Intricate patterns are big right now in design. They can make your boring run of the mill design look stunning, and give you the opportunity to include textures and shapes in your design that might not have been included. However, detailed patterns can often be difficult to create, which is why I was happy when I ran across PatternHead.

PatternHead is a stock pattern website that sells intricate vector patterns for only $5 each. Because each design is vector, you can use them on your website, in a print brochure (up to 200,000 prints) or even get them printed into real life wallpaper or gift wrap. All the patterns are seamless – meaning they can be repeated an unlimited number of times.

And if you're looking for something original, PatternHead also offers custom design services starting at only $100 – which is not too bad for an original piece of art for your design. Check it out at http://www.patternhead.com and be sure to let me know in the comments of any other places you like to get pattern designs.

For those of you unfamiliar with egaroo.com and bla.st, they are both visual web directories - with egaroo using banners, and bla.st using a custom business card sized format. Both offer the ability to add your own image and link to your site for free, but one of them comes out on top. Measuring my traffic between April 9 and June 15 (the day since Citrik Acid has been posted on both sites) I came up with the following results.

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Web statistics are big right now. In fact, if you don't have good statistics software installed chances are you aren't optimizing your website properly. I have been fortunate enough to use Google Analytics since it launched, but I have always found the interface to be cluttered and hard to use. Fortunately, there is a new player in the market.

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There is a new avatar-creation website in town, meez.com. While the site isn't absolutely new (it was launched at the end of March 2006), Meez lets you create a 3D animated character of yourself, letting you export it as an image at varying size levels -- full body or just head shots.

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On June 26, 2006, a new shopping search engine called Jellyfish launched in the United States. The difference between Jellyfish and other generic shopping portals such as Pricegrabber and Bizrate, is the advertising does not run off of a Pay Per Click system (PPC), but rather a Value Per Action (VPA) advertising scheme.

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