The representatives from Google, Ask, Aol, Yahoo! is going to be there. Besides, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang is going to talk tomorrow though I suspect that he will talk about Yahoo!’s anniversary only (Y! is 10 years old already!).

For the full schedule go to jupiterevents.

Have you ever seen Sqr Egg? Me neither.

Cubism 5 contest at worth1000.com represents some examples: SqrEgg

You don’t have to be Sir Francis Drake to know that navigation is a secret weapon. You can feel the difference between sleek and uninhibited movement nowadays found in a well-designed website and the foundering and unsatisfying feeling you get at any listing or sinking URL. Template #7596 is as good as any savvy ship that sailed under Drake. It’s a stylish and light HTML vortal – or as some say, Vertical Enterprise Portal — featuring a standard left-side menu that leaves no questions about navigation.

Vertical Enterprise Portals are in general very particular things requiring much time, much attention, and much devotion to a single, and usually commercial, idea. Keeping your site fast and easy for visitors to navigate can keep your head above water. Portal sites that fail are those that a) do not help the visitor to locate information and products b) fail to keep the visitor on the site c) give visitors no reason to return. Shopping should take as little time as possible, folks. E-business shops are little more than ethereal grocery stores. There are as many ways to organize shops as there are shops to be organized. The main thing to keep in mind is economy: the economy of time. Speed and convenience sells. Since there is no perfect navigation system, however, your sales will depend on your skills in tweaking out your site to meet the needs of your audience.

Having said enough about vortal navigation, we can return to the main question: what is a vortal?

According to Webopedia, a VORTAL, or Vertical Industry Portal, is a portal Web site that provides information and resources for a particular industry. Vortals are the Internet’s way of catering to consumers’ focused-environment preferences. They typically provide news, research and statistics, discussions, newsletters, online tools, and many other services that educate users about a specific industry.

Indeed, it is believed that as the Web becomes a standard tool for business, vortals will join and maybe replace general portal sites like AOL and Yahoo! as common gateways to the Internet.

For more information on building and running your own vortals and portals, visit these websites.
Portal/Vortal Tutorial
How to Design and Build Compelling Portal Interfaces

Build Your First Portal
Portal and Vortal Development

MyTemplateStorage – an affiliate center of TemplateMonster.com released dynamic banners. These banners display one (or two) TemplateMonster’s featured templates. As featured templates change every working-day you will have a banner with a new pic daily with no efforts.
Currently there are five designs available for banners.

Though it sounds cool and will probably be popular among the affiliates. These banners do not work correctly yet. Take a look at featured templates at templatemonster.com and at the featured templates displayed with a banner on one of their affiliate sites.

Hope mytemplatestorage.com’s team will fix it soon.

The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag has been released!

digital-web.com appears with a book review and interviews with Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag.

The summary on all the above:

1. You will probably dream about the CSS Zen Garden text and code because of seeing it so often while reading.
2. Dave Shea appears to be an artichoke.
3. Lots of other stuff (both funny and seriouse).

The book hasn’t appeared on Amazon yet but it surely will soon.

Well… The results do not inspire actually…

I’ve managed to find some blogs on templates but none of them is of extreme interest. The results are like these:

Crown Templates Blog – Chris is blogging there. The blog is on his website where he sells templates (well-know templates, you may see them not only with his website, but he works under his own brand so I be quiet).
Basic Blog by BasicTemplates.com – official blog of BasicTemplates.com. The blog is to support the company. They post regularly (several times a day) there notifying about added templates. The templates are cheap and extremely monotonous.
Website Template – website-templates-directory.com’s support blog. Filled in with stupid commercial ads and sponsored links only. Worth to be deleted – not visited.
$ 3.99 websites – stupid commercial “black hat� blog with broken links.
Make a Website – commercial blog again. Links full of keywords to web-design-template.info an affiliate site of boxedart.com? Nothing of interest.

Just commercial blogs and some spam blogs. That’s it.

Web Design Library – an educational resource of Template Monster redesigned its home page. Now there’re 4 featured materials with short description on it. Right under the featured materials they placed all today’s added materials (headline with no special description).
Oh, and they moved “Site of the Day� from the very bottom to the very top. Now you don’t need to scroll-and-scroll-and-scroll down to view it.

Nice changes as for me. Now it’s easier to find new materials. Besides, they’ve added ‘Editor’s Pick’ - hope they will mark there materials of real interest. We’ll see…

Very nice template. And absolutely free of charge.

Download it from here

Stephen and Joshua with Typographica released top pics from the fonts of 2004. One of the most interesting in my opinion is Kvavika by Eric Olson’s Process Type Foundry:

But there’re some other interesting displays. Check them out here.

If you search for Template Monster with Google you would notice a couple of sites which use “templatemonster” as keywords at Google Ads. The latest two I’ve seen were perfectory.com and boxedart.com. As far as I understood perfectory uses the same templates as Template Monster (I don’t know exactly if they are affiliates or resellers) this can explain why they use templatemonster as a keyword but what goes beyond my explanation is the fact that Template Monster’s competitor - Boxed Art uses its competitor’s name to attract visitors.

How much they will earn for their brand recognition and for TemplateMonster’s one? It’s not only misleading. It’s exactly what SEO experts call ‘black hat marketing’.