I’m currently busy with setting up a web shop and especially it’s design. When I searched for some color settings for the new website I came across the article below. It explains the essence of choosing the right colors for your website for about everybody and people with some kind of color blindness in particular. Did you know that 8% of the people have some kind of color blindness? I didn’t! To be honest I never ever have thought about the fact how people see my website when having some form of color blindness.

Reading throughout the article I found out that especially the colors red and green are misunderstood when having a color deficiency. So websites which use some kind of rating system with the colors green and red only are making a huge mistake. Color blind people will not see the difference at all! By adding some sort of icon or explanation to it will help those people and it won’t be annoying for people who can see those colors perfectly!

I also found another example of  how not to do it on this blog (dutch). He explains nicely what’s wrong in the new messenger service. In short all the known icons are gone and replaced by little square in the colors red and…yes green! As you can see, even the pro’s out there are making these mistakes. Therefor I advice you to read the article below and keep it in mind when designing something new!

You can read the whole article here, http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter09.html.

I’m not a frequent PowerPoint user. Sometimes however I need to create a presentation for a new product for example. Until now I always used my own timing to change from slide to slide after about 10 seconds. This took a long time, because if I added a new slide or something like that, I needed to rehearse timing again. Luckily this is going to be a thing of the past.

Today I stumbled into something to automate changing slides. God, it’s so easy to do! Why didn’t I figured this out a lot sooner then today! Through the animation tab at the right top corner you’ll find “Advance Slide”. You can select the option “Automatically After” and fill in the amount of time you want the slides to change. Easy isn’t it?

You can find the whole tutorial here:
http://www.technipages.com/powerpoint-2007-automatically-advance-slides-during-presentation.html

Google Reader is a web based RSS viewer that easily let’s you view the newly added articles of the websites you daily visit. You can add every website with a RSS feed if you like. All your feeds are visible under the “Subscriptions” tab. You can choose to see only the feeds from a particular site or view all feeds in one view. There’s also an option to star your favorite articles and easily view them through the “starred Items” option. You can share articles with your friends and share opinions or comment on each other.  If you want more stuff to read, You can browse for feeds through Reader itself.

The big advantage of Google Reader however is the fact that You can reach it from almost everywhere. The only thing you’ll need is a browser and access to the Internet.
It’s also a very fast Reader (like most Google products) and You don’t have to install any software on your computer.  Therefor this is a great alternative to a desktop based RSS viewer in my opinion.

Why Google Chrome is currently one of the best, if not the best browser available? Well that’s easy! It’s fast and renders quickly. It’s also much more minimalistic in it’s appearance. In my opinion this is the future of surfing the net! Not Chrome as a browser but the approach Google used. Everything is minimalistic in it’s own way and most of the time needs no explanation to the more experienced users. Chrome is also the fastest browser out there! When clicked on it’s almost immediately there. FireFox and Internet Explorer are a few seconds slower on my laptop. Try it yourself first click Chrome and then Internet Explorer or FireFox, you’ll experience the difference in speed.

A few months ago there was a new Beta version release which made Chrome even 25 to 30% faster! Currently Google Released the beta officially! So everybody can download it by now. However, if you wish to use the new Chrome functions as one of the first you’ll need to get the beta version! You can download the beta here. Try it and get your own conclusion about it!

I’m more and more getting into Google and all of their offered services. Not all as good as the other, but through the open source development (Labs and Apps)  those products keep getting better and better.

Recently someone asked me why I only used Google services and discussed with almost anyone why Google products are better then the product from their rivals. Then it occurred to me, I was becoming a Google Fan boy….

Luckily I’ve always had an open view towards other alternative solutions to the Google Products I use , but I still have to say….Google is just better! 

My Internet usage is Googlefied in the last two months and a normal day consists of checking my email accounts with use of Gmail. There I take a look at my upcoming appointments and tasks with Google Calendar. When finished Gmail is done and Google Reader enters which provides me with the latest news from the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. Some days it even goes further by working with Google Docs to write a letter or collect information in a spreadsheet with the use of forms. If I have some new pictures I upload them to Picasa and while uploading I watch some vid’s on YouTube.

At work Google comes in the picture by searching the Google Groups to find a solution for a problem I’m running into. When I have to go to a customer I check my route with the use of Google Maps and of course searching goes through Google.

As you can see Google is used a lot by me throughout the day! And of course all those products are getting browsed with Chrome.
So yes! I’m a Google Fanboy. Get used to it, because there’s more Google stuff coming up!

Today I updated the final design modifications on my website. The past few days you might have seen the changes in the footer. Yes! the color changed into more grey. Modified the footer height and changed category settings.

I also updated the main navigation. It took me a while to complete that even though it was simple, but the main buttons are now as they were in the original Photoshop design.  I also wanted to add a graphic in the footer area but wasn’t that satisfied with the result. Will keep working on that of course…..glad this site is a step closer to the final goal.