I’ve been using Adobe Fireworks as my graphic design tool for awhile, and like to think that I’m pretty decent at it.  Every now and then I see a graphic that is so well done that I can’t tell if its a photograph or a man made piece of digital art.  One website has me asking this often - Apple.com

I’ve always been a fan of Apple’s website, and decided to test my graphic design chops by designing it exactly how it is - from scratch.  Sure, I wasn’t going to design the entire site, so I took a shot at designing their homepage.  Specifically, their Nano-Chromatic campaign homepage.

I started with an attempt at designing an iPod Nano, from scratch within Adobe Fireworks.  My result is above.  So far, so good. Now its time to take on the rest of the homepage…

(more…)

Understanding the your website’s visitors is critical in maximizing your website’s potential.  There are a few packages out there to help you do this, but non as cost effective, or as powerful as Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is completely free, and very easy to integrate into a website.  On top of that, its incredibly powerful.

Here are my top 5 features of Google Analytics.

1. The Dashoboard. As soon as I log in I am presented with a flash driven dashboard that lets me select date ranges and instantly view up to date information about my site.

Now that we know how many visitors we have, lets find out exactly where they are - geographically…

(more…)