Great Graphics at Smashing Magazine

Nov 11th, 2008 Posted in design | no comment »

I was checking out what’s new with my friends at StumbleUpon and fastfastlane stumbled this great site Smashing Magazine. If you are a graphics junkie like me this site has a vast array of graphics for everything from icons to header graphics to some very classy Word Press themes. They also demonstrate a solid example of matching advertisers with ones blog and company niche.

The header graphic for my blog is from their freebies section. I just added the font.

I encourage you to check these folks out they are worth taking a look at. They are also a valuable site to have in your bookmarks for easy access to what is a comprehensive tool for web site graphics and how to’s.

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Things to Consider When Using StumbleUpon

Nov 9th, 2008 Posted in caroline middlebrook, stumbleupon | 2 comments »

While guest blogging for Scraps of Mind I came across a plug for another fellow Blog Mastermind student and 30DC Veteran Caroline Middlebrook, and her StumbleRush program. Being the start up supporter I am I decided to take her trial program and see what she put together.

There are a few points I want to make about Lesson 2 though. She states

If you rely on votes from the same people over and over you will see your traffic steadily fall and it could even stop entirely. StumbleUpon carefully collects statistics about the sites that its users vote for and if they continually vote for content on the same website, each vote has less of an impact than the last until it has no impact at all.

I beg to differ on this because I have seen my traffic spike from repeat Stumbles from more regular Stumble users. I have even come across Stumble reviews I hadn’t anticipated. I found these by way of checking my stats on MyBlogLog by the way.

She says that StumbleUpon will never serve the same page twice to the same user. I disagree with this only because it has happened to me, but rarely.

One thing I whole heartedly agree with her on is that if I come across a page while Stumbling that has excessive graphics and I have to scroll halfway down the page to get to any content, it becomes a distraction. Unless I am looking for sites that cater to digital artists / graphic designers then it is another matter. However, I don’t want to see a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense to the page in order to find the artists work.

She mentions inserting a nice looking image near the top of your content. I recommend a graphic of 150 by 150 but not greater than 200 by 200. Otherwise unless your showcasing art or photographs over sized images intertwined in content is irritating.

Pages that are slow to load I just Stumble right on through them. Non existent or error laden pages I have admittedly made this mistake before I switched hosting providers and forgot to set up my redirects.

Ads I don’t mind them but it shouldn’t be blatant on the pages you get people to Stumble for you. I also abhor the use of pop up and pop under ads. I have Ad Block plus for Firefox installed just for these two reasons. It has also eliminated excessive banner ads found at the top of a lot of pages.

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