Tweet-Parade (no.14 Apr 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, APIs, etc.

How To Develop Scalable And Maintainable CSS - Even if you don’t currently work on large sites or plan to, you should still rethink best practices and improve your systems. Small sites grow larger. Personal goals change. New technologies and techniques spring up all the time and we should be prepared.

Responsive CSS3 Slider Without Javascript - The actual slider is much like any JavaScript slider. It floats all of the content areas (articles) next to each other. And then hides the overflow. We then animate the margin of the inner div, so if we have 5 articles, moving the left-margin ..

Techniques for creating modal windows - Often times when working with modals they are used to clean up user interfaces and try to enhance the user’s experience—but it is important to remember that sometimes they do the exact opposite.

35 Great Resources for Compass and Sass - The beauty of implementing Sass/Compass is that the learning barrier is low and only requires general knowledge of CSS. It can be utilized in existing popular CSS frameworks because it actually compiles to CSS.

New CSS3 Attribute Value Selectors - CSS3 level selectors has made it way too easy to select attributes of your HTML elements with no use of JavaScript. Let’s have a quick look at some CSS3 attribute selectors.

Best CSS Validation and Compression Tools - If we do decide to compress, what tools are available? I’ll address these considerations and offer some free, top-notch tools for validating and compressing your CSS

Why Minify? - But how effective is it? It may strike some of you as somewhat ironic that you should use a plugin (which increases the load time of a site) to reduce load time. But so long as the net result is positive, it is worth doing.

jQuery: How to get objects by ID, Class, Tag, and Attribute - In this second segment in my jQuery series, we will review getting objects by ID Selector (#id), by Class Selector (.class), by Tag, and by Attribute (.attr()).

The Lowdown on Absolute vs. Relative Positioning - Today we’re going to tackle this subject and make sure you know exactly how and when to apply a specific positioning context to a given element. The default position value for any element on the page is static.

CSS In Depth Part 2: Floats & Positions - Discussing positions and floats as well as what the differences are and when it’s best to use them. Both floats and positions deal with the relationship of elements between each other. Without these, padding and margins would be ineffectual.

New Webkit CSS Properties - There are several new addition to the existing list of proprietary of WebKit property. Let’s have a quick look on some new properties.

CSS Refreshers: Borders - Sure, we’re all familiar with borders. Is there anything new that could possibly be introduced? Well, I bet there’s quite a few things in this article that you never knew about!

 

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

15 CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design – All of the frameworks below will help you rapidly develop sites by eliminating the need to write basic CSS styles yourself, and they also come with a responsive layout helping you to quickly and easily create mobile-specific sites.

CSS3 Animated Media Queries - In this article we are going to look at media queries, have a code snippet you can use to start your media queries and show how you can combine CSS transition with the media queries to show an animated change to your elements.

The select menu navigation pattern - Select menus simply sweep navigation issues under the rug. They don’t help solve questions such as how to handle long lists or nested sub-navigation. I suspect they’re confusing to users too. In my mind there’s only one form element that should ever be used for navigation and that’s search.

Mobile Navigation Design & Tutorial - One of the common challenges when designing responsive design for mobile is the navigation menu. If the site has many sections or pages, it gets challenging to squeeze all the items into a small mobile resolution. The navigation most likely ..

10 things every designer needs to know about forms - Forms, there’s nothing many designers hate more than forms. They don’t necessarily bring the creativity out, or do they? Maybe it’s time we looked at forms again and understand that a form, at its most basic, is a conversation between the user and the software.

Call to Action Buttons Part 4: Message - Choosing the right words or psychological triggers is highly determined by the level of emotional identification that word prompts. No emotional connection means no action.

8 Reasons Users Don’t Fill Out Sign Up Forms - Signing up for a website is a big commitment for most people. Users that sign up for your website are giving their personal information and trust to you. If you misuse their personal information or violate their trust, you can upset your users.

Guide to User Flow – The “Foolishly Ignored” Backbone of Website Design - User Experience, Responsive Web Design and similar terms have made such a serious impact on the lives of web designers that they have almost forgotten the core of website design – User Flow.

How to Implement in Code 5 Really Useful Responsive Design Patterns - It is necessary to think over all these questions before the creation of responsive markup.

 

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

strong>10 Useful jQuery Plugins For Enhancing Your Website UX - Incorporating jQuery effectively and modestly in your website build process is a great way to enhance and take your user experience to another level. Using jQuery plugins can be a great tool for helping display ..

8 Things That Grab and Hold Website Visitor’s Attention - The more you can sustain the visitor’s attention, the higher the chances they will convert. Here’s how to grab and hold attention, and how to design your websites for short attention spans.

Neuro Web Design: Tips and Techniques - Does your website have a stickiness factor? While most websites are built to attract customers to a business – providing the information necessary to do business with them – many may or may not contain an underlying strategy necessary to convert more sales.

SVG, Use it Already - Here’s the deal: there’s no reasonable excuse to avoid using SVG for vector graphics on the Web (with a PNG fallback, primarily for IE < 9 and older Android).

Scaling Font Sizes & Icons - Typefaces play an important role in responsive web design. UX designer Joshua Sortino covers how using a little snazzy jQuery plugin (FitText) and a special typeface can get our fonts and images scale easily.

Drop Caps: Historical Use And Current Best Practices - Unlike their historic counterparts, drop caps on the Web don’t add value in terms of usability or readability—and they are hard for Web developers to control, often rendering ..

SVG Stacks - Image sprites are wildly used for downloading lots of icons or UI elements all at once with just a single HTTP-Request. But they are somewhat cumbersome to use because you have to calculate the background-position offsets.

15 Handpicked jQuery Drop Down Menus Tutorials - Here we are presenting another brilliant collection of 15 jQuery navigation menu that you can download for free and use for your next projects. Navigation menu plays a crucial role in any web design and a well ..

 

 

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

The Importance of White Space: Take a Breath Already! - One very important concept in any area of design, including interface design, is that of space.

22 Best Photoshop Tutorials From March 2012 - All of the below mentioned tutorials are of March 2012 which shows that they are latest. I hope you will like them and have fun watching them.

Brand Awareness: Things Your Logo Say About You and Your Business - A business logo is exactly where a company obtains its recognition and brand awareness. Owning your very own business logo is very essential especially for businesses who want their brand easily identified by their clientele.

7 Ways To Craft A Consistent Social Media Brand – While each social media platform has different features, layouts, and functionality, one thing can always remain the same – your branding.

 

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

Four Ways LinkedIn Can Help Your Business Grow - Sure, LinkedIn’s profile features are essentially the same questions you’d answer on a resume. But there are more than 150 million people there who are ready to do business. It is, after all, the professional social network.

What is RSS? Why is RSS used? How is RSS used? - This article is aimed at giving you a very quick overview of RSS in the simplest way possible, thus answering you the following questions in the process: What is RSS? Why is RSS used? How is RSS used?

6 Types of Blog Content and How to Maximize Social Media Reach for Each - When you think of a blog post, you probably think of something that’s written. Text content, however, is only one of the six types of content that you can create for your blog.

7 Ways to Generate Blog Content Ideas Using Web Analytics Insight - Web analytics is often the go-to resource for measuring content quality and understanding user behavior. But it’s also a great resource for evaluating user needs, ..

25 Timeline Ready Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page - For page managers who know how to work with Facebook apps, the new Timeline layout for Pages is a great opportunity to highlight their application tab for maximum visibility and increase click through rates.

5 Creative Tips to Increase Blog Traffic and Boost Your Business - Unfortunately though, most businesses do not blog well. Why? Because they refuse to think like a consumer. They refuse to tell consumers the answers to the questions they most want answered.

How to Create A Powerful Writing Schedule for Your Blog - Before you set out to write your schedule it’s important that you consider your current availability. If you aren’t realistic here, then it’s likely you’ll ignore your schedule in favor of prior responsibilities.

10 Tips to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Brand Visibility - Setup a Facebook Page is easy but to maximize its potential for brand visibility requires constant updating and testing. Are you satisfied with your page presence so far or yearning for better results?

 

WordPress

How to Display Recent Posts with Thumbnails in WordPress - Those who run websites built on WordPress, are using a series of plugin which can make their life easier and more productive, but some things really don`t require the need of a plugin.

10 Plugins to Help Spring Clean Your WordPress Blog - This post rounds up 10 useful plugins that will really help service and maintain your WordPress blog. The plugins featured in this post will help you check, scan and backup various behind-the-scenes aspects of WordPress to keep everything in check.

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog - Now it is time to figure out how to increase the load speed of your website. A Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress is always going to throw up a few problems that you might not come across with a “manually” designed website.

Up and Running With Custom Post Types - A Custom Post Type adds a third (or fourth, or fifth, etc.) type of post to your WordPress sites. With some lines of code in functions.php, you can get up and running with Custom Post Types in your WordPress Themes.

20 Tips for WordPress Optimization - WordPress works great out of the box, but there are always ways to improve it to give yourself a faster, leaner site. This is particularly important if you run a site that has large amounts of traffic, or which is prone to traffic spikes.

Protect your WordPress site with .htaccess - Aside from plug-ins there are a number of additions you can make to your .htaccess file which in conjunction with plug-ins and regular updates will tighten up your site’s security and give you that extra level of protection.

WordPress and PayPal: An Introduction - For this tutorial we will go through the steps involved to integrate PayPal as your Payment Service Provider for a WordPress powered site. Working with Custom Post Types we will create a basic shopping cart and allow for payments to be taken via PayPal.

How to Display Your WordPress Category Description in Your Theme - Not everyone will need or want a category description, but it may be able to liven up your site (especially if you use HTML), give your users useful information, and of course, it may even help out the SEO of your category pages.

 

Search Engine Optimalization, Conversions, Analytics, etc.

Why Webmaster Tool is a Must for Every Website - There are several resources and tools which aid you in measuring and analyzing your SEO systems or your website’s performance. Webmaster tool’s such a service which is required for all blogs or websites.

Keep Your Analytics Data Safe And Clean - In this post we discussed ways to avoid bad implementations—by putting into place a process that requires users to report on changes made to their Google Analytics accounts.

25 SEO Tips for Successful Web Design - Looking into these tips, you may think that search engine optimization and Web design are complicated fields. Truthfully, it can be. But, that is, if you do not have adequate learning.

Content Density – Importance for Usability and SEO - Content density refers to the ratio of content on a page in relation to the size of that same page. Pages with higher content density tend to fare better in Search Engine rankings.

17 Best Options for Real Time Analytics - When it comes to real time analysis, it provides you invaluable information and if you have a strong presence at social media, or associated with some viral campaign which brings chunks of quick traffic then you need to react quickly.

9 Ways to Get More Out of Google Analytics – You probably already love Google Analytics because it gives you a big picture look at how your website is performing. But I have come up with nine more reasons to love Google Analytics. Check out these sophisticated tracking tools you might not even be aware of

What’s Better – On-page SEO or Link-building? - Unfortunately, there are plenty of SEO companies and consultants lining up to give them the answer – and that answer just happens (“coincidentally”) to be whatever the company/consultant is good at.

 

Tutorials

Using CSS3 Animations to Build a Sleek Box UI - CSS3 has dramatically changed the rules of the game where you can animate any standard property of an HTML element. This opens up a whole new room of effects you can put together in just 15-20 minutes of tinkering with code.

Timeline Portfolio - Timeline is a jQuery plugin specialized in showing a chronological series of events. With some design tweaks, this will make it perfect for a portfolio in which you showcase your work and interests.

Round-up Of 30 Handy Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Today we have decided to make you learn some techniques of adobe illustrator through a compilation of adobe illustrator tutorials. These all tutorials are well defined and also have source files.

Slideshow with jmpress.js - The jQuery port jmpress.js let’s you use this library as a jQuery plugin with some added options. We want to show you today how to use this great plugin to create a responsive slideshow with 3D effects.

A CSS Only Image Gallery With Zooming! - So today we’re going to be making an image gallery where the images zoom out on click. We’ll also add a close button for closing the images after they’ve been zoomed out. Best of all, we’re going to be doing it all with just CSS!

Checking Form Validation Fields with jQuery - In the tutorial below I’ll demonstrate how you can build a jQuery-powered form validation script. We will hide the submit button until the user has entered a name, a valid e-mail address, and some message text.

Auto Moving Submenu Using jQuery - Today we’re going to create an automatic moving submenu based on selected its parent. Each submenu is horizontally stacked, sequentially in the order of their parent menu.

 

Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff

How to Avoid the 6 Clients that Could Hurt Your Business - As freelancers we have a love/hate relationship with our clients. Without them we would be penniless, but at times they can make our work unbearably difficult. How do we handle the clients who don’t pay us, take ..

Answering a Designer’s Question: Should I Choose Web or Print? - Both areas of design have advanced so much in the past 10-15 years that they started to cross each others paths and while this can be beneficial, it can also create problems.

Should I Outsource? To Be Or Not To Be Outsourcing - To state things straight, it’s a world of interaction we live in and businesses often need to outsource tasks that can be done cheaper and better by specialized third parties. How to know if outsourcing is a go for your business?

7 Creative Ways to Get Customer Testimonials - The question is, how do you get believable testimonials? Let’s look at some of the sites you can collect reviews upon, as well as how to encourage reviews from your customers and how to gather them from all around the web.

7 Ways to Increase the Value of Your Web Design Clients - Selling to existing clients will cut out some of that wasted time because you will already be familiar with each other, and your conversion rates will likely be higher because existing clients are less prone to shop around with several different service providers.

Tips for Planning your own Design Studio - Getting started in freelance web design is an exhilarating process. Along with the added stresses of daily work you actually become your own boss, set your own hours, and even choose who you ..

6 Warning Signs of a Potentially Bad Client - While I appreciate the sentiment of having a good work ethic, (and I like to think that I do), there are certain clients out there that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. The two biggest reasons I have for turning down a client are

Budgeting Tips for Freelance Designers and Other Freelancers - Managing money can be a problem for a freelance designer. If you’ve been a freelance designer for any length of time, then you already know that your income can fluctuate as a freelancer–sometimes a lot.

How to make more as a freelancer - As a freelancer you can make money off of everything that you do. No work should go to waste and over time you will find that you have set yourself up with a sizable passive income stream that might rival your freelancing money.

Is Part-Time Freelancing a Good Deal? - It’s incredibly common to freelance on the side: if you’re working a day job, it’s inevitable that you’ll come across someone who wants you to exercise your skills off the clock.

 

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

The Value of Unoriginality - Some may argue that styles are less important than learning how to actually solve design problems — i.e. when and how to use designs patterns in user interfaces. That’s true, but that does not negate the inherent value of these styles, which is that they help create work that looks great and work that communicates a certain message or feeling;

Dropping IE Support - If you’re a so-called website designer or website developer then stop bitching. Learn to do your job. It’s irresponsible towards your employer to project such a negative light on one browser just because you lack the skills to do your job properly.

Generating New Ideas - This is why we need to be on the lookout for new ideas that can drive innovation, and it’s why the ability to think differently, generate new ideas, and spark creativity within a team becomes an important skill. You need to work actively on building and ..

Preparing for Disaster - That’s why you need to be prepared for the worst. Having an emergency plan in place is vital for any business. When your business lives on a single computer, your livelihood is at stake. Here are some tips to help you avoid a potential disaster

10 Tips for Writing for Designers - Sending out communications and messages that will reach your whole team can be somewhat tricky because of the differences in how people think. Clear communication is key when working with any different number of people, but  ..

Designing Lasting - Designers control the world because they shape how the world is seen. Many of us don’t take that responsibility seriously because we have been doing this for a while and don’t always step outside of our own world.

What UX Isn’t - But I do have an opinion on what I think UX isn’t. We should let go of the idea of UX as deliverables. Too often I see UX put in the deliverables context.

 

 

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