I cannot tell you how many hearts I have broken over the years with the news that “there is simply nothing I can do to recover your data” due to a dead hard drive. I have worked in repair shops and with student computing enough to say that more than any other problem, this is the most devastating yet the easiest to avoid. Unfortunately, in all my years of repair, I have yet to come across anyone who actually had a solid backup.

The prices of hard drive continue to fall so much that even the most frugal computer owner can add a backup drive to their system these days. To ease my pain after the tragedy, I added a pair of 1TB (yes folks, that’s 1000GB times 2) hard drives to my computer system, one to replace my fallen drive and one for the sole purpose of backup. I paid about $130 each for the pair from Buy.com around three months ago, but you can find the same drives now for around $100.

Your backup options are numerous. Depending on your needs and your system you might be able to set up your drives to mirror each other as in a “raid” configuration as I have. Your drives or system may also come with special backup software that can automate the backup task for you. Or, at the very least, you can add a new drive and just drag and drop the things you value most on to it. If you are not a techie, or don’t have a techie friend, don’t worry. You can also pick up external hard drives that need only a cable and possibly a power plug to get you up and going for only a little more.

Whatever route you choose, just do it. I promise you will not be sorry, even if you never need to use it. The alternative could be the road I am currently on. I am waiting to find out if a data recovery center will be able to retrieve the first nine months of video clips of my newborn that I had created, edited and stored on the drive. If I am lucky enough to be able to get any or all of them back, it will only cost me around $800. Now, how many backup drives would that have paid for?

One reliable source, which I use for information on web statistics and trends, is W3 Schools’ pages for browser statistics, operating system statistics and display resolution statistics. They have collected the data from over five years worth of traffic in easy to analyze tables. While they are a site designed for people in the web design industry, their statistics are a decent mirror of most web traffic and not only their log files.

The current trends are most visitors (over 90%) are running some form of Windows operating system and most of those are XP (73%) or Vista (13%). Mac and Linux users combined account for less than 10% of internet traffic. This may also explain why Internet Explorer holds a narrow lead in the battle for browser dominance with around 50% of the traffic versus Firefox’s 43%. Although, by this time next year, Firefox may be the new champ as it has been gaining around 8% a year while IE has been slipping 5-6% each year. The other statistical trend worth noting is the most visitors, nearly 90%, are now using monitors that can display websites at 1024 x 768 or higher resolutions. This will likely keep expanding as larger high-end video cards and monitors keep coming down in price.

Of course more than statistics come into play when designing a website. You also need to take into account your target audience and the complexity of the page contents. If you are running an Apple fan club website you more than likely will have more Mac than Windows visitors or Safari browsers over IE or Firefox. Plain text with scattered images will likely work on any platform versus strict layouts which provide a more aesthetically pleasing look, but need tweaking to look right on all fronts.

So, is your website working for those you intended it for? Or, is it possible it is only working for a small percentage. Just because it looks good to you on your computer doesn’t mean it will for all. Check it out, or better yet have a test group check it out for you, across several platforms and resolutions to make sure all is right. You may be surprised by what your visitors see (or don’t see) when they visit your site.

There are several sites out there that can help you on your way to an aesthetically pleasing website. After all, you don’t want to be that site, and you know the one that I am talking about. The one that has the black background, white text and blue, red and purple links! Well, do you? I didn’t think so. To help you avoid that fate, I’ll talk about a couple that I use myself in deciding on a color palette to work from.

ColorJack: Sphere has a very handy tool so that when you move any one of the color choice dots around on the color sphere, the other dots are adjusted accordingly to give you a multi-color palette. This can then be exported to Photoshop, Illustrator or even to a simple URL with a click of the mouse. There are many tweaks and settings for the advanced designer but it is so easy even a small child could create a great looking color scheme here.

Well Styled’s Color Scheme Generator II uses a similar style for selecting your base colors and it also allows you to choose quick variations on the scheme such as pastels, pales, and contrasts easily. It shows your palette choices in an easy to copy and paste manner to the side.

Kuler from Adobe allows you to browse and grab themes from other users or create your own. The cool thing they have here is that you can even upload a photo of your own and it will analyze it, extract the colors and create a suitable palette to use with it. If you don’t have your own photo, you can just use the interface they have with Flickr and choose one from there. You can join the community and save your themes and they even have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

COLOURlovers describes itself as “a resource that monitors and influences color trends.” They have a large community of contributors and lots to explore. You can create new palettes and patterns here that you can save and share with others as well as use for yourself. This site is definitely worth a visit.

There are many more out there that do many of the same things, but the most important thing to know is that unless you just happen to have a degree in graphic design, chances are you may want to use a site like one of those the next time you start to build a website.