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At our last Meetup, Fort Collins Internet Pros held a panel discussion featuring four of our more video-savvy members. If this isn’t playing for you, you can view it on Vimeo. (This was the first test of my new Flip camera as well).

Video on the Web – A Panel Discussion from Debbie Campbell on Vimeo.

Being a fairly active Twitterer and follower of a number of web design blogs, I’ve gathered a useful set of links to ‘themed’ website collections that I turn to for inspiration when thinking about the design of a new site. Here are a few of my favorites that I’ve visited again and again.

Color and Texture

• 25 Modest websites with a muted color scheme – very pretty, simplistic but not simple.
• Texture in modern web design – I love giving a site the appearance of more tactile surfaces with some subtle texture additions.
• 30 Textures for vintage designs – not so subtle, these.

Navigation

• Navigation menu trends and examples - from 2008.  A nice collection.
• 50 Beautiful, user-friendly navigation menus – a lot of pure CSS, plus some Javascript and Flash.
• Tabbed navigation and why it’s so useful – a collection of user-friendly tab menus.

Footers

• Footers in modern web design – a great set of examples of how to make sure the content at the bottom of your pages isn’t overlooked.
• 28 Inspirational web footer designs – more beautiful footer examples.

Okay, so I’m starting late. Anyway…

Today’s assignment is to write an elevator speech for this blog. I think the tagline is already pretty well focused on what this blog’s for and may just work as my elevator speech, too – ‘things I learn as a designer of websites.’ That takes into account a lot of things – code snippets, techniques, dealing with clients, motivation, business tools and practices. When I started this blog I kind of thought it would be about design, but it’s really about the whole gamut of running a business as an independent designer and developer.

Wow, that was easy. I think I’m done.

I signed up for ProBlogger’s ‘31 Days to Build A Better Blog‘ 11 days ago – I haven’t actually gotten around to doing any of the homework, though. I’ll be trying to catch up in the next week (it’s super-busy after a short vacation, you know?).

Review of the show last night from the Denver Post. It was excellent – nearly 2 hours and 40 minutes with no break.

Here are some photos from the show.

I’m looking for a WordPress calendar for a client that will let him:

• color-code his events by type;
• let him use icons to represent different events;
• let him include photos and larger images in calendar posts.

So far EasyPHP Calendar seems the best choice, but I’d have to integrate it into a page in WordPress.