I love the whole lightbox effect, but also being a huge Apple fan boy I thought I would have a mess around with Fancy Box which kind of rips the mac site style... Click on the picture to the right to test it out.

The great thing about Fancy Box is that it automatically integrates with WordPress so you don't have to enter a rel="lightbox" into your url... and more importantly... it looks sexy.

And don't forget, we can also add a little bounce.

I have always been of the opinion that Yahoo is the slow brother of Google but I have noticed some amazing changes lately with the speed of indexing and ranking from Yahoo. On a personal site I am working on at the moment I published a post last night (19 hours ago) and it is already appearing in Yahoo in number three for its main keyword term... You go girl.

404 Pages (i.e. the page that gets displayed when the page a user requested doesn't exist) are a great place to pimp an offer. In one site we optimized, we got a 2% increase in sales which is phenomenal. But I have decided to take a different tack with this blog and install a great plugin called Smart404.

What this plugin does is look at the keywords the user used to find the page (the one that no-longer exists) and compare them to the keywords of articles, post, categories, and tags on your site and send the user directly to an appropriate page.

Now there are lot of other ways to configure this (i.e. show a potential list of posts etc.) but I like the simplicity of the base functionality (i.e. push to the appropriate post) for small sites like this one, and will see how it fares long-term.

Here at Raine HQ we have just hit a monster of a milestone. Our keyword database just rolled over the 100 million mark, now that's a huge bunch of keywords in anybody's book, but we are not just collecting keywords...

Over the last few months we have been building up our infrastructure and sending out our bots to collect a whole array of data about the keywords, from relational info (LSI), to full search and competition counts. Think of it as a reverse Market Samurai. You put in the numbers you want and it brings you back a list of keywords that match!

Instant niche discovery

Now I am not sure when, or even IF I am ever going to put this out there, but I will be sending out some great niche ideas on Twitter v.soon. To get these, all you need to do is follow @NicheIdeas, I will be accepting follow requests real soon.

I have just added support for Twitter Connect in the blog so you no longer have to fill in a form or register to post... I used this plugin to add the functionality but am not entirely happy as I want one solution to support Google Connect, Facebook Connecct, and Twitter Connect. Looks like I am going to have to write one. (would love to have this done for the Thirty Day Challenge this year)

Ok, I am probably boring you to death now with this re-design, but I have just added a gradient below the mast and above the footer. This adds focus to the content and leads the eye in the appropriate direction. It also adds depth to the content below and above it. (oh yes, and it also looks cool).

I have just implemented the new *dark* header and mast style on the site. There will be multiple sizes for the mast for different sections of the site , a large one for the main home page which will show featured content, and smaller ones for the other pages. I really wanted to make these masts contrast with the rest of the page that they are on.

The new menu implements an effect which blurs all the other menu options when one is hovered over. I thinks this fits with the slightly tech feel to the mast and stands out from typical menu design. Next thing to do is play with the footer of the site to get it to fit with the top.

One of the first places I start when designing any site is the font style and color. Now for text and post headers we are restricted to the standard operating system fonts but for pullouts, special headlines, promotions, masts etc. we can use graphics, which means we can use any font we choose.

A font can define the whole style of a site, and after much searching I have decided on this one.

Live feedback is good. Really appreciate all the emails I have received so far. I have opened up commenting without registration at your request (see, feedback is cool)... this is evolving design.

Normally when I build a web site I keep everything hidden away until I release it to the world, but as this is my new site I thought I would open up the design process so that you could see this site evolve as I test out various things from concept to completion.

Not sure how many people will actually see this but it is up and out there anyway. Please feel free to comment and break things around here

Dan