1.Trends in Modern Web Design Portfolio Websites

Trends in web design are hard to get away from, one minute we’re all web 2.0, the next we’re scrolling jQuery galleries and textured backgrounds. Lets take a look at some great trends implemented by web design agencies and freelancers on the web today.

2.30+ Outstanding Character Illustrations in Modern Web Design

Having a unique design is a must to get your visitor’s attention. Vector characters can establish a memorable image of your site in the reader’s mind. So if you are looking for inspiration for your web design, here is an amazing collection of over 30 Vector illustrated websites.

3.Data Tables In Modern Web Design

Being able to organize data and information is a skill not to be overlooked. The way you organize content and text, generally referred to as copy, has a direct effect on how that content is received by users. You must find a way to organize information so that it is scannable and can be quickly absorbed by the reader.

4.80+ Perfect Ending of Modern Website Design- Footers!

A perfect layout, A Good Design and Nice resource can produce a creative output. Layout, textures and patterns are used more often than one may think but the outcome of different combination can result verity of designs.

5.Create a Clean Modern Website Design in Photoshop

Build a complete website design mockup for a fictional design studio, starting with the creation of the initial layout then moving on to designing the individual page elements.

6.16+ Top JavaScript/Ajax Effects for Modern Web Design

Currently there are a lot of JS scripts available for web developers. But all of them are not handy in the modern web design. Nowadays, web designers use some special effects more and more in their projects because those effects give usability and practicality as well as elegance to their projects.

7.Textures In Modern Web Design

Textures in Web design can be very subtle, so that the visitor hardly notices, or they can be a focal point of the design. In some cases, textures are used to emphasize certain parts of the design. Because of the versatility of textures, they can be used in combination with many other design elements, such as typography, lighting and colors.

8.Modern Clean Style Layout

9.Design a simple, modern web template

A tutorial by Dedrick Payne on how to create a simple, but modern web site template from scratch in Photoshop.

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5 Essential Firefox Plug-ins for Web Designers and Developers

Web Design Complete Guide Tutorials

1.Window Resizer

The Browser Window Resizer is useful for testing different screen sizes. It accurately resizes your browser so you can test to see what a web page looks like in all of the standard resolution sizes.
Supports the 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200 resolutions.
Resize the current page via the Context menu, Tool menu or Toolbar button.

2.Style Sheet Chooser

Style Sheet Chooser II allows you to choose author-provided alternate style sheets for a web site, and have those choices be persisted for all pages on the same site. Style Sheet Chooser II replaces Firefox’s built-in style sheet switcher

3.GridFox – The Grid Layout Firefox Extension

GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.

4.Html Validator

HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.

5.Screengrab

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.

6.Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

7.Image Zoom

Easily zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images within a web page. All this can be done by using the context menu or a combination of mouse buttons and scroll wheel. Handy to see the finer details of smaller pics or to make very large pics fit within your screen.

8.CSSViewer

Add CSSViewer in your toolbar to use it.

9.CSS validator

Validates a page using the W3C CSS Validator. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the CSS of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. Will only work on pages that have a CSS file associated.

10.ColorZilla

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

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Blogger Firefox Add-ons

5 Essential Firefox Plug-ins for Web Designers and Developers

Buzz is also available on your phone. When you’re out in the real world, a lot of the information you want to share often has to do with where you are.To start using Buzz for mobile, go to buzz.google.com from your phone’s browser. It is currently available for Android and iPhone

Google Buzz Tricks

1. Hide followers/people you follow on your public profile

If you don’t want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page.

2.block anyone who starts following you

Google making it easier to block anyone, by adding “Block” links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they’ve already created profiles for themselves.

3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile

Initially, Google showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. Google is making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you’ll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.

Google Buzz for Wordpress

if you want google buzz button for your posts go to your theme and  open single.php file and paste this simple code where you want the button to appear:

<a
href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" target="_blank" rel="nofollow external"><img
src="http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/9738/googlebuzz.png" width="50" height="58" alt="" /></a>

you can also use
Google Buzz Button Wordpress Plugin here

Google Buzz for Blogger

Log in to Blogger, go to Layout -> Edit HTML.

Click on Expand widget templates at right top side of an editor.

Locate <data:post.body/> there.

Now, copy and paste code given below before <data:post.body/>  statement.

<div style='float:left;padding:0px;'><a expr:href='&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Buzz this'><img alt='Buzz this' border='0' class='icon-action' src='http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/9738/googlebuzz.png'/></a></div>

if you like this post you can start following me on google buzz and twitter

1.How to Make a CSS Sprite Powered Menu

This tutorial will bring you through the process of building a slick menu using a single CSS sprite image. It’s a simple, but elegant solution for most websites.

2.Active State in CSS Navigations

3.Sponsor list with CSS Sprites and Mootools 1.2

4.CSS Menus With Images – CSS Sprites

This tutorial will show you how to build a CSS menu with images as menu items using a CSS tecnique that’s known with the name of CSS sprites.

5.Create a Sprited Navigation Menu Using CSS and MooTools

6.Coding Apple’s Navigation Bar Using CSS Sprites

create Apple’s navigation bar in photoshop. This tutorial is not going to go in depth about all the benefits of sprites, but will show you how to use the technique correctly.

7.CSS Sprite Navigation Tutorial

This tutorial teaches how to build a css navigation using sprite images. With the mobile web becoming more important than ever before, load time and the size of a web site are some of the biggest factors to consider when developing a site for mobile users.

8.Building Faster Websites with CSS Sprites

9.CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them

10.Creating easy and useful CSS Sprites

CSS sprites are a way to combine images to improve our page loading time, reducing the number of requests our server does. In this article I will teach you how to make them.

There are a lot of benefits for pagination such as  Improving Usability Of Your WordPress Blog , Enable your visitors to browse your site quickly and easily and ability to step through a large number of pages.

With Pagination , you can also paginate your Category, Author, and date-based archives, and even paginate your Entry archives, displaying only a small number of comments on each page.This post looks at best wordpress pagination solutions.

1.WP Digg Style Pagination Plugin

WP-digg style pagination allows to add or replace the Wordpress pagination by one easy and more comfortable navigation like Digg, Flickr, Meneame and Sabrosus.( I used this one on my blog you can see it below)

2.WP-PageNavi

WP PageNavi is an excellent way to manage masses of content into a user-friendly navigation. Instead of having the standard WordPress next post and previous post it has a list of the page numbers or posts. This enables the user to navigate there way through the website with complete ease and not having to click through post after post to get to the article they are after.

3.WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site.

In addition to increasing the user experience for your visitors, it has also been widely reported that pagination increases the SEO of your site by providing more links to your content.

4.wordpress seo pager

This Wordpress plugin implements a multi-page customizable pager to replace the standard, boring WordPress “Earlier Posts” and “Newer Posts” links. This improves SEO as well as usability. In addition to this it presents some related SEO options.

5.Better WordPress pagination (function)

Ever wanted to have better pagination controls in WordPress? Those “Newer posts / Older posts” links are a bit limited. Much better is the ubiquitous numbered list, a la Google’s results page.

According to Technorati State of blogosphere report 2009, there has been a staggering growth of 68% in the number of blogs as compared to 2008 which are trying to monetize their traffic in one way or another. The report also reveals that the popularity of Google Adsense has decreased from 67% in 2008 to 47% in 2009 which means that the bloggers are heading towards other ad publishing networks and affiliate companies to monetize their traffic.

It means that 2 out of every 3 bloggers are trying to earn money from their blogs.

Now are the majority of bloggers able to make any good money through blogs?

No! And we all know that.

Most of us (including me) are unable to make decent amount of money blogging.  Why?

Even though you update the content, have keywords in the title tags, do link building, comment on other blogs, and your traffic is increasing, but you don’t make enough money, not even 5% of that amount which Probloggers like Darren Rowse, Erik Schoenfeld, Brian Clark are earning.

The Answer is Simple YOU don’t have the Credibility.

Will your readers buy the products recommended by you if they don’t have trust on you? No they won’t. To convince them to buy those products, you need to build some reputation amongst them so that they can count on your opinions when they take a decision to buy something.

How to build credibility?

Credibility is not something which can be built overnight so don’t rush it. You have to earn it by helping your readers. To earn credibility online you need to have answers of these three questions.

Who is your target Audience?

What problems they are facing?

What kind of products they are searching desperately?

If you feel that you are capable of answering these three questions through your blog and can provide them with the valuable information, tool that can make their lives easier then you can easily gain some credibility.

Be prepared to work hard, remain honest and have faith in yourself. Always be ready to help your readers, provide them with enough channels to interact with you and try to develop a bond of trust with your readers.

According to me every blogger should just ask what kind of problems they solve through their blogs. Why should people trust then?  And if they can’t find answers to these questions then they would not be able to make any money blogging.

1.Firebug and Web Developer

I grouped these two extensions together because they provide similar functionality by allowing you to edit, debug, and watch CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live on any web page. The main difference in the two is how they operate. Where as Web Developer is a toolbar add-on and uses a bare bones approach to displaying markup, Firebug is an overlay/side bar implementation and uses visual cues to highlight markup similar to web development applications like Dreamweaver. Firebug also has its own extensions to increase its functionality for work with other web development languages such as PHP, jQuery, and Python.

2.Pixel Perfect

As the Photoshop to HTML market grows larger tools like Pixel Perfect are a great way to tie web development and design closer together. This extension allows for a composition of a web design to be placed over developed code in the browser with a transparency. This will allow the developers to tweak the code until it resembles the design.

3.Coral IE Tab

Not every person is using Firefox yet. In fact Firefox has only about 25% of the total browser market.  A respectable amount compared to other browsers, but is dwarfed by Internet Explorer’s 63% market share. This statistic means it is important for developers to check that their code is still valid between both Firefox and Internet Explorer. IE Tab allows users to quickly switch between using the FF engine, and the IE engine within Firefox to make sure their code holds up in both, or degrades gracefully.

4.Fireshot

Fireshot allows screen shots to be taken of an entire continuous web page through the browser. Alone that is not truly a noteworthy feature, but the ability to add annotations to screen shots make Fireshot a must have for development teams. The annotations can allow a dialog to open up between clients, developers, and designers pointing out issues with out using another application to mark notes on a web page.

5.Palette Grabber

Simply put Palette Grabber reads through the code of web pages to create a color palette based on the hex values. This color palette can be exported to Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X.  Palette Grabber is a great tool for jumping from the inspiration phase to the creation phase without the dirty work of reading through lines of code.

These are just a few examples of Firefox extensions that I have used successfully.  These may not be the best for everyone but there are plenty more out there for you to try.

1. Use the 80/20 Rule When Doing SEO

Google says they have over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm. I suppose the same is with Yahoo with Bing. However, this should not scare you. If we take the 80/20 rule, we can conclude that 20% of those ranking factors contribute to 80% of the rankings.

From experience and some testing, many people have concluded that the 2 most important ranking factors are links and on-page optimization.

2. Build diverse links

One of the key factors to search engine optimization is building links. Not any type of links, but diverse ones from various domains. Search engines probably count a link from each domain as a ‘vote’ to the domain you own.

3. On-page optimization

I’ve noticed that on-page optimization (optimizing title tags, adding keywords and so on) is usually more important when you already have more links to your site. Anyway it is very important you have a basic understanding for on-page optimization strategies, which basically are: putting the keyword in the title and the body text.

4. Piggybacking is a great starting point to build links

Piggybacking means seeing where other websites get their links from and then figuring a way for you to get those links also. You can use tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and Linkscape for this purpose.

The more you do this, the more you’ll start seeing different patterns and even coming with your own strategies for building links.

5. If you do manual link building, diversify

Search engine will become very suspicious if they see only links from blog comments or forum signatures coming to your site. Make sure your diversify if you plan to build links manually.

6. Create link strategies that create a lot of opportunities

Link bait is a great example here. If you create a link bait article and it goes viral, you’ll attract thousands of visitors. A small percentage of them will be webmasters who will link to that article. This is what I call ‘creating a linking strategy that creates opportunities itself’.

WordPress Job Board Script

Source

WP-Jobboard – Transform Wordpress into a Jobboard

This theme  will be able to turn your wordpress install in a simple jobboard.
this theme is released under GPL, so you can use the theme for free for every project you have in mind.

Demo | Download

JobCoin

Using JobCoin, you can create a job board on your own site with practically no effort. The service is a job board host. You tell it how much you want to charge for a posting, upload your logo, and bam, you’ve got a board.

Wordpress Job Board Plugin

Wordpress Theme for Job Board Websites

JobPress is a wordpress theme that turns your website into a perfect working Job Board Software. It comes with all features a website of this kind needs, and this for just $79!

Demo | Buy it