Tweet-Parade (no.28 Jul 2011)

Yeah, the start of the Weekend .. and you all know what that means: A brand new Tweet-Parade! A Tweet-Parade is a post filled with the best articles of last week from the various blogs around the world. It’s all about webdesign, graphic design, typography, social media and more. A broad scale of topics, but never-the-less the underlying focus is on Design.

Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics. The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter.

Webdesign, CSS, HTML, jQuery, Usability, etc.

Essential E-Commerce Website Features: Tips and Examples - There are many different approaches you can take when designing an e-store. However, you might notice that effective e-commerce websites have certain site features that are absolutely critical to the shopper’s experience.

Resource Roundup: 16 jQuery Plugins for Web Designers - JQuery, everyone’s favorite JavaScript library which famously allows you to write less, and do more. In this roundup I will be listing 16 awesome jQuery plugins that everyone needs to check out.

jQuery quickie: Colourful rating system with CSS3 - Today, we’re going to do a relatively simple jQuery tutorial. Rating systems are used a lot on websites, for example to rate how good a certain product, article or comment is. I slightly wanted to improve this idea, by making it more visually attractive.

Picking A Mobile Support Strategy For Your Website - The number of people browsing the Web from a mobile device has more than tripled since 2009, and it is sure to continue growing, with browser platforms such as iOS and Android offering mobile browser support that is almost identical to what we have come to expect from a desktop experience.

19 Questions to Ask Before Creating a Website - Have you ever come to a point in a website design where you’re lost? You’re staring at a blank Photoshop document and you have no idea how to fill the space. You don’t know what the client wants and what they will like. Don’t get yourself stuck in that phase again.

9 Timeless Techniques for User-Friendly Tables - Tables are great for displaying information. But making them user-friendly is a challenge. One reason it’s challenging is because the table grid limits the amount of information you can display in a table cell. This means you have to figure out how to display the information the user needs without displaying too much of it.

Behind The Scenes Of Nike Better World - Perhaps one of the most talked about websites in the last 12 months has been Nike Better World. It’s been featured in countless Web design galleries, and it still stands as an example of what a great idea and some clever design and development techniques can produce.

Using the Law of Attraction in Web Design - What is it that makes a brand, product and/or website so appealing that you can’t resist the urge to indulge? How can something on my computer screen garner so much of my attention and intrigue me enough to buy into that particular product or service?

15 Highly Useful MySQL Resources And Tutorials - Today we are going to discuss about MySQL Database. Currently MySQL is the most popular Open Source, Robust and fast Database Server. This Database is written in C and C++ and most commonly used with PHP scripts to develop secure and dynamic server-side application.

CSS Attribute Selectors: How and Why You Should Be Using Them - Today we’re going to learn about Attribute Selectors. What are they? How do I use them? What are the new CSS3 Attribute selectors? We’ll answer these questions and more. Before I introduce you to the concept of CSS attribute selectors, you should know what an HTML attribute is.

Basic Tips for Getting Started with jQuery Development - The jQuery programming library has dramatically changed the way we work online. Web developers are able to prototype animations and backend effects much quicker with fewer lines of code. This brings to the table a profound collection of functions which you can read about here.

The Secrets Behind Great Call To Action Buttons - Within web design ‘calls to action‘ can be defined as any element of the page that prompt an action of the user. However, clearly some actions are more desirable than others. For example, any site owner would prefer users to click on a ‘buy now’ link than a ‘twitter’ link.

Learning To Use The :before And :after Pseudo-Elements In CSS - If you’ve been keeping tabs on various Web design blogs, you’ve probably noticed that the :before and :after pseudo-elements have been getting quite a bit of attention in the front-end development scene — and for good reason.

7 Tips for Diversifying Your Freelance Income Streams - One of the biggest challenges of freelancing is finding clients to hire you. As an entrepreneur, the onus is on you to attract business through continuous marketing and self-promotion. The temptation, however, is to take whatever work comes your way, ..

7 Quick CSS Enhancements for Better User Experience - The beauty in CSS is that a tiny directive can make a huge difference in how the page displays. Here are seven quick CSS snippets that will give your website more “pop” and make your user’s experience more functional and enjoyable.

Essential Tips for Designing an Effective Checkout Process - Online shopping is a marvelous experience. One can easily find the best product among the others which are competing in the market and also get the price ranges. However, online shopping can turn into a frustrating experience if not programmed well.

15 jQuery Space-Saving Content Sliders and Carousels – We all know about the popularity of jQuery image and video sliders and galleries. For the most part they are all feature-rich and perfect in their own way, but very few of them have been built to accommodate non-image content (blocks of text) that would allow you to have, for example, a rotating featured content area or a popular post section.

How to Prepare a Well-Focused Graphic Design Portfolio - A graphic designer has to take care of its portfolio because it is the way in which he presents his abilities. The portfolio is a collected sample which showcases your creativity and ability and you need to submit it properly to your public.

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, (Web) Typography, etc.

Typography On Web: Cufón And @font-face Resources And Guides - I have always been envious of graphic designer for their ability of using every font they want in their projects, playing with typography and creating beautiful design while I had to limit myself to a few web-safe font families.

Why Use Adobe Fireworks? - Despite sometimes feeling like the un-loved, adopted child to the Adobe Creative Suite family, Fireworks remains for a lot of professional web and user interface designers to be the most useful, productive tool in their arsenal, however due to the vast popularity of a certain other graphics application in the creative suite, it doesn’t gain anywhere near the recognition it deserves for what it does best.

CSS3 @font-face Design Guide - Although CSS3 @font-face is supported by most major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), but not all. When it doesn’t, your custom fonts might break the layout or come out with undesired results. In this article, I will explain the common issues with using custom fonts, picking the matching fallback web safe fonts, and how to create a perfect fallback font style with Modernizr.

Build Awesome Color Palettes Effortlessly in Illustrator - Here at Design Shack we can’t get enough of good color schemes. We recently discussed some Awesome and Unusual Places to Steal Color Palettes From and today we’ll follow up that discussion with some tips on how to build your own awesome color sets in Adobe Illustrator.

All About Helvetica Font - Since its development in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann, The Helvetica font has undoubtedly dominated the Typography world with its different font family. A sans-serif typeface, you can see Helvetica font everywhere from posters to Hoardings, from print to web.

Blogging, Social Media, WordPress, Writing, etc.

50 Best WordPress Photo Theme Roundup - A WordPress Photo Theme is like a loophole for photographers to get n online portfolio set up fast and with a low cost. The supply of high quality and supported WordPress themes in constantly growing and it makes it possible and within reach to find a theme that match ..

25 Google+ Tips to Enhance Your Google Plus Experience - Google has finally rolled out Google+ which is not yet another service like Google Wave and Buzz, but is an amazing and power packed social networking website which is deemed to rise very high and compete with today’s biggies ‘Facebook and Twitter’.

Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy - When we integrate content creation early in our web development processes, we are more effective at orienting our conversations to the end goals for the user and the business. This is a huge win for our users, who are increasingly demanding meaningful content experiences before they engage with our web sites and apps.

How to Get More Quality Twitter Followers - You understand that social media plays a large role in internet marketing and have a Twitter strategy in place. But what if you have the best intentions, and only a few followers? How valuable is your message if nobody sees it? If a tree joins Twitter, but has no followers, does it make a noise?

4 More New Social Media Trends for Freelancers to Explore - At the beginning of the year we posted about five social networking trends that freelancers may wish to explore. While those five trends will still be of interest to many, six months is a long time when it comes to technology.

How Will Google Plus Affect SEO? - Google Plus has been live for barely two weeks, but inevitably, online marketers and search engine optimization experts are curious about how the new social product might influence organic search rankings in the future. Officially, there’s no official indication of how Plus will affect SEO, but plenty of speculation and some obvious hints about where things may be headed

5 Good Ways To Protect Your WordPress Login - Have you done anything to protect your WordPress site or is it lying there just like that without any protection and security? Of-course you have that default login/password system but do you honestly think that it is enough? Imagine what will happen if anyone gets access to your admin dashboard.

Content Choreography – The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past. Media-queried responsive & adaptive sites afford us the ability to re-architect content on a page to fit its container, ..

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

Meta Keywords: why I don’t use them - There is one question about SEO which seems to be coming up time and time again, so let me answer it now and be done with it. Meta Keywords are useless. No search engine uses them for any real rankings.

5 Ways to Improve Your Website Conversion Rate - At the end of the day, all the online marketing that you do for your brand (SEO, social media, content marketing, link building and so forth) are all designed to direct targeted traffic to your site. The end goal of your site is to convert.

The Curious Power of NoFollow and What Bloggers Need to Know - We’ve been spending the last few blog posts going deep into links, linking, and the importance of doing it right. Of course, we must engage the rel=”nofollow” attribute at the very least. What is “nofollow” you ask? It was, at one point, quite a simple concept.

The 3 Components of Inbound Marketing - In the most basic of terms, all marketing efforts can be divided into two distinct camps: inbound and outbound. Outbound marketing includes traditional forms of marketing like print, radio, television, out-of-home, direct mail and so forth.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them - I’ve had a lot of questions recently (like literally, several a day) on how I implemented the social buttons in WordPress, whether I was using a plugin or using a theme. First of all I’m glad to see all of you noticing my social buttons section so much.

Tools to Analyze & Test the Page Loading Speed of Your Website - Nowadays, Web search engines show millions of results for any keyword in 2 to 5 seconds and the visitors select any URL on a search engine result page (SERP) in next 10 seconds. After landing to your Website, any visitor takes only 5 to 8 seconds to analyze whether this page serves their purpose or not.

Keyword Research Best Practice Tips - Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO campaign. The keywords you select after conducting keyword research directly affect who can see you website and what kind of search queries your site will rank for. Selecting the right keywords means the search engines will be able to deliver targeted traffic.

Tutorials

40 Amazing Adobe Fireworks Tutorials - Many web designers find different techniques, experiments and learn how to work with various characteristics of Adobe Fireworks to interest up tedious pictures and make them into works of arts, in these of all listed tutorials many ways to get more inspirational stuff for design industry.

Creating a PHP and CSS3 Powered About Page - In this tutorial, we will be creating a simple about page that is powered by PHP, HTML5 and CSS3. It will present your contact information to your visitors, with an option for downloading it as a vCard (useful for importing it in third party applications).

HTML5 CSS3 Forms: 30 Tutorials to Design HTML5 Forms with CSS3 – HTML5 CSS3 forms let you take your contact form designs to the next level.  Web forms are crucial for interaction between a website and the user, and you’d be hard pressed to find a website these days that didn’t have a form somewhere on it.

jQuery Tutorial: Building a jQuery Scroller - If you’re working on a site where a number of important stories or features need to be showcased within a small area, a news scroller is a great option. Without taking up much page real estate, you can highlight several stories along with descriptions and links to view the details.

How to Use CSS Sprites in Fireworks and Dreamweaver - Ever wondered how use CSS Sprites in your own web projects? Today, Tom Green (our resident Adobe expert) is going to walk through how to create CSS sprites in Fireworks and then put them to use in Dreamweaver.

F*cking Brilliant, a great Read or just magnificent Tips!

Progressive enhancement demystified - If you’ve been working on the web for any amount of time, you’ve likely heard (or even used) the term “progressive enhancement” before. As you probably know, it is the gold standard of how to approach web design. But what is progressive enhancement really? What does it mean? How does it work?

What to Do When a Client Does Not Pay - You are merely doing your job as a designer and you have exerted much time and effort for a project only to find out that your client couldn’t pay you on time or worse, wouldn’t pay you. It is really a bad thing when this happens for you consider time as money.

Living a Dual Life – A View on the Coding Designers Debate - Lately I’ve noticed some great discussions in web design forums, on Linkedin and Twitter about the role of a web designer and what skills a web designer should have. The question that keeps getting brought up time and time again is whether it is necessary for web designers to have the ability to develop designs ..

9 Steps To Improve Your Design Confidence - How much of your design process do you share? Do you show your unfinished work in public? Are you afraid of the feedback you might receive? Most importantly how can you improve your confidence as a designer?

Build Your Business Around Your Customers (not the other way around) - The classical attitude of most companies is to see their own brand culture as a Sacred Graal, a forever-attractive source of interests and desire for the customers. Marketing directors have the tendency to think their products and services just need to be seen (or heard of) to be immediatly appreciated.

5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Expert Online and Off - There’s a lot of talk in the marketing blogosphere about the importance of setting yourself apart from your competition–about how to be taken seriously, you must establish yourself as an expert in your field.

The Keys to your creative career – Being in the creative field is often times a challenge. For designers, developers, copywriters, photographers and anything in-between. If you are just starting out in the creative field, or maybe you’re mid-career and you are not sure where your career will go OR maybe, you have a huge decision ..

Presenting design work to your clients - So you’ve landed that great client you’ve been talking to for weeks, and you want to make sure to keep them happy. Aside from giving them a stellar product, how do you do that? One way is by being ridiculously professional in how you present your work.

I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know  .. To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @gonzodesign_