Tweet-Parade (no.41 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, SEO, tutorials, 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, Javascript, etc.

Designing a Mobile Stylesheet for your Website - It seems mobile is becoming more powerful with the younger tech audience. More kids and young adults are carrying around smartphones than any other time period ever before. Each one of these devices is not just a phone ..

17 Useful Library and Components for Javascript Developers - JavaScript is a popular way of enabling programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment with the use of scripting language. It is currently the most popular programming language in the web.

Essential jQuery Plugin Patterns - I occasionally write about implementing design patterns in JavaScript. They’re an excellent way of building upon proven approaches to solving common development problems, and I think there’s a lot of benefit to using them.

7 CSS Snippets to Borrow from HTML5 Boilerplate - The “Scavenger” series looks at large-scale projects and focuses on the small snippets you can take from the project without needing the complete project.

Wrapping Your Head Around HTML5 Canvas: Part 2 - Let’s get back into the swing of things with learning about creating gradients and patterns in HTML5 Canvas.

Curing CSS3 Headaches in Older Browsers [*] - There are however, a number of tools to help out in situations like these. Today we’re going to figure out how to conquer CSS3 in older browsers, including Internet Explorer.. Let’s take a look at a range of techniques to render the most important CSS3 properties in older browser versions.

Seven Premium Style jQuery Plugins And Tutorials To Display Images On Websites [*] - There are many jQuery plugins out there, but getting by free and good ones is not that easy. Today, we are sharing Seven Premium Style jQuery Plugins And Tutorials To Display Images On Website.

In defense of CSS hacks — introducing “safe CSS hacks” - How do you target Internet Explorer in your CSS? Do you use CSS hacks, conditional stylesheets or something else? It’s the perfect trollbait. There have been plenty of discussions about this, and I don’t mean to start a new one.

How to use Media Queries in JavaScript - Responsive design is one of the most exciting web layout concepts since CSS replaced tables. The underlying technology uses media queries to determine the viewing device type, width, height, orientation, ..

Are CSS Tables Better Than HTML Tables? - Mention css and tables in the same sentence and controversy is sure to follow. Web designers like myself have been telling you not to use html tables for layouts and now here we have a way to create tables with css alone.

The Ins and Outs of PHP Exceptions - Still returning false whenever a function in your program fails? In this article, we’ll learn about PHP exceptions, and how you can use them to soup up your application’s error handling.

HTML5: New Functions Of The Old Tags - It is well known that tags <b>, <i>, <s>, <small> are presentational, and consequently, in terms of a paradigm “structure, presentation, behavior” their use is not welcomed.

An introduction to CSS pseudo-element hacks - But there are some common publishing effects – such as formatting the first line of a paragraph – that would not be possible if you were only able to style elements based on this information. Fortunately, CSS has pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes.

 

Webdesign: Usability, User Experience, Tools, etc.

Responsive Design: hype or solution? – They seem to love it in the US. Many blogs write about the latest trend: Responsive Design. With the arrival of smart phones and tablets, this is a logical solution for those who do not want to invest in various versions of a website for all those different devices.

8 Steps to improve User Experience Of Your Website - According to some people it is impossible to have both, a great looking site and amazing usability — which obviously is not true. You can boast both of these things in your website, and al you have to do is to ..

What’s new for web designers – Oct 2011 - The October edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, boilerplates, some JavaScript tools and resources, useful documents for working with clients, and a number of great new fonts.

Designing Websites to Increase Traffic and Conversion - Generating traffic and turning it into conversions is at the forefront of a businesses’ online marketing strategy. In an era where they may fight for clicks and spend an insurmountable amount of time getting their websites to the top of search pages

Awesome tutorials to master responsive web design - Due to the rise of mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones and other smart phones, your website must be easy to read and use in multiple resolution. In this post, some awesome tutorials that will help you to master responsive web design.

Semantic Code: The Concept and Practices - “Semantic Code” – sounds familiar right? The buzz word among web development community. Even if you are not related to web development; I know so many SEO experts who are aware of optimized HTML coding structure.

35 Excellent Wireframing Resources - Wireframes can save development time by outlining exactly how a site should look and function, in a manner that can be shown to and approved by your clients.

The insider’s guide to a successful website: design (part 1) - We’ve created a series of articles that break down each stage into 10 simple steps you can follow. We hope these will help you in your quest for online success and help you stay ahead of the competition!

7 Rules To Creating A Professional Portfolio Site - In order to attract the potential clients, your portfolio should be designed properly according to certain principles which not only impress the clients, but also ensure their smooth user experience.

Tips to Design a User Friendly Contact us Form to Increase the Conversion Rate - These days maintaining a website is a challenge, considering the ever increasing number of websites on the web. A website has to face a stiff competition from several other websites that offer the best in the best manner.

 

 

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

Quick Tip: The Rule of Thirds - The rule of thirds is one of the most basic photographic compositional techniques. The idea is that if the compositional elements of an image align with these intersections, that it will increase the impact and interest within the photo.

How Important is Sketching for Your Designing - I have tried to sum up a few benefits of sketching in the graphic designing process according to my understanding. My purpose is to remind the designer community about the ever so awesome importance of sketching.

How to Float Through Print Designing Process Successfully - Print designing sounds like a modern terminology, but infect, the origin of this designing dates back to the time when printing press was first invented. Although, online mediums have relatively diminished ..

How to Bulletproof @font-face Web Fonts - following best practices recommended by industry-leading developers and in the current situation where there’s much wider browser support for @font-face, web fonts just aren’t foolproof.

The Inner Structure of Infographics: How to Create, Important Tips and Free Tools - As a visual content helps to demonstrate efficiently engaging graphic data and helps to motivate readers to plunge into the text to find out more, infographics have to be the major part of your content business.

Beginners Guides to InDesign - InDesign is a powerful design program with so many tools and features it can a bit tricky to find a topic to begin with. With this in mind, we’ve put together a collection of beginner guides on various InDesign topics like the best way to ..

Quick Tip:Designing a Basic Letterhead with InDesign CS5 - For today’s Quick Tip we are going to set up a letterhead within InDesign. However, before we can start, you need to have a logo, some content (you can also use place holder text) and contact details ready.

Tips for Working with the Gradient Mesh Tool In Illustrator - In this tutorial, we’ll show you some tips that will improve your Mesh work. We’ll also show you a proper workflow to get outstanding results with this tool. We’ll take a close look at creating a layer ..

A Short Introduction into Typography - Due to the huge opportunities, sometimes, the online medium is more competitive than the “material reality” and, here, existing is equivalent to being professional. Freelance web designers but also specialized ..

Why Offline Advertising is Important For Your Business - Offline advertising is far from dead. Its basically the same as someone saying print media and newspapers are dead. Well if you look at the majority of people, they read the news online nowadays.

 

Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Content Strategy, etc.

Lessons I’ve Learnt From Blogging - I decided to write more and more tutorials and put them on here which is what gets me the most traffic to my blog, but while doing the tutorials I learnt that surprising I also liked writing.

Principles of Effective Blog Design - Websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.

6 Reasons Why Your Blog Sucks and How To Fix It - Firstly, it will make you see past all the petty compliments and kindness of your friends and relatives. Secondly, it will help you turn your blog upside down to start outputting amazing content and a creative design.

10 Tips To Drive Twitter Traffic To Your Blog - Twitter can become your blog’s best friend when it comes to traffic. I’m not suggesting that you use it for that purpose only but, if you run a blog and feel like you could be getting a little more love from it, perhaps you should ..

How to Make Any Good Blog Great - What made the popular blogs great? Was it the fantastic design? The voice of the writer? The consistently useful content and easy subscription buttons and successful marketing? While a combination of these things certainly made them top ..

Readability: Who Are You Writing For? - Readability is how well your text can be understood on first reading and is an important factor in how well your site will be received. As a skill within copywriting, creating or editing content ..

Tips to Help Designers Improve Their Social Network Standing - In this post, we will share to you ten useful tips that will help you as a designer improve your online presence or your social network standing. This is very vital in promoting your name as a designer, gathering clients and promoting your website.

 

WordPress

WordPress Essentials: The Definitive Guide To WordPress Hooks - Modifying WordPress core files is a big no-no, so whenever you want to change existing functionality or create new functionality, you will have to turn to hooks.

How To Style Your Posts Based on Category, Tag or Custom Taxonomy in WordPress - Child themes, taxonomy (categories, tags and custom taxonomy), the post_class function, it’s filter friend and their correct usage in WordPress themes.

30 Fresh Minimal WordPress Themes (2011 Edition) - Minimal is the timeless web design trend of basic styling a web page and stripping out all non-essential elements allowing the reader to focus solely on the content with absolutely no distractions.

How To: Create Tabs with the Settings API in WordPress - WordPress themes and plugins come with quite a lot of features and options these days, and the Settings API does provide a very easy to sectioning method.

How To: Upload Media via URL Programmatically in WordPress - WordPress themes and plugins sometimes need to download files from third party servers, like images, documents, archives, and more. A Flickr image browser is a great example, where you wouldn’t want to hotlink ..

How to Build A WordPress Theme From Scratch Part One - A developer with some skill in CSS and HTML can easily create their own WordPress themes to give their site the ability to provide a unique experience for their visitors. Part 1 of creating your own theme.

WordPress Widget Boilerplate - Over the past year, I’ve written a number of WordPress plugins both for contract and for hobby. During that time, I began creating a boilerplate of code off of which I build most of my widgets.

How To Backup Your WordPress Website - Anyone who has had their website hacked or inadvertently changed something they shouldn’t have on their websites database, will know the importance of backing up your live websites on a regular basis.

Display & Style Related Posts For Your WordPress Site - Displaying related posts is a great way to keep readers on your blog and this tutorial will show you how to achieve just this! There are definitely many related posts plugins out there that would be great ..

How to Maintain Your WordPress Site - When your site grows and matures, there are steps to be taken to make sure your site remains happy and healthy.To ensure that everyone enjoys the best possible experience at your site, it is important that everything ..

WordPress Hacks to Make Your Blog More SEO Friendly - WordPress has transformed itself into dramatically and it is now probably the best SEO friendly platform that a blogger can have. Perhaps, this is the reason behind its recent surge in popularity and ..

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, etc.

How Analytics Can Drive Your Email Marketing Campaigns - Email Marketing can be a great strategy for getting content directly to your customers, and there are a lot of robust email campaign packages available for for very little cost.

Coding a Design: SEO Best Practices and Mistakes to Avoid - How to make a website search engine friendly. The SEO best practices that can be incorporated in the coding part and mistakes to avoid while coding.

60 SEO tips & Online Marketing techniques for ecommerce Websites - In this article we list 60 important SEO tips and Online Marketing techniques that can be used in order to improve the Online Marketing presence of an ecommerce website.

5 Best SEO Concepts for Website Development - Whenever, you plan to develop a website for your business, the first and foremost thing you need to consider is the SEO. When it comes to optimizing websites for search engines there are a few rudimentary yet best seo concepts ..

New SEO Rules: See What You’re Missing… - For us web publishers, our focus must shift from keywords and links to the user experience, trustworthiness and likeliness your web pages will be shared. So let’s take a closer look at Google’s new SEO guidelines.

How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO - If you want to strengthen your personal or business brand’s visibility, then one of the top things you will want is to have strong social media profiles that rank in the top results for your name along with your website and blog.

The Truth About Keywords, SEO and Your WordPress Blog - Do keywords really matter to your WordPress SEO? Are you doomed to failure if you don’t target the right search terms and build your content around them?

30 must know strategies to promote your website - Promoting your website is one of the most crucial steps in the internet marketing business. You may have a highly animated, customized and descriptive web portal but if people are unaware about it then the entire act would be futile.

4 SEO Tips to Get Your Site Ready for 2012 - For many companies across all industries, these last few months of the year get very busy very quickly. Strategies are being created, budgets are getting approved, performances are graded and ROI is evaluated.

Don’t Forget to Include Keyword Variations - The beauty of the English language is that the same words can have multiple meanings depending on user-intent. For SEO, this means that not everyone searches for the same thing in the same way.

 

Tutorials

18 Fresh and Useful jQuery Tutorials – Web developer created some great jQuery tutorials and today we just want list some of the tutorials which are fresh and very useful. So in this collection we have compiled some useful fresh jQuery tutorials.

Create an Underwater, Vector-Style Illustration in Photoshop - While Photoshop wasn’t originally designed to create these types of illustrations, it does have the capability to produce illustrations that can meet or exceed that of Illustrator.

100 Best Illustrator Tutorials of All Time (From Newbie to Pro) - Adobe Illustrator is the most powerful vector software on the planet, and whether you’re using it alone, or in a workflow with other tools such as InDesign, or something else ..

Circle Navigation Effect with CSS3 - Today we want to show you how to create a beautiful hover effect for an image navigation using CSS3. The idea is to expand a circular navigation with an arrow and make a bubble with a thumbnail appear.

Design and Code an Integrated Facebook App - Welcome to part 3 of Design and Code an Integrated Facebook App. At this point, I’m assuming that you have created the HTML and CSS for your app. In this part, we’re going to take our app to the next level!

Flexible Slide-to-top Accordion - In today’s tutorial we’ll be creating a simple responsive accordion that, when opened, will slide to the top of the viewport and reveal the content by fading it in.

How to Build a Sliding One Page Portfolio with jQuery - In this tutorial, I will show you how to create an interesting jQuery-powered one-page site. One page sites are usually a great way to show your prospective clients how good you are at what you do.

11 Great Tutorials To Learn Responsive Web Design - In this post i would like to share 11 Great Tutorials To Learn Responsive Web Design. Responsive design has become quite the hot topic in the web design community.

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

5 Quick Tips for Presenting a Sample Design - They say never judge a book by its title, but we do that, don’t we? Haven’t you ever bought a product just because its advert was nice…. I’m sure you have. There are many things running in the market just because of their marketing.

Supporting Your Product: How To Provide Technical Support - Whether your product is an open-source script, a Web application or a downloadable product, you will need to provide some form of technical support. This article explores the subject based of support.

Establishing a Hierarchy of Goals for Everything You Design - Today we’ll take a look at why goal-oriented design is good design and discuss how being a designer means weighing several competing factors. We’ll also discuss how to decide which goals are the most important ..

Should Freelancers Outsource? Pros and Cons - If you are a freelancer and you’re contemplating outsourcing, know that it’s the happiest possible situation. All the pros and cons so that you can decide whether outsourcing is a feasible option for you.

8 Simple Steps to Set Yourself Up on Social Media - Freelancers new to flying solo can be overwhelmed by the mass of marketing opportunities on the web. And while social media is a great way to promote your business, it can be enormously time consuming.

How to Fire Bad Clients - Under what circumstances should you stop working with a client? Can terminating your business relationship with someone be done gracefully? Most importantly, what can you do to avoid such unfortunate working situations?

7 Signs That It’s Time to Simplify Your Freelancing Business - In fact, sometimes we freelancers make life too busy. If your freelancing life has become too much for you, it may be time to simplify your life and your freelancing business as well.

The biggest freelance mistakes… and how to avoid them! - In this article I’m going to share with you some of my most glaring freelancing mistakes so you can avoid making them. Now on to it…

Common mistakes designers make with clients – Part 9: Saying “yes” - One of the biggest mistakes you can make for yourself and ultimately for your client (if they know what’s good for themselves) is to simply say “yes” to any request or opinion they might have.

 

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

Envisioning a Responsive Future - It’s encouraging therefore to see philosophies like progressive enhancement, responsive design, and mobile first gain so much traction. We are finally embracing methods that help us to design forward instead of back, methods that encourage us to be future friendly.

Mobile apps must die! - The reason mobile apps must die is that it is a paradigm that is holding us back. The whole concept of just-in-time interaction is structurally impossible with installed apps.

Focus [*] - There is a trend starting to happen on the web that I like a lot. This trend is about design focusing on doing one thing great. I know it seems silly to call this a trend when the idea has been around ever since design became a concept, but look at the blogs around you.

Preparing an Image for Web vs. Print - In this tutorial, we’ll go through the requirements for both print and web formats. The requirements for print and web images differ greatly. The first major thing to check when prepping an image is DPI (Dots Per Inch).

Architecture in Web Design: Applying Vitruvius’ Principles - Let’s make a real world comparison: buildings are very much like web sites. So are we (web designers and developers) essentially just architects? When you compare web design with any other major form of art, fine art, print design, music ..

 

 

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