For years, many webmasters have used yahoo site explorer to check the backlink account of their own site and competitors. Unfortunately, due to the yahoo and bing merger, they are removing the site explorer. Commonly you could use operators like “linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com” or “linksite:” to retrieve a comprehensive list of every backlink pointing to domains and URL’s. It was also free.
You can search through backlinks in Google, but it only shows a mere fraction of the backlinks that yahoo has shown, making it ineffective to gain a solid idea of the amount and type of backlinks that a URL has.
Alternative Backlink Services
I was fortunate enough to snag up GooglePlusIcons.com after the Google+ social network was announced. Facebook icons are a commonly searched for keyword amongst designers, so it made sense to get in on the search traffic early while the competition is minimal.
So I quickly put up a site which features free downloadable Google Plus Icons <-Link there! Enjoy!
Google just launched (in an invitation only format) their response to Facebook; their very own social network. I’ve been fortunate enough to become one of the few invited to try it out. They do a great job of addressing the primary concerns of facebook (privacy) and then some (with group video chat and some interesting user interfaces with circles).
But one thing I was particularly interested in was whether or not they offered any level of profile customization in terms of layout/graphics. At this early stage, it doesn’t appear so. I understand that MySpace allowed for way too much customization which made it ridiculous with silly teenagers cluttering their profile, but I was hoping for at least *some* customization; which would have allowed me to launch one of the first google plus design/template services!
Oh well, perhaps in the near future they’ll rule out something similar to twitter in terms of graphical customizations; which would be great imo.
I decided to re-design the facebook like button in vector format. Sometimes it’s necessary to implement a larger version of the facebook like button. With this free vector facebook like button, you can integrate it into your designs and scale it to any size without losing quality.
To download the project files:
- Visit my Facebook Fanpage and click “Like” at the top (or beneath these steps)
- Click on the “Facebook GFX” tab on the left menu.
- Right click and hit “Save file as” on the download project files link. That’s it!
Included in the package are also 2 common facebook button designs (dark blue and gray) with editable button captions. The font used is Tahoma bold, which most people have by default.
I’ve worked quite a bit the past several months on building and launching a new site: Upcoming Games. Last year I purchased the domain from a company for relatively cheap, and decided to build it out at the beginning of 2011.
The site features the latest upcoming games based around every platform imaginable. Each game has its own forums (which I coded from scratch), video page via youtube api, release date page and more. I’ve ran game fan sites in the past but always wanted to run something that could cover everything.
Right now I’m simply focusing on building traffic and a member base via search engines and social media. I’m also focusing on putting out videos that have to do with upcoming games.
Follow UpcomingGames on:
Youtube UpcomingGames, Upcoming Games on Twitter, Upcoming Games on Facebook
I wrote two new tutorials that showcase HTML custom dropdown lists and HTML compression.
Custom Dropdown List
HTML Compression Tutorial
I wrote a quick example/tutorial on the CSS3 font face property. It allows you to use custom fonts that will render in HTML via the browser. Here’s the tutorial:
CSS3 Font Face Tutorial
If you have yourself a copy of Adobe Photoshop, chances are you were overwhelmed at first. It’s an incredibly powerful application that allows you to do many things from designing websites, brochures, editing photographs, etc..
Photoshop was built primarily for use by Photography professionals, but as I said, it can be used for print (business card design, letterhead design, posters, etc..) and also website design.
I compiled a nice little page that outlines a few of the available photoshop courses for each potential use:
A list of Photoshop Courses
I’ve put up a new portfolio page to showcase a select few IT Logos I’ve designed in the past. IT is an acronym for “Information Technology”; these are generally logos for internet based businesses. A decent percentage of my logo design clients need IT logos for their companies, so I thought it would make sense to create a portfolio specifically for the IT sector.
Here is the new page:
IT Logos from Gary Simon