We’ll soon be ringing in 2007, and some of you have probably already reached the new year where you live, so for our last post of this year we’d like to put together our own post listing a few of our favorites, as well as some final statistical information for those of you that just love to know the ins and outs on how a site like this grows throughout the year. So here we go, our final year end review that we’ll call Posts and Numbers.

Favorites of 2006

WordPress Customization Series – This series was split into three parts and went over different customization options for WordPress. From headers, to advanced, even down to setting up and using plugins, we had WP covered and showed our affection for the platform right from launch day.

Are you tempted to soup your site? – So many times we find ourselves wondering “should I redesign, should I, should I, should I”, but what we really need to do is stop sitting around and thinking and get to work. But first, it’s important to understand how are users work with the current design before diving into a new one.

Designers: Protect your content – An article outlining the use of a WordPress plugin to prevent your content from being spread around the vast and sometimes dangerous and unfair internet.

Preview of Crazyegg – Even though the service is long since launched now, this write up was pretty popular and still covers most of the features that are found in the version of CE available today.

The Benefits of Mint – I’ve been using Mint on DL for over 8 months now, and it was probably the best $30 I could have spent. If you haven’t given it a try, you owe it to yourself to find out why it’s worth it.

The The Jekyll and Hyde Effect: Philosophy and the Internet – Sometimes we expose different parts of our designing habits. A very recent article, but a good one.

The Ultimate BBpress Guide – The child forum project of WordPress that we covered first. From setup to install, this is a nice one.

Of course, with a database full of hundreds of posts it’d be impossible to highlight them all, but these are just a few worth checking out. Be sure to scour through our articles database for more killer content from 2006.

The Numbers

For those of you that love numbers, here are the final stats numbers for 2006 (well it will increase a little bit more because there’s still about 5 1/2 hours before the New Year hits here, but it’s close enough ).

Total Uniques / hits per month (from Mint):
April – 1,513 / 18,714
May – 7,199 / 21,544
June – 7,636 / 25,130
July – 7,506 / 25,130
Aug – 10,546 / 31,318
Sept – 11,202 / 30,442
Oct – 11,296 / 34,442
Nov – 9,874 / 26,983
Dec – 15,859 / 41,722

Feed Subscriber Stats:
Current Subscribers – 292
Highest Amount – 328

File Downloads:
Prebuilt 2 – 2,967
Prebuilt 1 – 1,826
Wave – 1,629
Iceburgg – 447
Custom Reading Width – 34

That about wraps it up. Happy New Year Everyone!

Well, maybe not better design, but certainly more efficient. I recently purchased a shiny new 22″ display to compliment my current set up (gotta love Black Friday’s prices). It is a much larger display than that of my laptop; I can use it side by side with my 13″ MacBook. Not only has it aided my gaming habit but also my efficient use of several simultaneous applications. This sort of upgrade may be more valuable to designers than a more powerful machine or the greatest software. Already, my workflow has changed and I have learned to be a better designer with more screen space.

Dual Display Goodness

Just like gamers everywhere designers can prosper from a few million more pixels. No more app swapping or minimizing and maximizing. I can run several applications side by side on two displays. For me it is nearly twice as fast to glance to my style sheet from a live HTML preview than switching windows or even using a tabbed editor. I can see several variations of a piece of print media I am working on across my large monitor and color match with a client’s web site on the other. So, stop flipping through programs, use a dual display set up and get to done faster.

Afraid of set up and logistics? Don’t be. It took little to no effort on my Mac; and as I understand it, using a Windows machine with an advanced video card is just as easy. Operation is just as intuitive. The system lends itself to the idea that the monitors are one and users can mouse, drag and drop, and move windows from one to the other.

Inches Make All The Difference

We would all love to have a couple huge 30″ HD displays mounted behind our keyboards, but most of the time it’s just not practical. Simply replacing your old CRT 4:3 monitor with a newer 20″ widescreen LCD can make an enormous difference. Govern your productivity with the ability to code and design side by side. The extra few inches add several thousand more pixels for designers to work with. With today’s prices being relatively reasonable, now is as good a time as any to pick up a new display. Two or three may be best, but bigger is always better.

Conclusions

From my experience with increased screen real estate, I have learned to work smarter, not harder. My work has been completed faster and turned out better results since my monitor addition. Using an additional, much larger display has been liberating and allowed me to rapidly boost my productivity. Don’t believe me? Give it a shot; you will never go back… I guarantee it.

And you thought we’d just rest after the holidays! Nope, Friday Focus is still here, with the very last one for 2006. This was an extremely busy week for DL, as we went through server moves, some adjustments, and published two new interviews. Besides are busy world, the rest of the design and development world also kept moving, and we’ve got plenty to talk about.

Sites of the Week

First this week comes Pipeline Deals, a new web application to track deals and offers. Yes, it is another tracker, but I did think the site design was pretty cool, and reminded me of Mint because of the “page on top of page” type look.

Next up in Uberlook, an upcoming resource for the submission of any time of resource; be it site, application, file, video, or anything else you find useful. The service is expected to open in January, and hopefully we’ll be able to provide you with a first hand look before it goes live. The site is simply, but its purpose of getting information about the project out without revealing to much is done right.

Finally this week is a photography portfolio which makes the list more because of the stellar pictures and compositions than a standout design. The site itself couldn’t get any simpler, but I think the photographs let you forget how basic the site is.

Digg Weekly

Design: How to Create Fake Mini Environments
Ever wonder how to make regular size images seem like they’re made for little plastic toys? This technique is actually very easy and simple, and really only requires the use of filters.

Programming: How to easily Ajaxify Your Site
A short guide to quickly adding some ajax effects to your site using the script.aculo.us framework. Give it a try.

Question of the week

We asked the opposite last week in a sidenote, so this time around we’d like to know your favorite website of 2006. Leave the responses in the replies, and by the way, it’d be nice to see Devlounge as a nominee, we won’t think you’re sucking up

About one hundred and forty years, if you had told General Sherman that the world would become interconnected in the next century, he would have set you on fire — and believe me on this; the man burned his way through Atlanta. You do not mess with William Sherman and come out of it alive.

But the Internet “happened” anyway, didn’t it? Now, I can talk to my family across the world without having to worry about when the next messenger will stroll into town, or why the last one tripped his way into a rabbit-hole for all eternity. With all new things come methods of using them effectively, and the proliferation of such techniques. And then…there are innovations, breaks in the conveniently restrictive structured technological cycle of fixes, updates, and version releases.

In 1999, my brother was pondering about this new thing called Google, which 4th graders today can utilize with frightening alacrity. However, when I was in 4th grade and chattering about Google, my precocious comments really didn’t have much impact, other than the fact that I didn’t quite make the kickball team that day. Thanks a lot, guys.

And then the truth hit my unaware friends in the face, locomotive-style. Google was something new, but soon joined Pogs and Pacman in cultural popularity. This was something everyone was using; it was mainstream and loved for it. No technology company has yet had Google’s extraordinary success, although many have tried…and many others have been acquired. When staring innovation in the face, I’m reminded of one of my favorite novels, The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde — a story of how the most familiar things we know can contain something more than face value can offer. In this age of invention, of fads, of frenzy, we can pinpoint exactly how trends and innovations came about, and yet, we don’t know why we like them or why we hate them. Ultimately, instead of judging the Internet as a series of fan-followings, we can call it a social network and get away with it. A social network composed of design innovations? Allow me to explain:

The social evolution of design trends

In the beginning, there were rocks. Sometime shortly after the rocks, there came the Internet in a massive cosmic explosion that killed off the dinosaur actors from Jurassic Park. The first sites on the Internet were composed of text in various arrangements — text on the left, text on the right, text everywhere across the screen. Images and CSS, as always, came later. We will always remember the late 90’s for the proliferation of animated GIFs, image backgrounds, and brightly colored pages as well as the ideal that anyone could make a website. This frame of mind has, thankfully, survived into the present day.

It’s a well noted fact that it takes one successful design to spawn numerous ones. Take Google, for example. With its simple layout, playful name, and ease of use, Google is lauded as the forerunner of all Web 2.0 designs. But the term is only resurging now because other sites try to work off of Google’s simplicity, and the look, which has undergone countless revisions, is more alive than ever before. But while Web 2.0 runs its marathon around us, we have to look back on other design trends that have run the gauntlet before it. We all remember Flash, and how we overused it for splash pages, navigation, and page content. What about image based navigation? Javascript effects (not the Moo.FX variety!)? We labeled how good sites were based on what was used to enhance them, not what was actually on the page. Think of it this way — if everyone who had MS Paint and used it to make buttons was a designer, we would all be rolling in money and flaunting it. And if no one had come up with the first Flash webpages, the first Google layout…where would we be now?

Humanity takes the road well traveled; our creativity, while individual, is also part of our evolution. In the future, if it becomes popular to build houses out of cheese, you can always trace the initial idea to one person and watch others expand upon it. Where there were roads before, there are now links that might never have been invented if one person, however far back you want to look, had not had the initial idea to start the framework for a computer (Charles Babbage?).

Web 2.0 – respected, reproduced, and underestimated?

When we look at “Old Gloss and Gradients”, we assume it’s too pretty to be taken seriously, as if the substance is really something else hidden beneath the surface. The trademarks of Web 2.0 override any actual value the page has. If bright colors could speak sentences, designers in this style would be writing novels. But what if we look at it as something beyond eye-candy? As something the internet truly needs in order to expand?

The hallmark of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is communication. Blogging, as it is now, would be absolutely different if it weren’t for comments, trackbacks and RSS feeds. Those three parts alone say, “You contributed to the growth of the Internet; thank you, come again!” But we’ve blocked the road with bloated websites full of images, gradients, misused CSS, and excessive scripts. In response, we see more and more simple websites showing off their caliber — Accessites, Tantek, and Google, which is still very much the same — and proving that it doesn’t take beauty to maintain something truly great.

To conclude this section amiably, my friend Lisa details the necessity for simplicity in this very quotable quote: “You know a light fixture installation isn’t going well when it takes a brick, a hammer, a candle, and my aunt’s foot.”

Moral: Things are not what they appear

The widely accepted ideology that everyone is different is fundamentally wrong in one respect: we love the same things as an e-culture — beauty, simplicity, and great content — but it’s hard to find all three existing together. Thankfully, you have Devlounge and scores of other sites in the 9Rules network to showcase the best of the Internet while expanding communication across all varieties of people. The story of Jekyll and Hyde is of a man trying to separate the wicked in him from the good man he tried to be. If we can sift through the worst of what we see in designs and find the best parts of the Internet, we will come back richer for it. And that concludes my philosophical articles! If I try to write another one, come back and yell at me, please. Best of luck in the new year

We’re happy to report that our server move went fairly smoothly. We ran into a few problems getting things squared away again, but everything is up and running like it should be once again and we’re happy with the move. I can see a pretty nice decrease in load time, so I’m liking this new VPS. We’re sorry for any inconvenience today might have caused, but this just puts us in a better position to serve you throughout 2007. Once again, thanks for your cooperation.

If for some reason you discover any issues, please let us know immediately.

Please note, our feedburner feed has not yet updated to the new nameservers, so it is not currently showing this post. This should only last a few more hours.

And for anyone interested, our new host is Wiredtree.

Important news everyone! We’re switching hosts, so expect some brief downtime here and there while we make the switch. This should improve performance around here because we’ll be on a VPS. ASO has been great to us during this initial year, and we were proud to be with them! Once again, expect a few bumps while we move things over, but it should be setup shortly.

Remember our interview with the three designers from New Orleans? If you do you remember talk about a book that was going to be filled with various artwork designed exclusively by designers living in New Orleans. The book was released and is for sale for only $20 + Shipping in the US and $24 + Shipping outside the US, so make sure you pick up a copy today.

In a Devlounge exclusive, I recently got the chance to talk design and art with a former Miss USA, current Bikini.com supermodel, and of course, designer. Sit back and give our interview with Larissa Meek a read.

Devlounge: Hey Larissa, thanks for giving up some time around the holidays to chat with me. Mind giving a quick background on yourself so everyone knows who you are?

Larissa Meek: I’m an artist, web designer, bikini.com supermodel. I placed 4th runner up at Miss USA 2001. But I’m most likely known as the girl from NBC’s Average Joe: Hawaii… (Oh yeah, and I was a kid with asthma.)

DL: How old were you when you began designing sites and digital artwork? Did you “teach yourself” your skills, or did learn from a school or other resource?

LM: The year was 2001. I was 22 years old. A month before I had bombed my top 5 question at Miss USA then became a recently laid-off 3D animator.

I felt lost. I needed to work and there was very little opportunity for 3D animation in St. Louis, so I turned to the web as a way to promote my artwork and modeling portfolio.

I studied 3D animation in school so the familiarity of timelines and motion made Macromedia Flash an easy transition. Thanks to hundreds of books, great resources on the web and a passion for visual stuff I learned web design on my own. Today my focus is on css/xhtml based sites.

DL: Let’s talk about design first. You’re a senior designer at Agencynet, and you run your own portfolio and studio site, along with a blog. I’d say you’re a bit busy. What’s it like try to balance all three, and how’s work at Agencynet?

LM: AgencyNet is my first and foremost priority. It gives me the rare opportunity to contribute to stunning projects in an energizing environment.
I admire the people I work for and with. I can’t imagine working anywhere else.

I wake up every day and feel energized by doing what I love.
It never feels like work.

Since I started working at AgencyNet, I have stopped freelancing with the exception of the occasional favor or charity based site. However, larissameek.com serves as a testing ground for new ideas. I never want to stop learning. I wake up every day and feel energized by doing what I love.
It never feels like work.

DL: In terms of some of your artwork, a lot of it is focused on a woman’s life and body. Is there a reason for this reoccurring theme in your art?

LM: I think, as a result of modeling and growing up a little girl bombarded with images of female perfection I became fascinated with the female form.

I find the flowing curves more captivating than trying to figure out the defined muscular structure of the masculine form and I’m a sucker for fashion. It also seems that some of my works subconsciously become auto-biographical.

DL: You had the chance to spend 8 weeks in Hawaii filming the NBC show “Average Joe”. I do remember bits and pieces of the show, but I never watched the entire thing. What was that like being part of the “reality TV”
craze?

LM: It was the most fun and most emotionally difficult part of my life.
Reality TV is not reality. It is very much produced and seeded. Don’t get me wrong… It’s really fun but a lot of the situations are molded to have an outcome for the highest entertainment value. And then there’s the magic of editing.

I had a blast being on the Average Joe: Hawaii. I met oodles of really cool people and dreaded every “elimination” night.

The strangest part is going from obscurity to becoming semi-famous. At the height of the show I was walking into Hollywood VIP parties and talking to celebrities whom had been watching my show. About a year later people are like, “I know you from somewhere. What High School did you go to?”

I respond, “I think I sat behind you in math class.” (hee hee)

Also, contrary to the way the show ended, I’m still dating the guy I picked.

DL: Going from competing at Miss USA to a designer is a pretty sharp change in occupations. Did you find it a struggle to turn careers around like that?

LM: Coming back from Miss USA was a whirl-wind. Especially because I bombed my on-stage question which you can see on YouTube, but the more I think about it the more I realize that things happen for a reason. I love design and I love technology.

DL: You’re known for a multitude of different things, from web design, to art, to television appearances, but which would you prefer people recognize you for?

LM: For web design and art.

DL: What are some of your other favorite things to do in your spare time away from the designer world?

LM: When I’m not at AgencyNet I’m probably thinking about what to blog about next. Otherwise I like to break out my sketchbook or hunt for books on anything from fiction to computers to art.

DL: Are you happy you made the switch to designing? Any regrets?

LM: No regrets ever! I’m just amazed how I aimed to do something else and web design found me. The path it took me to get where I am now is something I could have never imagined. I just know that since I was a little girl I always wanted to work in something visually stimulating.

DL: We’ll that about wraps it up. It was an honor to conduct this interview with you. Hopefully I’ll be talking to me Miss USA’s in the future, but that’s another story . Good luck in the future, we’ll be watching!

LM: Hey, thanks for the opportunity to chat! I love Devlounge! You guys rock. If I come across any available Miss USA girls, I’ll be sure to pass on their number, so long as they don’t get fired.

Even though it’s a day early, we wanted to say Merry Christmas to all our readers. Hopefully, you’re not out buying last minute gifts and you’re spending time with family. Expect new stuff starting on December 26th, when we will launch another new interview, this time with Larissa Meek. Make sure, if you haven’t already, you take a quick look at our year in review post and leave your thoughts and feedback for this past year, which will help us improve in 2007.

Enjoy today and tomorrow everyone!

A short podcast introducing what we hope will be a weekly or bi-weekly look at various design elements that we’re calling the rundown. If you’re interested in joining our podcast team, please let us know. It’s pretty wide open and we’ll allow you to talk about a range of subjects. I do want this to be an every week or every two week type of thing, but having someone else take over podcasting duties would be very helpful seeing I write about a lot of the things I myself would talk about throughout the week.

This weeks background music: Incubus – Dig from the album “Light Grenades” in stores now.

Links mentioned in this podcast:
Devlounge – The Year in Review
Digg Redesign

Fresh off the press comes our latest interview, this time with Shaun Andrews, designer and XHTML & CSS Genius, and time tracking master. A little late, but who can blame him when you have a look at all the sites he’s involved with!

Devlounge: Hello Shaun, how are you? Thanks for taking the time to answer a few for us, I’ve had some things I’ve been burning to ask

Shaun Andrews: I’m doing great. Thanks for the opportunity!

DL: Alright, let’s get started. Mind introducing yourself for those who may not yet have seen Tick or your personal blog?

SA: Well, my name is Shaun Andrews. I’m a 24 year old web designer from a smallish city named Binghamton in upstate New York. I’ve been working on the web for a few years now and for the last 9 months I’ve been making a living as a contractor doing design and XHTML/CSS coding. Some of recent projects that I’ve been involved with are: Tick, the Molehill, Scrapblog, Pluggd, the DrumArchives, and XHTMLGenius. Of course I’m also tweaking and posting at shaunandrews.com, my little corner of the web.

DL: On the subject of Tick, we first previewed the application in mid July, and recently Tick opened to the public. Where did the original idea for Tick come from, and what made you want to put together an application like this?

SA: First off, thanks for the great write up. The Molehill team has poured many hours of sweat, blood and tears into building Tick. We’re very happy to see others finding it useful. The original idea for Tick came out of our own need to accurately track project and task budgets and keep our teams up to date on the project status. We searched the web for a solution, and although we found some great time trackers, none of them gave the feedback our teams needed to really work towards a budget. Many people make the assumption that Tick is simply another time tracker. While it is true that Tick tracks time, Tick was built with the goal of helping people hit their budgets and, as a result, have profitable projects. So we only track time to the extent that it helps achieve that goal.

While it is true that Tick tracks time, Tick was built with the goal of helping people hit their budgets and, as a result, have profitable projects.

For us, the big idea behind Tick came out of the realization that for a services company, time is your inventory. We began thinking about how companies that produce physical product track, price and sell their products. This realization changed the way we ran our business, thought about time, and back to your original question, drove the development of Tick. We have written a little more about this on the Tick website (http://www.tickspot.com/why/). If you work in the service industry, I think it’s worth checking out.

DL: By the way, how did that public launch go?

SA: The public launch was a huge success. It’s still early, but so far all of our expectations have been exceeded. Our preview period was immensely successful, with thousands of subscriptions created, and hundreds of encouraging emails. It’s great to see that Tick is providing a real solution to a real problem that a lot of people are struggling with. At the same time, we had more than a few people that would prefer a heavy time tracking application, which as we stated before isn’t our goal. This really helped us hone in on the folks that stand to best profit from Tick.

DL: Our preview article generated a pretty good amount of buzz surrounding Tick and I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of positive comments. It’s inevitable however that a few people will have negative things to say about the product. How do these negative comments effect the team as you work to complete and launch an application?

SA: Tick isn’t build for everyone. Tick was specifically designed for people who work in the service industry and struggle with hitting budgets. We knew going into this project that some people wouldn’t get it, but more importantly we know a lot of people were in need of it. Even though Tick is still young, we’re delighted at the level of passion our users have. Most of the criticism that product has received has been in comparison to time tracking or project management solutions. For the most part this doesn’t affect us much, as we understand that the reviewer/commenter may not understand the pain that Tick relieves. We’re not interested in going feature-to-feature with other products or compromising the foundation that Tick was built upon.

DL: Let’s talk personal: How’d you get into design & development?

SA: It’s strange really. I’ve always been into computers, but never specifically web design. I actually went to school for Computer Aided Drafting/Design, and then continued and received a masters in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. I spent a lot of time with math and physics throughout college, and I loved every minute of it. Somewhere along the way I began to realized that being a mechanical engineer just wasn’t for me.

I think I made my first website while I was in high school. It was a personal website with links to sites I thought were “cool”. I made it with Netscape’s built in WYSIWYG editor, and I only toyed with basic HTML. All throughout high school I played with HTML as a hobby. In college I began using the Macromedia studio (Fireworks and Dreamweaver 3 mainly) to create websites for bands and school organizations. Sometime during my junior year of college I discovered CSS. Since then I’ve been addicted. I got my first professional web job before I graduated from college. I moved to Miami, FL to begin working at Alienware Corp. as a web editor. After getting my feet wet I then moved onto to a much bigger role as part of a small web team for a branding agency name Propeller in downtown Miami. After leaving Miami for Jacksonville, I made the choice to start my own business and have been self-employed ever since.

DL: What are you hobbies and interests away from the desk?

Music. I’ve been playing drums for well over 10 years now and guitar for about 5 years now. It’s a safe bet that if I’m not online, I’m sitting at my kit or playing guitar.

DL: Let’s talk about your newest venture, XHTMLGenius. First off, killer domain name, I can see that going for thousands in the future . What made you decide to give it a shot, and how do you hope it will pan out (max clients per week, future plans, etc)?

It’s a safe bet that if I’m not online, I’m sitting at my kit or playing guitar.

SA: Yea, XHTMLGenius is a pretty cool domain name, but I don’t see myself selling it anytime in the near future. I also own CSSGenius.com and WordPressGenius.com. There are plans to launch those other two sites as companions when time permits.

The site came about during some down time between projects. I was looking for a way to bring in small projects to fill those gaps of down time. I saw a few sites popping up offering similar services and I knew that I could compete. I kept the site very simple and gave myself a budget of 5 hours – I really thought it would be wasted time, an experiment at best. I spread the word through Google AdSense and some forums and before I knew if I had a few jobs lined up.

The site has been a huge success and has paid for itself many times over. The great thing about XHTMLGenius is that there’s no negotiating or squabbling. The scope, price and timeline are all set up front. The client pays and I deliver. It’s simple and it’s been working great!

DL: Any things you want to get out while you have the chance?

SA: You can expect a redesign of shaunandrews.com in the coming weeks and some code updates to Tick in the near future.

XHTMLGenius has been getting a lot of love lately, and you can expect to see some other Genius sites in the future as well.

DL: As always, thanks for chatting with me. Looking forward to more of your projects in the future, and of course, we’ll be talking about them before anyone else.

SA: Thanks for the opportunity and keep up the great work with Devlounge!

Just in time for Christmas comes the release of sIFR 3, the javascript, flash, and css solution to outputting smoother text using flash. Previous versions of sIFR were frowned upon by most designers because they increased loading times on pages greatly, but this new beta has supposedly eliminated that by using on-demand loading to load the text – not loading the text after everything else which was the case prior to version three.

You can read more about the update and grab it for yourself here.