Best Web Design Resources and Links

Thursday, July 13, 2006

HTML's a Tag Too!

It's the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of every document. But yet, it happens to be one of the most ignored tags out there. Why?

read more | digg story

Monday, July 10, 2006

Test Your Web Design in 20 Different Browsers + More for FREE!

Preview your website in 20 different browsers for Linux, Mac, Windows, Terminal, and Mobile. Customize screen resolution (tiny to huge), JavaScript (yes/no + version), Flash (yes/no + version), color depth (4/8/16/24-bit), Java (yes/no + version), media plugins (QTP/WMP/SVG/PDF), and maximum wait (15 min to 4 hours). FANTASTIC WEB DESIGN TOOL!

read more | digg story

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Multi column layout in CSS

The W3C's CSS working group recently released a draft of a new multi column layout module--to be included (with possible modifications) into the CSS 3 specs. For those web developers that have been lamenting the lack of adequate multi column support in current supported versions of the CSS specs, this is an exiting addition.

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Friday, July 07, 2006

Top 20 Blog Designs Part 2

Part one was a huge success so we present new Top 20 Blog Designs Part 2 gathered by our team. The best blog designs for your inspiration gathered in one place. This should be ABC for all internet geeks !

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Thursday, July 06, 2006

SEO for FireFox Launches!

Are you curious why a certain page on Google or Yahoo! ranks better? Do you ever wonder how many links your competitor has, but don't feel like logging into your SEO tools? If so, the SEO for FireFox extension is for you. Created by Aaron wall - it will save you countless hours of research frustration and complexity.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Litebox - Same great taste, less calories (1/4 the size of Lightbox)

Litebox is a modified version of Lightbox v2.0 created with one thing in mind, size reduction. Litebox utilizes the 3kb javascript library moo.fx in association with prototype.lite, giving us the basic tools we need to make this work and the ability to expand.

read more | digg story

Sunday, July 02, 2006

how to optimize your blog for search engines

There is a big bunch of resources on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have tried to collect the best tips and plugins in this article.

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Friday, June 30, 2006

Web 2.0 Design Tutorials

Here is a list of good tutorials and articles on learning the fundamental design elements for web 2.0. Mac style rounded corners, tabs, colors, drop shadows etc are all covered.

read more | digg story

Thursday, June 29, 2006

How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible - 40 Tutorials and Articles

"AJAX is a great tool for creating rich internet applications, however, when improperly implemented it can cause hugh accessibility issues. The good news is that most of these issues can be fixed so your websites are viewable by a much wider audience."

read more | digg story

Download 400+ Royalty Free Stock Photos for Free!

Download 400+ quality royalty free stock photos for free. Note that these images range from 400kb to around 1.5mb, and are 1200 x 900 to 1600 x 1200. Fantastic resource for websites, Flash animations, playing with Photoshop, etc.

read more | digg story

Create Motion Graphics Using Only CSS

Fed up with 'Flash'? Getting annoyed with animated gifs? Well, why not try an alternative - CSS Flick Animation.

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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

CSS Galleries

A single RSS feed of all of the major CSS showcase and gallery sites (CSS Mania, CSS Drive, Unmatched Style etc.). Indexes all featured sites into one simple feed, with thumbnail.

read more | digg story

The First Version of Photoshop

An interesting look back at Photoshop 1.0. Photoshop's developers, Thomas and John Knoll began development on Photoshop in 1987. Version 1 was released by Adobe in 1990. The program was intended from the start as a tool for manipulating images that were digitized by a scanner, which was a rare and expensive device in those days.

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8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins

8 great plugins that'll help you pump more juice out of your Wordpress installation. Check it out!

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Top 10 Designs for Web 2.0

great list of 10 nice web 2.0 designs

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Test Your Web Design in 20 Different Browsers + More for FREE!

Preview your website in 20 different browsers for Linux, Mac, Windows, Terminal, and Mobile. Customize screen resolution (tiny to huge), JavaScript (yes/no + version), Flash (yes/no + version), color depth (4/8/16/24-bit), Java (yes/no + version), media plugins (QTP/WMP/SVG/PDF), and maximum wait (15 min to 4 hours). FANTASTIC WEB DESIGN TOOL!

read more | digg story

10 Free Plug-ins to Enhance Photoshop

Take the world's best image-editing program and make it better
�with these free plug-ins that let you spruce up your images like the professionals.

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The use of colour in web designing

This article explains the use of colour, what colours signify, and how to find colours that fit with each other in your web pages.

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Monday, June 26, 2006

How to Airbrush your photos in Photoshop!

wonder how models' skin look so perfect in photos? Here is a tutorial on how to airbrush your photos in adobe photoshop!!

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Saturday, June 24, 2006

WidgetBox is a new marketplace for widgets

If you like widgets, there's about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page.

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Open Source Templates - Amazing Designs

Great web deisgner resource.

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9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards

Some people just misinterpret how the web should be used/designed.

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Opera 9 vs. Firefox 1.5 - The Complete Battle

An in depth look on how Firefox 1.5 holds up to new Opera 9.

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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Learning Ruby in 15 minutes? This actually works.

Using some friendly copy even Google would adore, this web application integrates a live Ruby compiler and holds your hand through ever step of the way.

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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team - ALA

Excellent "A List Apart" article discussing to identify the right levels of manpower for a web team.

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Prettier Accessible Forms - ALA

Another great read from A List Apart.

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Behavioral Separation - A List Apart

Breaking up is hard to do. But in web design, separation can be a good thing. Content, style, and behavior all deserve their own space.

Another great article presented by ALA and written by Jeremy Keith.

read more | digg story

How Q.U.I.C.K. is Your Site Design?

Quick is a scale to rate your site on, based on 5 major categories:
Quality, Usability, Informative, Clarity, and Kode. Does your site add up?

read more | digg story

Simply creating a website for your company isn't enough anymore

Savvy Web marketers realize that consumers turn to the Web to shop and to learn about companies, which is forcing them to market beyond just the company website.

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Styling Checkboxes and Radio Buttons in Pure CSS

Tired of the lame javascript hacks? Using only proper CSS and semantic markup, it's still possible to replace default sytem graphics for these widgets with whatever custom look you like. Learn a new CSS trick!

read more | digg story

Tutorials bringing you from newbie to coding pro

I was looking for a way to learn coding (PHP, Javascript, CSS), and I found this website. Its created by Ron, the maker of "SayBox". It brings you from the ground up with extremely descriptive tutorials in many different coding subjects. Its growing quickly, and more tutorials are being added very often... give it a look and digg on!

read more | digg story

Top 10 Web Dev Libraries

List of 12 complete with descriptions. Includes JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, and CSS Libraries. These libraries should be in any web developers bookmarks.

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Monday, June 19, 2006

Why business blogs are important

More and more companies starts blogging, but why do they do it - what are the benefits? This article gives several arguments and ideas - is blogging the right choice for your company too?

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CSS Text Zooming

Allowing users to increase/decrease text size using CSS and simple Javascript like Wired and digg does. Full source code and working example.

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5 Steps to Building Better Websites

Included in this article are 5 principles that guarantee your website to be more usable, more effective and overall more enjoyable for everyone involved.

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New CSS Showcase for masses

New gallery update daily with best websites. First place to go for a new nice websites. All you got in one place.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Amazing photoshop work - all done with a mouse - plus tutorial

This guy is amazing... he has created a photorealistic image using just Photoshop 6.0 and a mouse... no graphics tablets here. Pure talent.

He has also created a nice step-by-step tutorial on how it was created.

Final image: http://www.wade.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/images/FinalPic.png

read more | digg story

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Rendr

Rendr is a live CSS and HTML rendering tool. It displays what the page would look like as you type, making it great for rapid testing of page designs.

read more | digg story

Monday, June 12, 2006

CSS Drop Shadows

The CSS2 text-shadow property makes it easy to add a drop shadow to a web page's text, but so far it's only supported by the Safari browser for OS X. Today we're going to create CSS drop shadows for other browsers, including Firefox.

read more | digg story

Ultimate Imageless Rounded Corners with Anti-Aliasing

There are a lot of rounded corners scripts out there, but none of them really achieve image quality corners with borders.

This script not only has full anti-aliasing but also supports background images which can then layer other background images and still AA.

I don't know of one other script that can do that.

read more | digg story

CSS3.info Launched

Joost de valk, who brought the CSS3 preview page, has just put online CSS3.info, a site dedicated to information about CSS3. So if you are interested in learning more about CSS3 dig this link.

read more | digg story

Friday, June 09, 2006

AJAX Feedback Mechanism

Nifty little mechanism that lets you get user feedback on a page without harassing them. Should be on your site

read more | digg story

Ajax Back, Forward, Reload and PHP

We will use JavaScript to create a history stack for the Ajax photo gallery built in Part 1 of this two-part "Developing PHP the Ajax way" series. This history stack will closely mirror the history utility found in Web browsers, and it will be used to provide Back, Forward, and Reload buttons for the application.

read more | digg story

Create Chat Rooms on the Fly (AJAX)

The site allows you to create light weight AJAX chat rooms on the fly by just typing in a room name and a nickname. This is a great service for anyone that wants to communicate with someone who doesn't have the same messaging client as themselves. I created a sample room just for this digg link. It's http://www.chatcreator.com/chatap/rooms/digg/

read more | digg story

AJAX Edit In Place With Prototype, Version 0.2.0

AJAX Edit In Place with Prototype lets you edit text in line like Flickr. This new version fixes some bugs, is more flexible and cleans up the JavaScript code.

read more | digg story

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Fresh links for developers-updated daily

dzone.com (DZ) is a link-sharing community where member participation determines what gets published and what does not. Members submit links to developer-related content into a queue, and you vote to indicate whether or not you like those links. A must read for developers CS pros and hobbyists.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

HTML Emails - Taming the Beast

Should you use CSS or (horror of horrors) tables? And what do you do when images are "blocked"?

read more | digg story

5 Great Domain Naming Techniques

So you have a beautiful website complete and you have no idea what to name it. You have tried to think and think over and over, yet nothing seems good enough. Why don't you try one of these naming techniques?

read more | digg story

Photoshop, Flash, Programming, & Web Tutorials

Hundreds of tutorials on photoshop, flash, css, asp, php, javascript

read more | digg story

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Very Cool Javascript : Easily Add Sidenotes To Your Blog

Just by adding this javascript to your blog or website, you can easily add color coded sidenotes to your blog entries. The script does everything. All you need to do is add a single tag to your text. You can also completely style the color, borders and positioning of the sidenotes with CSS. Very cool and simple to use.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Levels of HTML knowledge

6 levels of HTML knowledge among people, spanning from next to nothing to those who write the actual HTML specifications. Quite a funny read and not too be taken to seriously.

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Narrative JavaScript

"Narrative JavaScript is a small extension to the JavaScript language that enables blocking capabilities for asynchronous operations. This makes writing asynchronous code sequences easier and increases code readability."

read more | digg story

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

How To: Design for Web 2.0

This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to easily create some of the more popular "Web 2.0" design effects.

read more | digg story

Slashdot CSS Redesign Winner Announced

After oodles of entries, most of which were featured on digg, the Slashdot redesign winner has been announced.

read more | digg story

Responsible Asynchronous Scripting

AJAX and its kin are empowering developers, but with great power comes great responsibility.

read more | digg story

Monday, May 29, 2006

Free Photos for Your Web Site or Blog

Sick to death of the rotten stick figures that come with PowerPoint? Want to punch up your presentations, your blog, your Web site? Getting ready to shell out money for custom or stock photography? Don't.

read more | digg story

9800 Free Fonts

9800 fonts free to download with a nice preview feature.

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Canvas for Wordpress - Design Your Blog with Ease

Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.

read more | digg story

YShout: A Free PHP + AJAX Shoutbox. Now officially v2!

YShout is a free and lightweight package that allows you to easily add a shoutbox to your website. It's standards compliant, customizable, and more. V2 adds tons of new features, check it out!

read more | digg story

Friday, May 26, 2006

Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers

It's well known that AJAX in its current state is fairly inaccessible to certain types of users (eg. the vision impaired). This article offers some suggestions of how to improve the accessibility of websites using AJAX, specifically for those people using screen readers.

read more | digg story

Configuring Rails Environments: The Cheat Sheet

A fairly exhaustive list of the options allowed when configuring a Rails application.

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Thursday, May 25, 2006

Very Cool CSS Hoverbox Menu Technique

Supercharge your navigation menus with this cool CSS. The examples they show kind of suck but the technique is actually worth looking at.

read more | digg story

5 Worthy CSS Tips

"After reading "5 Steps To CSS Heaven" and disagreeing with some of what was said I thought that writing this would be appropriate...so here are 5 quick tips that help me out in my day to day work. I wouldn't call them best practices because everybody has a style that works for them, but these are what work best for me."

read more | digg story

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

New domain launched for mobile phones

Web browsing on portable phones still has some way to go before it is as useful and convenient as browsing from a PC, but a new industry consortium wants to change all that. Their plan? Introduce another top level domain called \".mobi\", which will feature content formatted for mobile devices.

read more | digg story

More Rounded Corners with CSS

\"Admit it. You know it, your Mom knows it and even your Grandmother probably knows it by now: Rounded corners, borders and drop shadows (while nothing new) are all the rage these days on the \'Web 2.0, fully Ajaxed, Ajax-enhanced, Ajaxified\' Web 2.0-era Web.\"

read more | digg story

Object-Oriented Javascript

\"Although Javascript shouldn\'t be classed as an object-oriented language, pretty much everything within it is object based; from DOM scripting (Document Object Model) through to specific built-in objects such as Image and Date.\"

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Steal It! Ruby Code & Style

There\'s a whole world of language features that we sometimes miss out on as Rubyists, such as pattern matching, S-expressions, and external domain-specific languages. But the good news is that we can have them, too, as long as we\'re not afraid to steal a few things first.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

How To Speed Up Your Web App

The next generation of web apps make heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. This article, by the lead developer of Flickr, shows you how to make those apps responsive and quick.

read more | digg story

Ajax Tabs Content script

A tab content script that combines Ajax and CSS to let you display a selection of external content on the page, inside a DIV and via CSS tabs. For each tab, you can also dynamically load external .css and .js files associated with the external page if desired.

read more | digg story

Webdesign mockup using Photoshop

Through images and a small amount of text, an example is shown of how to make webdesign mockups in Photoshop. Yet another addition to the webdesign workflow articles.

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Monday, May 22, 2006

17gigs of free searchable textures and models

Spectralogue - thousands of free textures and some fully textured tileable 3d models. No registration, no ads, no chance for the server.

read more | digg story

Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures

Lots of great photos.

read more | digg story

Sunday, May 21, 2006

CSS3 Preview

A preview of the nice things to come in CSS3. Most of them are supported by either Gecko (Firefox and a few others) or WebKit (Safari) based browsers, so have one (or both) open. IE users don't get to have any of the fun yet.

read more | digg story

Saturday, May 20, 2006

about your URL

Providers all sorts of information like loading time, uptime, Cacheability, Readability etc. Its a Keeper...

read more | digg story

How to create an Awesome Logo

Learn how to create really good logos with an in depth step by step "how-to" in adobe photoshop, with the guidance of a really well regarded designer.

read more | digg story

Friday, May 19, 2006

Stealthier Firefox Extension (aka. pr0n mode)

Firefox extension Stealther lets you browse the web without leaving a trace of your browsing session on your computer.

read more | digg story

5 Steps to CSS Heaven

Writing CSS is very much like having sex. Not everyone does it the same way and there is no particular right way to do it.

read more | digg story

Thursday, May 18, 2006

An AJAX commenting application using jsolait library

Here is a good example of AJAX using jsolait library - a red box that
interactively lets you write comments. Particularly interesting are the
History feature and the login box.

read more | digg story

Integrating Google calendar in your website

This article shows how to integrate Google Calendar to your website with a simple PHP/ Javascript

read more | digg story

Rich Ajax slide shows with DHTML and XML

"How difficult is Ajax to implement? Each element of the Ajax model is relatively easy to learn. But the trick is blending all the elements into a seamless experience."

read more | digg story

Upload files with an AJAX progress Bar!

Ever wondered if it was possible to display the upload status to a user while he is uploading a file to your website? It is! Check out this PHP implementation on thinkingphp.org.

read more | digg story

Top 20 AJAX Tutorials

List of 20 most helpful AJAX online tutorials.

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Mapping website visitors in real time

What if you were to try to geographically locate all the visitors to your website, and tag their locations on a map? Using Google Maps, Ajax, MySQL and some PHP, you can!.

read more | digg story

60 More AJAX Tutorials

As the title implies... 60 useful AJAX tutorials. Some really useful stuff for beginner and advanced.

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Cut through AJAX hype

If you're considering building an Ajax application of your own, you will inevitably need to consider the discussion points in this series. You'll learn about both the potential and the pitfalls inherent to this new technology.

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Build RSS reader using AJAX and PHP

Learn how to build an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader, as well as a Web component that you can place on any Web site to look at the articles in the RSS feeds.

read more | digg story

Over One Hundred page layouts, One CSS File: Y!UI to the rescue

The Yahoo! User Interface library has made a second release. This one now includes a CSS Grid Kit which allows you to create hundreds of css-based page layouts and it's only 1.82k

read more | digg story

The best CSS optimizer hands down

Web-based CSS optimizer cleans up poorly written code and reduces file size with multiple compression settings. A must have for any web designer.

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Learn CSS

This CSS Tutorial will get you started with CSS in just a few minutes. It is easy to understand and will teach you all the sophisticated techniques.

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AJAX How To: Build A Digg Spy For Your Site

Simple tutorial to build an AJAX Digg Spy-like feature for your website. Covers everything from Prototype, Scriptaculous, and basic javsacript to fetch XML and leverage Fade Effects. Includes pretty good instructions and source code.

read more | digg story

MySQL Cheat Sheet

A fantastic quick reference sheet for when you are working with MySQL from the command line.

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Wednesday, May 17, 2006

New Google tool compiles Java to AJAX

When you deploy your application to production, the Google Web Toolkit compiler translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

read more | digg story

100+ powerpoint presentations on improving your PHP skills

Nice page on php.net that has a ton of PHP powerpoint presentations from some of the top PHP developers out there. Topics range from Database, Internal Workings, Internationalization, Debugging, Performance and more. Good stuff.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Simple AJAX inline text update 2.0

As everybody knows, refreshing pages is so 1999. AJAX, DOM, whatever you call it makes it possible to let people edit a piece of text inline without having to use a submit button. You say: but that ain�t new at all! But all of this has been made easy to use and implement.

read more | digg story

Monday, May 15, 2006

What's The Secret Sauce in Ruby on Rails?

Rails isn't a better hammer; it's a different kind of tool. This article explores the compromises and design decisions that went into making Rails so productive within its niche.

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Blursoft's metaForum - an AJAX refresh to forums.

metaForum is a web2.0 forum. It uses AJAX only where it makes the end user's experience better. It really does turn a forum into a kind of group chat with its auto-refresh, but it's really something you have to experience to properly understand...and yes, the back button works.

read more | digg story

Open-Source pyxy-gallery PHP+Ajax Photo Gallery

"Pyxy-gallery is a PHP script to make an image gallery. There are many other scripts to do this, but this is one of the nicer ones." Excellent PHP Photo Gallery, with slick AJAX!

read more | digg story

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Pricing a Project

Excellent read on pricing work. Must bookmark.

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Honest Tips for those Switching to Macs

"There are already scores of religious fanboy zealots who are going to tell you - in great detail - how great the Mac is, and why you should switch. I'm not going to. But beware. Just because the Mac is an excellent computer, that doesn't mean it's panacea. Here are some things you're going to want to pay attention to as you switch."

read more | digg story

Friday, May 12, 2006

Open Source AJAX Ruby on Rails Subversion (SVN) Browser

BountySource.com today just released the first version of their web-based SVN browser, written in Ruby on Rails, under the GNU GPL license. Now you can browse your code repository with all the trendiness of a Web 2.0 application.

read more | digg story