From a search engine optimization standpoint, most link directories aren’t worth the time, effort (and often money) spent in getting your site added. However, there are exceptions.
SEO Company has a useful list of the top 40 or so web directories rated by inbound link quality.
This is worth bookmarking should you ever need to quickly get some quality inbound links to a site.
If you’re not sure about the value of link directories in this day-and-age, SEO Book has a good article about whether they are still relevant for SEO purposes. In short, yes, if they are quality directories.
Most of the top directories listed require a fee to get your site listed. However, if you’re not willing to pay for a listing there are five that will list your site for free:
- Open Directory Project
- Librarian’s Internet Index
- Starting Point Directory
- Jayde
- MavicaNET
So, if you’re looking for an SEO boost, it would very likely be worth your time to get your site added to these five. And, good luck getting into the Open Directory Project! I’m still waiting.
Posted by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog on 3 Aug 2006 1:09 pm. Filed under
General ,
Web Design.
For a recent project I needed to create a month-at-a-glance date picker / calendar. Seeking some design inspiration, I took a look around the web to see how others had tackled this challenge.
As a result of this search I put together a gallery of calendar and date picker designs that I liked.
In Search of Inspiration
I had hoped to find some good examples from blogs, but it seems that this feature (providing a calendar view of entry dates for the current or previous months) has largely been discontinued. And for good reason — did anyone ever use it as a way to browse someone’s blog? I never did.
Another source I had expected to provide some useful ideas were the date pickers used by travel sites. However, in the main I was disappointed by how poorly these tools were designed from a presentational standpoint. Yes, they functioned correctly, but did they have to look so ugly?
In fact, not all of the date pickers even worked properly. For example, try using Jet Blue’s in Firefox and see if you can navigate forward a month. Just try getting Continental’s to even open in Firefox!
Interestingly, some travel sites, such as Expedia and Virgin Atlantic, have decided to forgo the date picker altogether as a means for choosing your travel dates.
Why they would do this is beyond me — the date picker icon takes up very little screen real estate and is an invaluable tool if you’re not fixed to particular travel dates.
Let’s say you wanted to travel on a Saturday in September. Without a date picker you’d have no way of knowing what dates to choose without consulting another calendar, which you may not necessarily have to hand.
Success at Last
I had more success with the new breed of online calendar applications. The majority of them combined functionality with simple, clean, clear design.
Where I did strike a ‘goldmine’ of sorts was at a couple of sites where you can download user-created skins for various desktop applications. I found many different skins for a calendar app called Rainlender, some of which were extremely well designed.
Obviously, it’s not always possible to exactly translate the design of a desktop application to a web-based one. However, with a bit of creative coding I’m sure you could get pretty close. And what I was looking for was inspiration, not to simply copy something someone else created.
The Gallery
So now I have a nice reference collection of good calendar designs. To save others the effort I had to go through in finding them, I’ve come up with a showcase of the ones I liked the most.
I’d love to find some more examples, so if anyone has any, please email me or let me know in the comments.
Just received confirmation of winning the Silver Award for excellence in Webdesign. This is too great and happy moment for all of us.
At last the redesign of Dzignerwebs is complete. See the new site here. Used some nice pieces of CSS for formatting and other stuff. Check out the slant for the top menu – it is css. This may not be very revolutionary, in the sense that it has been done waaaaaay before on lots of sites. But it is always nice to do something new on your site. 
Now, onto developing those scripts and demos. Some are ready, and most have to be developed. Have put up the links too. If you want to check out the backend parts of the sites/demos, just email me from the link on the website and I will give u the login info.
