One of the most visible things on a business websites are its icons. It may not seem that way, but they are what draws the eye to each section of content. If you’re not experienced in programs such as Fireworks or Photoshop, it may be hard to design a site with a good layout and image scheme. I found a few ‘free’ icon sets for web designers to use, and I’d thought I’d share them with you. Make sure you check that they’re copyright free and royalty free for commercial use, before you use them.

http://djdesignerlab.com/2010/12/17/useful-free-web-icons-for-your-next-design/
http://www.pingable.org/20-sets-of-free-royalty-free-icons/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/06/35-really-incredible-free-icon-sets/

I’ve changed the header to look more like the rest of the site, and I’ve added twitter integration to my TravisDanielson twitter account. Also, I’ve finished the low-res redirect, and added a dynamic RSS to PHP blog listing on the lower part of the main page.

A few days ago I read an article that talked about the increasing number of smartphone sales in the years to come. Here is the article. It might seem a little astounding that by 2012 more people will be buying smartphones than computers. Now, I don’t think the increase in sales will be quite that big, but it will still be a huge part of the design world. I think it will take a long time for many small town web designers to take this into account, leaving a lot of clients either getting something that won’t fully promote their business or spending thousands of dollars for a large professional design company. There’s nothing wrong with that if you choose to do so, but it’s always good to have some options. Now, I don’t know how many years it will be until there are very few new computer sales to the point that web designers actually build their sites from their smartphones, but until then people will have to put greater focus on cross browser compatability for smartphones. How does this affect domain names? Well, I don’t really know of the .mobi domain names will become that much more valuable, but I think short .com and .net’s will be much more valuable, even more than they increase regularly each year. That is simply because people with smartphones don’t always have the advantage of a full size keyboard, and a 5 or 6 letter domain name would be much easier for them to get to. I’m going to start developing an android app soon, which will be a tutorial program for things like HTML and CSS on the go for new designers.