We know you love the Directory Journal. And do you know what? We love our visitors and customers too. We work hard to bring you great links and content. Our designer did an outstanding job at setting the Directory Journal apart in the Web directory industry. We get it. We’re flattered when people try to emulate us. But please…. Stop stealing from us! Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but theft is not.

It has recently come to our attention that quite a few Web directories ripped off the Directory Journal design. The directories we’ve been notified about are listed below (although the majority of the sites have now changed their templates after being contacted by us about the infringement).

• MaxLinks.org
• LiveDir.net
• Papdir.com
• Petsdir.com

To give you a better idea of the ripped off design work, you can compare a screenshot of the Directory Journal and that of MaxLinks.org below.

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I had a talk with my several fellow designers and artists about building their own website and an interesting thing  came up, they don’t know where to start. Obviously, they want to show the best of their works, have the website clean and uncluttered,  user friendly and of course unique and speaking about the author. No need to say that simplicity sells, so in our todays post we decided to study several most popular and successful approaches towards simplicity in design of a website home page for designers, illustrators, photographers, painters and other people of art.

Tip 1. Splash page can save it all.

If you feel that your home page turned out to be not that simple and balanced as you wish, make a splash page, a very simple one. Find some of your creatives that people like most and place it somewhere on page (the less expected the location is the better). The feeling of simplicity from the splash page will stay with the website visitor once he launches on your home page. Same thing about your artwork, even if the website itself seems somewhat disappointing, the great work on the home page can save it all.

Arturo Elena. Graphic design and illustration.
http://www.arturoelena.com

Candybird. Graphic design and illustration.
http://candybird.free.fr

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Ian Francis

Website: www.ifrancis.co.uk
Mixed media painting,emotion in every line. Ian Francis works most productive at night, spending a lot of time watching TV/films, reading books and looking around the internet while creating a new piece of art.

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Adam Cvijanovic

Website: www.bellwethergallery.com
Adam Cvijanovic lives in New-York. He had multiple exibitions all over the world and every time his works strike imagination.

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Stella Im Hultberg

Website: www.stellaimhultberg.com
Naked sensual girls everywhere, on drawings, paintings, sketches. Stella Im Hultberg* is a painter currently living and working in new-York is aiming to explore the side of human nature that is suppressed or unspoken in most people.

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Flash web designing means using flash to design the web sites. Flash is a multimedia format, a web technology that allows graphic movement and animation. Flash makes the designers more flexible and gives them grounds to create animations and develop interactive movies and images that can be kept in the website that makes the website more attractive and interactive.

If you want to give a big impression to your visitors and get them occupied in your site then getting flash in your website is the answer. However, it is important not to forget that your visitors visit your site for certain information. So it is important that the use of flash doesn’t distract your main intention. You should use a quality piece of flash. Make sure that the flash doesn’t contain anything that doesn’t not match with the other content of your website and it doesn’t give wrong impression about your website. The flash animation you use should not be long and tedious. They should give quick information and gone. Besides bigger flash need long time to download and you don’t want your visitors waiting for a flash animation to download. (more…)