Tweet-Parade (no.36 Sep 2011)

Hello Weekend! .. 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.

7 Factors to Consider When Redesigning Your Website [*] - There are very few, if any, websites on the Internet that don’t undergo at least a minor facelift at some point in their lifecycle. If you own a business with a web presence, at some point, that site will need to be redesigned ..

Resizing: Fixed, Fluid, or Responsive Layouts [*] - Back when we were looking at layout blocks done with pencil and paper, I explained that the outer rectangle we were designing within was the containing block.

When perfect code gets FUBAR … and how to avoid it! - You hand your beautifully crafted code to a client, colleague or even CMS, and the next time you check in, it’s all ruined. Front-end alchemist Scott Lenger explains how bad code happens to good people, why it matters, and the steps you can take to prevent it

20 Highly Useful jQuery Tooltip Plugins - This time we come again with useful stuff for developers and designers. Today We are going to share jQuery Tooltip Plugins which is most popular technology used during websites development in a massive range now a days.

Html5 Tutorials: Useful Html5 Tutorials to Boost Your Creativity [*] - Html5 tutorials are on the verge of search engines for a while now, as new developers and designers are opting for this technology alot. Its pretty cool to be frank and although some browsers still face ..

GradientScanner: Easily Get The CSS For Gradients In An Image - Coding up the CSS for gradients in an image can be a difficult matter if you do not use the proper tools. But thanks to a web service called GradientScanner, the gradients in your image are automatically detected and their code generated.

9 Inspirational Website Effects Deconstructed [*] - As you may know, there are lots of great tutorials out there which can definitely help you practice, learn and achieve amazing results. The good thing about having so many tutorials to learn from is precisely that ..

Swiss Army Knives [*] - When you’re drawing the line around your software, make sure you’re not leaving in marginal utility features in an attempt to add more value. These little wannabe-features hang around unloved, bloating your app, hogging the UI and adding to maintenance costs.

Freelance Help, 100+ Tips on Creating an Effective Online Portfolio - Online portfolios are one of a freelancer’s greatest marketing tools. You can reference it in your business cards, promotional campaigns, email signatures ..

Ultimate Guide To Setting Up Your First Online Shop [*] - E-commerce is the most popular business trend in our futuristic society, as it’s such a simple process to send payments anywhere in the world via Internet connection.

A Developer’s Guide to HTML5 Canvas - Undoubtedly, the canvas element in HTML5 is the feature that most developers will want to use to develop truly rich web applications – without needing to install browser plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash player.

How to Use HTML5 File Drag & Drop - Dragging and dropping files from your desktop to a browser is one of the ultimate goals for web application integration. This is the first in a four-part series of posts ..

Pure CSS3 typing animation with steps() - steps() is a relatively new addition to the CSS3 animations module. Instead of interpolating the values smoothly, it allows us to define the number of “frames” precisely. So I used it to create headers that have the well-known animated “typing effect”:

Take advantage of the CSS background-size property [*] - The changes brought by the various CSS3 modules are pretty exciting for designers and front-end developers. Decreases in bandwidth and HTTP requests, faster maintenance and using real fonts instead of images are all big pluses on the SEO and accessibility fronts.

11 Websites to Learn PHP - PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. If you are new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, try the introductory tutorial.

8 Usability Mistakes Made By Web Designers - In the world of web design, we can look around and see so many shining examples of what makes this industry great. Though we are certainly not an industry without our faults and flaws.

Responsive Web Design Tutorials for Web Designers [*] - Responsive Web design is the new big thing in web design. Whether you believe its valuable or if its just “fools gold” you should still probably learn something about it, at very least just so you can stay up with the water cooler design talk at work.

55 Jquery Tutorials, Resources, Tips And Tricks: Ultimate Collection - If for whatever reason you don’t know jQuery, it is a “write less, do more” JavaScript library. It has many Ajax and JavaScript features to allow you enhance semantic coding and user experience.

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing - The last few years have been a good time to be a web designer. After a decade of making do with the aging technologies, methods and assumptions that gave birth to mainstream web publishing, designers ..

A Brief Look at Screen Resolutions - In comparison to the fixed-​​versus-​​fluid debate, the argument about designing for particular screen resolutions has been quite tame these past few years.

30+ Useful CSS/jQuery Plugins and Coding Techniques - Do you want to build an attractive website? If yes, then try using any of the 30+ best CSS/jQuery plugins and coding techniques that can help you big time. By using CSS/jQuery plugins and coding techniques, you can develop an advanced website

How to Create An Effective Complex Footer: Content Design and Examples - In the past, copyright information and the website name were the main elements found at the bottom of a website. Sometimes, the most heavily used navigation links would be included as well.

Create Columns Easily With The CSS3 Multi-Column Layout Module - Last week we looked at the css flexible box module, one of the new css tools to help with site layout. The css multi-column layout module is another that also helps with site layout and has even better support than flexible boxes.

CSS Resources for Developers and Designers [*] - Here is a list of CSS tools and resources that you may find useful in your web development and design work. We all know that us web developers and designers are very busy and often overworked!

Live Search for Your Website the Easy Way - If you want to offer your visitors a more rewarding experience on your website a customized search engine allows you to create a more rewarding search experience for your visitors and help them find what they are searching for.

Five killer ways to use a gallery style - A typical business website or new web application homepage has to lead a visitor clearly through crucial content gateways. In a matter of seconds, these sites must encourage people to keep reading or dive deeper.

6 Powerful jQuery Plugins to Create and Enhance Website Layout [*] – Javascript has opened wide possibilities of what you can do with HTML and CSS. Well, we have HTML5 and CSS3, pretty sure it can do more than before, but with a magical touch from Javascript, it can add interactive elements into your website layout.

The Science Behind A/B Testing [*] - A/B Testing, or split testing, has been enacted in the past few years by companies who want their designs to go under experimentation as an approach to their marketing decisions. It’s a simple practice that companies that to maximize their profits.

Anatomy of a HTML5 Mobile App - Over the past year I’ve been pretty hard on HTML5 Mobile Apps. The general perception is that HTML5 will provide companies with a scalable and flexible cross-platform mobile app strategy.

25+ Latest jQuery Plugins - 25+ Latest jQuery plugins and scripts for web designers and developers. This post contains jQuery sliders, image galleries, slideshow plugins, jQuery navigation menus, interactive maps, image rotators, plugins for tabs, accordion menus, user interface elements, web contact forms, modal windows, tooltips, font size ..

Responsive Web Design Toolbox: 50 Handy Tools and Services - we would like to present to your attention some fresh data on Responsive Web Design that is about grids, frameworks, JavaScript Libraries and jQuery Plugins, online services and testing tools.

Creating responsive images using the noscript tag - When building responsive websites, you immediately run into the problem of trying to implement responsive images which would be sized correctly depending on the user’s device.

 

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

How to Promote Yourself as a Graphic Designer - Becoming a freelancer might be an easy thing however, surviving as a freelance graphic designer is definitely a hard task. At times, you might think that you are a great designer ..

An Easy Design Trick: Using a Photo’s Natural Lines - Today we’re going to explore a super easy design trick for combining text and photos in interesting ways. I’ll teach you four methods for using the directionality ..

43 Free & Premium Fonts for Bold Headlines - Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, and modifying type glyphs. The good selection of typography can convert your normal design into very attractive piece of pure art.

Tips To Help You Present a Logo Design More Effectively - Logo designing is not that easy to do, frankly. If you are a designer who goes for logo design, you already know what I am talking about. The story just doesn’t end at the step where you just finish off with your project and the logo is all ready in front of you.

The 10 best fonts from the Google Webfonts Directory - The idea of the Google Webfonts Directory is great: offering everyone free webfonts, which you can include in your website with just one line of code and without worrying about the multiple webfont formats, subsetting, file size, download speed and so on.

Famous Type Designers – The Origins of Type [*] - As a designer, you come across projects that implies using typography and it’s important that you have some basic  knowledge about this subject. Sure, there is a lot of information on the Internet about typography,

8 Ways to Get the Selection You Want in Photoshop - Mastering different forms of selection creation is one of the fundamental aspects of becoming a Photoshop professional. If you don’t know half a dozen techniques or more to create a usable selection, your toolbox of skills ..

35 Fabulous Fresh Free Fonts - Each of us often need a new shape, thickness or appearance of the font to make our projects look modern, fresh and different. That is why almost every designer always looking for good, nice and effective font ..

8 essential Fireworks tips for web design - Are you a Photoshop die-hard and wondered why you’d ever use Fireworks? Have you been using Fireworks for years and looking to improve your workflow? Save yourself from doing the same thing over and over again.

The Role of a Logo - A logo is a graphical design concept, usually not complicated, that has the main role to represent the image of a product/service/company/website. Even if it is ignored by most of us, practically a logo has enough importance that while neglecting it ..

35 Awesome Free Sans Serif Fonts - Every one is looking around for high quality fonts to spice up their design. Here we have collected 35 free and high quality sans serif fonts for you to use in your design. If you like these free fonts you might also want ..

 

Blogging, Social Media, WordPress, Writing, etc.

30 More WordPress Security Plugins - We all know these days Internet is full of opportunities and free-for-all so you don’t know when the next attack is going to come from. Today, security and privacy are some of the major concerns and for simple users who don’t code a lot it goes hard to deal with such issues.

15 Useful Twitter Plugins for WordPress [*] - Nowadays successful blogging definitely depends on effective use of social media. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks and you must consider its benefits if you want to be a successful blogger.

32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business - Facebook’s not just for keeping tabs on friends and filling out quizzes — it can also be used as a highly effective business tool. It’s great for marketing your products, landing gigs and connecting with your customers

15 Free WordPress Themes with a Responsive Layout [*] - The most popular topic of discussion at the moment, amongst web designers anyway, is undoubtedly responsive web design. This is in response to the popularity ..

Content Strategy for the Web - You probably have a website. Has your philosophy for it evolved with the times? Contemporary websites offer more than just information about your company, contact information, and your product offerings.

How to upgrade a WordPress theme after you’ve hacked the heck out of it - Have you ever wanted to upgrade a heavily modified theme and seamlessly knit all your changes into the new code? Here’s how.

Build a multilingual site with WordPress [*] - In most of the world, a multilingual web isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. About two-thirds of the world population use more than one language in the real world, so it’s no surprise that they use those languages online as well.

6 Steps to Focus Your Blog Content to Your Target Audience - Maybe you are about to launch a blog or possibly considering how to focus your content to draw a specific customer. Content consumers – your customers – are looking for something when they come to your blog.

The 7 Cs of Business Communication: Make Your Posts Shareworthy Every Time - We all agree that at the heart of great content lies effective communication. If you don’t, you are almost guaranteed to fail at whatever you are trying to accomplish with your posts.

20 Great Looking WordPress Themes Which You Can Use For Free - If you are looking for a free WordPress theme that is also good looking, then this article is for you. Here you can find 20 superb themes that are not only great, but also very well made.

4 Biggest Blogging Myths That Lead to Bloggers Giving Up - If you are new to the world of blogging, there are few pieces of advice that you can never, ever escape. The sad thing is the most of them are utter non sense – huge time wasters.

10 Ways to Turn Your Blog into a Lead-Generation Machine - Blogs are a great way to increase your digital presence, making you more visible and “findable” via Google, Bing and the like. They can also be a great way to generate leads. Your blog can function as a kind of triage for your sales team, fielding and answering questions organically via the content you produce there.

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

20 Google Pagerank Checker Websites - Every blogger is surely interested on their site’s importance based on the most used search engine on the web. Therefore, we bring to you these tools for you to easily and instantly check the rank of your website in the search engine giant Google.

5 Small Tips to Find Big SEO Problems - In need of some easy tips to better optimize your site? Look no further for some quick ways to identify potentially significant SEO issues.

5 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog Links Better - Blog links can be amazing. Links from real, powerful blogs that have a strong subscriber base and an active community are worth their weight in gold. Not just in the usual way links are useful, but they are great for increasing brand ..

Do You Need to Change Your URLs? - The URL is more important than you’d probably think when it comes to SEO and usability. After all, it shows right there along with the meta title and meta description that you so carefully crafted in a search result.

How to Get Your Content Shared - Links have always been an important search engine ranking factor. The more relevant, inbound links pointing to a webpage, the better the chances are that that page will show up in a search result for the targeted keywords.

Tips For Designing an SEO Friendly Website - It’s not enough these days to design a beautiful, functional website that addresses your clients needs. If you truly want your client to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO is a necessity.

How the Age of Your Blog Effects Authority, Credibility, & SEO - One of the elements that can contribute to your overall success in terms of organic search results and SEO is the age of your domain and blog.

Successful SEO Tactics: Off-Site Optimization - The large majority of external factors that influence organic rankings fall within the classification of link building. There have been great debates in recent months that the ranking impact that can ..

Going Local with Location Based Searches - An easy first step to maximize your exposure as a local business is to turn toward the search engines. With more than 3 billion searches a day, and a rapidly expanding mobile search market, every local business should be catering toward location-based searches and services.

 

Tutorials

Tabs with Round Out Borders - Rounded corners are now trivially easy to achieve via border-radius. But that only allows us to cut into the shape. What if we want to connect a shape to another with a rounded outward corner.

Just another awesome CSS3 buttons - Whether you’re designing a website or a web application, you’ll need buttons for it. Now, with CSS3′s help, it was never easier to create nice looking buttons.

Slicebox – A fresh 3D image slider with graceful fallback - With the CSS3 3D transformations we can create some neat effects by transforming elements in three-dimensional space. Slicebox makes use of the 3D transforms properties and allows different kind of effects.

Creating Simple Origami Style Typography in Illustrator [*] - In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple Origami style piece of Typography. You will create a set of basic shapes to build letters from and see how to refine those into a more realistic look of your type.

Roundup Of Superb Photoshop Tutorials For Poster Design - Adobe Photoshop tutorial are wonderful tool for every professional and non-professional designers and photographers. Of course design geeks are keenly interested in experimenting something different and learning something new, so poster design could be an excellent way to practice for design enthusiast.

Code a Web Magazine Style Dropdown Navigation Menu - In this tutorial we’ll be creating a magazine-style drop down nav menu. This will be created with some fancy CSS3 techniques to work in standards-compliant browsers. Even if you are shaky with jQuery you should be ..

30 Breathtaking Surreal Photoshop Tutorials [*] - Photoshop is one of the most popular tool used among graphic artists. Photoshop tutorials are definitely one of the best ways to learn and master this tool. There are lots of high quality and variety tutorials on the web available for free ..

Make CSS3 buttons like a boss - This tutorial is going to give you a deeper understanding of the design thinking that goes into making these buttons and show you how to make them from scratch.

Create Sticky Notes To-Do List In CSS And JQuery - In this tutorial you will learn how you can create your own simple To-Do list using CSS and JQuery. First you will design the To-Do list, this is going to be a simple form where you can quickly add your tasks for the day.

 

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

18 Helpful Time Management Tips for Designers - Some people claim that 24 hours is not enough for them to finish all their tasks for the day. Indeed, most of us are running after time trying to befriend it. Time is very vital for us.

Make things [*] - Anil worries that it’s hard to communicate this motivation to a new generation of entrepreneurs, and I agree. There are so many conferences these days, so many voluble, charismatic leaders, and so much noise.

Web Design is Product Design [*] - A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures. Web design is product design. Web design is experience design.

Future of Web Design – Facts and Thoughts - Web design has changed tremendously in the last few years and it’s still changing. More than changing, web design is evolving and evolution is bounded with complexity. Although the industry is not in danger some web designers are.

Writing an effective sales proposal – the basics [*] - the sales pitch is one of the hardest challenges a freelancer will face (unless of course you are a freelance salesperson – in which case it should be second nature!), so it is essential to get to grips with some basic sales techniques and tools in order to continue finding new work.

Spark Your Freelance Business with Strategic Synergy - Are you trapped selling buckets of time? Bouncing from one freelance project to the next? There is a better way – develop a synergistic approach to your freelance business.

No Comments - When I started blogging some 5 years ago or so, it was all about the conversation, engaging readers and networking. I met incredible people via the comment section of my first blog—many I still talk to and even work with today. Good times!

The Dark Art of Pricing [*] - I’M SURE MANY OF YOU WENT TO ART SCHOOL and I’m assuming most of the people reading this article are designers, illustrators or others working within the world of what we reluctantly call “communication art”.

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 ..

7 Golden Rules of Starting a New Business - What are the golden rules of starting a new business? Or rather, the golden rules of succeeding with a new business? Anyone who is planning to start a new business – be it startups or business owners who are planning to exit a business and start a new one, go through the same dilemma.

Mark Boulton on layouts and grid systems - It’s time for a big, fundamental shift. For hundreds of years books and magazines have been designed the same way. The web, though, requires a different approach. We now view content in many ways on many devices.

Effective Business Presentations – 7 Spicy Secrets - Presentations are a business staple. In fact, they are second only to email as the most commonly used business tool, and an effective business presentation separates the extraordinary from the average.

8 Things That Are Harming Your Creative Potential as a Professional - Obviously, as creative people, stunted creativity, and the lack of productivity, and strength of mind and character that come with it, is something to address and reduce.

7 Sins of Website Copywriting That Send Prospects Fleeing - Remember: your website is your virtual salesperson. The design is the way that salesperson is dressed. It makes the first impression. But the copy are the words coming out of that salesperson’s mouth: that’s what will make or break the sale.

Freelancers: Fix Your Communication Errors Now - If you’re a freelancer with excellent communication skills, then you’re ahead of the pack. You’re more likely to have an easier time marketing your services.

A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Conversion - Converting visitors into valuable users is arguably the most fundamental element of managing a website. We’re going to take a closer look at conversion, discuss what it is, cover some common pitfalls, and tackle improving your site’s conversion rates.

10 Tips to Invoice Your Freelance Clients Professionally - Let’s face it, while receiving money can be very addictive, invoicing is a total nightmare for freelancers, especially designers with artistic talent. However, the truth side about the freelance business is you ..

The three secrets of business analytics (no rocket science here) - I’m going to give away all of my secret sauce, and tell you the three things that are required to be successful at business analytics (or data science, or whatever you want to call it)

Marry Your Clients - I run a distributed agency where our longest client relationship is now in its eighth year of active collaboration. We have been working together longer than the average marriage in the United States.

The Age of Noise - Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that. Just now, Twitter is augmenting their already busy feed of messages with even more messages.

10 ways to win pitch work every time - Always be closing with our guide to nailing those pitches and sealing the deal

101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads - So as the kicker for a new series on how to get more freelance work, we have put together an enormous list of ideas, ranging from ones that take 10 seconds to 10 days. There’s something for everyone to try and I guarantee there will be plenty of things you never thought of.

Interaction Design Tactics For Visual Designers - Anyone designing Web-based properties today requires a basic understanding of interaction design principles. Even if your training is not formally in human-computer interaction, user experience design ..

5 ways to protect your work online - Anyone who shares their work online knows there’s a risk they’re taking. Photographs are constantly ripped off, articles plagiarized, and even code is often stolen.

How to Find the Clients That YOU Want - Fortunately, there are some things that you can do to make yourself and your services more noticeable and more appealing to the right kinds of clients. In this post we’ll present some tips that you can implement to help you to attract the types of clients that you want.

 

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_