One site I like to visit is tvguide.com.  I find it a perfectly good waste of time to check out news stories about shows I like to watch.  On top of the normal ads tvguide.com has around the perimeter of their site, they essential advertise other articles right in the middle of the current article.  Sometimes these links can be confusing because they appear to be a part of the story you’re reading.

Another site I check frequently for news is cnn.com.  Like most websites, CNN has ads all over their webpages.  Once again, the amount of advertising makes it difficult to read the actual content.  The image below is purposely shrunk in order to get an overview of what a webpage with a simple news article on cnn.com looks like.

I discovered a great tool that easily gets rid of all the webpage clutter.  It’s called Readability.  Installation is easy.  You simply go to the Readability website and make a favorite/bookmark from the Readability button found there.  Check out the difference in the images below.

Standard Webpage

Same Webpage with Readability

For an overview on installing Readability, check out this video.

Readability – Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

LINK -Readability

Favicons add professional polish to a website, and are easy to create.  All modern browsers have tabs.  This allows you to have multiple sites open in the same window.  The more tabs that are open, the shorter the site’s title becomes.  Regardless of how small a site’s tab gets, the favicon remains.  Whether a site’s tab has been shrunk or not, a favicon will grab someone’s attention much faster than the site’s title.  Most people are drawn to pictures, symbols and logos over words.

Tabs in Internet Explorer

Tabs in Firefox

Tabs in Google Chrome

It costs nothing to create a favicon.  If you don’t have a logo or an image associated with your site, you can always just use a few letters that represent the name of your site or your domain name.

This is the favicon for my site

All one needs to do in order to add a favicon is create a 16×16 image using any image editing program and then save it as an “.ico” file.  If you don’t already have an image editing program and/or don’t have the funds to purchase one, I recommend the well reviewed Gimp.  Gimp is a free image editing program with versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.  To download Gimp, CLICK HERE There are also online tools that can do this for you, such as FAVICON GENERATOR

Check out the video tutorials below for help creating a favicon with Gimp and Favicon Generator.