Tweet-Parade (No.6 FEB 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.

Catch up on HTML5 tips and resources - We have also covered many CSS3 topics which coincide and overlap somewhat with HTML5 technology, and these posts will be summarized in another piece specific to CSS3.

Keys to Email Creative Success: Marketing and Design - Email ads and newsletters are still big converters mainly because you can directly reach your target audience and keep them informed of new products and services you are offering. However, even though people are ..

Build Awesome Apps with CSS3 Animations - Today’s HTML5 applications can provide awesome experiences thanks to the new CSS3 specifications. One of them is CSS3 Animations. It can help you building rich animations on HTML elements. This can provide interesting feedbacks to the users and enables fast & fluid UIs.

HTML5 Boilerplate is 3.0! - The key feature of this update is making Boilerplate smaller. Most of the changes have been working towards that. We have significant work done to our build script, so much so that we thought it deserved its own repository.

Pears - Collect, test, and experiment with interface pattern pairings of CSS & HTML. Pears is an open source WordPress theme, enabling people like you to get your own pattern library up and running quickly.

Amazing things to do with PHP and cURL - cURL, and its PHP extension libcURL, are very useful tools for tasks like simulating a web browser, submit forms or login to a web service. In this article, I’m going to show you some amazing things that you can do using PHP and cURL.

Pushing CSS to its limits - As CSS3 roars ahead in spite of the old Internet Explorer legacy browsers acting like a drag weight on faster adoption, there have been some really fascinating experiments with CSS3 properties and values which have created design styles far beyond ..

A Beginner’s Guide to Using AJAX in Your Website - AJAX is used for updating and interacting with a server via JavaScript, therefore allowing far more functionality with the server without having to reload the webpage. We’ll go over the basics for implementing AJAX into your website.

Enhance Your Website with the FullScreen API - With this api, you can display not only entire pages full screen, but individual elements within them as well. The intent here is to allow for full screen HTML5 videos and games, so that we can finally declare HTML5 as a viable alternative to Flash.

Control image aspect ratios with CSS3 - Controlling the aspect ratio of replaced elements, such as <img> or <video>, can be a pain. For example, you might want all images occupying the same space on a page, but to not distort and lose their aspect ratio when someone uses an image file that isn’t the right size.

Using :target to Create a Lightbox Effect with CSS3 - An interesting one that I just started to use is :target. A full explanation of what it does can be found on the W3 site but for the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using it to create a Lightbox effect.

The difference between width:auto and width:100% - As long as the value of width is auto, the element can have horizontal margin, padding and border without becoming wider than its container

13 Most Used Speedy Tools To Write CSS And HTML Code - In order to minimize the time needed to design a website or optimize a web page we need to increase the speed of the coding of HTML and CSS. Here are some tools which can speed up your HTML and CSS coding time.

multilevel float - I’m probably not the only one struggling with this. So here’s a blog post for all of you who’ve been trying to stack elements residing in different dom levels.

 

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

Modernizr 2.5: Supercharged for 2012 - Modernizr 2.0 came out more than eight months ago; we’ve not sat still in the period since, and today we’re proud to announce the release of Modernizr 2.5, our biggest update yet!

Designing for responsiveness - Designing for responsive websites can be a bit challenging at first because the process is so different. As designers, we’ve gotten used to building pixel-perfect mockups as our web blueprints. But responsive design takes a different approach.

Mobile Web Resources - One of the most frequent questions I get asked about the mobile web is “Where do I go to learn about all this stuff?” So here’s an extensive list of helpful tools and resources that can help you create great mobile web experiences.

Creating Minimalist Designs Makes You a Better Designer - People simply had enough off all the sites that were impossible to grasp and extremely user-unfriendly. Minimalist designs change all that and provide a new, friendly environment.

Responsive Design & ROI – The advantage of Responsive sites is that one codebase covers all devices, meaning that changes can be rolled out to an infinite number of devices by amending one set of code, and one set of assets (images, videos etc).

 

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

Email marketing – templates, boilerplates, marketing guides and services - I decided to talk today about such interesting type of marketing as email – marketing. It is frequently used nowadays in different spheres and it doesn’t depend whether your business is large or small.

10 Simple Ways to Increase Conversions by Reducing Friction - The basic problem we face when selling online is getting our prospects all the way from our headline to our call to action.

Why You Should Build A Sitemap Before Designing Your Site - Designing a new website can be a daunting process, only made more complicated by the volume of information that sometimes needs to be organized and incorporated.

Styleguide - This document is a guide to the mark-up styles used throughout the site.

6 CAPTCHA Alternatives to Improve Conversion - CAPTCHA is more than a catchy name, it’s an acronym — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But in practical terms, CAPTCHAs ..

What’s Your Type? The 5-Step Guide to Finding the Right Font – To benefit from the possibility of using real fonts in our work, we clearly need to get savvier with typography. There’s a gross misconception that typography is simply ‘font choice’.

Three Super Easy Ways to Pull Off a Masonry Layout - Today we’re going to dive into the concept, ideas and popular techniques that are currently prevalent in masonry style layouts. We’ll learn three different methods for pulling off a masonry layout, ..

Build Interactive Websites Easily With Javascript - In this post, I have found 10 plugins that focus on building a cool website layout. Some are built for such purposes and a few I reckon they have the potential. For me, my favourite would be QuickSand, Masonry and ScrollTo plugins.

Know Why Your Website’s Header Is Driving People Away - Whichever website you visit, the first thing that you will notice is the header image of that website. Later on, scrolling down the page or admiring the header image is something that depends on the purpose of your visit.

How To Design a 404 Page That Keeps Visitors On Your Site – While this page has the sole function of telling the user where to go next, the creation of your 404 page should be approached from both a creative and functional point of view.

CSS3 structural pseudo-class selector tester - Helps you understand how the nth-child, nth-last-child, nth-of-type and nth-last-of-type CSS3 selectors work. Uses the native browser algorithm, so you’re out of luck if you’re on IE

Purpose And Usage Of Htaccess Security - Have you ever wanted to create a directory to your website that is available for certain people? The options have proved frustrating for website owners who are faced with inadequate privacy options. .htaccess is the key to your privacy questions.

The 4-Point Minimalist Guide to Web Design – A typical webpage has images sliders, videos, social media widgets, blog summaries and advertisements vying for our attention. But more is not always better.  Sometimes, more is just more.

 

 

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

Reposition and Revitalise your Brand with a New Logo - Do you feel like your business could easily become more profitable? Are you stuck in discovering what it is that is holding your business back? The likely factor that is holding your business back is its brand image.

More Thoughts About Paragraph Styling - A couple of weeks ago I asked if there was a better way to style paragraphs and mostly considered whether or not paragraphs should be indicated with an extra line space or an indent. Comments on the earlier post showed a preference for the extra line space.

Top Most Important & Crucial Points To Consider Before Becoming A Freelance Logo Designer - You may have thought that you could just up and start freelancing any day, but there are some top most crucial points before becoming a freelance logo designer, that you ..

Type Effects and Modification - Setting type effectively in any project requires a little more thought than just selecting a font and point size. The way the letters relate to each other can be just as important of a consideration.

Quick review of ttfautohint version 0.6 - With not too much more effort, autohinting directly in FontLab can produce the same kind of result as ttfautohint, but with the major advantage that the hints are editable directly after the autohinting process, so I can’t really ..

Practical Tips for Utilizing Columns of Text in Your Layouts - Designing around large blocks of type can be tough and more designers are taking the “fewer-is-better” approach when working with columns and large blocks of text. When using a mass of type, such as in a book, ..

How Branding a Good Logo can Boost up Your Business - A logo forms the base of a company’s quest for success. Successful logo design is that pointed weapon, which enables a company to draw the attention of its market. You must have seen a logo of a company, which then ..

10 Principles That Should Be Considered Before Designing a Logo - Branding is something that is in your client mind to your company. Good branding will distinguish your product and service by the positive way that is really embedded in your potential costumer brain.

 

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

6 Ways Google+ Can Win you More Clients - Google’s latest addition to the ‘social’ world, in the form of social networking platform Google+, appears to have divided people on how useful and how valuable it actually is.

Your Competitors Are Feeding Off Your Twitter Ecosystem - Create a Twitter List seems innocent enough, but this way you can tap into your competitor’s ecosystem. The two names will now be mentioned in the same sentence. It will come up in the searches, etc, etc.

Getting More Out of Your Blog Archives - If your blog has been around for a while, chances are you have archives that could be doing more for you, and helping more readers at the same time. If you’re looking to get more out of your archives there are two things ..

13 ways to get more email subscribers - Capturing more email subscribers is essential for countering the constant erosion that occurs over time as people unsubscribe, change email addresses, or otherwise encounter any number of circumstances that render ..

 

WordPress

WordPress Shortcode with loop, meta, category, pagination, Gallery and Plugins - With shortcode it is possible to display complicated codes or function result every where in your WordPress  Theme like  in widgets, excerpts, comments, theme files, user descriptions, and category/tag/taxonomy descriptions.

Creating a Filterable Portfolio with WordPress and jQuery - Learn in this tutorial how to make a filterable Portfolio with jQuery integrated with WordPress, remember that this portfolio kind can make a big difference on your themes!

How to Add Additional Fields to the WordPress Media Uploader - While working on a project where we created a very cool gallery powered totally by WordPress attachments and a custom post type, we found a need to add additional fields to the WordPress media uploader.

WordPress Plugins to Help Make Your Site Responsive - You can help your WordPress website become more mobile-friendly, and here is a list of the most useful WordPress plugins that would help you in that. You’ll find simple tools for re-sizing images, making videos responsive, ..

How to Create a Photo Album Gallery in WordPress without a plugin - They wanted the user to be able to click on the album photo to see all posts listed in that month’s album. Each photo should have it’s own individual page with information about the photographer and their URL.

15 Free WordPress Plugins For Multi-Author Blogs - Fortunately many WordPress plugins are available out there to help owners and managers to manage co-authors easily and efficiently. These plugins have made the managing task a bit easier.

WP_Query by “Standard” Post Format - When using WordPress post formats, you’ll quickly start looking for a way to query WordPress content by the “standard” post format. This Trac ticket seeks to work on solving this. The implementation there handles URL-based requests quite nicely.

WordPress robots.txt Example - Robots.txt is a way to tell a search engine which pages it’s allowed to spider, to “see”, and which pages it cannot “see”. Because of that, robots.txt differs from meta name="robots" tags, which tell search engines on those individual pages, whether they can include them in their index or not.

Extensive Roundup of the Best WordPress Plugins You’ll Ever Need: Year 2012 Edition - Besides being a beautiful, easy to use and powerful platform by itself, WordPress is also loved because of it’s high level of customization and optimization. Plugins are the best way to optimize and enrich your WordPress blog.

How to Add Infinite Scroll to your WordPress Blog - automatically load the next page content once the user hits the bottom of the post. This technique has proven to show an increase in time spent on page by the user because the new content loads automatically.

 

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

Does Google Love Your website? Not sure, here is how You can Check - So, it is quite evident that winning love of Google is quite tough but unless your website is loved and admired by Google, it will not be able to make the most of it.

10 Free Tools to Test the Loading Speed of your Blog - As webmasters know, website speed is one of the major parts of optimizing your web pages not only for the sake of internet users but also for search engines.

The 2012 Guide to Google Webmaster Tools – Analytics Integration, +1 Metrics, and More - We have updated this guide to include new ways to set up your website with Webmaster Tools, the new data included in Webmaster Tools about your website, important data you might have forgotten about, and how to connect it to Google Analytics to learn more about search queries driving traffic to your site.

Quick Tip: How to Forward a Domain, and How This Helps Your Blog - The power of domain forwarding for your blog. When you use domain forwarding in this way your regular blog post or page becomes like it’s own little microsite, and is far more brandable.

Why is My Website Failing to Convert? - Traffic and conversions are two different things. Website traffic is great but ultimately you want to operate a website that generates traffic that turns into conversions, meaning that website visitors take some kind of action.

 

Tutorials

Create a Vintage Space Poster with Colorful Lights in Photoshop Tutorial - In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a stunning and high-impact retro-style  poster that’s out of this world. I will walk you through the steps for creating an unique and detailed light streaks ..

3D Gallery with CSS3 and jQuery - With 3D transforms, we can make simple elements more interesting by setting them into three dimensional space. Together with CSS transitions, these elements can be moved in 3D space and ..

Code a Useful Expanding Vertical Navigation Menu - This time around we’re going to build a super useful expanding vertical navigation menu. It’s a great way to hide a lot of links in a fairly small space and the animations will add a nice touch to your site.

Creating “Next Level” Search Form Using jQuery & CSS3 - Lately we found ton of new style search form crafted beautifully using CSS3 and JavaScript. The question is “how far we can go for styling search form?”, in this tutorial we are going to move search form to next level using jQuery & CSS3.

Free Video: Getting started with iOS development - In this 6 minute video, we will get you started with iOS development by learning about the benefits of Apple’s iOS Dev center and how to gain access to the integrated development environment (IDE) called Xcode.

How to Create a CSS3-Only Tab Control Using the :target Selector - This example demonstrates the power of the CSS3 :target selector. We’re going to build an attractive animated tab control using HTML5 and CSS3. You won’t need JavaScript or images and it works in IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Orman Clark’s Vertical Navigation Menu: The CSS3 Version - Next in the Orman Clark’s coded PSD series is his awesome looking Vertical Navigation Menu. We’ll recreate it with CSS3 and jQuery while the only images we’ll be using are for the icons.

40 Fresh Highly Creative Illustrator Tutorials - In this post, we’ll be sharing with you a collection of useful tutorials that will help you to to use Adobe Illustrator in a variety of new ways. Whether you are a pro or a budding novice, you are bound to find something that will help you.

A Beginner’s Guide To jQuery-Based JSON API Clients - Are you fascinated by dynamic data? Do you go green with envy when you see tweets pulled magically into websites? Trust me, I’ve been there. The goal of today’s tutorial is to create a simple Web app for grabbing movie ..

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

15 Challenges of Having a Freelance Job - Some people cannot really understand how it is to have a freelance job. But this article would help you to have a wider perspective of it. Yes, you will enjoy the freedom but it entails much hard work and self-discipline, too.

A Client Questionnaire, Who What Where and Why - Every freelancer or business owner needs a client questionnaire, also known as a project planner. The benefits are numerous, but which questions to add and what to omit can lead to a client walking away or not ..

A 10-Step Process to a Successful Freelance Career - As many freelancers eventually realize, going into business for yourself means you actually take on two separate (very different) full time businesses. How’s that for a surprise when you originally thought that you ..

21 Times for a Freelancer to Say “No” - The ability to say “no” is vital to freelancers. While there are many good freelancing opportunities out there, there are also many bad gigs that every freelancer should turn down.

Leveraging Twitter for Your Freelance Business - Social media applications such as Twitter can be effectively utilized as a tool for freelancers like yourself to promote your services. In a time when the world is connected through the internet, failing to employ such a ..

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

How Designers Can Help Developers - Traditionally, developers aren’t great designers, and vice versa. There are many exceptions (ahem), but generally the art of one group is a mystery to the other – yet we routinely have to collaborate on projects.

Structure First. Content Always - Let’s focus on structure to begin with, and think about content all the time. There is a symbiotic relationship between content and design. One cannot thrive without the other. Let’s start with structure. Let’s know what our content is made from.

How to convince your clients of the importance of white space - As a designer, you should probably already know that white space helps a lot to create more elegant designs, separate elements better from one another, and allow to focus and make things more readable.

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem - There is some problem you are trying to solve. In your life, at work, in a design. You are probably solving the wrong problem. Paul MacCready, said it best: “The problem is we don’t understand the problem.”

CALL FOR ACTION: THE OPEN WEB NEEDS YOU *NOW* - But there is an aspect of the problem we did not have during the IE6 era: these web sites are also WebKit-specific because they use only “experimental” CSS properties prefixed with -webkit-* and not their Mozilla, Microsoft or Opera counterparts.

 

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