I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. They help me multitask and every program lets you use them. It’s a great feeling to discover one on your own.

For me keyboard short cuts started with Photoshop. I can work on an entire project without once touching the top navigation bar or selecting something I need. I know just about every shortcut, test me. My favorite would have to be ctrl + alt + shift + s (save for web) I think I like it so much because I use it the most. Then of course you have to move to the Tools. Using Tool shortcuts makes image editing a breeze. You can manipulate the image and it’s so fast. The Tool short cuts are a hit of just one letter. Let’s say you need to type something, press T and your new tool is the Character tool, start typing. Need the Magic wand? Press W. How about Zoom, press Z. See the pattern, most of the shortcuts are the first letter of the tool you need. If it’s not a tool but a part of your page setup it’s simply ctrl + the first letter of what you need. Like Ruler ctrl + R. If you need to change the color of your image slightly try Levels, ctrl + L (that is one of the first shortcuts I learned) I also like to close my docs by hitting ctrl + W, don’t forget to save it though… just press Y when it asks if you’d like to do so. The list of shortcuts goes on, try them out and discover new ones, that’s the best part.

A great thing about mastering a programs keyboard short cuts is that it will be the same in their sister programs. For instance all Photoshop shortcuts are the same in Illustrator, In Design, Fireworks, and the other programs use simple shortcuts. Simple shortcuts are ctrl + s (save), ctrl + p (print), ctrl + w (close) you get me gist. Oh design program short cuts are different than development short cuts. I am learning the shortcuts for Dreamweaver. I only have the most important down pat. Like ctrl + shift + U, will Put the file. F5 will refresh your url so you can see the change you made. Then there are different ways of saving your files. So I have found those most helpful. I can’t imagine how many more there are. It will be exciting to find them out.

I heard a quote floating around the internet a ways back. At the time I didnt fully understand his point.

"Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign"

What hes trying to say here is that anybody can redesign a website. Its easy to add a mirror reflection and some drop shadows to make a site look "slick". Sure it may look cool, but does it work better? does it convert browsers into buyers? Did the redesigned site post better results than the original?

On the otherhand a realignment will take the existing content and reposition it to gain results. A good approach is to step back and ask why the site was built in the first place. Is it to sell watches? If so, the most available path should guide me to where I can buy a watch. Paths that guide me away from buying the watch should be removed. In other words a well designed site will guide me towards buying a watch and nowhere else.

This concept seems obvious but for whatever reason people have a tendancy to add things. Often these additions become distractions which comprimise the sites effectiveness. Next time you set out to redesign a site think about your goal, Are you trying to make it look better or work better? A good looking site is cool, but a site that works better is way cooler.

What was a source of incessant press and speculation over these last few weeks, the decomposing dog/shell-less turtle/water rat/monster that graced the shores of Montauk, New York also found its way to this office, and materialized a tiny home for itself within each of our hearts.

I like to believe that Monty inspired us to pause, step back from our present selves, and reconsider who we are and where the rickety tracks of our lives were leading us.

To watch this awkward little mound of death be cast into a slow news day and paraded along various media outlets; well, it made us feel as though we, too, were the pun of office ridicule and the subject line for billions of e-mails. Something needed to change; if not for our own smug self-satisfaction, then for the sanity and welfare of others. So we blogged about it.

We assigned everyone in the office accounts and let them vent. Any and every post published after the 25th of July—an elaborate metaphor for how the exploitations of Monty was, in effect, an exploitation of us.

- THAT Agency

P.S. Our mural of Monty after the jump.

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Now we recently came across a situation where we had to work on changing some stuff around on a website. Since the website was already established and had inbound links and such, we could not just start all over with writing a new system. So we decided to do what we needed to do using an .htaccess file.

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We live in an information-saturated world. There are more than 5 billion websites out there so people have a lot of choices. This means if people cannot figure out what your site is about almost immediately they will move on to the next site. So how do you make sure they stick around long enough for you to really get a chance to persuade them to buy your product or use your service? You need to control your visitor’s eyes of course. Don’t worry it sounds a lot more complicated than it is.

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In an ideal and alternate universe, fame, popularity, influence, the size of your "carbon footprint", are all a product of what you do, not who you do know. And with the big lean on reputation management, it's essential that the name a SEOlebrity makes for him or herself is one earned.

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• There are a million and one ways to express the damaging affects of UV rays—a puddle of crayons, sun-bleached cars, a melanoma ward. Roasting infants should not be one of them.

• A stevedore is someone who "loads and unloads vessels in a port." A john is someone who solicits prostitution. A Poet Laureate, well, that person is given the straightforward task of "bringing poetry to the forefront of the American consciousness."

• A daily dose of architecture.

• Iconic lit and buried within mountains of short story anthologies, Tobias Wolff's 'Bullet in the Brain' was also made into a short film that, unlike so many adaptations before it, doesn't suck.

• AltFontPrev describes itself as a "JavaScript bookmarklet that allows you to preview how any website would look if a particular font was not available." Test out alternative and custom fonts on different elements of any website. Sculpt your website's typography.

Most people know that the first step to creating a website is planning. What might be a little more unclear is how is the best way to go about planning a site.

Your 1st step should be to find websites that are serving a similar purpose as the one you want to build. Next, you should asses the strengths and the weaknesses of those sites. Use the sites to get ideas of what you would like to incorporate and what needs work.

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Eye tracking allows us to graphically observe what a person sees when they look at a website. It gives us an idea of where people look first and what grabs more attention. Some big companies may want to use eye tracking to make sure the right parts of their website is actually being viewed. Those who may lack the ability to get an individual assessment can learn from the many studies that have been conducted using eye tracking technology.

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If you have a website you might be asking yourself whether your site is fine as it is or if you should redesign it. This is a tricky spot to be. I will go over some of the top reasons you should consider redesigning your site. If you do not fall into one of these categories it does not mean that a redesign is out of the question, at the end of the day it is best to use your own judgment.

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