A rare treat: stumbling upon a high-quality web site

I believe I've found what I consider to be a truly high-quality web site, and it was entirely by mistake, in the course of my life as a normal person, not as a web developer. Actually, that's not that surprising, because I believe that it's only when we are using a web site the way a normal person does - and not observing it consciously and critically the way a web developer does - that we can really appreciate its value.

It's my local library's site: www.chapelhillpubliclibrary.com.

• It has a logical, memorable domain name. I don't care if it's a little long - I'm just grateful it doesn't include any initials or hyphens, or use an obscure domain extension.
• The page design is uncrowded and easily readable. The pretty colors and pleasant graphics are just icing on the cake. And check out what happens when you click on "Children" from the top menu, or "Teens" - the page structure is familiar, but the design has altered to better match the content.
• The navigation - well, I didn't have to think about it at all. I found everything without having to dig or click aimlessly. Crucial!
• The really cool thing is - with the above factors not getting in the way, I'm free to make use of the very useful functionality offered - find out if a book is in the collection and whether it's currently checked out or not, see if I have overdue books, pay a fine, or get on a waiting list to borrow a certain book.

The amount of skill and planning that must have gone into producing that deceptively simple interface with many layers of functionality behind it is impressive. I might just imitate some aspects of this site in some of my own work!

Electronic Financial Worksheets from The Planning Shop

Wow, did I discover a useful business planning tool. No affiliation here; I'm just a customer and a fan.

I'm writing a formal business plan, which is no easy task, if you've never done it. So I went to the library and checked out a pile of books on business plan writing. One book distinguished itself from the others pretty quickly, just in its completeness, readability, and usefulness: The Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies by Rhonda Abrams. The book has been invaluable, but it's the Electronic Financial Worksheets that took me through the scariest part of business-plan writing, those ten or twenty pages of financial spreadsheets.

The worksheets are in Excel format, and are brilliantly linked together so that you only need to plug in your actual figures, and the software automagically makes hundreds of calculations instantly and fills them into the proper cells all across the worksheets. Assuming your own figures are good, of course, the result is a set of very professional financial spreadsheets, formatted and ready to print and include with your business plan.

After worrying for a month about getting to this part of the business plan writing process, I was able to get 98% of the financials completed in a few hours yesterday.

Not only that, but when I had a technical problem - one which was entirely my doing - aan email to the support address got me an intelligent and friendly response which completely solved my problem in less than an hour. The help files actually had all the information I needed anyway, but I was just stuck, and having a human being to lend a hand just when I needed was priceless.

WebDevBiz.com is truly not affiliated in any way with the writers or publishers of these materials; my own set of forms for web developers is quite different. I just really appreciate this kind of quality. The price is $27.96, a steal for something so useful. If you're writing a business plan, and you're not a CPA or other experienced financial genius, you might find these as invaluable as I did.