Clients often ask how to customize the little logo for their website that appears in their web browser tabs, title bars and bookmark lists. This little icon is called a “favicon” and is 16 pixels by 16 pixels. Here are some familiar examples.

Some people try and create the actual 16 x 16 graphic by hand using Photoshop, but editing at that small level of detail can be difficult and you often end up with a blurry and pixelated square.

Here’s a quick and easy shortcut to creating your own custom favicon for your website or blog. Find any square graphic that you want to use as your favicon. Ideally, this graphic is a larger, detailed graphic, around 200 pixels by 200 pixels, such as our Durrani “D” graphic that we use for our logo mark, pictured here to the right. Any image you want to use is fine and can be a .jpg, .gif or .png file type.

Then just go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/, browse to your graphic and click the button to generate your favicon. You can even optionally animate your graphic. The generated favicon file will be a compressed ZIP file that you can download to your computer and extract.

Transfer (FTP) the favicon.ico file that you downloaded, to the root folder of your website (the main public directory). A web browser automatically looks for the favicon.ico file when it loads your website and if found, will use it instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox default icon. Now when someone visits or bookmarks your website, your new graphic will show up as the custom icon and will give your site a unique branding to stand out from the rest.

We used the “D” graphic above to create our site favicon. Here’s what the final image now looks like in a web browser:

One quick note – web browsers typically store or “cache” these files in a temporary folder on your computer each time you visit a website, so in order to get your new favicon file to show up, you might have to close and reopen your browser and/or clear out your browser temporary internet files. You can also try pressing the CTRL key and F5 key at the same time to force the page to load from scratch and refresh the all content and images.

That’s all there is to it. So go make your website bookmark and browser tab stand out from the rest with your new custom favicon.

A LinkedIn member posted a question in the "Answers" section, which read:

What is the average cost of developing a commercial website? (without hosting and domain name cost)

I have heard it can range from $1500 - $30,000.
What have you experienced?

As a website design agency, we are faced with this question daily. I took a few minutes to reply at the LinkedIn site and have reposted my answer here below. I think it’s an important question and something every business should consider.

Reply via Linkedin.

The secret question you are asking is, "What’s the best deal I can get, if I’m going to build a website for my business?". Don’t get me wrong, it’s a legitimate question. As the previous response stated, it depends on what you’re asking for. The range of complexity in web design is huge. Ask yourself, what do you want your website to do? What is the intended action I want a visitor to take when they visit my website? You don’t need a large-scale commercial website built using Flash if you are really just trying to sell a simple product… unless you are Sony, it’s wasted money.
If you were going to build a new house, would your first question to the builder be "What is the average cost of building a new house for my family?" We probably wouldn’t think of asking a simple question like that without first considering what your purpose for building the house is. How many rooms, is it for a family, what is the growth expected, will you need more rooms in a couple years (before you intend on building a new house) etc. Websites require no less planning then this. Sure, lots of 16 year old kids are running around building websites these days and you could get a great deal. But they are building websites… not businesses. Will your website convert on the goal you have set? I would sit down with someone who will help you think through your plan for your commercial website, not just what software you should use and how much it will cost. You could spend a ton of money and still not get the website you need, or you could spend a moderate amount and get your perfect online business. You get what you pay for these days. Not all websites are created equal. I’ve built many websites for $1500, as long as it fits the client’s needs.
Just remember, you are building a business, not a website. A website should fit snugly into your overall business objectives.
As they used to say in the days of dirt roads and horse drawn wagons… "choose your rut carefully… you’re going to be in it for the next 30 miles."

If you’re a member of LinkedIn, you can connect to me at: www.linkedin.com/in/durranijoe

Setting up your digital office can be expensive. Many new businesses fall into the trap of thinking they have to setup a complete office environment to appear legitimate to their clients. One of the major startup expenses is the office phone system. Setting up a business line from the local telephone company can cost upwards of a $100 or more with taxes and fees as well as installation costs lumped on, and that’s just for a single line. Setting up a multiple extension phone system with voicemail and fax capabilities is an entirely different investment and can end up being several hundreds of dollars in phone equipment and extension routing software.

It’s important to spend your often limited resources on useful technology and functional things that actually serve a useful purpose to your startup business. That’s where voice-over IP (VOIP) or internet based telephone systems come in. At Durrani, technology is our business, so we are always looking for ways to implement new technologies that help our business run more efficiently.

We examined several services and decided upon RingCentral.com.With RingCentral.com our basic monthly subscription gives us up to 5 configurable extensions, a unified voice and fax line, voicemail on each extension, an automated attendant (a virtual operator that greets callers and allows them to select an extension or leave voice messages) and the ability to forward incoming calls to several other numbers, such as a cell phone, in sequential order or simultaneously. The service also includes a PC application that resides on your desktop so you can answer calls (with a headset) and monitor voicemail and fax messages. Each person with an extension can completely configure their own services down to the hours they want their phone to ring and how many rings it should ring for. Take for example my extension #101. I have it setup to ring on my office desktop first, then rollover to my cell phone. If I don’t pick up the call on either my desktop or cell phone, it rolls over to my RingCentral.com voicemail. I then get an email and optional text message notifying me of the new voicemail.

The system also automatically detects incoming faxes and converts them to your choice of document format, such as a PDF, TIFF, or JPG. And the fax gets emailed to your email account. You can also setup your desktop computer to automatically send any incoming faxes directly to an office printer. Faxes can also be directly sent to an individual extension number.

Any optional toll free numbers associated to your account are completely integrated to your system. Inbound calls can be routed to any extension or office phone. We have several 800 numbers (which only run about $5 per line per month) and we have them routed to separate office phones with unique voicemail systems to take messages and deliver them to designated staff.

RingCentral.com lets you manage your office and client communications virtually from everywhere. Not only is it significantly less expensive then traditional phone systems, it’s smarter and more convenient. All for less then $50 a month.

There are many other features we won’t get into here, but you can get your own free 30 day trial by clicking the banner below. Once you try RingCentral.com you won’t look back.

The latest, highly anticipated 5.5 release of MIVA Merchant is now available. The new release includes a long list of enhancements that really smooth-out some of the rough edges that has dogged MIVA for the past few years. MIVA has always been a favorite of programmers and developers but many considered it lacking the back-end usability and ease of use that most non-technical business owners desired. Checking orders and performing simple day-to-day operations of your online business wasn’t as intuitive as some other shopping carts. MIVA has taken great strides to improve this in this latest major release.

Here at Durrani, we are still working our way through the latest features and how best to use them, but so far the admin interface is a welcome improvement.

The upgrade to 5.5 is free for current users of MIVA Merchant 5.0 and is only $99 for users of previous versions until May 31st. The upgrade is automatic on 5.0 installation when you run the upgrade wizard in the admin area. Customers running versions older then 5.0 who have heavily customized their store with modules and OpenUI configurations, should think through the impact of upgrading and make sure they take into consideration everything that needs to be changed for an efficient migration. Open UI modules, design templates and all modules from versions older then 5.0 are not compatible.

For a complete list of the latest features and fixes click the link below to view the complete post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our preferred shopping cart of choice has always been MIVA Merchant. We develop and support several other carts, but if we are building an e-commerce site from scratch or have the option of switching a client over, we use MIVA Merchant. MIVA is much easier to configure and customize and getting a site launched is faster. MIVA is also very expandable for the future growth of an online business.

Last year we designed and constructed a completely new MIVA 5.0 storefront for our client, Walleye Direct (www.walleyedirect.com). We’ve watched Walleye grow from a side-job dream idea to a full-time business with sales rolling in every day. We continue to manage the Walleye MIVA website and also provide SEO optimization and marketing.

We’re exited that WalleyeDirect.com was this months featured MIVA site in the MIVA Merchant Galleria.

Click here for the complete interview with Walleye owner Jesse Ness. And for some fresh Walleye fish from the brisk rivers of Canada, visit www.walleyedirect.com.

A friend of mine sent me a photo he took today with his iphone while he was working at a coffee shop in San Diego. The photo shows a nice clean table, a quaint coffee with heart-shaped foam from the barista, a Mac laptop and mouse.

The quintessential life of a freelance web developer.

In contrast, I too snapped a photo with my iPhone of my desk and my work environment. Nothing in the photo was added or moved. This was my desk at that exact moment.

The quintessential life of a web developer in an office.

A picture is truly worth a thousand words.

Life as a Freelancer

Life in an Office

Announced at Interop New York, the e-mail feature synchs with Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Apple Mail, Windows Mail, and Thunderbird 2.0.

Gmail users can now use IMAP to synchronize e-mail on their iPhones and desktops.

Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, announced the release of IMAP support in Gmail Wednesday at Interop New York. Glotzbach, a keynote speaker, said Gmail account holders can begin using IMAP immediately.

He held it up as an example of Google’s attempts at continuous innovation, saying it’s one of many new features Google has added since launching Google Applications in February.

“IMAP isn’t new, but bringing it together is,” he said.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following instructions provide a way to save your sent messages in a folder on the mail server so they can be accessed from multiple machines/clients.

So as not to ruffle anyone’s feathers, this information is (obviously) from the MIT helpdesk, although the steps are defined by Microsoft and are in the public domain.

So, by default, Outlook 2003 saves sent email locally within the Sent Items Folder. These instructions do not affect this behavior, so you will be saving two copies of each sent message (one locally and another on the mail server). If you do not want to keep a saved copy locally, go to Tools>Options. On the Preferences tab, click e-mail options and clear the “Save copies of messages in sent items folder”.

To configure Outlook to save a copy of your sent messages in an IMAP folder on the mail server:
Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Matt H., one of the co-owners and chief designer here at Durrani, has submitted a design to Threadless (www.threadless.com). The design is called “Conventional vs. Unconventional”. At Threadless, the top voted-on designs get turned into printed t-shirts so jump over to Threadless and vote now! (click the image below).

Basecamp is a web based approach to project collaboration.  You can find it at http://www.basecamphq.com. The clean interface allows a company to coordinate and communicate project details.  One of the many great features that Durrani uses for basecamp, is the dashboard feature that outlines any upcoming to do’s that need to be accomplished, as well as give an overview of all upcoming projects.

Customizable

Unlike, most web based project collaboration software.  Basecamp by 37 signals has a clean interface that allows the user to customize the look and feel of the interface.  From customizing the color of the layout appearance to uploading a company logo, Basecamp allows the user to customize its interface for a greater aesthetic appeal.

Click on images to enlarge.

Organization

From the dashboard, that gives a breakdown of upcoming projects.

 Manage Your To Do Lists!

To the to do lists, that show upcoming to do’s for each project that specifies a to do that must be accomplished on a either daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

To milestones, that show upcoming events for projects, these milestones are useful as a project coordinator can see if they are on track of a project and if one can fulfill any and all deadlines and adjust accordingly.

Also, file sharing, allows different users to share files over the web that pertain to a certain project, where it can be accessed anywhere around the world.

The message board, allows users to communicate with one another and any notes that pertain to certain projects, without the hassle of emailing one another back and forth.

Finally the project overview, gives an analysis of the project to see if all to do’s, milestones, have been accomplished or is about to be accomplished.

Time Tracking

However, the best feature that seems to be of most prevalent use to Durrani, is Basecamp’s time tracking feature.  This feature allows workers to log-in time they spent on certain projects, of which reports can be drawn up to customers of Durrani.  So that the customers can see what they were being billed for, for an ethical price analysis.