In the last three months of 2009, about 1,095,000 computers in China were hacked, and 1,057,000 in the United States – this on top of the 10 million or so machines already infected in each country. An estimated $1 trillion in intellectual property was stolen worldwide in 2008 through hacking, McAfee estimated.

In China, hacked computers often are clustered into “botnets,” a.k.a. battalions of corrupted computers commandeered to attack websites and spew spam. The growing presence of botnets is yet another sign of network insecurity – already a huge concern for both business and government. The news comes just after China closed down Black Hawk Safety Net, the country’s biggest training website for hackers. The site signed up some 12,000 paying subscribers, providing them with both primers for cyberattack and Trojan software, which hackers use to illegally control computers. The report also comes after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic Jan. 21 speech on Internet freedom, where she announced: “An attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all.”

China produced 12 percent of the world’s botnet “zombies,” as they’re called. The U.S. was second on the list with 9.5 percent – down from the top spot (and 13.1 percent) in the previous quarter. The rest of the top five: Brazil, Russia, and Germany.

It’s not necessarily the Chinese themselves who are causing the problems. “Just because the attacks original from China doesn’t mean the people behind the attacks are Chinese or even physically in China,” Gideon Lenkey, founder of protection company Ra Security, told Internetevolution.com. “China’s Internet is very closed off from the rest of the Internet so it’s a great position to attack from.”

Other findings from the report:

• A drop in spam: Levels dropped from a record 175 billion a day in the third quarter of 2009 to 135 billion, a 24 percent decline. Don’t get too excited – the “overall historical trend still points upward,” said the report. “Compared with the fourth quarter of 2008, volume is up 35 percent.”  For the record, there were about 135.5 billion spam emails sent every day in 2009, compared with 122 billion a day in 2008 and 76.5 billion a day in 2007. The U.S. is the world leader in spam production, but Brazil and India are fast catching up.
• Malware threats are on the rise, nearly doubling over the year. It was a “transformative and evolutionary year for computer threats,” the report said, with portable storage devices becoming a very popular target. This is partly because the hardware is so popular, but also because so many PCs use the Windows autorun feature – meaning no user action is required to become infected.
• Last year saw an increase in bogus  antivirus software that convinces web users their PC is infected and asks them to pay for equally bogus security software. Thanks to the growing popularity of Adobe applications, there also was a rise in attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in Flash and Acrobat reader.

Last month a report from McAfee and the Ce nter for Strategic and International Studies revealed a growing threat of cyberattack, with widespread attacks on critical systems.

We all get the design flavor of writers block occasionally it is unfortunately part of life. What you do when that happens makes the difference between a designer, and a good designer. Some will call it a day and go home, others will go to the nearest bar or coffee shop and forget about everything for a while. Others will go and do something completely different like go fishing, skating or to the gym.

When you do lost inspiration, it is certainly time to step away from the project for a while but it doesn’t necessarily mean the time is wasted. There are plenty of ways to spend time away from the desk but not be productive. Every city has plenty of places you can go to take your mind off things while still being productive.

Here are some of my favorites.

An art gallery is an obvious choice I guess, but one that shouldn’t be ignored because of that. Here you can spend time looking at other people’s ideas and work. You will be relaxing away from the office, but still not wasting time. While your conscious mind might be taking in great works and admiring the skill of the artist, your subconscious will be storing it all up for another time.

A modern art gallery is a variation of a theme but still worthy of an honorable mention. Here your mind can take in the latest in contemporary design. These places are often great for exploring color and how different ones can work together, or not. Not everything in a modern art gallery appeals to me, but there is often enough in there to get my mind ticking over.

A Museum is another great place to get inspiration. While it won’t have cutting edge, modern exhibits, there are a lot of retro ideas that can come from somewhere like this. Old engines, architecture, jewelry, even clothing from days gone by. New designs often use influences from the past and the museum is a great place to get them. It could be just the use of colors, or the lines of a specific exhibit. It’s all subjective so you will take what you will from it.

Going shopping is another great pastime when you have designers block. Especially a department store that sells high fashion. A slow browse around taking in the colors, shapes, lines and anything else that takes your fancy. You don’t even have to buy anything if you don’t want to, just look and absorb what you see. Your imagination will do the rest.

These are just a few of the places I use to visit when my creativity takes a break. Which one and where depends entirely on my mood at the time, but by the end of the day my mind is brim full of ideas ready to go the next day. It might not seem as productive as slaving away at your desk, but it is, just in a different way.

Continuing from the previous post about the basics of good design techniques.  This is predominantly aimed at new designers, or those wanting to take up design as a hobby or career.  Welcome to our world!

Footers are so often overlooked that I simply must mention them here.  Many designers don’t put any value on a footer in a design.  They are there merely to carry the copyright information and other company or site info.  They can be much more than that, as many newer designs can testify.  They can include links to other site resources, external links and carry other information designs to keep a visitor on the site.  The creative use of a footer can intrigue a user when they have scrolled to the bottom of a page and are about to leave.  Having something there to catch their eye or attention is a great way of redirecting them within the site.

Navigation is the second most important part of any site after the content.  If visitors can’t find their way around then they aren’t going to venture further than the home page, which makes the site a very expensive landing page.  Navigation is the only way people get around, and if it isn’t clear it will either baffle or confuse users, which is the best way to lose them.  Proper navigation reduces the frustration visitors might feel when moving around and removes a barrier between them and the content or product.

White Space is essential for any page that has content, be it written or graphic.  Not only does it add contrast between the background and the content, it also give the eyes space to move around the page.  There is nothing worse than visiting a page that has tight copy packed between other page elements in order to squeeze as much onto it as possible.  It might inflate the page count a bit, but the effective use of whitespace is a major contributor to whether a design works or fails.  Good use of whitespace gives the whole page room to breathe and making visiting it a much more pleasurable experience.

Detail is what you add when a design is almost finished, but needs a little more punch.  It can be anything from adding shading, gradients or shadows to graphic elements to little touches that add so much to the overall appeal of the page.  Be careful not to overdo it though as it’s all too easy to go overboard with finishing touches.  Learn when to say enough is enough.

These 7 tips are what I regard as essential basic training for would-be web designers.  You need to get each one exactly right in order to get the most out of every design.  The most important ones to get right are Navigation and White Space, as without them no design is going to work.  It won’t matter how much detail is on the page, or how clever your CSS is, if the content can’t be read or accessed by the users it’s a fail.

I like the number 7, which is why I keep choosing it for my posts.  It’s an odd number, small enough to be remembered easily but not too many that it becomes tiresome to read.

While most of you will already know these basic but important tips for good web design, I believe them important enough to mention for those new designers amongst you, or those thinking of taking up web design as a career or hobby.

Learn CSS and HTML.  This is a pretty basic requirement but it’s important enough to re-iterate for those of you who think you can get by without it.  You can’t, simple as that.  Having a grasp of how your designs are rendered keeps you grounded and only producing designs that work online.  Both techniques are being continually improved and new ways of using them are appearing all the time, take HTML5 for example.  With every improvement comes more tricks you can use in your designs.  Keeping on top of them means you’ll always be able to use the latest techniques and be at the forefront of design and usability.

Proper image use.  Images are a pivotal part of most web designs.  There are plenty out there that don’t use any, but for any page that uses them, using good quality images is a must.  A picture paints a thousand words, or so the saying goes.  Any image used on a web page must be the best it can be.  As bright, as vibrant and as detailed as the design can cope with to really sell the site, and the product or service it might be promoting.  See my earlier post about the many sources of free stock photos, or how to acquire original photography or images to use in websites.

Proper Color use is another essential ingredient in any design.  It is also one of the easiest aspects of a page to get wrong.  While there is a definite movement for minimalist designs, and white is a very effective color for websites, the appropriate and clever use of color can make all the difference.  It can be as simple as using standard link colors and a different used link color to using bold or rich colors for the site background or page elements.  Using color is a great way to make a page interesting or highlight a specific part of it, it can even be used as navigation.  Dark backgrounds will need contrasting light text, and navigation, where light backgrounds will need dark.  Getting the contrast right between colors takes skill and practice, in that order.  Once you get it right, the world is a colorful one.

We shall continue the 7 Tips for Good Web Design in the next post where we’ll cover the Footer, Navigation, White Space and Detail.

Continuing on from the previous post about frequent mistakes we as designers spot on websites when surfing.  We don’t spot them on purpose, we don’t set out to pick holes in other people’s work, it just happens.  Just like a car salesman checking out the traffic when he is stuck at the lights, it’s in our blood.

So in the last post we covered four of the seven.  They were browser inconsistencies, confusing messages, not having a clear idea of the client’s needs and designs that use Flash when they shouldn’t.

So the fifth mistake, and one of my pet peeves is a search function that doesn’t work properly.  If you want to include a search function on a website, make sure it works properly.  The more barriers there are between the user and the information they want, the less likely they are to stick around to find it.  Poor search results are a classic example of this.  If you code your own, make sure you test it thoroughly, otherwise use something like Google’s Custom Search Engine.  Nothing is more familiar to users than the big G.

Number six, and an all too familiar one is the use of poor quality images.  There really is no excuse for this one.  Graphics and images are so prevalent on the internet now that you should be able to find something suitable.  There is a plethora of free stock photo sites, graphics repositories and other sources of images for a design.  Or, if you really want to, you can make your own.  If you have a graphic artist on staff, or know of one then you should always leverage the original.

Using original images is the ideal way to make the design stand out from the crowd.  The same with photographs.  Stock photos are all very well, but they have the potential to have been used thousands of times.  If you can source your own, original pictures the site stands a much higher chance of making an impact.

When you have an image, make sure that it’s formatted and resized properly.  There are way too many poorly manipulated images around, and there are plenty of free tools if you don’t have Photoshop.

The last web design annoyance as far as we’re concerned is URLs that make no sense.  This is becoming an increasingly popular problem with the advent of CMS like Wordpress who default to a dynamic URL structure.  They do however have the option to be reconfigured to make sense.

A URL should always be meaningful, especially if you have even half an eye on SEO.  Including a keyword in the URL is worth a lot of points in an SEO campaign.  It adds quite a bit to the optimization as a whole, if not on its own.

Seven is something of an odd number, but a nice word.  I’m sure there are plenty of other web design faux pas that we could think of, but nothing else springs to mind at the moment.  These should be enough food for thought for now.

As web designers it’s fairly standard for us to critique every site we see, especially as design is more than just a job to us.  Most of the time it’s unconscious, when we surf a site and see poor design, bad navigation or other element that we don’t like it leaps out at us.

The first problem we should highlight are browser inconsistencies.  If a particular site doesn’t know how to handle different browsers the average user isn’t going to know to try another.  A website that doesn’t play well with all the main browsers is just poorly done as far as we’re concerned.  Even more so because in these days of the CMS, it can take care of all that for you.  All you have to do is provide the different templates and the system can choose which to display.

Another mistake is not communicating the message effectively.  This can either be through bad copy or poor design.  A good design makes an instant impression on the visitor and leaves them with no doubt what it’s about.  Poorly constructed copy or convoluted design can both contribute to poor communication.  If a visitor has to work out what’s going on they are going to leave.  The use of a tag line or clear banner message at or near the top of the screen is the best way to achieve clarity, unless the site is for a well known brand or product.

Connected to an unclear message is the mistake of not being clear about what the client, and their user base needs in their site.  Taking the time at the very beginning of the process to get to know exactly what the client wants, and ideally their vision for their company or brand will ensure you’re both on the same page.

I know we have said this before, but we design sites for the users first, then the client and then ourselves, in that order.  The skill in our craft is to manage all three so they match or at least complement each other.  The most important people in this equation are the users.  If the client brief isn’t going to work for their user base it’s our job to tell them, and negotiate to a position where we’re all going to be happy.

While we are the least important element in that triumvirate, we still have to believe in what we’re doing.

So the fourth mistake is using Flash when you really shouldn’t.  Flash is a great tool when used well but still has more negatives than positives.  It still slows down browsers, uses too much CPU and crashes all too often.  It should be used sparingly, and only by experts.  The more Flash on a site, the less accessible it is.  It pains us when we see Flash navigation on a site, a simple jQuery would do a much better job, and use less resources.

Check out the next post for the other three main mistakes web designers make.
7 Mistakes Web Designers Make Cont.

Navigation is the key to the success or failure of any web design.  It determines how a user moves around the site which directly affects usability.  The easier someone can move around and find what they need, the more successful a site will be.  Make it difficult or confusing and the design fails.

The first aspect of navigation is telling a visitor where they are.  This can be achieved by making it obvious using the site copy, headlines or the navigation itself.  Highlighting the current page is an effective way of letting a visitor know where they are.  After all, not everyone is going to access the site via the home page.  With the increased use of deep linking, and every page of a site appearing in the SERPs it is more important now than ever before to be clear about what page a user is on at any given time.

Making the navigation menu or options as clear as possible will improve usability no end.  Clear wording, graphical representations or other navigation aids can help avoid confusion, as can supplemental text like a secondary navigation bar.  A secondary navigation bar can reinforce the primary method by offering the same options in a different way.  This also gives the user the illusion of freedom as they can choose their method.

Secondary navigation is also useful if the site is a large or complex one.  It can remain reasonably static and offer a quick route home, or to a different location.  Larger e-commerce sites often use this method to their advantage, offering a quick and easy way to navigate between product ranges.

The other navigation option for larger sites is the breadcrumbs method.  These are great for larger or more complex websites with multiple levels of navigation.  They are in essence a growing navigation path with each step listed and linked from the page you’re on.  For example: Home > Computers > Peripherals > Headphones.  Each link in the chain is a step backwards in the route taken and offers the user the ability to hope to any of the preceding pages, or use a secondary menu to jump somewhere completely different.

Breadcrumbs are good for users to be able to compare products or pages with each other.  They offer a quick way of jumping back a page to select another in order to read, compare or move somewhere else.  The name comes from the idea of leaving a path behind you so you can find the way home.

Navigation is essential to the success of any website.  Get it right and it won’t even be noticed.  Get it wrong and you’ll never hear the last of it.

• Get pens made with your website URL on them. It’s so easy to pass a pen out to someone when they ask. If they go to give it back, tell them to keep it.
• Carry your business card around on you. You can get really inexpensive ones at some online websites. Get them and include your website on it so when someone asks you for your phone number, you can give them the card and they’ll see your website.
• Put an ad in the newspaper. Newspaper ads are still really good. They don’t do as much as they used to, but a lot of people still go and read newspapers.
• Submit a press release to your local paper. Your local paper may pick it up and write a story about you. This story will, in return, create talk about you which may send you an increase in traffic.
• Just talk about your website. Tell your friends and your family that you have this new website, that it’s an addition to your business already, and you are really looking to get it larger.

These are five ways. There are hundreds. I’ve used tons of different methods when promoting offline. You could be in a conversation about the topic of your site and then you could suddenly say, “Hey, I actually wrote an article about that on my site. Check it out.” Boom. One more visitor. One visitor may not seem like a lot, but if you remember viral marketing, one can lead to two can lead to four and the list goes on. Don’t spend your entire life on your computer trying to promote your site. Go out, experience life, and promote that way as well. It really does work.

Viral marketing is a fantastic method in which someone is able to create something that really creates conversation. For the sake of this article, let’s say someone wrote a really controversial political piece for their blog. A couple of diehard fans of the blog read it and go, “Wow, that’s killer.” They tell some of their friends. Those friends tell some of their friends. What happens is a situation where that single article begins to pick up steam. Is it effective? You betcha.

The reason viral marketing works so well is it spreads like a virus. If you tell one person about an idea and tell them to tell three people and to tell those three people to tell three people, what you’ll have is an exponentially growing story. If you tell a person and they tell three people, that’s now four people that know. If those three tell three, that’s now thirteen people that know. If those nine people each tell three, that’s now thirty one people that know. It continues to grow and grow and grow. The traffic can be absolutely amazing.

How do you get a word of mouth campaign going? You need to have loyal readers. This one depends entirely on your site. If your site is trash and the readers just don’t care about what’s going on, they’re not going to stick around to learn more and become loyal readers. If they’re not loyal readers, they won’t tell their friends about it. You want your readers to become diehard fans because once they’re diehard fans, they’re invested in your success. So, they’ll be more willing to tell friends. If there is only one way to get traffic, this is the best way. A single viral campaign can do wonders. The grassroots have shown that they have the power to bring success. President Obama anyone?

When you’re running a website, you need a few things: a domain name, a designed website, content on your site, and oh yeah, the part that makes it run…The hosting. Without the hosting, you could have the most amazing domain name and a gorgeous design, it will not appear on the web. Someone has to put your information onto a server so that when a visitor comes to it, the server can display it for that person. However, when you go to a web host, how do you know which package to get? What does resell mean and shared? I hope to explain that.

• Shared Hosting: This is the typical $9.99 a month hosting that you see. Here, you are one of a thousand people that are all sharing a server. The hope is that you won’t use up nearly as much as they say you have, but will continue to make the $9.99 payment. Shared hosting is a great way for web hosts to make money and a great way to get a site on the web. However, if you’re looking for reliable hosting that won’t crash if you hit the front page of Digg, this isn’t the one to get.
• Reseller Hosting: This is where you get a chunk of a server and can basically resell it to other people like it was shared hosting. You can make the prices and then sell it off. This is also a great way to inexpensively set up a network. You can give each domain name its own cpanel and it cuts down on setting up addon domains and all that jazz.
• VPS: A Virtual Private Server is where you get a chunk of a server and it is “yours.” There are other people with chunks of server, but it cuts down the number of people on it so you can use up more CPU. Great for a mid to high level of traffic.
• Dedicated: The only site on the server is yours. If you’re getting a ton of traffic, this is the way to go. Get a managed one unless you’re a server expert. This way, you can know your site is up and running and can focus on other things.

Which is the one to go for? Shared if you have a tiny site that won’t get a lot of traffic. If you’re going to run an e-commerce site, you’re going to want to get a VPS at minimum because the software that is running will lag on shared hosting. A VPS is a great middle server. It’s not too expensive ($50 sometimes) and it does its job. A dedicated can cost $200, but that’s a server just for you. Go with a VPS if you need that traffic amounts until you absolutely need to upgrade.