At DynamiX, we love nothing more than getting deep into statistics to find out what trends are taking place, what small changes can make a significant impact to the results gained on a particular page, etc. But this one is just plain easy to track, and is very helpful in determining when your site has reached Google’s index.

To explain what to do, let’s use an example that just happened. We recently published an article on our business site about one of our clients, and published it at 10:52am.

Since we are subscribed to Google Alerts, we are informed “as it happens” when a new page has been indexed by Google. It’s not always perfect, but it does a decent job. In this case, our e-mail came in at 11:00am, just eight minutes after we first published the article:

It’s not always this cut and dry, but tools like Google Alerts will often give you a pretty good indication of when something new has hit search engines.

We just came across a great site for visualizing your blog content. It’s called Wordle, and it’s delightfully easy to use. Just keep in mind that Wordle creations are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License and all images must be attributed to http://www.wordle.net/.

With all that out of the way, here’s ours!

The program allows for a lot of customization, including color, positioning and fonts. To get even more creative, you can play with the Advanced version of Wordle, which allows you to choose the weight of words yourself.

After a little tweaking and some custom colors, here’s how ours looks:

And here’s one we created using the colors of one of our clients, Injected Engineering:

Try it for yourself and link us to your finished creations in the comments!

Keeping up with web technology resources can be of tremendous benefit to any good website designer. As an organization, the DynamiX team frequents all of these sites with great regularity, and flag/categorize important articles for later reference. In so doing, we are able to stay in touch with the latest trends and upcoming technologies that will continue to change the face of the web, and are able to ensure we are continuing to move forward on our own work. As you either already know or will soon learn, even a short stagnation in skill growth can spell doom in the website design world. It’s a keep moving ahead at full speed or quit now business.

Resource: Smashing Magazine

Of course it goes without saying that no article would be complete without including Smashing Magazine as an essential resource for web designers, and we have given it proper respect by making it the first on our list. If you haven’t found these guys yet, you are in for a treat. smashingmagazine.com

We don’t mean to toot our own horn, but we are proud to have been featured in Smashing Magazine ourselves twice. Once for DynamiX Labs, and a second for our work on Blue Hat Design (bluehatonline.com).

Why We Love Them:
Aside from their aforementioned featuring of our work, Smashing Magazine is an excellent resource for virtually everything you may need as a website designer. The articles are well thought out and loaded with example imagery and links, but the site doesn’t end at the articles. Patterns, brushes, icons and even entire themes are available for free, and when I say “free” I am speaking of commercial use in most cases. This is a welcome change from the myriad of sites out there that simply grab anything that says “free for personal use” and throw it into an article hoping for some quick traffic. Drop these guys into your favorite RSS reader today, and I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed.

Resource: Webdesigner Depot

Why We Love Them:
It probably boils down to the level of time and research that goes into every article we read from these guys. Nothing was just pushed out the door just to get it up on the site, it’s all very well researched and with exceptional examples. But then you can discover that for yourself here: webdesignerdepot.com

Resource: n.design studio

Why We Love Them:
Not only do these guys know design better than most, but they sift through the mess that is the Internet to find many great apps and websites. Often their posts are no more than a paragraph in length, yet they still manage to say all that needs to be said. ndesign-studio.com

Now It’s Your Turn:

Our list is intentionally short (we left out about 17 other blogs that we frequent often), what resources have you found useful? Share in the comments!

There are literally thousands of icon sets out there. Some are free for personal use, some free for commercial use and many are paid sets. We often come across sites that feature great icon sets that they claim as “free,” with no explanation as to whether they are personal or commercial licenses (they are often only free for personal use).

To clear things up and provide icons that you can actually use for your projects, we have compiled our own list of only the best icon sets that we could find that are all completely free for COMMERCIAL use. Enjoy!

E-Commerce Set:

License (from the downloads page of their web site):
“Available e-commerce icons may be used in any projects, whether commercial or private nature. Please refer the ZIP archive with shop symbols not directly, but I would appreciate a link to this post. Thank you.”

Download it now! http://playground.ebiene.de/2316/free-ecommerce-icons/

Circular Icon Set:

License:
“Circular is free to use for whatever you like without attribution – the only thing we ask is that you don’t distribute them yourself!”

Download it now! http://prothemedesign.com/circular-icons/

Stationary Icon Set:

License:
“100% Free”

Download it now! http://www.dezinerfolio.com/freebie/stationery-free-vector-icon-set

Bright Icon Set:

License:
“You can use Bright! for personal and commercial projects at free of charge. What I only need in return is your comments and backlinks, if possible. Do not redistribute or sell any icons of this set. Do not provide the direct download link nor upload Bright! onto other servers for your own share (Please link to this article instead – I deserve some traffic!).If you want to spread the words, just link to this article.”

Download it now! http://min.frexy.com/article/bright_a_free_icon_set/

Project Icon Set:

License:
“completely FREE… (even commercial use)”

Download it now! http://www.dezinerfolio.com/freebie/project-icon-set

Shiny Icon Set:

License:
“This free set includes 20 icons that you can use for both personal and commercial projects. Resell and distribution is not allowed.”

Download it now! http://www.doublejdesign.co.uk/2009/11/a-free-icon-set-shiny/

The Ultimate Free Icon Set:

License:
“You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.”

Download it now! http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/18/freebie-release-quartz-icon-set/

As with any other freebie, we highly suggest reviewing the license on these sites directly as it may have changed since this article was written. If you catch one that is no longer accurate, do let us know!

We’d love to hear about your favorite free (commercial) icon sets, leave us yours in the comments!