Please note, this post is a sponsored review of IconGalore.com. If you would like to purchase your own objective review, please contact me. Only products and services that will be beneficial to the readers will be considered.

Go a step above
If you take a look around the web, or your desktop for that matter, you will notice that most apps and sites you see fall into two basic categories: polished and not-so-much. Two sites can do the exact same thing, but if one has a more professional look and feel, then, odds are, it will be more successful. Apple is the ultimate example. The ipod wasn’t the first portable music player, but it has something that the others simply didn’t have…panache and style.

When you are building an application (online or off), a great and easy way to add a bit of oomph is to use quality icons. You could make your own, or go and hunt down some free ones on the net, but with either scenario you run into a major snag. Building your own takes a lot of time that your client probably doesn’t want to pay for. On the other hand, if you go look for the freebies then you may find 10 nice icons in a single size that are whatever subject the designer wanted to create that day. When you are making a professional application or website, you need icons that exude that professionalism and come in the correct size (nothing looks sloppier than an icon that has been stretched).

A better way
So what is a savvy developer to do? Use IconGalore. IconGalore is a custom icon shop that makes great web application icons. Say you are building a shnazzy ecommerce site for a client. You need about 50 different icons of various sizes to make the app perfect. If you go to the web you may find 2 nice ones here, 5 there, etc. etc. By the end of your hunt you may find 50 ecommerce icons, but they are in completely random sizes and none of them actually go together…

The better route is to save yourself the hassle and go to IconGalore and spend about $100 and get a whopping 1400+ icons that cover just about every possible need for your site. If, for some reason, you can’t find what you need, then they will design one from scratch for $35. Order one up and they will get it to you in a day or two.

They have over 13,000 icons available in several different package (ranging in price from $100 - $200). If you are on a tighter budget you can get their value sets for around $50 - 100. In all honesty, their “feature” packages are higher quality and give you A LOT more icons for the price so I would recommend saving your pennies and going for one of the bigger packs.

Currently their icons are focused on the “XP style”. They are clear, colorful, and well done. I, personally, would like to see their take on some Vista sets. I am sure they are working on some, but they aren’t available yet.

Service
From a personal standpoint what I like about this company is their service. Over the years I have employed some different custom icon companies and it would sometimes take weeks to get a reply. In one case I emailed the company asking if they had gone out of business or something because they were so slow to respond (true story). Conversely, every time I have corresponded with the IconGalore folks they have been really quick to reply (usually a couple of hours). They even have live chat if you are having an icon emergency (a nice touch if you ask me).

If you want to “try before you buy”, they have some free icons that give you a good feel of all the various sizes and formats (in case you are wondering there are 5 sizes and 6 formats).

All in all I have been impressed with IconGalore. They are polite, quick to respond, and they do good work at a good price. If you are looking to take your app or site up a notch I would recommend their services.

A while back I built a very simple CMS system using .NET for a client. That little tool became very useful and I have been able to use it over and over for various clients.

As I have worked with it, it has slowly improved, a few new features here, a little bit of polish there…and *poof*…simpleCMS was born.

The goal of simpleCMS is…well…simple. It is built for developers to give to their clients so they can have easily managed content. Its not for blogging (yet) nor does it have all the bells and whistles that some of the bigger guys out there have. However, the features it does have work well and it will be easy to deploy and even easier to rebrand for your own companies.

Best of all…it will be free. Free to use, free to customize, free to do whatever.

In the next few weeks I will be releasing it under my new DevMade brand which will contain all of the tools that I and my company, Visionary Online, release to the community. When it is available I hope all you freelancers and web designers/developers give it a shot. If you do, please tell me what you think of it.

Nick Hand is a graphic and web designer who lives in Alaska. When it came time to design his new portfolio he wanted to use some slick effects to make it stand out a bit. He ran across the side scrolling effect that I detailed in several articles and liked it enough to use it.

The final product is very creative and utilizes the effect very well I think. I was proud to help him through some of the stickier spots he ran into while implementing it.

If anyone else needs help with any of the articles that I have on the site, please feel free to contact me. I love seeing my tutorials “at work”, so if you use one, let me know and I will give you a little link love.

Great job Nick!

For the few people out there that don’t read A List Apart, they have recently come out with their first “Web Designer Survey” results.

If you ever wanted to see how you fit in the web professional industry in terms of education, salary, etc. it is an interesting read.

Check it out

Smashing Magazine has a great list of usability problems that are pervasive on some of the biggest sites.

Personally the whole “Popup to get content” drives me batty. You usually see this on full flash sites (movie sites are the worst), but it is used by lazy designers everywhere…

At the end of the article they have a nice checklist to keep in mind while you are designing new sites. Here is a slimmed down version…

1. You don’t use pop-ups.
2. You don’t change users’ window size.
3. You don’t use too small font sizes.
4. You don’t have unclear link text.
5. You don’t have dead links.
6. You have at most one animation per page.
7. You make it easy to contact you.
8. Your links open in the same window.

Definitely worth a look.

Man it has been too long…its been crazy on the homefront and it has kept me away from writing. For the regular readers, I apologize for slipping away. Onto the task at hand…

Recently, a commenter asked…how does Yahoo! Reset CSS fit in with Blueprint and Tripoli?

The answer is quite snugly really. I have talked about Tripoli and Blueprint in the past, so I figure that you have a grasp on those guys. So what about Yahoo!?

According to the Yahoo! crew:

The foundational YUI Reset CSS file removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements, creating a level playing field across A-grade browsers and providing a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions.

To take out all the big words, this basically means that it takes out all the funkiness that the most common browsers automatically put into all of their rendering. In other words, you get a clean slate in which to build your own funkiness. Cool.

So how does this stack up? Well, its purpose is just about the same as Tripoli’s purpose. Neither are frameworks in and of themselves. Instead they just clear everything out. In order to make things look the same across browsers the Yahoo! guys have created their own base CSS which then sits on top of the now defunkified reset (much like Tripoli does).

If you want to go a step further and start encroaching on Blueprint’s territory, you can implement Yahoo! Grids CSS. The grid’s job is to setup some markup that will layout your page for you. Like I mentioned in my overview of Blueprint, this can make things get ugly really quickly. When you have classes like “yui-t3″, you have, in my opinion, crossed the line from helpful to painful. There are uses for such CSS, but in all honesty, I think I would build this complex CSS from scratch.

The YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) really is a kind of “one stop shop” for just about everything web related it seems. It may not be the best implementation of everything, but overall they do a great job and, more importantly, they provide great documentation.

So there ya have it. Hope that helps anyone who was a bit confused.

Thanks for the question “mike from ohio”!

So the stats are in for the month of August, and it was…by far…the best month this little blog has ever had. My side scroller series seemed to have gotten a lot of attention. Another big performers was the pretty popups article from July.

After I released the side scroller series the developer’s site DZone grabbed it and ran giving a boost of over 1,000 hits throughout the month. So thanks DZone!

The site gotta few digs now and then, but not enough to matter. I have found that my traffic primarily comes from google searches from designers/developers looking for a tutorial of some type. In my opinion this is the best kind of visitor because when they find me, I know I can provide them some value. Visits from the social sites are great, but I notice that there are a lot of “hit and runs” that come from those sites. My goal is still to create a community for designers and developers so a hit and run doesn’t add a lot to that.

With that said, in between the runners, the social sites do attract some great people here that visit, learn, and contribute. The more of these we have, the better the community will be.

So how good was August? Well, according to Mint, here are my stats.

Total Visits: 8,420
Unique Visits: 4,060

This averages out to be about 130 people a day. Now, you take out the bump from DZone and this was still an amazing month. The average daily traffic Monday - Friday is around 230 or so which is a huge increase compared to any other month. This average has been holding steady for about 3 weeks now so that is pretty exciting. My initial goal is 1,000 visits a day so I am still a ways off, but it is fun to watch the site and community grow.

With feedburner I am averaging just about 70 for the month of August (69 to be exact). I get about 800 or so hits from the feed every day. That is awesome, but I am not sure what constitutes a hit when it comes to RSS (anyone?).

Will September be better? I have no idea really…if I keep the same averages we have for the last few weeks then it will be close. Only time will tell…

Daniel Mall is an acclaimed web designer who works with some of the best in the business at Happy Cog Studios. Long time readers may remember the interview I did with him in the early days of this blog.

Daniel is submitting a panel idea for the next SXSW festival called “Cross-Pollination: Breeding a Better Web”, or in his words…

The web’s history is full of accidental innovation. By scrutinizing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and other familiar technologies, we’ll explore how unlikely combinations can spark evolution and show that even individuals operating outside the various standards bodies can advance the industry.

To make the panel even more exciting he will be working with the illustrious Shaun Inman (of Mint fame).

It sounds like a cool discussion. If you want to join me in supporting his panel idea cast your vote in the SXSW Panel Picker.

You can see the other panel ideas by visiting the Panel Picker home page

So I am minding my own business…reading up on some of my favorite sites, and I see this fun article on FreelanceSwitch called 15 Web Addressess for Wasting Time.

So I think to myself…I always have a few minutes here and there to waste…lets see what we have here.

One of the links on the article is a game called Duels, and seriously, I think when you sign up for the game they lace your keyboard and mouse with crack. This game is REALLY addictive even though it is rather simple. Basically, you create a little gladiator and fight in duels against other players, gain levels, buy loot, etc. It has a great polish to it (as these games go), but it is a bit on the slow side (probably courtesy of the FS article).

Anyways…if you are stuck at work and have a few minutes to spare, check it out. And while you are there, throw out a challenge to a warrior named Azmodian.

Hey y’all, I am back from my vacation (it was great! thanks for asking), but I have been knee deep in projects since I got back (hence the lack of updates).

However, the good news is I am working on some stuff that should yield some sweet tutorials once I figure out how to do it myself.

Again, sorry for the lack of goodies. I will be back on it soon.