This morning, after reading the news of the day, and of course stumbling several of the news items of import, I also started stumbling (using StumbleUpon of course) one of my favorite categories, Web Design.

Immediately, I came across two that I would like to draw your attention to:

o CSS Basics
o Nice and Free CSS Templates

The first is a lesson-by-lesson, 18 “chapters” leading you by the hand so you can create your own website stylesheet. You can also choose to download all the chapters, or even print them all out (put in a binder, sometimes it’s easier to reference points via print).

The second web site actually gives you 11 pre-made stylesheets. From a single box on a page to a full four-column layout, all your css stylesheet components are right there! Of course this would be the easy route to take, however, I urge you to also visit and study the principles behind doing anything online.

Sure there are WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and other blog frame works from which you can work. There are also numerous html editors one can use to create web sites themselves. I, personally, believe that everyone needs to know the underlying reason and/or methods used that make the magic of a blog or website happen.

Ten years (plus) ago, I knew absolutely nothing about web page creation. In fact, my first “web site” consisted of nothing but banners centered down a page. At the time, I was thrilled to have accomplished even that much. But, as we all should know, that’s just not going to cut it out online. Visitors need a sense of uniformity and the means to navigate a website or blog. Knowing how to do this yourself, independent of the program you use, really understanding the coding involved in linking up, inserting images, creating the framework page, and navigation are but a few of the “I really need to learn this” strategies I would recommend you learn.

Then, you are no longer confined to a web site given to you (or one you pay for or use for free). You have learned a new, and highly valuable skill. In fact, for job seekers or those looking to add to their present skills, learning and implementing coding can be a good job skill enhancement.

Coding by hand is an art. Coding an entire website of say over 100 pages without understanding how it all comes together is insane. After visiting the above, you might also like to check out an article I wrote quite a while back titled, How to Learn HTML Without Even Trying.

Go for it! You can do this – it’s fun and you will never be at the whim and mercy of others. I’ve seen people pay exorbitant prices for web pages (websites) not worth a fraction of what they spent. When you learn a new skill, duh, you grow. Today is your day to do just that

This morning while participating over at ForumFinder [40,466 Alexa traffic rank], my eye was caught by a particular post at U-G-H [108,508 Alexa].

The post itself, One Step Closer to the Living Room YouTube Goes Widescreen is not only interesting in terms of YouTube, (can you guess what YouTube is up to now? LOL), but in the formatting – the WAY – in which the post is constructed.

And it’s done brilliantly! (more…)

If you do a search on this blog, you’ll soon discover that we’ve been fans of Jumptags for quite a while now. Surprisingly it snuck up on us, and if we hadn’t been paying close attention to our search engine stats, we might never have realized how very wonderful Jumptags can be to your search engine linking.

A simple website, Jumptags gives you the opportunity, with a minimum of fuss, to (more…)

Everyone is buzzing about it – the magic “Web 2.0″ word is drawing people like bees to honey. But there’s one slight catch to the whole thing… there are so many of them, what to choose? Where to start? How to work them effectively so you get what you need without ticking a bunch of people off (which you really want to avoid!).

That’s where our suggestions come in handy. We’re actively using the resources we talk about on this blog. You’ll see down below (or off to the side) coverage we are giving to Facebook. Well here’s our next suggestions – Hubpages.com

BUT… before you rush off please finish reading this post. It will save you hours of work and, more importantly, your reputation online if you approach this (or any) social media website with the right mindset.

If you’re reading this blog (and we sincerely hope you are and telling others all about us, hint, hint), you’ll notice that versus posting an entire article here, we present a summary of what to expect and then send you out to hubpages to read the rest. It’s not laziness on our part, lol, but a really good marketing strategy that you, too, can benefit by using.

The really great part is that you don’t even need your own website to get started. If you do, great! If you don’t, don’t worry about it (though down the line you should plan to have at least a blog of your own).

You’ll first signup for a Hubpages account. From this one account, you create multiple “hubs” which are nothing more than a fancier way of saying “individual pages” under your one account. Yes, you can post numerous “hubs” from just one username login area. It’s great!

Which means you can write about ANYTHING that you’re imagination, and research, can dream up.

Each new hub gets a new name – typically it pulls from whatever title you’ve given your initial page. For instance, if we did an article about:

“How to Benefit From Using Hubpages”

the url would look like this (this is fictious)

/hubs/How-to-Benefit-From-Using-Hubpages

So you see hopefully right off the bat that placing your keyword into your title is a primary objective, right?

The idea with Hubpages is, after posting many (this will not work as a “do it once” strategy and should be avoided if you don’t plan to build multiple “hubs”), the search engines will pick up your hubs and create even more valuable backlinks to your hubpages and (ultimate) your website or blog.

Now versus reinventing the wheel, we’ve downloaded the nifty pdf that Hubpages provides to its users. You can:

Download the HubPages User Guide Here
Download and Read First!
It is highly recommended that you get this download first.
Read it through, it’s a clear step-by-step process guide, and then start
your own Hubpages hubs.
WORD OF CAUTION: This, nor any social media, is NOT the place to do blatant advertising! If you do, you will ruin your reputation in a heartbeat! Our suggestion is get the guide, read the guide, and then go travel around within Hubpages before doing anything. Get a feel for what’s what, who’s doing what, how they are doing it. Look for “high score” pages. You can bet these people understand the process and are working it properly.