back Link – a hyperlink from another web page that links back your web page. See inbound link.
• Black Hat SEO – SEO techniques that go against search engine guidelines or try to trick the search engines into giving you better search rankings.
• Deep linking – a type of backlink that links to an inner page of a website rather than to the homepage.
• Google Bot – a web spider specific to Google.
• HTML - hypertext markup language – the underlying code commonly used to create content of a web page.
• Inbound link – a link from another website to your website. A natural inbound link will pass on some of the linking websites link juice. This is a good thing.
• Keyphrase or keywords – the words or phrases that you are trying to optimize a web page for.
• Keyword research – the process of finding out which keywords you should optimize a website for.
• Link bait – Internet content created with the intention of attracting back links.
• Link juice – the value or authority that flows between web sites and web pages via links. If I link to a website, I will pass on a little bit of my web pages authority onto that website.
• Long tail – in an SEO context this is the practice of optimizing for longer and less frequently searched for combination of keywords.
• Meta tags – specific HTML tags used to provide information about a webpage to browsers and web spiders.
• Meta description – a type of meta tag used to provide a summary of a web page in the SERPS.
• Meta keywords – a type of meta tag (now largely ignored) used to tell the search engines which search terms it should rank for.
• Meta robots – a specific type of meta tag used to tell web spiders whether they should index a page or not.
• No follow – the rel="nofollow" HTML attribute can be added to anchor tags to tell web spiders not to follow and index said link.
• Off page SEO – optimizing a website by improving the text and links of other websites that point to your website.
• On page SEO – optimizing a website by improving the text and content of your website.
• Organic Search or Organic Listings – the non-paid for results that appear in the search engine results page. This is also known as Natural Search.
• Outbound link – linking from a web page to someone elses website. This will give away a little bit of your link juice.
• Paid Search – the paid for or ’sponsored listings’ that typically appear to the right in the search engine results page.
• Search Engine – a website that people can use to search the Internet. Examples: Google & Bing
• Search Query – the words or phrases that someone types into a search engine when searching the Internet.
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing – the practice of marketing a website to search engines typically by SEO, PPC (pay per click) and paid inclusion.
• SEO - Search Engine Optimization – a system of methods used to publish & market your website to improve its performance in the organic listings.
• SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages – The page in which your search results are displayed.
• Web Spider – a computer program that crawls the Internet and indexes the content for a search engine.
• White Hat SEO – friendly natural SEO that works with search engines and surfers to create and promote good relevant content.

For the record, my favorite buzzword bingo buzzwords are: “pushing the envelope”, “thinking outside of the box” and anyone who expresses something as a percentage that is more than 100. Example: “Team, we need to give it 110% to ensure the web 2.0 paradigm shift leverages the enterprise synergies”.

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tom

It’s an exciting time here at Midphase. First, we rolled out our new vastly improved website design, then we launched a massive 50% off server promotion. Now, we are very proud to announce that we have launched our new Hosted Exchange email hosting product!

Midphase Hosted Exchange is quite an exciting concept. Businesses large and small can now enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 without the tremendous upfront investment costs or management overheads. This is a very unique product, and one that we know will vastly improve the efficiency of our customers and their businesses.

Unlike our competitors, our product is extremely simple to understand. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the incredible features that are included:

• UNLIMITED Storage! This means that you’ll NEVER have to worry about mailbox space again. Ever! Plus, there are no hidden overage charges – what you see is what you pay.
• A personalized email  address for your company (name@yourcompany.com). Your business is worth so much more than a free Yahoo! or Gmail address, so why not show it?
• You can access your email, calendar, and contacts from anywhere. This means that no matter where you go, you will always be connected to your business, whether you are on your computer (support for desktop apps like Outlook, Thunderbird, and Mail.app, as well as web browser support using Outlook Web Access), or on your Blackberry or iPhone (how awesome is that?).
• Concerned about security? Don’t be. Hosted Exchange is hosted in our state of the art cloud infrastructure.

All of that must cost a fortune, right? Nope! You get all that and more for the crazy low price of $9.95 per month. Not to mention the fact that the low monthly price includes all server management, licensing, and hardware fees, you really start to see how amazing this deal is.

Ready to roll? Want to learn a bit more? Head on over to our Hosted Exchange product page. Isn’t it about time you took your business to the next level?

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Noah

I spotted on twitter last night an official announcement from Google that people in the SEO community had long suspected: Google no longer use the meta keywords tag in web search.

Sounds fun, but what are meta tags?

A meta tag is a line of HTML code that sits in the <header> section of your web page and provides information to search engine spiders and web browsers about the contents of your webpage. Different meta tags tell the browser or spider different things, it might be whether the web page is written in English or French, who wrote the page, or by what rules the browser should interpret or render the page.

Meta tags & Search Engines Sitting in a Tree

In the early days of the Internet when search bots were less sophisticated, meta-tags played a really important role in how search engine spiders searched your website and where they decided to rank you in the search engine results page. Search engine spiders couldn’t really decipher and prioritise all your web page content (as they do now), so were helped out by two tags in particular:

• the meta description tag (the brief description of your site that appears in the Google results page)
• and the meta keywords tag – a tag that tells Google & Co what keywords you would like your site to rank for.

But having a tag which lets you tell Google which keywords you would like be listed for is just way too easy and was never really going to be sustainable. As the Internet got bigger and webmasters (we were called that back then) wised up to to search engine optimization, people started stuffing their meta tags with keywords even if it didn’t reflect the content of their site.

Do I need to do anything?

Maybe – if you’re particularly paranoid you might want to remove your meta keywords tags from your existing websites, it certainly won’t help your Google listing but it does give away your target keywords to any enquiring competitor who has discovered how to view source (hint: right click). For most websites however keeping your meta keywords tags certainly won’t do any harm.

I hope you found this post interesting, I might do some more on search engine optimisation – let me know if you’d like me to cover any areas in particular.

For full info read the full Google post, you might also like to follow Matt Cutt’s twitter stream (Matt is head honcho of the Google search engine spam team).

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tom

I got linked to an interesting article on Typophile.com today and thought it’d be good to share

In the article Miha shows off his use of ninja skills and false color to improve the readability of favicons, if you’re into design or typography you can check out the full article at: http://typophile.com/node/60577

What is a favicon?

If you don’t know what a favicon is, simply put it’s the little icon that appears when you visit certain websites to the left of your browsers address bar. If your website has a favicon and its bookmarked, your favicon will also appear in the users bookmarks – quickly identifying the bookmark as your website & helping it to stand out..

How do I create a favicon?

Creating your own favicon is really simple.

1. Create your icon. There are really good freeware icon editors, I recommend:
2. Save your file, importantly it needs to be named ‘favicon.ico’
3. Upload it to the root of your website – this is usually inside the public_html folder.
4. Add this line of html to the header of each page <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> – this isn’t strictly necessary but it helps nudge some of the older browsers.
5. Hey presto – your site now has favicon goodness

Tip: Convention is to keep your favicon.ico in the root of your site. But if you really want to call your favicon something else, or store it in a different folder on your website eg: /library/images/my_favicon.ico – just change the path & file name in html .

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tom

The nerds have been busy at Midphase towers. Not only have we updated our range of server hosting and server management upgrades, but we’re also running a massive 50% off promotion to celebrate.

The 50% off offer is really simple and there are no hidden costs, minimum contracts, or strings attached. Simply put we’re offering 50% off all SoftLayer dedicated servers and all server management upgrades for the first month.

We think we’ve got some of most competitive dedicated servers in the market, and, while the prices are cheap, it doesn’t mean you’re sacrificing on quality. We’ve taken great care to put together the best hardware and providers, and, of course, all servers come with their own dedicated SLA.

SoftLayer is a true global provider, with state of the art datacenters and a massive robust network. This is probably the most price efficient way to experience premium dedicated servers and test drive our offering.

This offer is strictly limited (until the boss says stop). For further information, contact our sales team at 1-866-MIDPHASE.

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tom