Baseline: Here are a few key things to think about when it comes to Web site design and management in terms of search results, audience and growth.

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Here's an execise for the reader.  What CMS does this site use? You can find the answer and more here.

Compass Design: Many readers of this blog are one of two types of business, customization/design of Joomla websites or downloadable digital products. Prompted by a chat among some of my colleagues, I'd thought I'd see what people think about an important part an online business - your refund policy.

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DotNetNuke Blog: I believe that Silverlight will drive growth in the DotNetNuke community. Most Silverlight applications will still require membership, authentication and access to data. As many in the DotNetNuke community already know these things are easily provided by leveraging the DotNetNuke framework.

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ThemesWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides for designing Web Themes and Templates. This site intends to ease the web design process by providing tutorials for a large number of systems at a common location.

It is often difficult to find a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant and free information for designing themes and templates; specifically one that covers a wide range of applications. This is where ThemesWiki.org intends to step in. Launched initially with tutorials covering over 20 Content Management Systems, ThemesWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive resource for the theming community, with users generating most of the content.

The number of users browsing the Web from a mobile device continues to rise, yet most mobile web sites are still sub-par.

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"Church websites have come a long way in the past decade. They've gone from being an ugly after thought in the church to something with some importance and style. You can plainly see this on Church Relevances list of the top 75 church websites. As community trends have grown the church has embraced them...We are now in another technological and paradigm shift that is offering up an opportunity for us re-think our church websites. Over the next several posts here let's do just that. To start this off we need to take stock of where we are at with our church websites."

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First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows, perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site - sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

Gadgetopia pointed their readers to a site with a number of screen captures for how the Internet looked like in 1996. Almost a year ago, I posted a screen capture of the first site I did in that era. I'm somewhat pleased that the appearance of my site was no worse than the sites of well known companies. The author brings up the point that you have to consider the technology back then to why sites looked the way they did.

In their defense, the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs.

Most people who were quite active on the Internet in the 1990's shouldn't be surprised with the way the Internet looked back then. I can easily recall the controversy of whether to design sites for 640x480 or 800x600 screens. We were simply limited in how we designed our sites by the technology we were using. However, what was our excuse for not providing better content than what we did?

Confession: I never knew how much there was to Photoshop until my wife, the photographer, decided to move over to the digital age. During the course of our marriage, while she has excelled in the art of digital photography, as well as Photoshop, I have remained the amateur.

Luckily, Corrie Haffly at Sitepoint has started a series of articles for geeks like us who still think all we need on our Websites is any of the eight colors we learned when we were five. (By the way, I got a star on my paper in kindergarten...red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown, and black!)

The visual style that has come to be associated with the term Web 2.0 has exploded in popularity; everywhere you look, corporate sites, web service sites, ecommerce sites, and even personal blogs are making use of clean, minimalist design coupled with fancy graphic effects. If you'd like to jump on the bandwagon, this is the article for you!