If you’ve heard the news lately then you’ve probably been made aware of the impending gas price spikes over the summer. With predictions of an average price of over $4.00 per gallon it’s safe to say that many people will have to carefully plan (or replan) their summer vacations. Some parts of California have already seen prices near $4.50 a gallon as of this last week. Sounds exciting right? Well it is for the oil investors but maybe not so much for the rest of us.

While this is certainly an unfortunate price for gas, one benefit that could arise from this is an increased interest in hybrid vehicles and alternate fuel sources. At this point the “transition” away from gas is hardly underway. Unless there are some major changes soon it looks like we might need to each get our own personal Mel Gibson to go get our gas for us when it runs out. (Mad Max anyone?)

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I’ve been using PayPal for years. I know the in’s and out’s of it and haven’t really had much trouble with it for the most part. Just the other day I sold an item for $100. A few days later I noticed that the money had been put on a “Temporary Hold” due to being randomly flagged for investigation. The buyer has already received the product and now PayPal has decided to randomly investigate the transaction.

I have been a PayPal user for almost a decade and I have had countless transactions with other “Verified” PayPal users. I’ve never used PayPal for illegal or even questionable purposes and yet they have decided to put my account into a negative balance while they investigate my transaction? What a joke. One of my clients recently had his PayPal account locked and his funds frozen while PayPal investigates his recent transactions. Again, what a joke. I only use PayPal because it’s convenient, but lately I’ve been very annoyed with their practices. It’s no surprise that anti PayPal websites have been blowing off steam for years now. PayPal is out to protect themselves, not their loyal users. Otherwise why would they be taking our legitimately earned money on a whim?

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Do you ever wonder if all of the different people selling e-books are full of it or not? After all, if they are making so much money why would they care about your $50 or $100? Sure they offer a money back guarantee, but, is this just a clever disguise of the whole rebate argument? Are they counting on a certain number of people to be too lazy to bother asking for a refund? All I know is that I am fairly certain that most of what you need to know to make money online is not exclusive to e-books.

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I just read a really good article on Yahoo Finance. If you tend to err on the side of perfection from time to time, you could be wasting a lot of time. There is a big difference between good and great, a smaller difference between great and excellent, but, a much smaller difference between excellent and perfect. When it comes to making you work time worth your while, often times the extra work involved in order to achieve “perfection” is not worth the small increase in money (if any) that you will make.

I think most webmasters and/or designers can relate to perfectionism on at least one level. We like our work to look and function as good as possible, but often times it’s easy to get caught up in a single project when we could be moving onto the next. The Yahoo article mentioned above has some really good tips and pointers to where you should draw your lines, how close to perfect is still ok, and of course some reasons why it’s better to spend less time as opposed to extra time on any given project. It’s definitely worth a read over.

I’m a graphic and web designer by trade (among other things) and one of the main questions that my clients often ask me is whether they should use a lot of graphics on their website. My answer usually varies from person to person, but generally my theory is similar. If you want your website to look like it was made in the 90’s then feel free to use a lot of graphics.

There are some websites that look really nice with high end graphics, background images, flash banners, the works, etc, but, these websites generally do not benefit directly from their high end interfaces. For example, one of my favorite “Web 2.0″ designs is the Skype layout. It has some images in the middle, but really the layout does not rely in the overuse of images. If you browse from page to page you will notice images are used as supplements to the CSS. The site makes very good use of colors and fonts to create a soft and welcoming feel.

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Hello everyone. Money Complex is my newest blog project in which I plan to blog about financial news, investment ideas, and anything else related to money. I’m an entrepreneur at heart and run several blogs and forums as well as doing all sorts of web and graphic design. My company website is www.nurv.com.

I’ll cover topics such as AdSense, Yahoo Publisher, and anything else that is working for me at the moment. I’m a big fan of affiliate programs and all sorts of alternate marketing and advertising so you’ll be sure to find exciting new trends and ideas mentioned here as well.

I will NOT be talking about PIPS and other scams (at least not positively). I do not consider these legit means to make money and to be honest most of the high end money makers on the web agree that PIPS are garbage.

I’ll talk about real money making and real things that go on with my business. Hopefully you’ll find some of this information helpful in growing your own monthly check!

Thanks for looking and be sure to stop back often!