With the new Web site I’m developing drawing nearer to its public debut, and with the entire backend being written from scratch by me, I’ve become concerned with optimizing the output as much as possible.

While searching for some resources the other night (I was mainly looking for a Firefox add-on that would display a page’s load time, the way Netscape used to do - the only one I found has not been updated to work with FF3, yet), I came across two interesting resources.

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Our sister site, CenterNetworks, unveiled a new Web site design late last week. I must admit that, though I never really had any problems with the previous design, I think the new one is a real upgrade. The new design features cooler colors, working within the blue and green spectrum, and a slightly more intuitive layout. The ads seem a little less obtrusive and more of the items people are apt to use on a regular basis are easier to find. Let me know what you think of the new design, especially if you had experience with previous incarnations of the CN design.

I came across a very amusing and disturbingly accurate post the other day on a blog I frequent. The content of the post deals with how to diplomatically deal with the barrage of requests you get for “front page exposure” at an institution of higher learning.

I’m not sure how much of this translates to the corporate world, but this is a common occurrence at many colleges and universities.

Thankfully, I don’t deal with this at my job nearly as much as Drew seems to.

Facebook has unveiled a new look. The color scheme and basic design are still basically the same, but the layout is actually drastically different. Comparison screen shots after the break.

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It seems that I am seeing more and more news and posts about plagiarized songs. You can’t go to the movie theaters and watch an original movie any more. With a few very rare exceptions (Metalocalypse, for one), television is a vast wasteland of unoriginal, uninspired ideas. Web sites (especially the news sites) all look the same nowadays.

With all this rehashing and regurgitating of ideas, why should logos be any exception? They’re not. Here are a few posts (anyone catch the irony in this post?) detailing some of the more aggregious logo copies (not all of them are actually ripoffs, but they still look strikingly similar):

• DataPortability Project Sued by RedHat
• Red Cross vs. Twiddict
• When logos look alike

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I visited the main Web site for the Novell companies the other day, and was fairly impressed by the design of the home page. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the menu is hidden until you mouseover (poor choice for usability), but I was impressed by the overall design.

The site makes very good use of Flash, and seems to have optimized the Flash items extremely well. You won’t hear me toot the horn for Flash usage very often, but Novell’s Web site impressed me very much. When you have a chance, you should pop on over and check it out.

I was especially impressed by the home page of the main site and by the SuSE Linux pages. I am honestly shocked at just how quickly the pages load, even with the large Flash objects on each one.