Over the several years I’ve worked in the Web Development and Consuting area, I’ve come across many websites. Some simply dazzled me with their layout and interactivity, some became very useful in my daily work and some, well, were buried and forgotten.

Since I like things to be organized, catalogued and easily accesible, I have a taste for directories. Directories, if well implemented, allow you to find what you’re looking for much faster than any search engine. Yes, even faster than Google.

One example I always show to my clients and friends is ClickSmart.com (the professionals directory, not the Webcam), a directory of certified experts that’s useful because of two things

1. Professionals are pre-screened, so you don’t have to interview them.
2. Content is well organized, so that if I’m looking for louisville realtor, I can find them after no more than 3 clicks from the home page.

That’s what really makes the site useful. You don’t have to browse through the whole site or search for a dozen keywords (Raleigh Landscaping, Realtors in Raleigh, etc.) and after that, not being sure to find what you’re looking for, least of all sure that you’ll find reputable profesionals.

3 Clicks. That’s my usual measure of how useful a website is. Of course, there’s design, layout, features but in the end, when I’m in a rush and I need to find something, getting to the information/person I need is what matters most. What’s your input on this?

In earlier days, plagiarism was harder to achieve, as people didn’t have access to the almost endless source of information (and papers, documents, etc.) that the Internet placed at our fingertips.

It was even harder to catch someone redhanded, as we needed to manually search for the original work that we suspected a paper or essay was copied from. Checking for plagiarized works was a daunting task that required a lot of knowledge (and even better memory) in order to perform a serious search.

With the advent on the World Wide Web and all its services, plagiarizing  a paper, article or essay is much simpler as search engines have gotten so smart that allow users to exactly pinpoint similar works from which people can “extract” ideas and text.

On the other hand, checking for plagiarized works hasn’t become much easier. Search engines are not able to detect rewritten papers, nor they an spot “mashed up” works, product of several previous works.

But there’s hope for those that want to ensure that their papers, articles, etc. remain original and are not copied by others. A new service checkforplagiarism.net helps authors to find any plagiarized copy of their work but employing advanced search methods and techniques that go well beyond current search engines and check written material for plagiarism. They provide such a thorough search that they back their results with a full money-back guarantee.

or many years, I’ve been handing over budgets to my clients, whether for a PSD to HTML conversion, a complete website or many other projects. I used various tools (including a handheld calculator) to create the budget.

This often took a sizable bit of my time, so I always wondered how to make it simpler and, more importantly, faster for the person requesting the budget.This becomes more important as we don’t always get the project after we send out a budget, so any automation steps are welcome.

Well, the guys at W3<MARKUP/> found a cool, elegant way of calculating budgets, using AJAX and a very nifty design. They created a very sophisticated budget calculator, using CSS, mootools and some hand-coded Javascript.

They managed a very useful tool for people who want to turn their PSD flat-grabs into working pages or templates (Wordpress, Cubecart, Joomla, just to name a few). Any option you can think of is there, from what type of JS framework you want to use to Render and Load Optimization.

I must say, I’m really impressed by their work. Their portfolio has some truly dazzling designs, and they’ve done something I haven’t seen anywhere else. They added the source code for the page, as a frame at the bottom, so you can check their coding.

In short, W3<MARKUP/> has created a very interactive, useful site that I bet catches most of their audience. And they do it without having to do the calculation themselves. Thumbs up, guys!

In any business, no matter the market it’s in, documenting your business is of critical importance. Documenting your business is important because it’s for communicating to your people how your business is doing and what needs to be done by the other members of your company. Even if you own a small company, and you’re the only person working in it, you still need to document many things to manage information to be shared / sent to customers, the Government, etc.

Documenting your business becomes of prime importance if you decide to sell your business or if you are looking for external funding. The main aspects that need to be documented are: strategic goals, marketing plans, company policies and procedures, position contracts, business systems documentation, operations manuals and several more.

One important requirement for managing company documents is the format of the documents, which have to be in standard format. Otherwise, it complicates communication and might raise confusion among readers if documents are in many different formats. Moreover, paper-based documents pile up very rapidly, demanding an increasing amount of room for storage, not to mention the time spent on organizing and searching through the paper piles.

If you feel identified with any of the problems cited above, you may want to check a service that lets you manage all your documents, while doing all the nasty work for you. The service is called Document Scanning + (from http://digitaldocumentsllc.com).Basically, the service works its magic by converting all the paper documents into a standard, searchable digital format.

The benefits coming from the digitalization scanning services result in increased productivity, performance and profits. It also reduces your total document management expense while increasing profits by optimizing their business processes.

A few days ago I was reading a post from the MetaSpring blog called ‘5 Ways Your Business Can Embrace Micro-blogging’. In this article, they lay out the intricacies of the micro-blogging trend and provide a few interesting ways that businesses can take advantage of it.

Although the article was interesting, I found the blog itself more interesting, packed with custom web design and internet marketing ideas. Although the reason behind the blog might be to simply attract visitors, the quality of their blog is very high, so it’s really worth a visit.

This is a very clever move of MetaSpring, an Ann Arbor web design, marketing, and development startup studio. MetaSpring offers creative and technical services and advice for web, print, and interactive media. Whether you’re looking for a logo, web application, or tradeshow display, they can develop a graphic design and matching campaign that will convey your message not only correctly but with great taste and originality. Their portfolio looks really neat too.

Still, no matter the reason behind publishing the article, it is quite interesting to bear in mind when developing a strategy to attract visitors. For those who don’t know what micro-blogging is, Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web.

The most popular service is called Twitter, which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.