I logged into my GoDaddy account today to renew some TLDS and decided to look around for any new domains that were golf related. I thought the results page from GoDaddy’s domain search was ridiculous enough to warrant a short post.

Here’s what the GoDaddy site looks like after I search for ohiogolfcourses.com:

And here’s that same search after I remove all of the gratuitous advertising, worthless information and flashy graphics:

This is just the search page. Anyone with experience actually purchasing a domain at GoDaddy knows that the sales pitch gets even louder and more intense as you try and navigate through their checkout process.

Now I understand everyone wants to make a buck and I’m fine with that but this is crazy. Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that this ad assault performs quite well for GoDaddy’s bottom line and things will stay this cluttered for a long, long time to come.

In an old post I made about buying images from iStockphoto I totally forgot to mention the free alternative: stock.xchng.

Over the years, stock.xchng has proven to be an invaluable resource for anyone looking for photos of a wide variety of subjects. It’s especially nice because most of the photos at stock.xchng are royalty free and high resolution.

The only real downside to stock.xchng is that you don’t quite see the quality that you find at iStockphoto. The scene at stock.xchng feels like it’s geared more towards amateur photographers looking to share their work instead of professionals looking to make a dollar. It’s similar to flickr I guess but there’s no question that the photos at stock.xchng aren’t meant to be used elsewhere and not just browsed for your leisure.

Anyway, if you’re a designer or programmer looking for some free photos to use on a project make sure and create an account at stock.xchng and see what they have to offer.

I mentioned in my post about Entrecard that most of the banners people were designing were less than stellar in my opinion. That might have been a little harsh so I figured it would only be fair to highlight some of the cards I thought were especially well done and link to the owners site.

Obviously, there are more than just eight decent banners on Entrecard but I feel these are definitely some of the best. I also only focused on the web-related categories in my search because those are the kinds of sites I figured you would all be the most interested in.

Occasionally I receive a client request to fix a design bug in a browser I don’t currently have access to. When this happens I turn to a site called Browsershots that lets you submit a URL and, after a short wait, get full-sized images of your URL running in a wide variety of browsers on multiple platforms.

Browsershots is an open source project started by Johann C. Rocholl that uses a distributed system of volunteer computers to open up sites in the different browsers, capture the screen and send the resulting image back to the requesting user.

The list of browsers includes:

Windows
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
MSIE 5.0
MSIE 5.5
MSIE 6.0
MSIE 7.0
Opera 9.24
Safari 3.0

Mac OS
Firefox 2.0
Safari 1.3
Safari 2.0
Safari 3.0

Linux
Epiphany 2.14
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
Galeon 2.0
Iceweasel 2.0
Konqueror 3.5
NetFront 3.2
Opera 9.24

As a Mac guy, I definitely find the different versions of Internet Explorer that Browsershots supports to be the most valuable. After you make your browser selections, you can optionally choose screen size, color depth, versions of Javascript and Flash and even whether or not Java is installed.

The site is genius and highly recommended.

There’s a great online community called COLOURlovers that all graphic designers and web development people should know about. The site is full of discussion and helpful tips about color for creative types but the best part of the site is the collection of user-made color palettes that members of the site have put together and are sharing with the public.

I actually used the palette directory at COLOURlovers twice very recently. I first used the site to help me make the right choices for the look of Fore Score Golf Stats. Obviously, I was interested in using greens but with the help of the user-made palettes I found the final combination you see on the site today. My second opportunity to take advantage of the palette directory came last week. I decided to redesign the look of my custom built, invitation only MySpace profile tracking site. You can see a sample of the finished product on the right.

A lot of people find working with color difficult. If you’re a web developer strong on code but weak on design you should definitely think about checking out COLOURlovers for help with your next project.

I came across a nice post today about outsourcing graphic design work and, in particular, it mentions purchasing vector illustrations from sites like iStockphoto.

I’ve never had to go that route for client work but for side projects like Fore Score Golf Stats I managed to buy a lot of the graphics we used in the site design for under $15 USD. I went on iStockphoto looking for golf related images that had a look and feel I knew I couldn’t create on my own and came away pleasantly surprised. The amount of time I saved compared to the cost was so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly be beat.

If you’re on a budget (of time and/or money) and need some graphic work done fast and cheap don’t hesitate to think about shopping around any of the popular stock photography sites. A lot of them have more than just photos.