Hey guys! Ok. Today has had its fair share of ups and downs. But it had an up that totally surprised me (in a great way!). So today, after locking myself, my wife, and my 14 month old son Landon out of our house, in the rain, and wasting $40 bucks on a 2 minute locksmith, I’m finally back inside! Hooray!!! The first thing i did was text some buddies to see if they were playing Modern Warfare 2. No luck. Next best thing? Aha, let’s pull out the trusty MacBook Pro! And boy am I glad I did! But we will get to that in a few minutes…

Lately I’ve been making some minor changes to 365icon.com to improve its SEO in an attempt to pick up more organic traffic from Google and Bing, and other search engines as well. Aside from that, I use a few different plugins that keep track of daily visits, pageviews and (mainly) referrals because I literally love running this website and interacting with you all. One plugin that i particularly enjoy is Wassup. It has a WordPress dashboard widget that tells me how many people are currently on the site, and where they came from. The great part of that is the simple fact that its in the dashboard and takes two seconds to view. Another great thing about it is that if someone previously typed in a keyword or phrase in Google, then clicked on a 365icon link, it will show that particular url string, allow me to click it, navigate to that exact search query, and see exactly where 365icon.com landed in the Google search results for that particular keyword or key phrase. Nothing revolutionary going on there, but it’s cool and very convenient, nevertheless.

So i did just that. I logged into my WP dashboard, scrolled down to view the current visitors and site referrals, and clicked on a link to one of my visitor’s Google search… and lo and behold! Our somewhat popular post NorthStar iPhone Icons was sitting pretty in the second spot on the first page of Google for keyword “better icon styles for iphone”! Now, I see plenty of our pages ranking daily anywhere between 2nd and 4th placement on the first page of Google for various keywords, so generally this would not have been so exciting. But as i was looking over the site that ranked higher than mine, i glanced down at the sites that ranked directly below us, and… ZOMG! It was Apple.com! Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but they just so happened to be 2 notches below us! LOL So Apple.com’s post was for Facebook icons for the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad that are located in the iTunes store. Ummm… newsflash…they are the creator of the iPhone. No search for “iPhone anything” should yield results that rank higher than Apple.com’s, IMHO. But hey, I’m not complaining!

So aside from this strawberry margarita I’m sipping on right now (no, literally… as i’m typing this post), this has really been the highlight of my night. Outranking Apple.com for an iPhone related keyword on Google is definitely something to remember. I will NEVER delete these sceenshots . Well, thanks for listening to my embellishment! TGIF everyone!!!

View All iPhone Icons

Also view:

How to Change Your Mac Dock Icons

View this post HERE

There’s no doubt that dark websites are becoming more popular day by day. What exactly is a “dark” website? Well, a dark website is a site that utilizes darker background tones and more colorful accent tones. Some people still look down on the idea of having a dark website, saying that they prove to be harder to read for most viewers. I personally love dark websites, which is obvious with one glance at 365icon.com. And apparently, so does Keven from KevenCrafts.com. This week 365icon.com was featured in his post “25 Awesome Dark Website Designs”. I was honored to have my site included in this list. It was my first time visiting his site, and boom, there it was. And to top it off, 365icon is at the top of his list! How awesome?! I started this site to simply keep track of all of my favorite icons that i found from around the web, so this was definitely a cool find. Big thanks, Keven!

What do you like more, light or dark websites, and why? Share your opinion by commenting below.

Today we released an awesome container pack that has a sort of grungy feel, and incredible attention to detail.  This is one of two packs that we are putting out.  We were thinking of putting out the second container pack tomorrow, however, we ultimately decided that might be interpreted as a “wasted” opportunity for our viewers to get a “new” icon pack.   I mean, it’s a new pack, but it’s not a “new” pack, if you know what I mean (two container icons packs, two days in a row???- nah, we’re better than that!).   So we are listing the new pack today in conjunction with the original container icons pack that we put up this morning.  Sort of like a “twofer”.  Then we thought to ourselves “Hey, who doesn’t like a twofer?  Why not give our loyal visitors something extra?”.  So we are now making every tuesday “Twofer Tuesday”.  Every tuesday, we will post two free high quality icons sets instead of one!  We are excited about Twofer Tuesdays, and are thinking of more fun ways to bring new free resources to the design community every day.  Thanks so much for your support.  We have gotten an incredible response in the last week, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for 365icon!

We want your feedback! What do you suggest we do to make 365icon a more fun and resourceful place?

One of the things that stuck out to me when reading interviews with Todd, and when viewing the sites in the BuySellAds network, is that they yield high percentages of targeted ads. That’s a huge factor in my book. I was recently browsing one of my favorite tech blogs and noticed a Colgate banner splashed across the top of the site. Let’s be honest here, a toothpaste ad has no place on a tech blog. It’s untargeted junk. Wasted space. At least, that’s my take on it. So it is a real pleasure to now be a part of the BSA network of ad publishers. I’m looking forward to testing it out and seeing where it goes. The open ad spots should be going up soon. I still need to figure out where they should go, how many there should be, etc. Plus I am still tweaking the site. I was thinking of adding a slider to the “Icon of The Day” banner at the top of the page, or creating another slider section for the top 5-10 highest rated icons. I personally would rather do what my visitors would want, so don’t be shy… Let me know what you think! If you have any suggestions, please post a comment below.

See you there!