Tweet-Parade (no.3 Jan 2012)

It’s weekend! .. Time for a brand new Tweet-Parade! A Tweet-Parade is a post filled with the best articles and tutorials of last week’s blogosphere. 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 Coding: CSS, HTML, Javascript, PhP, etc.

CSS3 technology replaces JavaScript functionality - This post will highlight several CSS3 techniques and tutorials that push the envelope and create similar effects that in the past were relegated to just JavaScript only functionality. The examples are organized into three sections, Image and ..

Resolution Independence With SVG - In this article, we’ll look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), one of the most underused technologies in website development today.

The developer’s guide to the HTML5 APIs - In this article we’re not going to look at code but instead we’ll focus on describing the APIs, their purpose and progress. We’ll then point you in the right direction to find out more.

35 HTML5 Tutorials – Functional methods for Experts - As a web designer now a days practicing HTML5 standards and understanding all possible code tags for avoid other graphic tools like flash animations and Ajax scripts with maximum results, so this HTML5 tutorials roundup  ..

10 Must Know CSS and CSS3 Resources and Tools - Today we are sharing with you this collection of 10 “you must know” CSS & CSS3 tools and resources you need to be aware of as a web designer/developer. You can check here what CSS3 features Internet Explorer supports.

10 super useful PHP snippets you probably haven’t seen - When working with PHP, it is very useful to have a “toolbox” of handy functions and code snippets that can save lots of time when needed. Today, I’m going to show you 10 super useful code snippets that you ..

Where to Place Scripts in Your Web Documents for Optimal Display - When JavaScript was first added to web pages to make them more interactive, web developers were taught to always put the SCRIPT elements in the HEAD of the document, just like CSS style sheets.

How to Create Simple Tooltips with CSS3 - Because you know that designers’ imagination is very creative and sometimes even wild. They want to make inclined arrows, frames, or add some shadows. Certainly, it is possible to complete everything on the pictures, but it is impractical.

Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Code Frameworks - There are reasons both for and against building on top of web frameworks. You need to spend time learning the code and adjust your website accordingly. But in the long run you’ll save a lot of frustration as many common features ..

The Principles of Web API Usage - There are thousands of Web APIs available and most can be either integrated into a website, or to create a mashup. Some Web APIs are fairly simple and require minimal coding skills to implement, while others can be extremely complex and ..

A simpler and faster alternative to wireframes – Wireframes are a better tool for sharing information in a way that’s approachable to people without design or coding skills. Although that’s a good point, in my opinion there’s a better, faster, and easier way to accomplish that goal: prioritized lists.

The new (and hopefully final) linear gradient syntax - The latest Working Draft of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content module was released last month, and contains some changes to the gradient syntaxes — for what you’d hope would be the last time.

CSS Tools for Designers and Developers - CSS tools are important for web designers and developers because they help them by simplifying the jobs they have to do. Considering time is money and such generators spare time, it is easy to ..

CSS3: The Multi Column Layout and How it Will Change Web Design - That’s why the CSS3 Multi Column Module is perhaps one of the most interesting and exciting things that has happened to CSS in a long time. It’s not a gimmick or design ..

Getting Started With PHP Templating - In this article, we’ll cover how to separate the view of your PHP application from its other components. We’ll look at why using such an architecture is useful and what tools we can use to accomplish this.

10 Resources To Get Started With HTML5 - HTML5 development will determine the future of web development with its current usage and influence on web applications. Therefore we hope that the 10 HTML5 resources we gather here will help you in your task.

 

Usability, User Experience, Responsive Webdesign, Mobile, etc.

7 Ways to Totally Screw Up Your A/B Testing - The whole point of A/B testing is to put your feelings aside, and let data tell you if the layout, content, and design of your web page or marketing element is optimized to meet your goals. But what happens when the way you proctor the test ..

Responsive Ad Demos - Build an HTML ad that could shift itself into 3 different standard IAB sizes: 728×90, 300×250, and 300×50. So I designed a mock Foursquare ad with HTML and CSS, using media queries to define break points at 500px and 728px.

Building Websites and Browser Apps with jQuery Mobile – A Beginner’s Guide- JavaScript was a start, but there hasn’t been any truly unified library until now. jQuery Mobile takes all the best features of jQuery and ports them over to a mobile-based web source. The library is ..

Designing Websites for a Better Mobile User Experience - Numerous aspects have to be kept in mind while designing websites for the mobile and we have touched on some of the important ones in this article.

Developing a Responsive Website: Background Images - In this installment we’re going to set up the structure of our homepage and add in a few media queries that will help the site load quicker, navigate better, and keep our desired appearance across multiple devices, platforms, and resolutions.

Beating Borders: The Bane of Responsive Layout - Responsive design often requires setting your widths using percentages. This is easy enough to accomplish, that is until you start throwing borders into the mix. If your columns and total width are set using percentages, a static ..

Content Strategy and Responsive Design - The point of using a responsive approach is to allow the same content to work across multiple devices. This can make your job easier, because you don’t have to update content in multiple places.

Faceted Overload: Simplifying the Sidebar Navigation - The benefit of using a faceted sidebar navigation on your website is that you aren’t vertically constrained by space. You can list as many links in the sidebar as you need. However, this known benefit also has an unknown ..

 

Webdesign in Common, Web Typography, jQuery, Tools, etc.

HTML5 Video vs. HTML Video- Nowadays, designers and developers have several options for integrating video into a web page. You can design your own video player, use free widgets, embed YouTube video code or buy a fancy flash pop-up player.

Design Trends 2012! - Around the end of the year you’ll find in all web design theme oriented blogs and sites countdowns on what trends you should look out for in 2012, you may be thinking that this is just one more of those repetitive listings but you’re wrong!

What’s new for designers – January 2012 - The January edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, color tools, and a number of great new fonts.

ResponsiveSlides.js - ResponsiveSlides.js is a tiny jQuery plugin that creates a responsive slideshow using images inside a single container. It work with wide range of browsers including all IE versions from IE6 and up.

16 CSS3 and jQuery Loading Animations Solutions - The largest resource of CSS3 and jQuery Loading animations is now in your hands. You will be surprised to see the amazing animated series as we bring for you the best of the run.

Webfont Icons: an Alternative to Images - A font set can contain graphical icons and character sets. Wingdings is the most well known but free fonts such as Iconic can be more useful and provide example HTML and CSS code.

10 Javascript Text Effects - So, what if you want something a little bit more cooler without using those web services? Or perhaps, you can spice things up a little more by combining those fancy fonts you can find from web services and combine it with these cool javascript effects.

Guide to Building Semantic Web Forms - In this guide I’d like to focus solely on building input forms for the web. There are plenty of semantic rules to cover for both beginners and experienced web developers. To gain some further insight into the discussion check out ..

E-Commerce Design Mistakes to Avoid and Increase Sales - Some little mistakes are avoidable by online retailers and the good thing is that if you are already into making these small mistakes, there is a way to solve them. But to create the best impression for customers it is better to avoid them.

Using OpenType font features with CSS 3: Part 1 - Web designers have had access to OpenType features for a year or so, through properties proposed in the CSS 3 Fonts Module. Firefox has supported this since version 4, but until this week it was the only browser do so.

 

 

Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, Print Design, etc.

Logo design tips from leading designers - What makes a successful logo these days? The question ‘does it work in black and white?’ will be recognised by identity designers everywhere, and while that’s still mainly true in these colour-saturated days, logo designers now also have to deal ..

Is There A Better Way To Style Paragraphs? - What’s the best way to indicate a new paragraph has started? Should you add an extra line space as is most common on the web or is it better to indent the first line as is common in print? Are these our only options?

Working with Professional Typography in Adobe Illustrator - Which are the methods of processing printed text for better legibility and beauty. Typography is composed through the graphic design of printed text using the specifics for that languages rules.

11 Reasons Adobe Fireworks Is The Best Design Software You Never Use - But as I, and a growing number of Fireworks enthusiasts have discovered, not only is Fireworks the best possible launching pad for all manners of creative work but it’s also a consummate design tool in itself.

5 Cliché Logo Design Trends to Avoid - Too often we see designers falling into the trap of rushing into a logo design project and coming up with ideas that are so overused that they’re downright cringe-worthy.

25 Most Recently Released Illustrator Text Effect Tutorials - Adobe Illustrator is a powerful resource not just for graphic designers but also to everyone as it allows us to create cozy, vague, glowing, gelatinous, sleek, shimmering, vintage ..

 

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

How to Incorporate a Custom Facebook Page Tab to Your SM Strategy - Despite the new challenges that this poses, converting a consumer into a brand loyal advocate promises stronger commitment to your products and business.

Tips to Create an Effective Graphic Design Blog - Some people think that creating their own blog is as simple as sketching a dream web design on paper. Of course, having a blog is not just on aesthetics but there is really more to it (good tips, but very bad examples BTW).

31 Ways to Make Your Blog Stand Out - Do you want your blog to stand out from the pack? Here are thirty-one ways to increase your blog (or content marketing for that matter) visibility.

10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget - As people get started with blogging, they think it’s as simple as clicking, “Add New Post,” typing up a few paragraphs, and , “Publish.” Here are 10 of the most popular SEO blog post publishing steps that bloggers tend to forget.

7 Fatal Business Blogging Mistakes (And Easy Fixes!) - Creating remarkable content is one of the core components of inbound marketing, and one of the best ways to generate a steady flow of fresh content is by publishing a business blog.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012) - It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we’ve grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too.

7 Keys to Effective Blog Re-Designs - n this article we’ll take a look at 7 keys to the blog re-design process. These are all things that should be considered at the time of the re-design in order to make the site more useful for visitors and more effective for its owners.

Five Common Guest Posting Mistakes & How to Avoid Them - Guest posting is becoming a very popular link building tactic. So much so that I think using an opening sentence along the lines of “guest posting is becoming a very popular link building tactic” is becoming pretty ..

 

WordPress

WordPress tip: Show admin bar only for admins - ntroduced in WordPress 3.3, the admin bar is a new version of the controversial “Toolbar” which came with WordPress 3.0. Personally, I think the admin bar is useful only when you’re the blog admin. When you’re a simple ..

Advanced Layout Templates In WordPress’ Content Editor - This article shows you an easy-to-implement trick that enables even the least tech-savvy of clients to manage multi-column content layouts within the comfort of the WYSIWIG editor.

How to Develop Useful WordPress Plugins – 20 WordPressTutorials - These of all wordpress plugin tutorials make life more comfortable to get desired results, one thing more which I would like to share with you wordpress newbies and professionals, these of all wordpress tutorials based ..

How To Integrate Facebook, Twitter And Google+ In WordPress - Integrating social media services in your website design is vital if you want to make it easy for readers to share your content. While some users are happy with the social media buttons that come built into their ..

The Ultimate WordPress Theme Development Glossary - This post is an attempt to provide a glossary for the common terms used in WordPress Themes. This glossary will help new WordPress users understand the features offered by a theme and they can make informed ..

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, Loadtime, etc.

Your Design Blog Should Be More SEO Friendly Than You Think - It seems everyone around us is well aware of what SEO is and how important it is for their blogs and they are brave enough not to take any consultation of those so called SEO professionals.

5 SEO Trends Writers Should Target in 2012 - Freelance writers need to deal with web content all the time, as more and more of publishing goes online. Although the basic principles of good writing don’t change in the online realm, there are certain differences that writers should be aware of.

SEO for Web Developers Part 2 - As a developer, the number one thing we need to consider is can a search engine spider crawl my web site? Because quite honestly, if the pages of the site can’t be crawled nothing else really matters.

Pinterest Works Better Than Google+ - Like on any social network, it just depends on whom you’re following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google’s efforts to figure out how to ..

 

Tutorials

YouTube Popup Buttons - There is a certain style of button on the latest YouTube design (most easily found in the footer) where the default state of the button has a very subtle bevel to it, but on :hover and :focus states the button pops up, eager to be clicked.

50 Great Adobe Photoshop Tutorials That Every Designer Should Know About - In this massive collection of 50 Adobe Photoshop tutorials you will find almost every type of resource you will ever need. You have everything from a small and simple badge ..

Sliding Image Panels with CSS3 - Today we’ll show you how to create some neat sliding image panels with CSS only. The idea is to use background images for the panels and animate them when clicking on a label. We’ll use radio buttons with labels and target the respective panels ..

Useful CSS3 Buttons Tutorials And Techniques - CSS3 brings to life countless new possibilities to make even better websites. Creating buttons with CSS is one of the most experimented-with web design techniques.

How To Create CSS-Based Content Accordion - In today’s tutorial we are going to learn how we can create a horizontal and vertical content accordion by just using CSS3. There are many jQuery plugins out that can do this job for you but what do you do if the visitor has ..

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

How to Know if You Should Accept a Freelance Job - In freelancing, you will surely find too many jobs to choose from. There would also be many clients who would ask you to work for them. Some of them will even offer you a big payment for your job while there are also some ..

Tips for Making Clients Read Your Emails - Email marketing is one of the in-vogue techniques in the online marketing world. Over time, it has turned out to be one of the best ways to interact with one’s audience, keep them informed and share updates.

5 Crucial Points Before Becoming a Freelance Web Designer - A freelance career offers a plethora of opportunities and rewards for web designers like you, just itching to make it on your own. At the same time, it can lead to a lot of headache, even failure, if you don’t grasp a few ..

Are You Making These 8 Marketing Mistakes? - It’s the beginning of a new year and you have decided to get serious about marketing yourself as a freelancer. Congratulations—that’s half the battle.

Do You Make These 5 Common Negotiating Mistakes? - Negotiations are key for successful freelancers. Nearly every project starts with negotiations. Freelancers who can’t negotiate a profitable deal are at risk for losing money, or even worse, going out of business.

Should designers do personal projects? - As creatives, most times we feel like we can do it all, or we are put in a position to do it all. We typically take on a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ mentality, that can either help or harm us. For some odd reason, there seems to be a discrepancy of sorts ..

5 Types Of Clients To Avoid As A Designer - For a designer, the focus of your endeavors is your ‘Client’. Let’s face it folks, everyone has to make ends meet. One simply cannot live merely on passion for their work. A customer is where your primary source of income comes from as a designer.

Tips for Keeping Focused on Freelance Deadlines - t can be a bummer when you’re stuck in a freelancing rut. Anybody who has worked this field will understand the grief of struggling to finish project deadlines in time. Often the work quality will suffer along with the accompanied mental fatigue.

10 things I have learnt in 10 years of business - It seemed only appropriate that I share with you 10 of the most poignant lessons, beginning with the realisation we are not just hired to build websites.

10 Essential Guidelines for Freelance Collaboration - Freelance collaboration is on the rise. Increasingly, teams of freelancers are now doing the work that in-house departments used to do. Graphic designers are now working on teams with writers and programmers.

6 Things To Consider For A Better Web Design Career - For most of us web design started as a passion or a part-time job. For many of us it started before we turned 18, but most of us ended up working full-time in an agency or as freelance web designers and developers and will ..

 

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

Discovering and Focusing on High Leverage Business Tasks - If you’re a freelancer, an online business owner, or a blogger then just stop for a minute, and be honest with yourself… is it really possible that everything you do in your business is the absolute highest leverage stuff ..

5 Tips on Getting Organized (From Someone Who Hates Organizing) - The task of getting organized can sometimes be a very daunting prospect to those who don’t think of themselves as organizers. Some people love to have a place for everything, arranged in 90^o angles, sorted by color, ..

How To Stop Designing Websites And Start Designing Brand Experiences - First and foremost we are not simply web designers, we are brand experience designers. It is critical for us as design professionals to fully understand our clients’ brand and design an experience that tells the story of that brand.

Web Design: Say No to Spec - No really, you should! Spec Work is defined as producing a piece for a potential client with no guarantee that your work will be chosen and/or paid for. With the influx of sites popping up all over the web that allow a company to have their brand ..

An Important Time for Design - Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage.

Designing for the Next Step – There are cases in which no amount of visual design will significantly improve the state of things…instead we need to focus on making people care. Remember that comparison is how people make decisions.

Develop for as many users as possible - John Allsopp, developer and organiser of the Web Directions conferences, responds to Aral Balkan’s “one version manifesto” and argues we should embrace the web’s universality and aim to make our sites available for everybody.

The Proxority Principle in Web Design - In web design, the position of design elements and the layout of web pages is everything. So many cool, exciting techniques are available to help us lay out our designs that we often forget that structure is as important as aesthetics.

Is Design A Machine? - Can design be reduced to formulaic solutions to a common set of problems? Can creativity be stripped from the process? Once you’ve chosen a design concept is the resulting finished design inevitable?

 

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 me @gonzodesign