Today I logged in to moderate my comments and I wasn’t surprised to see one from PinUpDoll and her followers, accusing me of sending my friends over to flame her and call her names. I did not ask anyone to flame her, and simply put, I did not write the article “dedicated to her” as some have claimed. I wrote it for pure lulz! In case you didn’t realise pinupdoll, it was completely satirical and not an attempt for hits. I do not care what you have to say, or what you (or your followers) are going to do. Build a bridge and get over it.

People will do anything for hits today. Ok, first I got this comment of some ignorant simple minded little boy calling me a “fucktard”, so I deleted it, whatever. Then I see he came to my site from this site. Then I notice the specific page the visitor came from was this page entitled “World’s Longest Sidebar”. Here is a print screen because incase the pitiful little owner deletes it - click here .

First of all, I wasn’t doing it for hits. Do I have a tracker displayed in my sidebar like I am desperate to check my hits every two seconds? I wouldn’t want ‘hits’ from your website either, as the majority of the people who visit your website are lame teeny boppers who wouldn’t know the difference between shit and a stick. Besides, your Extreme Tracker indicates that you use automated traffic systems, that automatically generate hits to your website via a rotation system. You make no attempt to hide this shameful fact though, as you’ve even listed these systems under ‘Traffic Boosts’ on your sidebar. You log into their system and automatically surf to other sites to gain credits, and for each credit earned it results in one hit to your website - a hit from someone else using the system. Besides, who cares if you get 1000 or even 10,000 unique hits a day - your website is still inaccessible as hell and your babyish attitude fully laughable.

Nice to know you took a screenprint “incase the pitiful little owner deletes it”. HA HA HA! You actually expect me to delete it? Honey, I’m not an immature saggy cleavage ridden e-tard like you are. I am not scared of getting flamed, in fact I love the drama so bring it on bitch. This page will not be deleted and will remain there indefinitely.

How the hell are you going to call me out in a subpage & I don’t even know your shitty little site exists?!

WTF are you talking about. What does “call me out in a subpage” supposed to mean. Learn English. Learn to spell. Learn proper grammar.

LMFAO! I mean hey thanks for the hits! I only get 1000 unique visitors a day, I guess I can always use more. Maybe the little cunt wanted me to blog so someone will give her poor excuse for a site the time of day maybe? Well you wanted my attention, now you got it bitch. If you have a problem with my sidebar, site, content, etc, then don’t come. Is that so hard? Maybe it is for you, but for normal people it isn’t.

Ah pulling the “how many hits I get means my site is better” card. Yep, heard that before. Getting 1000 unique visitors a day is what we’re all striving for isn’t it. Like I said earlier, you use an automatic traffic system, and looking at your referrals on your Extreme Tracker, this is where most of your hits are coming from.
My site is a “poor excuse for a site” is it? That’s news to me, considering my website is featured at per.fectio.net. And I am sure many will agree my site pwns your crappy-copyright-infringement-weborexic-longest- fucking-sidebar-littered-with-ads-and-PPP-posts website. Let’s not forget the fact that my cleavage pwns your cleavage, and I don’t even have to post a picture of mine to prove it.

You didn’t buy my domain, you aren’t paying for my hosting, hell you’re not even paying for your own hosting. After going through your site sugar, you have no room to talk.

What does paying for hosting got to do with anything. Corinne kindly hosts my website free and there’s nothing wrong with free hosting. At least I’m not on geocities, freewebs or god forbid piczo where the website is cluttered with advertisements. Oh I forgot, you pay for your own hosting, yet you still have an abundment of ads. Most people pay for hosting to get away from ads. But not you, so desperate for some money. Go do what a ‘normal’ person does and go get a job. And whatever you say, PPP is not a fulltime job

If my site was so bad, I wouldn’t have the hits I have now, obviously I’m doing something right. I left a comment on her recent blog too, but its awaiting moderation. I’m assuming she gets cursed out a lot? She’s scared of what people say in her comments? Whatever the situation might be, you can view my comment by clicking here.

Is that all you care about? Hits this, hits that. Will you ever STFU!

FYI, I don’t get cursed a lot, the comment is in moderation for ‘new’ visitors to my website because of a recent spam problem I was having which forced me to moderate comments as a last resort.
Hey there goes the ‘dumb bitch’ insult again. I wonder who is the smarter one out of:
a. One who cannot spell properly, use proper grammar, has a whopping 168 errors in their coding (and doesn’t even have a doctype) and relies on fruitless advertising and PPP to generate an income.
Or
b. One who works full time at a University doing Marketing and Graphic Design, has a valid accessible website and earns more money per day in her job than the other would make in a week from their PPP.
Go on, you make the choice.

Now let’s give all dumb bitch all she wants, attention.

I think you mean: Now let’s give this/the dumb bitch all that she wants; attention. Yeah, like I said; learn grammar.

So everyone go over to IntoTheRain.Org & clap for her because now someone is giving that poor site the time of day. Oh yes, let’s all leave her rude comments like she had her little friends do me! Thanks!

I didn’t send my friends to leave you rude comments, but you are more than welcome to invite your friends to leave me rude comments. Obviously your ‘friends’ really give a damn about me, since I’ve had like, one flame from someone other than yourself? LMAO.

Let me start off by saying having people come to my site is cute. I mean hey, I only get 1000 unique visitors a day I guess more would be nice.

Having people come to your site is cute? What’s that got to do with anything? Good for you and your 1000 visitors a day.

Until you start paying my hosting bills or anything, you can keep your pitiful comments to yourself.

I may not pay for my own hosting, but I sure as hell don’t litter my site with PPP and ads. Regardless if I pay your hosting bills or not I am entitled to my opinion and I can post it online if I want to. Just like a movie that is available for the public to view, and criticise; I have viewed your website once, formed my opinion and written it down. You cant stop me.

Obviously my site isn’t that bad being I get so many visitors & such a day. I mean, seriously sugar, why do you care? Just for your little article I should make my sidebar even longer

Go ahead make it longer, it aint affecting me baby.

Get it together. The mature thing to have done was to come with me & said it was an issue instead of your little article & having your ignorant little friends coming to my site calling me out of my name. “Fucktard”? Last I checked that wasn’t in the English dictionary.

I do have it together, at least my site is valid, accessible and legible. At least my site loads in no time compared to yours taking 10 years due to all the ads. Blimey, not even your CSS is valid. I thought almost anyone with a brain could validate their CSS.
I didn’t have my ‘little friends’ come to your site and call you names. I never told anyone to visit your piece of shit of a website, I wouldn’t wish that drain of precious megabytes and loading time on my worse enemy. I had no idea people were commenting on your site “for me”, but at least when your little friends come comment on mine I have the decency to let their comment stay. I’m not like you and delete comments, everyone is entitled to free speech and if you want to flame me on my website and leave me hundreds of bitchy remarks I couldn’t care less. In fact I just read them and then piss myself laughing at your ignorance.

Fucktard is in the dictionary. Get with the times.

IF MY SIDE BAR IS TOO LONG THEN DO NOT SCROLL DOWN TO SEE ALL OF IT, I MEAN MY GOD. IT IS NOT THAT SERIOUS PEOPLE! GO READ A BOOK OR SOMETHING. YOU GUYS ARE REALLY STARTING TO IRK ME, I MEAN, DO WE NOT HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

We aren’t scrolling down to see it for fucks sake. We have to WAIT for the whole sidebar to load before we even see your content/blog. Be considerate to those on dial-up or those with slower browsers who simply cannot wait 7.167 minutes for a sidebar to load before even seeing the blog.

Ok guys, we have a few more sites we have to give attention to, ok? You guys go visit Jamie & Amanda & tell them PinUpDoll.Nu sent you. Make sure you take a look at their sites so they think they’re worth something, ok? They’re obviously thirsty for attention, so let’s all give it them! My mommy said it was always nice to be good to the needy!

Way to act the hypocrite. Saying I am immature for telling “my friends” to flame you, when looky here, you just did the same fucking thing. Except I didn’t tell anyone to go to your website. They did that on their own accord, because unlike you I don’t go parading around like an immature brat who bitches and moans over criticism. I’m respected because I’ve earned it - you are still waiting for such an honour.

On a final note, learn to accept criticism you fucktard. And I say that from the bottom of my heart.

//Edit// Her update below

If you guys don’t like my site, then just make yours 10x better than mine & continue doing what you do while I’ll continue to do what I do.

No need for me to make it 10 times better, my site already pwns yours. Amanda’s site pwns yours. In fact, every site pwns yours.

I mean, hey, I didn’t lose an ounce of sleep last night due to my sidebar, or comments, or anything! Did you?! Ha!

I didn’t lose any sleep whatsoever. You obviously care so much seeing as you have edited two blog entries about ten times.

Well, let me sum this up, i didn’t read your comment, I’m not reading your bandwagon’s comments. You are all obviously immature & base your life on the internet. Maybe you should just turn your computer off sometimes, I mean it will be there when you’re gone.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Someone please help me before I choke from laughter. You think I base my life on the internet? You are the one with so much time on your hands that you have time to write all your PPP posts, join all the link referrals and spend every waking minute on your website. I think you need to get over yourself and turn your own computer off. No seriously, turn it off and never turn it back on again before you write another lulz-worthy blog.

It is true. Although I want to ‘be’ a graphic designer, I can’t help but hate other fellow graphic designers. Not because I am jealous of their talent, or even because they themselves believe they are God’s gift to the design world. Not because they snub other designers, due to the competitiveness streak inside them. But because of how incompetent, ignorant and uneducated they are with the difference between web and print. This really annoys me.

See, I learnt how to do graphic design the ‘web’ way; that is learning off other graphic websites how to make blends and signatures. I of course was making everything in 72dpi with low quality. I have a job now as junior designer for a screen printing company. We do printing on T-shirts and other promo stuff like bags, hats, umbrellas etc using images of 300dpi and higher.

Right now I am at work (blogging-oh no) and this rant was sparked by some rich company who wants us to print t-shirts, but didn’t provide a logo. They told me to ring another printing company and get them to email the logo to me. Of course this company claimed they “didn’t have it” because our company is obviously competition to them. Then after going down there in person to speak to the Senior Designer there telling him that I am desperate for this logo, he emails me a low quality 2cm jpeg and says that’s the best he could do. Knowing I needed a printable size logo he send me this piece of crap I could have found on Google.

I can’t remember exactly where or how I learnt, maybe it was always general knowledge to me, but I knew that you cannot print off anything at 72dpi. You cannot expect a graphic you made for your website to print off a nice A3 sized design. Yet these so-called designers send in low-quality tiny jpeg images to be printed, and when I ask them for a higher quality larger sized graphic, they blatantly refuse. But worse still, some don’t even supply artwork. They tell us to “go to their website and get the logo” and expect me to be able to print it at perfect quality without pixelling or deterioration. Impossible people!

Sometimes it isn’t the graphic designers fault, I give them credit for that, but sometimes it is the company wanting the shirts done. We print a lot of soccer shirts and football shirts. We also print the official soccer shirts for a major team here, yet when they request logos from their sponsors to be printed on the shirts, they do not provide any artwork. I am simply told to get the logo online, but to print it at a nice sound quality. We print it to the best of our ability and they go ape-shit over it. These are companies that are rolling in big bucks, company’s that have probably paid someone thousands to design their logo, yet when they want something printed they can’t even supply the logo at decent size or vector form.

I spend the majority of my workday re-drawing logo’s and designs in vector format, for no extra money, so of course I am annoyed. But I can’t refuse to do the work if there is no logo, my boss won’t let me ‘lose’ a customer, so I have to redraw the logo. I spend hours searching Google and Brands of the world to find the right size logo, and if I don’t find anything of decent size I have to scan their business card and re-draw re-draw re-draw! Now I must get back to work and finish this impossibly small logo.

I tried my hand at writing an article. This is my first and although I chose a pretty easy subject, I hope it is easy to read and understand, and maybe even help someone.

Five Mistakes ‘Web Designers’ Make.

With the ever-expanding number of personal websites and blogs appearing all over the web, in conjunction with the amount of bad tutorial sites out there, it is no wonder many of these “web designers” make mistakes. These are simple mistakes you can circumvent. I have collated an article on five things to avoid so you can improve your overall website look and usability, as well as increase visitor traffic. The following five examples are not in any particular order, each is as important as the next, and these are certainly not the only mistakes that are made.

1. Colour Schemes
Colour choice is a big factor in web design. A good use of colour and contrast is imperative to a website, so the visitor can easily distinguish between the text and the background. The most common colour use is the contrast between black and white, such as a white background and black text. Other colours can be used, such as a light pink background with a darker text colour, but make sure the colours do not clash and make text unreadable. Use a colour wheel if in doubt about the colours, but try to make sure you don’t use complimentary (opposite) colours such as red and green because the contrast clashes.

Colour scheme isn’t just restricted to the contrast between text and background, but also to the images and the CSS. Keep all colour schemes minimal with a maximum of 5 colours, some designers can pull off more than 5 colours, but seldom do. Keep all colours in the CSS relevant to the header image or logo of your website. If you have a header image with your website title written in dark blue on a light sky blue background, with say a bit of pink in the image, keep the colour palette to those three colours. An example of a mistake is having the said blue and pink header with a red background, some green font and then some orange links. None of the colours will match and your website will look like a mess.

2. Images
Just like colour choice matters in your CSS and overall layout, the images on the website should go together, and not have too many colours that conflict. So when making a header image for a website, try not to have too many colours all at once, keep it minimal but still stylish. Try not to use too many images on one page at a time, and make sure the images are gifs, jpegs or png unless absolutely necessary. Image optimisation is integral for your website, as it reduces slow loading times which in turn caters for a wider variety of visitors to your site, whom may not have the fastest broadband. Optimising an image is basically reducing the file size to as small as possible, without any conspicuous loss of quality.
Don’t use images that are of text, when it can be typed out instead. An example of using images of text would be the use in navigation links. Sometimes the designer would like a decorative ‘bevelled edges’ or ‘drop shadow’ link to direct visitors where to go because they don’t like the standard web fonts available. There is nothing wrong with using image links, but if your page is too image heavy the loading time will dramatically increase. Instead of using images for your navigation links, make use of CSS. There are plenty of examples of using CSS instead of images for navigation, with equally good effects available on the internet.
In addition, it is also very important to use alt attributes with your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique, the keyword here being unique. If you have a gallery with 100 different pictures of the same subject, such as kittens, don’t just name each image “kitten1” or “kitten2”, provide a unique description of each image such as “kitten playing with yarn” and “kitten sleeping on bed”. Keep the descriptions small yet informative, don’t fill it with long paragraphs or 20 keywords. Keep it down to about 5-7 words per image, but don’t repeat the words such as “kitten sleeping kitten kitten cat”.
Make sure you give your images a title as well, in the case that someone visiting your website has images disabled, can they still navigate your site easily? When a search engine such as Google trawls your website, it is blind and sees no images, so it indexes images based on their alt attributes and title tags. If you have no alt attributes, Google, and other search engines will see your page as image-free and won’t index the images, consequently decreasing the amount of traffic you could have gained.

3. Navigation
Navigation should always be near the top of the page, or at the very least within the main view without having to scroll down. If a visitor to your website cannot find the navigation easily, they will leave. With a personal website the links are usually something along the lines of “Home, Webmaster, Website, Visitor Content” and so on. Try to keep the names similar to that, whether the “about” link is named “Webmiss, about me, me, girl” etc, the name is still familiar and immediately understandable about what the link leads to. Don’t name the “about” page something absurd like “whore” (I have seriously seen this) or some random word like “reality” which has nothing to do with the actual subject matter. Don’t confuse your visitors with these names, otherwise they will just click on links trying to find out where it leads and makes them annoyed, or they wont bother in the first place and leave your site. Also don’t replace the names with simple numbers 1,2,3 or even with little ‘x’s, I just do not see the point of this and it will make visitors irritated, especially the web-illiterate.
Another no-no is image maps. Image maps can look good, but only when used in an obvious way that there are actually links there. Back in the day when I had a freewebs website, all my layouts were of big blends with image mapped links. Once I sent a “normal” (web-illiterate) girl my link, and she asked me “What do I do with it?” I told her she could click the links, read the content etc and tell me what she thought. She told me she couldn’t see any links. I explained to her the links were the words “me, you, visitor, home” in the picture, and she replied saying she did not know that nor did her sister. I have since learnt my lesson and have never used image maps, unless they were extremely noticeable as actual navigation links. Besides, you ca achieve almost the exact same effects you want with some CSS.
Another important unwritten law for navigation is to not have advertisements near it, not even the really small Google Ads, as immediately this is proving to the visitor that your site is not that important, and that they can simply leave whenever they want by clicking on said ads. Furthermore, don’t use JavaScript for your navigation, quite simply put, Google will not index JavaScript and will ignore your links, in turn reducing incoming clicks. Secondly, not everyone has JavaScript enabled on their browsers, so when someone without JavaScript visits they will not see your navigation at all and will depart your site once they get bored of the main page.

4. Frames and Iframes
I do not need to go about the reasons not to use frames or Iframes. The only reason people use Iframes is because they think it is the easiest way to update their site quickly. These people are also the same people who use chroma colour to make “transparent” Iframes, that blind visitors on another browser other than IE. These people need to learn there is something more easier, something much more accessible, and something super easy to learn. Introduce PHP Includes.
With frames, search engines may not index your site at all, or worse if a visitor comes to your website via a search engine, they may come to one frameset without the surrounding content and navigation, hence making it difficult to navigate and use your website to its full potential.
Search engines have a tough time with frames. Using frames either prevents them from finding pages within a web site, or it causes them to send visitors into a site without the proper frame “context” being established. Source
Bookmarking a framed page within a website generally won’t work either, because only the main page will be bookmarked (the inside frame will be lost). Say for instance my website relied on frames and the main page is the URL http://intotherain.org but my content is in a page called ‘content.html’ inside the frame. If someone wanted to bookmark the content page they will bookmark it, only to come back to the site later and find they have only bookmarked the main page, losing the content page they originally wanted to revisit. Also if the visitor clicks an external link on your website, they could get “stuck” in your frame, with the new website displaying within the frame of your website. This can be avoided by right-clicking and opening in a new tab/window, but for a lot of web newbie’s they will not know what to do and more than likely be confused as to why this has happened.

5. Outdated Information
Keeping a website alive and well means updating often. I don’t mean you need to update every day, but at least once a fortnight (for personal websites/blogs) is generally good. If you know you are going to be away from your site for a while, have an open hiatus. Nobody wants to go to a ‘dead’ website and see that the owner’s last blog was written 7 months ago, and promises to update soon. No one likes to go to a website that proudly displays “last updated on __” in the sidebar when the answer to that is October 2002. Keeping your website up to date, adding relevant news, updating information, making sure links aren’t broken and looking after your website are your duties. It is crucial to attracting new visitors, and keeping those visitors. The most successful websites always have returning visitors, not someone who just stops by to look, or at the least say ‘hello‘, and never come back. Even if your website is not a personal site and is something like a portfolio website, keep material fresh; add new artwork, or update contact information.

So in conclusion, if you follow these simple suggestions you can improve your website and gain more hits, and more returning visitors.

I probably could have made the list longer, but this is already a long article so I will leave it at that. Anyway please let me know what you think of this article honestly, and if anything I have written is incorrect. I did my best to research everything and make sure everything was relevant. I will finish with some related links to some very good articles.

Jems Top Five SEO Tips
The Value Of Your Visitors
Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
Common Mistakes Among Web-Designers
Web design 101