I've had my web designer hat on lately. I've always been a much better judge of good design than a creator of good design, so I need all the help I can get. One thing that can make a huge difference in the quality of your site is color selection. Here are some sites I've been going to lately for chromatic inspiration.
ColorBlender
Pick your starting color and ColorBlender will show you a 6-color palette for that color, and allow you to easily play with variations or customize them. You can also save them [to a cookie] so you have your personal blends available to you whenever you visit the site. You can also email direct links to your blend. Very cool.
Color Scheme Generator 2
The ultimate color-generating tool. If you can't come up with a color scheme you like with this tool, you really are a lost cause. You can even see how your scheme looks to people with any one of eight different types of colorblindness.
I just spend *hours* trying to get some CSS working only to discover that the reason it wasn't working was because I didn't have the DOCTYPE declared at the top of my html:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Took me about 45-50 minutes, the first 30 minutes of which were spent on a false start. After starting over with a better system for keeping track of everything, it wasn't that bad.
I really doubt that this was Einstein's puzzle, and certainly the 2% figure is pulled out of someone's ass, but it's still good for some brain calisthenics.
Last night Jacqueline was looking around online for flights to Seattle. She ended up falling asleep before she could book anything, but when she went to check again in the morning, she found that the same flights were about $30 cheaper.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but my theory is that people/agents put holds on flights throughout the day, and those holds are released at the end of the day (assumedly midnight, although I don't know which timezone), freeing up seats and thus reducing prices. Has anyone else seen this? Or is this common knowledge and I've just been clueless?
I finally caved in and signed up for Netflix, as you'll see if you look on the bottom of the sidebar. I've been a bit of Luddite, preferring to get my movies from one of the great local video stores. But we recently moved and now our closest video store is about a mile away--as opposed to about 200 feet away--so our movie-watching has dropped dramatically (while our watching of mind-numbing reality shows has increased accordingly).
It seems to me that the queue is the key feature of Netflix. I can't count the number of times we've seen a preview for a movie and thought "We should rent that." Then you get to the video store and you spend half an hour walking up and down the Recent Releases trying to figure out what to get. Then again, sometimes you're in the mood for a particular kind of movie, and it might not be what's next in your queue.
Hmmm...here's a business idea to help out all those struggling video stores in the new Netflix world: make an online service (let's call it FooFlix) where people can browse movies, get recommendations, and add movies to a queue, much like Netflix. But then install terminals in video stores and tie member's FooFlix accounts to their video store account. Then they scan/swipe/enter their store card/code in the terminal and it brings up the movies in their queue and highlights the ones that the video store has available. The stores would also be able to see what their customers (or an aggregate of all FooFlix customers) have in their queues, so they know what they should be ordering.
As for a revenue model, you probably couldn't get away with charging customers for the service, but you could charge video stores to rent the terminal, and perhaps for customer queue data. You could probably do some pretty targeted advertising on the site, too.
Probably not going to make me a billionare. If anyone steals the idea, at least send me a postcard or something.
