Tweet-Parade (No.32 Aug 2011)

It’s Saturday again, .. and you 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.

HTML5 CSS3 Framework Choices: 10 Great Web Frameworks - HTML5 and CSS3 are the future of website development, mobile app development and web gaming development.  The advantage of having a standardized platform on which to develop is faster development time with cleaner and more efficient code.

Good-Looking and Responsible Design - Should design be environmentally responsible? The only sensible answer to that question is “yes.” But if you asked a group of designers to define what that term means, each would be likely to give a different answer. Though there is one thing on which they might agree: that the most successful examples of environmentally ..

Review Of Cross-Browser Testing Tools - At some point in the future, the way that all major browsers render Web code will likely be standardized, which will make testing across multiple browsers no longer necessary as long as the website is coded according to Web standards.

Preparing For a Web Design Project - There are several stages during the process of a web design project, and every stage is important to achieve a positive end result. In order to proceed to the research phase, you need to gather information and know what the project is about, which technology is required, the target audience, goals, content, etc.

20+ Most Wanted & Useful jQuery Photo Gallery Plugins - jQuery Gallery take a grouping of images and turn it into an flash-like image/photo gallery. It gives you freedom of displaying images galleries in most effective way and that too with very little coding. Photo Gallery, picture gallery, or slideshow are the best way to showcase your images/photos to your readers.

Web Usability: Getting Ahead of the Game - What is great usability for a website? Usability means being able to find exactly what one is looking for while spending the least amount of time doing so. It can also mean accomplishing something through a web site, but still while spending the least amount of time doing so.

Top tips for designing mobile sites and apps from the professionals - As mobile devices become increasingly capable and the mobile audience becomes increasingly sophisticated, companies are stretching the bounds of possibility when it comes to mobile sites, native applications and Web apps. It becomes all the more important to consider not just graphical design, but also the physical design of your mobile product.

Latest Javascript Resources For Web Designers And Developers - Javascript and jQuery plugins are very important resources nowadays for designers as clients want everything to be dynamic and modern. They are important also for their versatility and the possibility to create incredible new features with them.

How Many Pages Does A Website Need? - Designers and clients frequently ask this question before designing or ordering a new website. Is there a “right” answer to it? No. The number of Web pages that a particular website needs directly depends on the type of website, its application and also its potential user base.

A simple introduction to web accessibility - Accessibility can often seem daunting and complex but in fact there are only four types of disability you need to be aware of. Through groupings, simulations and quick fixes, UX and accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton shows that the basics are actually surprisingly simple<

Grid-Based Design Theory - Grid is an important tool for graphic design. Commonly people used to think that grid is related to engineering and architecture, but this is not true. Today the graphic designers use grid extensively for website design. It is a very popular tool in present times.

8 Ways your Landing Page Design is Sabotaging your Click-Thru Rate - Testing and optimizing landing pages can be a fun and frustrating game of cat and mouse. Every time the mouse gets away, it feels like self-inflicted sabotage. After all, as marketers we really don’t want to eat the mouse, we’re just inviting them to play!

Responsive Web Design: Helpful Articles, Techniques & Tutorials - With the advent and popularization of tablets and smartphones in our lives, as well as the development of mobile versions of different sites there’s a need in creating a websites which will correspond to the requirements of multiple devices. The aim of creating a Responsive Web design can be achieved with the help of flexible grids, layouts, images and the use of CSS.

Separating Content: 10 Ways to Draw the Line - The story is as old as graphic design itself: you have two different sections and you need a way to visually separate them. As a designer, I frequently spot myself reverting to the same old one or two tricks to pull this off. Why not mix it up a bit?

A CRAP way to improve usability - Visual design is often dismissed as eye candy. In fact, we can use four key principles of visual design to create more usable interfaces. These principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.  Within the field of user experience, visual design is sometimes perceived as a bit of an outsider.

The Most Important Parts of HTML5 - 20 years ago today (Aug 6th, 1991), Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web on the world while working at CERN. Actually what he released was a program called “WorldWideWeb” which was eventually renamed “Nexus” to clarify the distinction between the concept of the World Wide Web and the browser itself.

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design - Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned web professional, creating responsive designs can be confusing at first, mostly because of the radical change in thinking that’s required. As time goes on, responsive web design is drifting away from the pool of passing fads and rapidly entering the realm ..

The UI Guide | Part 1: Buttons - I should begin by explaining why I’m doing this guide in the first place. I believe that every designer has a right to know what many of us have learned via trial-and-error and word-of-mouth teachings. I’m quite aware that this is not the first UI guide that has ever been published, nor do I expect it to be the last.

CSS3 Animation With jQuery Fallbacks - In today’s post, we’ll be taking a look at how you can use CSS3 transitions to power your application’s animations with jQuery’s .animate() method as a fallback where transitions aren’t supported. The benefit of transitions is that unlike JavaScript based animations, they’re hardware accelerated in certain browsers and mobile devices, resulting in a potentially ..

Designing for a Responsive Web - The web as we know it is changing. In the past, designers and developers only had to concern themselves with one medium: the computer screen. In recent years, however, a plethora of fully internet-enabled devices with scores of different shapes and capabilities have cropped up, ..

How to tame forms in web design - Forms are often considered one of the most painful HTML elements to program. But form design and development has progressed by leaps and bounds; it is not nearly as hard as it once was. That being said, while the industry has made tremendous progress, some hurdles are still in place.

Things Web Designers Do That People Love - Web designers and web developers often wonder what kind of things they should do so that their audience will love them. Today we will talk about those little things that create a big impact on people throughout the internet.

HTML5 Boilerplate is 2.0! - H5BP is a year old! We launched on August 10th, 2010 and now we’ve got a plethora of new, exciting changes that comprise our 2.0 release.

Techniques For Gracefully Degrading Media Queries - Media queries are the third pillar in Ethan Marcotte’s implementation of responsive design. Without media queries, fluid layouts would struggle to adapt to the array of screen sizes on the hundreds of devices out there. Fluid layouts can appear cramped and unreadable on small mobile devices and too large and chunky on big widescreen displays.

Chop Slider – awesome and kickassable animated jQuery image slider

The three pillars of #ecommerce design - Actinic powers over 12,000 stores in the UK and I get to see a lot of sites, both big and small, broad and niche. I also talk to loads of designers and merchants. In fact it’s the best part of my job. However it doesn’t matter who you are, I always receive the same set of questions: what’s the best checkout experience, what should my content pages look like and how ..

Improve your website navigation - The ability to instruct our web browsers to move from one page of hypertext to another, or between blocks of content, is a fundamental building block of the web. In recent years it’s developed far beyond its humble beginnings as a list of small blue links set in Times New Roman.

12 jQuery Infinite Scrolling(scroll & read) Plugins for Content Navigation - Our sites generally have lots of content and it increases day by day.Especially giant websites like Twitter,Facebook have too much thing to present to visitors so many new techniques have been released in the last few years and ”Infinite Scrolling” is one of them.Infinite scrolling is a technique to retain your users on a website in a single page.

 

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

7 Quick and Easy Ways to Jazz Up Your Headline Typography - Headlines are one of the most important elements on your page and are often the starting point that sets the tone for the entire design. So why not make them great? Today we’ll take a look at seven different design techniques that you can implement in a minute or less that will boost your headline ..

Why Business Logos are So Integral to Success - A logo is a critical and essential part of formulating and promoting a brand or identity, and every business needs identity in an often overcrowded market.  When you attempt to sell any service or product it is essential that you inform your consumers of precisely who you are.

What Designers Need to Know About Typography - As a designer, you would always use type in your works. Hence, it is important for you to know the basics of typography. Typography is a central component of design and one of the primary ways of communication. This has been passed from generations and has undergone various improvements.

A Look Into: Better Typography For Modern Websites - Digital text can be formatted in so many flavors. With the further advancement of web fonts and browser scripts, we have seen new project code for developers to utilize. Web designers, too, are looking for the best strategy to code their websites and build a uniform typographic style between all of their pages.

How To Design Headlines and Subheadings - Headlines draw people into your copy and they help strengthen information scent. Subheadings create a hierarchy and allow you to communicate messages to those who scan. How should we visually design these very important parts our pages?

The secrets to successful data visualization - Effective data visualization is about more than designing an eye-catching graphic. It’s about telling a clear and accurate story that draws readers in via powerful choices of shapes and colors. These are some of the observations you’ll find in the insightful new book Visualize This

Mastering Photoshop Techniques: Layer Styles - Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

 

Blogging, Social Media, WordPress, Writing, etc.

50+ Beautifully Designed Free Themes and Widgets to Enhance your Tumblr Experience - Tumblr is getting popular day after day because of its flexibility, power and simplicity. Tumblr is a blogging platform through which you can share your content, images and videos with the world even when you are on the go.

Extending the Functionality of WordPress (Part 1) - For a platform that started its life as solely a platform for blogging, WordPress has come a long way over the last few years. It’s certainly earned the right to be known as the most popular Content Management System (CMS) on the net with speculation that between the self hosted script ..

Top Differences between WordPress vs. Blogger - It’s the battle of the ages—Wordpress vs. Blogger. Which one will meet your needs while providing you with the greatest ease of functionality? For many bloggers today, the notion of paying a designer to create a website from scratch is more than they can handle monetarily.

10 Topics That Make or Break Your Blog - Your blog is your baby, but if your baby isn’t talking the talk, you could quickly find yourself losing traffic, money and followers. As you have probably heard before, blogging should be about the passion first, and the money second. If you blog about topics you are passionate about, chances are you will have a successful site.

How to: Monitor your twitter followers – Part 1 - Monitoring twitter followers can be tough. With the amount of importance and emphasis of online marketing through social media, it’s time to actually start getting smart about it. While I do believe it’s better to have tweeted and lost followers than to have never tweeted at all, I also believe it’s time to stop viewing our social media with such a romantic disposition.

21 New jQuery Plugins to Add Cool Effects to Your WordPress Site - jQuery is a beautiful thing. It powers most of the fancy plugins you find that add cool, interactive effects to your WordPress site. I’ve selected a few of my favorites from the newest jQuery-powered plugins to hit the repository.

Extending the Functionality of WordPress Pt.2 - Previously, on Noupe. We brought you a handful of ways to expand on the functionality of any WordPress based site using some inspired plugins and/or themes to elevate this CMS beyond its humble beginnings as a blogging platform. With ways to turn WP into a Discussion Forum, an Online Shop, and a Helpdesk.

HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for the Job Hunt - About 120 million people now use LinkedIn, and 1 million more join every week. But how many users have a professional profile that’s actually attracting interest from hiring companies?

Additional Things to Consider When Blogging - The decision to blog shouldn’t be made lightly. Obviously, you need to know who your target audience is and understand what kind of content they want to read. It’s also important to keep SEO in mind and optimize the posts by including keywords naturally in the headline and body of the content.

Kick Ass Snippet of the Week: WordPress Pagination Without Plugin - Today’s Kick Ass Snippet is a nifty little WordPress snippet that allows you to add pagination to your posts anywhere without using a plug in. I was working on a project recently and needed a better solution for pagination.

How to Create Meta Boxes in WordPress – Meta boxes are the the little blocks in the editor section for each post type. They are actually quite old in WordPress terms – they were introduced back in 2.5 and now almost every premium theme uses this feature. Meta boxes are commonly used by themes and plugins when a developer wants to implement a nicer interface for saving/editing a number of custom fields than the one provided with WordPress.

Flux Slider WordPress Plugin - This is the official Flux Slider plugin for WordPress. Creating stunning image sliders powered by CSS3 transitions has never been easier! Manage your image sliders from within the familier WordPress environment and then easily deploy them to any of your posts or pages.

Adding “Feed Only” and “Site Only” Shortcodes in WordPress - So you’re running a blog and some of your readers are following it via your RSS feed and their feed aggregators. I have to say that I’m not a fan of excerpts (summaries) in feeds, I’d rather give my feed readers the full content to save them the extra clicking trouble (it’s an option under Settings – Reading in your admin panel).

Hardening WordPress Security: 25 Essential Plugins + Tips - If you are running a WordPress-powered website, its security should be your primary concern. In most cases, WordPress blogs are compromised because their core files and/or plugin are outdated; outdated files are traceable and it’s an open invitation to hackers.

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

How I Use BuySellAds to Monitor Blog Traffic and Goals - One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers and webmasters make is to check traffic stats and affiliate reports too often—often enough for it to stop them doing real work on their projects. That being said, it is still important to check stats from time to time.

The Elephant In The Room When It Comes To Link Building - Want to learn something that most professional SEO’s know? A little fact that – when it comes to link building – is often dismissed for being terrible? Well, here it is. Directory Submissions Work! Now, before I continue, there are two caveats associated with this statement.

3 Common Link Building Mistakes - After optimizing your site for both visitors and the search engines (visitors first!), you have to create a diverse portfolio of one-way, incoming links to your site to help drive targeted traffic through. That’s where link building comes in. It may seem like a relatively simple process, but it is incredibly important that you take a strictly white hat approach to your link building.

New Benchmarks Study Shows 5 Key SEO Findings - MarketingSherpa, an SEO research firm that publishes an annual benchmark report, has released its 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. The new benchmark study covers five key SEO and SEM findings in depth.

 

Tutorials

Create a stylish HTML5 template from scratch - HTML5 is certainly one of the latest buzzwords in the web community. It isn’t something new anymore and we’ve already seen how cool it is. Features like simplified doctype, more semantic markup, input types and placeholders are just some of the reasons you’d like to use HTML5.

Portfolio Image Navigation with jQuery - Today we want to create a portfolio image navigation template with jQuery. The idea is to show some portfolio items in a grouped fashion and navigate through them in all 2D ways (horizontal/vertical). Either the arrows or the little boxes below the current image can be used in order to navigate.

30 Brand New HTML5Tutorials (Summer 2011 Edition) - HTML5 should definitely be considered as important markup language to know about and start using it. Now TemplateMonster shares some new tutorial goodies for those wanting to take full advantage of HTML5 and see what latest features and functions it provides.

20 Really Useful HTML5 Tutorials - HTML5 is the talk of the town and everyone seems to be talking about it. If you still haven’t started working on it because you find it difficult, we have very resourceful list of HTML5 tutorials and articles that will remove your slightest of doubts.

20 Dextrous Adobe Illustrator Logo Design Tutorials - Your logo or brand is your visual identity it gives you an individualism. We can easily recollect a name of a Brand just by looking at the logo. Logos are mostly created in Illustrator. We have placed few Tutorials based on Logo Designing in Adobe Illustrator that will not only ..

40+ Best WordPress Tips and Tutorials of July 2011 - Why wordpress is one of the most popular CMS and blogging platform around? I think it because wordpress is free, customizable and have a great support by community or other developers.

15 Cool and Creative Jquery tutorials - Jquery is really a great way to code dropdowns, navigations, and a lot more. I start working with Jquery about 1 year ago and really starting getting hands on training with live websites, that I have done for clients. In this post I have 15 Cool and Creative Jquery tutorials

 

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

7 Ways to Get More Referrals for Your Web Design Business - A long time ago, I heard one businessman ask another, “What can I do to help you out?” The man thought for a moment, and then said, “The best thing you can do for me is refer someone else my way.”

How to Deal With a Non-Paying Client - We all would like to live in a perfect world. One without suffering, sickness and… annoying clients. Some clients will be very rational, some amazingly stupid. That’s what makes the work interesting though, right? Yeah, I know – wrong.

Back to the Future of Wireframes - We’ve spent a year pondering the role of wireframes in the design process, and the results are finally in. After this, there’s no looking back. A year ago, I proposed the future of wireframes. My proposal centered around relaxing the stranglehold wireframes have on layout decisions.

6 Ugly Truths About Being A Freelance Designer - People assume freelancing is easy, for the simple fact that its easy to become a  freelance designer because their isn’t any initial start up costs. Freelance designing is more than being a good designer, there’s several other skills which come into play such as for e.g. marketing, fiance, project management etc in order to have a long a prosperous carea ..

Finding success as a web developer - Let me start by setting the record straight. I’m not going to tell you how to build a huge successful startup because I haven’t done it myself. But I have made a small name for myself, created a few minor successes, and hacked away a good path to follow (pun intended).

Act First, Do the Research Later - Think before acting. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Think before starting to design. Yup. Do some research, learn more about the requirements, the people, the activities. Then design. It all makes sense. Which is precisely why I wish to challenge it. Sometimes it makes sense to act first, think afterwards.

Handling the client approach - It’s important to have some kind of filter system in place for the stream of work enquiries I receive. Why? Because not every potential client is one I’m well suited to, and where that’s the case, both parties obviously want to minimise the time spent finding out.

Protecting yourself as a designer - Graphic design is one of those job that everyone needs but whose value perhaps not everyone appreciates. People who don’t understand the true value of graphic designers will try to take advantage of them, especially if they’re newbies.

3 Ways to Raise Your Rates and Crush Your Freelancing Fears - Are you getting paid what you’re worth as a freelancer? You might think so, but it’s more likely that you — like many freelancers — are charging much less than what your clients are willing to pay. This is especially true if you do excellent work (and I’m guessing that you do).

Big Screen Little Screen. Why one web design layout does not fit all - Mobile web traffic now accounts for nearly 1% of all Internet traffic and almost 7% in the U.S. alone. That’s a serious amount of pinching and dragging. Internet viewers are on the move and do much of their surfing and catching up during commutes and downtime.

Two Things About Web Design - There are some design principles that are universal, such as “form follows function,” “the client is always right” and never use Comic Sans for anything. But in this post I’ll address design aspects that are unique to the web.

Time Management Tips for Being a Successful Web Designer - Being a freelance web designer means that you can wear many different hats on any given day. Although it’s a great freedom to be your own boss, at times it can become overwhelming, leading to that awful burnt out feeling.

A Mobile Web Divided - Unless you’ve been living comfortably under an elaborate dwelling constructed entirely out of rock, you’re aware of the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices. With that growth we’ve witnessed a bumper crop of component libraries and frameworks to enable us to create mobile web sites ..

Essential Help & FAQ Usability Tips - A FAQ – frequently asked questions – should be an important part of your website or service. They speed up the help for your users by not waiting for a response from support, and thus save time by not having to repeatedly answer the same questions.

Reasons to Fire Your Client - It’s something we don’t like to admit very often is it? No matter how great of a freelancer we are, no matter how fantastic your contracts and vetting process is, you’ll ultimately end up with a client you feel that you can no longer work with. Hopefully, you’ve protected yourself so that these occurrences are rare, but no matter how rare, they’re never easy nor pretty.

8 Tips To Work With Better Freelance Clients - Are you happy with your clients? Are they giving you projects you enjoy? Paying enough for your time? Hopefully you answered yes, but I often hear freelancers saying they’d like better clients. I thought I’d offer some ideas to help you build a better client list.

It’s Not Responsive Web Building, It’s Responsive Web Design - For an industry that generates probably more buzzwords than any other, we love to pretend to shun them. So, unless you’ve been living in a cabin in the woods for the last year, you’ve likely been bashed over the head with this term: Responsive Web Design (RWD).

How to Use a Design Blog to Find New Clients - Today I’d like to offer a few solid strategies for designers who want to use blogging as a tool to find new clients and build their business. I use my blog to sell products and other services. And the most lucrative way to monetize a design blog is to use it for finding design clients.

How to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors and get More Offers as a Freelance Designer - Every time I’m in need of design work and I visit my favorite freelancer portal I become really disappointed, not just because of the fact that it is usually difficult to get great talent but also because of how manipulated the system is.

Freelancing Tips for Building Your Client Base - As a freelancer, you are free to put your feet up and work, if that’s what gets your creative juices flowing. Yet it takes talent, business savvy, commitment and time to be a successful freelancer. Freelancers are always in search of some work, so that they can earn something by rendering their services to people from the comforts of their home.

The Dirtiest Word in UX: Complexity - It’s hard to read anything about UX without finding a reference to the constant tension between simplicity and complexity. People have strong preconceived notions about the words, especially when it comes to experience design. You don’t have to be a UX practitioner to understand that simplicity is a good thing.

 

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_