Crenk

Marketing material costs for freelancers and new businesses can be an expensive investment for start-ups with little money. Sure it’s said “to make money you have to spend money,” but what if you didn’t have to spend a dime?

Do I have your attention yet? If you’re looking for a “quick and dirty” way to get yourself off the ground and utilize the full capability of print work to market your talents, look no further then BrandDoozie. This web-based design application puts the creative tools in your hands. You can design postcards, business cards, letterhead, and other important documents with clicks and drag-n-drops.

The only downside is the limited flexibility of the application, but the service is free, so the concern is moot. The ease of use and quick return make it possible for you to have marketing material in a matter of hours as opposed to weeks. Sure you’re going to sacrifice some of the self creative ideas you might have, but for a freelancer such as myself, I was able to create collateral the same day as a major networking event.

The interface is easy to use, and users are walked through step by step in the creative process. You can save your work mid-project, and even store your completed files in folders. Options to establish your brand, designing a logo, and accessing stock photos are all apart of the experience working within BrandDoozie.

It’s definitely worth jump starting your company’s image with this amazing brand establishing tool. If you need something in a flash, direct yourself to BrandDoozie and get yourself noticed!

Lately I’ve been doing more and more web design and with that comes graphic design, photo placement, text alignment, so on and so forth. While I’m building a site out, I often find myself needing to know the exact distance in a column or row so that I can size a graphic or photo to fit properly. This is where PixelStick comes into play.

This tiny Mac only piece of software will show you distance and angles shown your screen, perfect for web developers needing to know how wide something is to fit a proper graphic in. Prior to using this tool, I used to screen grab a site, open in Photoshop and then crop down to determine the distance. Now all of this is gone!

Anyone who does web or graphic design work should give PixelStick a try, and it’s totally for free. The only requirement is Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

A month or so ago Crenk.com got a complete redesign and branding and since then I have never really thought about adding it to design galleries, mainly because I think our site is quite ugly. That being said we did get inclusion into WeloveWP.com and since then they have been driving some good traffic to Crenk. Therefore, I thought I would,  head to whole lead of CSS galleries and submit our new design. I also then thought I might as well make a list of all design CSS galleries so our readers could also submit their designs. Thus, here is the definitive CSS gallery list:

• Boxed Css | Submit Page | Alexa: 100,516
• Best Web Gallery | Submit Page | Alexa: 28,860
• Css 2.0 | Submit Page | Alexa: 146,497
• Css Artillery | Submit Page | Alexa: 148,361
• Css Band | Submit Page | Alexa: N/A
• Css Based | Submit Page | Alexa: 87,589
• Css Beauty | Submit Page | Alexa: 22,044
• Css Clip | Submit Page | Alexa: 122,760
• Css Collection | Submit Page | Alexa: 197,565
• Css Container | Submit Page | Alexa: 431,106
• Css Creme | Submit Page | Alexa: 59,235
• Css Daddy | Submit Page | Alexa: 251,555
• Css-Design-Yorkshire | Submit Page | Alexa: 287,684
• Css Drive | Submit Page | Alexa: 22,763
• Css Em | Submit Page | Alexa: 368,449
• Css Glance | Submit Page | Alexa: 188,097
• Css Heaven | Submit Page | Alexa: 90,604
• Css Hive | Submit Page | Alexa: 327,985
• Css Import | Submit Page | Alexa: 115,927
• Css Impress | Submit Page | Alexa: 282,027
• Css Leak | Submit Page | Alexa: 489,150
• Css Love | Submit Page | Alexa: 614,893
• Css Mania | Submit Page | Alexa: 12,917
• Css Snap | Submit Page | Alexa: 380,963
• Css Star | Submit Page | Alexa: 290,830
• Css Vault | Submit Page | Alexa: 45,613
• Css-Warfare | Submit Page | Alexa: N/A
• Css-Website | Submit Page | Alexa: 150,147
• Css Zone | Submit Page | Alexa: 631,032
• Daily Slurp | Submit Page | Alexa: 173,843
• Dark-i | Submit Page | Alexa: 304,925
• Design Creme | Submit Page | Alexa: 523,932
• Design Expanse | Submit Page | Alexa: 531,762
• Designs Creme | Submit Page | Alexa: 476,731
• Design Shack | Submit Page | Alexa: 68,887
• Design Snips | Submit Page | Alexa: 468,389
• Genuine Style | Submit Page | Alexa: 500,244
• Inspiration King | Submit Page | Alexa: 413,481
• Lookom | Submit Page | Alexa: 530,714
• Nice StyleSheet | Submit Page | Alexa: 762,742
• One Star Gallery | Submit Page | Alexa: 844,318
• Screenalicious | Submit Page | Alexa: 91,451
• Siti Web Design Gallery | Submit Page | Alexa: 317,295
• Style Gala | Submit Page | Alexa: 36,454
• The Best Designs | Submit Page | Alexa: 69,812
• Css Thesis | Submit Page | Alexa: 571,619
• Unmatched Style | Submit Page | Alexa: 74,695
• Web Creme | Submit Page | Alexa: 24,392
• Dimix Web Gallery | Submit Page | Alexa: 1,291,619
• Website-Gallery | Submit Page | Alexa: 135,719

Company Name: BrightEgg

Type of Industry: Design and Development Platform

Based: USA

Founded: 17th December 2007

Competitors: Synthasite and SiteKreator

About: Brightegg is a powerful web platform that enables businesses to build, manage and market a feature-rich, highly professional website at a cost-effective price. Joined by a community of talented designers, Brightegg targets organizations that want to grow online without spending thousands of dollars or hiring a full-time programmer, web designer and marketing expert.

Brightegg and their experienced designer community offer premier, sophisticated web designs that businesses use to build their website. Once launched, businesses can easily manage their entire website in-house, market themselves using a multitude of features and collect leads and client information through a dedicated database.

Crenk Thoughts: BrightEgg is great for users who want design their own sites in less than 30 minutes. Currently, users can receive a free 30 day trial with the service and then it is quite affordable, costing less than $20 per month. This service is really not for a tech savy user, but tailored to meet the needs of an existing company looking to try to make a small presence on the web.

I would like to welcome everyone to the new Crenk design. Before I run through the new features of the design I would like to thank our designer and coder, Astrit. Astrit has a great company which really helped us make our ideas become reality.

As you will notice with the new Crenk the design and branding has completely changed and become a lot more simplistic. The logo and tag line has remained the same as well as the highlighted red colour. However, in terms of basic navigation there are a lot of changes. Navigation now is more recognisable on this design and each channel is easier to navigate into. Additionally, you will noticed that we now have our most recent article list in the left column. This is aimed to help making content easier to find within the design.

The other major changes are in terms of advertising. Crenk now has a top 728 x 90 banner in which acknowledge some of our main sponsors. Additionally, a 300 x 250 banner can be found in the right column, as well as a 160 x 600 at the bottom of the left column. Crenk is very thankful for our sponsors because they are the ones that help us stay in business. Finally, we are going to open 125 x 125 advertising which will be located in the right column above the 300 banner. If anyone is interested in one of those positions, please drop us an email and let us know.

Finally, I would like to welcome our new contributor Abdylas, who will be adding to our You’ve Been Crenked section which focuses on startup reviews. Keep and eye out for more contributors in the near future, additionally if you are interested in joining the Crenk team please drop me an email and let us know why you would be a good addition to the team.

Well I hope you all like the new design, but im sure that is not going to happen. If you have any ideas or feedback you would like to add, it would be much appreciated.

In the last three months we have had a lot of changes here at Crenk. Our previous theme was personalised and since we now have Ade on the team it was a good time to move from a personal weblog style to a more commercial theme.

I have never thought about Crenk being a pure commercial entity. It has long been my personal weblog and I would never want it to be seen as just a stupid money making blog that is trying to earning as much in revenue as it can per month. Since on the new theme I have placed Adsense, this will not be a permanent fixture, just a stop gap until I can arrange some nice in-house placements.

The colour scheme on Crenk has changed and some bought some much needed branding to the site.

Please bear with us as we make a few changes over the coming days. If you have any suggestions or comments about the new theme, please let us know.

Thanks and hope you like the new theme.

Crenk Team

Interesting news has come our of Technorati today: former boss David Sifry has announced changes that will help bloggers again, like in the old days of Technorati.

Changes include:

1. Change of design and results on search pages.
2. Authority filtering. You can now narrow your results based on authority, which really only goes so far when tryign to evaluate the usefulness a blog, or if it is a spam blog.
3. Charts. You can now see the popularity of a word over time.
4. New Server Farm. They recently moved from 365 Main to a new colocation center.

It is good news to hear that Technorati is back and trying to satisfy their core customer base that helped them get to where they are today. Recent redesigns have completely turned away several numbers of bloggers from the service and although these changes are going in the right direction, im not too sure if they will be able to get all the bloggers back. Time will tell! Technorati stick to your core customer base, cause Google owns the rest of the blog search market!

Im sure this bit of news is most probably worthless, but PayPal has a new look! Paypal have been reaching out to some of their merchants and letting them know (via emails) that the company is adopting a new look in the coming weeks. It already seems to slowly be taking shape!

Digg’s Kevin Rose has announced plans for a Digg facelift this week.

The change comes in the form of a home page that can be viewed in three forms: just news, just videos, and both at once.

The new home page will “pave the way” for Digg to start cataloging images, which will be rolled out around October.

Digg also plans to overhaul the comments section so it’s “easier and more lightweight.”

Orkutis rolling out a new design this morning, starting with a select number of users. It’s a much-needed change to the previously ugly social network that became unintentionally popular in Brazil. Apart from Brazilians does anyone else actually use Orkut? It is so surprising that Google, the leaders in many markets have never really tried to make an impact on the social networking aspect of the internet!