$29.1 billion online retail sales in Nov. – Dec. 09
Yes, the markets are looking up again. $29.1 billion – thats the figure a Comscore report claims – is the value of online transactions that happened in the holiday season in the year just gone by.Truly an indication of the growing optimism for the economy in 2010. The product categories that led this surge in sales include Jewlery & watches, consumer electronics, sales of event tickets, computer hardware and books & magazines.
In another research, Gartner predicts that  by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.
The total number of PCs in use is projected to reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and therefore, be greater than the installed …..

I had been itching to do something creative, read more creative than the standard web layout designs that I had been doing and so when I got the brief to design creative custom 404 pages for a number of websites, I grabbed the assignment with a glee. There’s plenty of inspiration out there on the web and after a bit of rough sketching and brainstorming, I came up with these 404 page designs. Take a look and let me know what you think folks! And yeah, if you want to get a custom 404 page designed for your website, we are just a phone call (or email) away! …..

My initial days of writing were not as interesting as today. In fact I considered writing a time pass hobby and never took it seriously. Thanks to genelia, my friend, who came up with a challenge to me and said I could never become a good blogger. That was the time when I started reading blogs and other useful stuff to build up my level of knowledge. Gradually, I became habitual of reading and started with genuine writing. See, today I am one of those bloggers who can feel a difference in their style of writing.
While studying tips for good writing, I got to know about the concept of SEO copywriting. This technique indeed distinguishes your copy from a general one. I think an SEO copywriter is the actual hero and not merely a writer. He is a chef who has to convert a complex structure into a simple one …..

One of the most important elements of graphic design is typeface or font. Choosing the right fonts while designing the layout is critical to the look and feel of the brochure or the website. Equally important, if not more so, is the role of typeface in how effectively the brochure design or web design conveys the message to the target audience. Is the heading attracting the viewer’s attention while not completely shadowing the other elements on the page? Does the brochure appear cluttered with text? Or is the text laid out in a way that all important info is available at a glance? A lot of these things are decided by the fonts we choose for that brochure design or website design project.
Given its importance, no designer can take the choice of fonts lightly. And that often means hours spent surfing fonts online or trying various combinations through graphic design …..

Post the Microsoft-Yahoo deal which finally happened in July end, it is well known that Microsoft’s Bing will now power Yahoo search and Yahoo will be the exclusive worldwide salesforce for both Yahoo and Microsoft’s premium search advertisers.
In simple terms, its goodbye to optimising your website for yahoo and the focus now is on Google and Bing. While Google still has the majority share (70%) of the search traffic, Bing’s share of the market is likely to increase with Yahoo’s search volumes.
As a webmaster or an seo, therefore, you need to have an seo strategy for Bing in place. A step in that direction is using Bing’s toolbox. The toolbox, in ways similar to Google’s webmaster tools, offers sitemap submission, url submission, malware detection, an seo toolkit and guidelines for webmasters. Using Bing’s toolbox, webmasters can get valuable insight into how Bing sees their sites and improvise as per its guidelines for …..

Small businesses thrive online…declares Verizon’s site. If there is one business segment that the internet has done maximum good for, it has to be the “small business” segment – be it a mom-and-pop shop in a remote part of the world or a small manufacturing unit in a big city.
Internet has made it easy to reach out to far flung markets like never before. It has made communication way cheaper than what it used to be in the olden days. Skype phone calls, IM conversations with clients are a norm now. And a website provides you with a 24×7×365 office – reachable anytime, anywhere. That is the beauty of the internet.
Those who boarded the bus early will gladly vouch for it as they also benefited from easier search engine indexing (read visibility). Since there was lesser online competition then, search …..

Adobe has recently released a critical security patch for its Flash player and Acrobat reader. The patch is for what is being termed as the biggest security hole in the internet. According to Trusteer, an online security company, 80% of users are still vulnerable! This is a huge number by any reckoning.
Who is affected? Those with the following versions of flash player, AIR or Reader are vulnerable:

Adobe Flash Player 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87 and earlier 9.x and 10.x versions
Adobe AIR 1.5.1 and earlier versions
Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.2 and earlier 9.x versions

What surprises me is that until I read this article incidently yesterday on WebProNews, most of us had neither heard of the security vulnerability, nor the patch release. This is when the patch was released over 2 weeks ago.
An important update like this one, which affects as much as 80% of internet users, should be given more publicity. I would …..