There are some lovely fonts out there.

Moonfruit is a site that lets you easily create stylish websites, with content management, Flash and more. They also let you create free websites, as long as you don’t mind having Google ads and a link back to Moonfruit at the top.

7 yr itch rally is a site created using Moonfruit. And such a lovely font on the front page. It’s a car rally from Sydney to Dubbo via the Birdsville Track. Not for the faint-hearted. Check it out.

I’ve just started promoting my new Halloween Australia website, Halloween Australia.
It’s written from the ground-up in php, with a mysql database to store halloween events.
The goal is to let local families spread the word on how they plan to organise trick-or-treating.
In previous years, a family in my suburb has dropped leaflets telling people to tie a balloon to their front fence. Although I don’t always get one.
And sometimes they’ve decided to celebrate Halloween on the weekend, instead of the actual day.
The events section also lets you list community halloween events that are open to all, such as school or community parades.
I’ve put some of my favourite halloween recipes up.
In the next few days I’ll add a few more forms to allow people to submit photos, recipes and stories to the site.
It’ll be fun to see how well i can get it ranking in the weeks leading to Halloween.
I haven’t done much link building yet, but I will probably start this afternoon.

Not impressed, Google.

A few years ago when my boys were doing little athletics, I commented that the local little athletics website was not being updated. And offered to assist, if required.

Back then I was still doing everything as cheaply as possible - using free hosting at freewebs, using subdomains to avoid buying more hosting, and buying cheap .com domains.
So I tried to grab the original domain, copied the source code from the web, and stuck it on freewebs.
After a while the ads were annoying, so i moved it to a spare subdomain of one of my sites, and did a redirect from the .com to the subdomain.
They still didn’t update it more than twice a year, so I let it chug along.

Then today (as the new athletics season is about to start), I was asked to update it again.

I moved it to a much nicer layout at wordpress.com, so they could update the content whenever they liked. Redirected the domain to the new wordpress location, and bobs-your-uncle.

Thought I’d see how it was ranking at Google and Yahoo. And got the nastiest possible message.

At first I hadn’t noticed the warning on Google’s search results page that ‘This site may harm your computer’. So when I clicked on my site, it was a bit of an unpleasant surprise to get a big red warning saying ‘ visiting this web site may harm your computer’ , and to proceed at your own risk.

How to damage a reputation, Google.

I’m also not impressed that the old freewebs site, which hasn’t been used since 2005, is still coming up third in the results list. I though fresh data was supposed to be important.

And fyi, there are no ads or viruses or downloading software on the site. It’s a pure kids athletics site.

There is a link to stopbadware.org, saying I can appeal for my site to be reassessed. But when you fill in the details, you get told you are at the bottom of the list, with no estimate on how long it will take to get the warning message removed.

Surely Google has better things to do than accuse a family-friendly community sport site of being badware.

I’ll update this post when I get a response from Google or stopbadware.

Again, not impressed, Google.

UPDATED TO ADD: Ok. It only took Google a few days to review the site and remove the warning. Not as bad as it could have been.

I’ve got a few sites. Some are fixed width, some are full screen. And until this week when i got my new laptop with a 17 inch screen, I didn’t realise the full impact.

Some sites look reaallllly bad when they have a fluid, stretchy width.

Sure, if they’ve got lots of text content, then full screen is great - you can read heaps of information before you have to scroll.

But the majority look crap. Too much white space, and when they start throwing pictures in, it doesn’t flow nicely.

Now I know why they like building fixed width 1024 sites at work. A lot more control, you can still fit lots of information on them, and it looks good for most people.

I checked out stats at two sites: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp and http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/September/res.php, and they both basically agree that 80% of visitors now have a 1024 or great screen capability. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.