Tweet-Parade (no.40 Oct 2011)

Hello Saturday! .. It’s time for 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 Steps To A More Effective And Productive Webdesign Process [*] - Designing for the web is fun and we as web-designers are constantly learning new techniques and improving our skills. But to be honest, kicking-ass at Photoshop doesn’t mean your new website will be a success.

10 PHP Hacks Worth Knowing - PHP is a very flexible programming language and no matter how much you know, there is always more left to learn. Some of the things that are definitely worth knowing are all the different hacks that help you solve problems and make you more productive.

Principles of Proximity in Web Design Before You Plan For Website Design - The principles of proximity play a major role in making web page more effective than what can be achieved without it. You must be curious about the term proximity in web design and might be thinking that what does it actually mean?

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Web Accessibility - Accessibility is simply defined that people of all sorts, regardless of disability, can access the information you provide in your website. There are many ways on how to make your information accessible to people, from simple ..

CSS Selectors: Should You Optimize Them To Perform Better? [*] - This entire discussion is based on how browsers read selectors in order to identify which html gets styled and the key is that browsers will read your selector from right to left.

Are You Using CSS3 Appropriately? [*] - The new CSS3 capabilities should be treated just like any other web technology we work with: It should always support user-centered design and the site’s goals and purpose.

25+ Free High Quality HTML Templates - In today’s world, online presence is crucial. Whether you own a business or just want to promote yourself, you need to be “out there”.

Practical CSS3 tables with rounded corners - Though, the conclusion is the same: when you’re dealing with tabular data, tables are absolutely required. Designing a table is a challenge – it’s (mostly) about how easy is your table to read.

Beginner’s Guide To: Building HTML5/CSS3 Webpages - HTML5 and CSS3 have swept the web by storm in only 2 years. Before them there have been many altered semantics in the way web designers are expected to create web pages, and with their arrival come a slew of ..

Discover the power of CSS3 selectors [*] - To style an element with CSS, we need to be able to target it. Enter CSS selectors, which enable us to target elements at a more granular level without adding presentational markup or attributes.

How To Build A Successful & Effective Online Web Portfolio - The majority of the people, interested in launching an online presence, don’t have the same acknowledgement in web design and network applications as the ones involved in – and working on the Internet.

Redesign your portfolio site in 10 easy steps [*] - Our portfolio can break or break us, which is often why creating a unique, well crafted site that showcases our work is one of the toughest tasks we undertake as designers.

The CSS Display Property: A Reintroduction To A Familar Friend [*] - All elements have a default display and most of the time that default is exactly what you want. In fact when you choose to use a div, it’s mainly because of it’s default display value of block.

Wrapping Your Head Around Canvas: Part 1 - One of the newest features that have most of you cooing, aside from the new video and audio tags, is Canvas. It has been dubbed a convenient replacement for the use of flash in the browser, and it translates ..

Roundup of 25 Oven Fresh jQuery plug-ins - jQuery plugins are really helpful for developers, so today we decided why not to make a collection of jquery plugins. In this roundup we have put together 25 useful and helpful jquey plug-ins

10 wireframing tools for web designers - No matter what size your project, creating a wireframe will save you time and help with problem-solving. Here’s our pick of the best tools that you can use to build them.

CSS3 Gems: The calc() Function [*] - The CSS3 calc() function is primarily used to calculate lengths, numbers, angles, transition / animation times or sound frequencies. However, it allows you to mix measurement types — a powerful concept in CSS.

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

Using Adobe’s Kuler engine with Illustrator - The right colour palette can turn a good image into a great image, but it isn’t always easy to select the best combination for your work. Adobe’s Kuler is a web-hosted community-based colour scheme editor that enables users ..

5 SEO Strategies When Naming and Branding Your Company - Lots of factors go into a great company brand, first among them, the business name itself. For many aspiring entrepreneurs and internet start ups, the prime consideration is search engine optimization.

5 Elements that Make a Font Successful - Whether you are considering designing your own fonts for a brochure printing or committing a brand to a particular font family, there are a few elements of a successful font that you may want to know.

How Brands Were Born: A Brief History of Modern Marketing - The standardization of quality products forced companies to find new ways to distinguish themselves. Understanding how those marketing campaigns began helps to explain why branded products are so ubiquitous today.

Illustrator Mastery: 25 Techniques Every Designer Must Know - There are many tools within illustrator that are often overlooked. So we decided to put together this handy guide of 25 essential tips for Adobe Illustrator.

 

Blogging, Social Media, WordPress, Writing, etc.

Understanding Social Media Marketing BEFORE Using it - Social network is the trend nowadays. From youngsters to elders, everyone finds themselves engrossed in one, two or even more social media sites.

Customizing the WordPress Dashboard For Your Clients - Have you recently started using WordPress for your client’s project and want to further impress your client with better packaging? This article will focus on packaging WordPress so that, in just few minutes ..

Useful WordPress Code Snippets and Hacks [*] - When coding WordPress themes, especially if you do it regularly, its really useful to have a selection of code snippets in your toolbox to just ‘copy-n-paste’ as and when the functionality needs.

How to Protect Your WordPress Blog From Getting Hacked - As many users are probably aware, WordPress is one of the premier open source blog software available on the internet. It has gone far beyond the standard weblog and is now an excellent foundation for just about any type of website.

A comparison of leading WordPress theme frameworks - So you know you need a framework if you want to be more efficient in designing WP themes, but there are dozens of starter themes and frameworks out there. Where do you begin?

20 htaccess hacks to prevent your WordPress site from hacking - A .htaccess file is the common name of a directory-level configuration file which allows decentralised management of web server configuration. A .htaccess file is always added to the root directory ..

How To Create Custom Post Meta Boxes In WordPress - Creating custom meta boxes is extremely simple, at least it is once you’ve created your first one using the tools baked into WordPress’ core code. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about meta boxes

Remove WordPress Version Number - Having an out dated blog can cause you some security issues. If a hacker knows what version you are running then they could know the exactly security loopholes to exploit your blog.

How To: Create Tabs with the Settings API in WordPress - Sections are good and work out of the box, but if you’ve got more options than your sections can handle, it’s wise enough to split them into different options pages and provide tabs.

10 Ways to Set Up a Testing Environment for WordPress - It’s very important to have an environment where you can test new themes and plugins without breaking your live site. That’s why many WordPress site administrators choose to set up a staging ..

Getting Started With The WordPress Transients API, Part 1 - The Transients API provides a way to store information in the WordPress database with an expiration time. When saving information using the Options API, values are stored using a key and a value.

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors [*] - Tracking and optimizing error messages will help you measurably improve your website’s user experience. We’ll walk through how to add error tracking using Google Analytics, with some code snippets.

15 Title Tag Optimization Guidelines For Usability and SEO - The HTML title tag defines the name of a web page and should be used to describe content of that page in a concise way. Thus, what is placed between the opening and closing HTML title tag is  important for SEO.

Why a Freelance Designer should know SEO? - SEO is a very complex process and to explain it all in one post is impossible. But there are a few simple tips/steps that you can apply that will improve SEO on your website and search engine rankings.

How Social Share Buttons Impact Your SEO - These little social share buttons are actually a critical component of my content promotion campaign, and they should be part of yours! Social share buttons allow your readers to submit your content to ..

Top 10 SEO Tips for Web Designers - But now, you need to have an analytical mind as well, you have to think how the search engines are going to look at your design – SEO suddenly becomes a word that you have to pay a huge amount of attention to

4 Reasons Blog Comments Are Great for Link Building - Blog commenting is one of the best components of a link building campaign for numerous reasons. Aside from the obvious value of the link, there is a lot of long term value associated with developing a ..

Why In-Page Navigation Links Matter More Than Menus - Users spend more time with in-page navigation links than they do with menus. In fact, some users don’t even look at menus. What users look at is page content.

How to Get Started in Getting More Links to Your Website - Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? It’s about the trivial many (80%) and the vital few (20%), the trivial many that bring small results and vital few that bring most of the results.

Get More Pageviews: How To Encourage Visitors To Click More - The secret of success in constructive blogging, is getting more page views. This will make sure readers get involved in your site and click more, resulting in an increase in the traffic and page views.

 

Tutorials

Using HTML5 geolocation API to get the distance of the visitor from me - GeoIP, pulling my current location from Google Latitude with a clever hack to bypass all the API security shenanigans and displaying a distance of the visitor from me.

Fresh HTML5 Tutorials to make you HTML Expert - HTML5 is no doubt most popular comprehensive markup language for front-end development and its already giving tough time to Adobe Flash. HTML 5 is useful because of the advances features/structures like ..

Designers Know Your Code: Web Design Tutorials - In this post we have gathered a handful of useful tutorials from these various areas of code that designers should have their hands in. We have standard CSS and CSS3 tutorials, HTML5 and also Javascript tuts as well.

25 Top Photoshop Text Effects - There is no denying that there are hundred and thousands of Photoshop Text tutorials and you will find atleast one Photoshop Text tutorial in every design related site.

Create a Security Seal in Illustrator Using Guilloche Patterns - In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a security seal using Guilloche, the artistic technique that is typically used in banknote design and other documents to prevent them from being forged.

Integrating AJAX with PHP Part I – This tutorial will help the latter part enjoy hands-on experience with AJAX and PHP. I won’t be using jargons yet I am assuming that you understand the basics of HTML, PHP and JavaScript.

Useful jQuery Image Sliders and Galleries Tutorials –  jQuery image sliders use CSS that gains it more popularity than any other image slider tutorials. Some of the jQuery image sliders are free to use under MIT license - a list of stunning jOuery image sliders and tutorials

How to Create Your Own 5 Stars Voting System - Today I prepared very interesting article – today I will tell you how you can create own voting system for your items (any units at your website) with PHP. I prepared two SQL tables: first table will keep our ..

Build An Innovative Portfolio Site Using Alternative UI/UX - We’re going to create an online portfolio site with a grid of images, a fixed header, text and interface elements. The mark-up will be styled so that the content fits without scrolling in nearly ..

Cycle Through Images on Hover with jQuery - A quick way to add a hover responsive, fast cycling, jQuery powered slideshow to your site. Each slideshow, with the images are pulled from the unordered list and turned into a slideshow by jQuery Cycle Plugin.

Draggable Image Boxes Grid - Today we want to create a template with a fullscreen grid of images and content areas. The idea is to have a draggable grid that shows boxes of thumbnails and menu like items.

11 jQuery and PHP Tutorials - I have listed 11 jQuery and PHP Tutorials that I have found useful and easy to learn. PHP is not something you will learn overnight but tutorials are a great start. Also check codex for wordpress very helpful when it come to coding for wordpress.

13 Fresh PHP Tutorials - PHP is a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP is the widely-used, free, open source, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft’s ASP.

 

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

Why Your Brand Is Everything - if you want to run a website that supports yourself, you need to find a topic and stick to it. You need to ask yourself what you want to be, and focus on creating content and a brand around that.

A Quick Networking Tutorial to Build Strong Connections - A lot of people don’t understand the true power of networking and how far in life you can go with knowing the right people. I’m sure you have all heard of the phrase, “It’s not what you know, but who you know”.

Respecting Ethics - So where are our moral principles in regards to our work? How do we guide ourselves and others through business decisions? Without an ethical system we’re left to do whatever we think works at any given time.

Storytelling in Design - “Design is not just the way a product or a website may look – design is the product in its entire form, and a big part of that is its story.” No story is without a purpose. No great story is without a great purpose.

Guidelines to Writing a Web Design Proposal - Writing website proposals is boring. There are no two ways about it, but they’re a necessary evil. The proposal is the final push before our client signs on the dotted line. We need to make sure we have all our bases covered and ..

Responsive web design is boring! - I’m worried that in our quest for modular, gridded and responsive nirvana we’ve lost the spark. Case in point: the much talked about Boston Globe refresh. Where’s the character? Where’s the personality?

Developing Emphasis in Web Design - Simply put, emphasis is creating a focal point that will grab the viewer’s/user’s eye. In web design, it is often referred to as ‘eye-direction’ and if you have ever designed a call to action you know all about emphasis.

Simple Ways to Keep Your Project on Budget - Here are four proven practices that will help you define and manage your budget more effectively. As the Project Manager you must master the practices for managing the spend within your limits.

Doing More With Less: Tips for Designing With Limited Resources - Today we’re going to tackle some common issues that arrive not with having too much scattered content but with too little. How can you flesh out a design when your client has barely given you anything to work with?

How to find better clients - Finding who you are supposed to working with is critical, but it is just part of the evolution of client service. The way we work together, the way in which teams are compensated and understanding who is actually in charge ..

Rethinking The Business Card - Making an impression is not your card’s job. That’s your job. More often, your business card will just be ignored, whereas a truly impressive person who knows how to communicate effectively about his or her work is very hard to forget.

Common mistakes designers make with clients – Part 6: Not asking for referrals - So what’s the problem with not asking your current clients for referrals? Here’s why it’s a critical mistake that any designer should avoid

Common mistakes designers make with clients – Part 7: Neglecting to follow up - Neglecting to follow up could potentially ruin your design business if you’re not careful. Why? Because neglecting to follow up allows potential clients to slip through the cracks.

The Top 4 Things to Know When Redesigning Your Website - Not getting the traffic you once had and feeling like your site needs a tune up? Before you decide to revamp your site, develop a strategy or plan of sorts. Map out what you want to do and make sure ..

What Is Influence and Do Freelancers Really Need It? - In this post, we’ll look at the meaning of the word “influence” and discuss whether freelancers should be concerned about it.

Top 7 Traits of a Successful Designer - In order for a person to earn a career as a well-respected and recognized designer, there are several different factors that they must consider and several more that must be mastered. As with any career, education is of utmost importance, but it all comes down to hard work.

5 Powerful Tips on How to Be a Strategic Creative - After well over a decade of working in agencies, freelancing, and running an agency, I’ve come to believe that there are really two kinds of freelancers.

Take Control of Your Web Presence with Ten Top Tips - Social media is a brilliant way to build your brand, which in turn grows your client base. But it can suck hours out of your busy day. And time is the one resource that we freelancers crave.

How to Turn Your Website into an Automated Sales Machine (Part III) - Few people are simply going to hand you their money (especially on the web) unless the following three conditions are met:

6 Steps To Scaling Your Freelance Business - Most freelancer’s incomes are tied directly to their time. Since there are only so many hours in the day, how do we break through our income ceiling? The answer boils down to this: Stop working alone.

The Price of Good Design - A continually updated guide to help new designers manage money and price their services provided by seasoned and international industry experts.

The typography-out approach in the world of browser-based web design - As the web is content and content is type, it’s no surprise that at the heart of this approach is typography: stripping away all the cruft and getting back to good, solid design principles, like well-formed grids and decent measures and incremental leading and appropriately paired typefaces.

There Are No Bad Ideas: Just Ideas That Don’t Work - But unsuccessful ideas are extremely important too; not least for the amount of damage they often cause. Damage not from the ideas themselves, but from how badly organizations often deal with unsuccessful ideas.

Mobile: The Web’s New Minimalist Movement - There is a movement growing in the web design community for a more minimal web, a user friendly web, a more semantic web where things have a purpose and reason for their existence. And the new mobile revolution is taking us there.

Be Your Own Social Duck: 10 Tips To Differentiate with Results - People are doing much more following than leading. They are losing site of who they are. They are losing sight of WHY they are doing any of this in the first place.

The Great Freelancer Pricing War – This post is intended to outline some of the pricing dilemmas that freelancers face and maybe provide a few tips to give you an advantage in the great freelancer pricing war.

 

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_