piksels

I couldn’t watch this video just once. I had to watch it several times to completely absorb it. Partly due to the fast paced visuals, partly due to the great song (any one know the artist/title?), but mostly due to the great composition of the clip. The video, created by Circus Family Amsterdam (motion graphics and video studio), is basically a one minute portfolio; and personally, I’m sold:

7 Quick tips to improve your online portfolio:

1. If you got it, flaunt it.

Yes, it sounds corny, but make sure your best work shows up first. Don’t expect viewers to dig through your links to find the work you are most proud of. There is nothing worse than designers with great talent where you have to crawl through the dirt to find the treasure.

2. The one-two punch.

If you are applying for a job or position some where, don’t ever expect your portfolio to get more than 2 minutes of true viewing. Most people will have made up their mind whether they like your portfolio within the first 15 seconds, if you haven’t convinced them by then, it will be hard to change their mind afterwards (Again, point 1). Only stellar portfolios get true ‘air time’ and return visitors.

3. Little to no text.

Don’t expect viewers to read large bodies of text which may accompany the images in the portfolio. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if the images don’t clearly tell the story, find a creative way to get your message across.

4. Range

Make sure your portfolio shows off several different talents of yours. Don’t appear to be too specialized in one area, or you might miss out on other opportunities. Demonstrate your familiarity with different mediums, areas, techniques, etc.

5. Ambition

If you’ve got their attention so far, keep it. Make sure you let them know that you are planning on growing and going places. Maybe this can be presented in a short text, or something creative like mock-ups or sketches for some futuristic ingenious idea of yours.

6. Tell your story

If they are truly interested in you, make sure they can learn a little more about you. Even if this is just by adding your resume, you never know who may be watching!

7. Contact info

Make sure they can get in touch with you, add a contact form, leave an email address.

Mint vs Google Analytics
Five days ago I decided to purchase a copy of Mint. For those who aren’t familiar with Mint, it is a web analytics program (tracks visitors, referrals, popular pages, etc).
I had read about Mint several times, and even visited their website once or twice before, but never decided it was worth forking up $30 for, until now.

I’ve been using GoogleAnalytics for about 1,5 years now, and it is truly great. There is so much to love about GoogleAnalytics: it’s free, it’s accurate, it’s relatively easy to use, and it’s possibilities are endless. You can track visitors, traffic sources, keywords, content, marketing campaigns, etc. You can do so much with it, that it is unbelievable that it is free.

Mint can’t even do half of what GoogleAnalytics can, and costs $30 more, so why did I switch? Because I was curious. But luckily they ended up being the best 30 dollars I spent last week, and here’s why:

Fast & Lightweight
Mint is fast. Very fast. Both for tracking visitors as well as displaying data. The visitor tracking script is less than half the size of Google’s, so for the people worried about bogging down their website with nasty scripts, Mint is definitely for you.
From the moment I open my browser, using Mint it takes me less than 8 seconds to display all data I am looking for (honestly), and it shows it to me all on one page. This is truly refreshing after having to spend a minute or two going through Google Analytics.

Instant updates (yes, instant)
Unlike GoogleAnalytics, Mint’s data is stored on your own MySQL server. And every time you refresh your analytics you get fresh results. Sure this may not be important for many people, but having to wait in 4 hour intervals for GoogleAnalytics to update may be annoying for some people.

The great thing about this as well is that you can have hourly reports and see during which time of the day you have the most visitors.

And here another example of hourly reports:

Local Data
Having data on your own server means you have complete access to it. Trying to make a third party application for GoogleAnalytics is quite difficult as they haven’t opened up their API (yet). But this is great for PHP or flash Gurus who want to make some nice live visualizations of the data.

Plugins, 3rd Party Apps, Themes
Using Mint reminds me of Wordpress. Similar to Wordpress you download plugins and install them through the dashboard. Good examples of 3rd party apps are Widgets for OSX (or Gadgets for Vista) which allow you track the number of visitors straight from your desktop (very handy).

But I think my favourite plugin is the Feedburner plugin, and I love it twice as much because Google still hasn’t gotten around implementing it into GoogleAnalytics (even though they own Feedburner now…)

Oversight
Displaying all of the information on one page allows you to easily and quickly find anything you are looking for. You can customize the order in which the information is displayed, and you can choose which information you want to hide.

This is what it looks like on my wide-screen monitor:

Bea-u-ti-ful!
Mint looks good, no doubt about it.
And yes, functionality > looks… but Mint is definitely a sight for sore eyes.

But it’s not all peachy…
Mint does cost $30 dollars per site, and is therefore not for everyone.

Conclusion
Purchasing Mint was the best $30 dollars I spent last month, but mostly because it truly matched what I was looking for.
Anyone who uses the advanced features in GoogleAnalytics will miss them in Mint. But if you are like most people who are only interested in tracking the number of visitors, traffic sources, popular pages, visitor location, browser/platform/resolution, etc then Mint is definitely for you.

I highly recommend Mint for anyone (with $30 bucks) who is looking for a fast, accurate, lightweight replacement for Google Analytics.

Hey everyone, today I decided that Piksels.com is going to be offering 2 months of free advertising (125×125 image ads) for a maximum of 3 websites.

If you’ve got an interesting website which you want me to advertise, just leave a comment below (make sure to fill in your email and http address so I can get back to you) and I will take a look at it.

After looking through everyone’s websites, I’ll pick out my 3 favourites and set up the ads.

The advertisements will be placed in the sidebar, replacing the “Network” section.
The ads will be images (jpg or animated gif) sized 125×125

(I’ll make my choice by August 13th)

Currently piksels.com getting about 1000-1500 uniques per day, and now that I am finding some more time to write again it is steadily increasing.

And if I some sites really are interesting I’ll mention them in my next post

Specifics:

• No illegal / adult / offensive content
• Preferably websites related to technology / web / etc…
• Direct link only (no forwarding)
• The advertisement will be hosted on my server
• The advertisement may be animated, but must not be annoying =)
• The advertisement must be visually appealing
• I retain the right to remove the advertisement

That’s it, hope you all had a good weekend =)

-joel