I stumbled upon this incredible Photoshop image created by Bert Monroy. After some 2000 hours and 15,000 Photoshop layers, he created this incredibly realistic image of Damen Station on Chicago’s Blue Line. It’s definitely worth a quick look. Maybe even a long look.

View the image here.

Google Checkout is now live. The service is something of a PayPal competitor but depending on whose analysis you read it may or may not directly compete. From what I read it seems certain to compete with PayPal.

Google Checkout could be a great e-commerce solution for your clients. Small clients with few products can use “Buy Now” buttons to sell products online. Larger clients with hundreds or thousands of products and an existing shopping cart system can use Checkout’s more sophisticated functionality to offer an even better shopping experience.

As a consumer/shopper I see these key benefits to using Google Checkout. If Google Checkout gains traction among more sellers, it’ll put pressure on your clients who sell online to offer this payment method too.

1. Use one account (your Google Checkout account) to purchase at many websites
2. Avoid getting more spam from places where you shop online
3. Track all orders in one place (rather than visiting the various sites from which you purchased)

For sellers there are a few attractive features beyond the ability to quickly setup Google Checkout on a website. Google’s fees are pretty reasonable at 2.0% + 0.20 per transaction. Also, for every $1 a seller spends on AdWords, Google will credit the seller $10 in transaction fees. So…spend more money on advertising (Google’s main revenue stream) and they’ll make it up to you when you make a sell.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly online merchants adopt Google Checkout as a payment solution.

View the Google Checkout product tour page here.

Do you ever have potential clients who use a hugely-successful company as their frame of reference for what they want to achieve?

We’re often approached with a request that goes something like this:

“We’re starting a company that will sell widgets online. It’s going to be revolutionary. How much would you charge to build our website? It doesn’t need to be complicated. Kind of like an Amazon.com or something simple like that. We just need to sell the widgets.” Read the rest of this entry »

Found this link to a list of the Top Ten Stock Photography Cliches. Pretty funny stuff. I swear I’ve already seen all 10 photos on other sites while browsing the web this morning.

View the list here.

I found a good article this morning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and web design. The article explains some of the friction between the two camps and offers some good suggestions for designing a website that is search-engine friendly.

Read the full article here.