Here we are again, showcasing some 10 cool new blogs & websites we come across lately aka Inspired Websites. Feel free to leave a comment and suggest other interesting stuff for the creative community.
Tuesday Total Textures is post series that will bring a new life to your Tuesdays. Every week I'll be posting some free hi resolution textures that you can use in your projects. Check out this week's textures, download the ones you like and start making your texture collection.
Planet Texture
Art Nouveau Pattern Texture
Colour Creation
Grungy Texture
Peeling
Rainbow Water
Presswood
a (...)
In this tutorial I will show you the steps I have used for making the Butterfly in the spring image.
After 13 years of being a vital part of web designs, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has evolved into a powerful tool, allowing you to develop more efficient and better-looking sites. Many of the new features in the latest CSS revision (CSS3) are rich and take the quality of our designs to the next level.
We’ll be looking at a few of the essential things you need to know about CSS3. With all of these new features, it’s important to place emphasis on the most important ones to get you (...)
Java provides automatic garbage collection,sometimes you will want to know how large the object heap is and how much of it is left. You can use this result to know about the efficiency of your application or program,that is you may come to know how many more objects you can instantiate. To obtain these values use totalMemory() and freeMemory() methods.
Since Java Garbage Collector runs periodically to check the dangling object references and empty Strings and to recycle these unused (...)
Nature is something that inspires all artists, designers and photographers on a day-to-day basis. Wherever it is you work, rest or play, there will always be nature around you, and whether you intend to or not it’s always going to influence you in one way or another. This round-up of nature-themed Photoshop artwork is sure to get your creative heads buzzing!
Mother Nature Is Crying
This incredible piece of digital artwork uses various manipulative skills to produce a realistic yet (...)
You can argue that a minute is a minute, no matter who you are or where you live, but the perceived speed of time can change person-by-person and even minute-by-minute. Ask anyone who has ever done something they have not enjoyed; they may say that time slowed and dragged by. And consider the idiom, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Time often seems to go too fast when we’re enjoying something, like a vacation or a movie.
While you can’t lengthen or shorten time at your leisure, you can (...)
Yesterday I wrote a post about some of the factors that bloggers might consider when deciding whether to end a blog or not.
Today I want to continue the theme and look at some options available to bloggers who have decided to end their blog but who don’t quite know how to do it.
Here are some of the most common ways that I’ve seen people end blogs: 1. Sell It
Before you decide to delete your blog, or simply decide to stop writing – consider whether it might have some commercial worth. This (...)
JohnMu from Google posted a blog post named Working with multi-regional websites. The post goes over many of the SEO implications behind making multiple web sites all targeting different regions around the world. John discusses URL structures, hosting, domains, using...
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While many of us in the marketing world tend to focus on how many followers we have and how to get more, for many Twitter users the other side of that coin is a real challenge: How do I find good people to follow on Twitter? Twitter itself has underscored the challenge as far back [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the "View Original Post" link below. (...)
One of the most powerful features inside SEJ tools is its advanced reporting ability which makes it a lot easier to create pretty, fully-customized and data-rich reports for clients.
With SEJ tools you can choose among multiple templates (or create your own), schedule reports, include any sets of data, etc. 1. Create a branded template
The first thing you may want to do is to create your branded template. To do that, hover over REPORT tab and choose BRANDED TEMPLATE. From there you will (...)
Java provides automatic garbage collection,sometimes you will want to know how large the object heap is and how much of it is left. You can use this result to know about the efficiency of your application or program,that is you may come to know how many more objects you can instantiate. To obtain these values use totalMemory() and freeMemory() methods.
Since Java Garbage Collector runs periodically to check the dangling object references and empty Strings and to recycle these unused (...)
One of the most common CSS effects is using shadows in various ways. Before, we needed to resort to images, but now we can offer this to all major web browser with CSS! Web browser support
Believe me or not, but all of these web browsers we can offer shadows with CSS: Firefox 3.5+ Safari 3+ Google Chrome Opera 10.50 Internet Explorer 5.5 The standards way
As we all know, a majority of the web browsers implement features in a standardized way, while others don’t (although they are getting (...)
I had the chance to talk with another freelancer the other day: she’s been offered the opportunity to take on a six-month project where she’d essentially be working full-time for a single client. The money is good, but there’s a catch in the contract—a non-compete clause.
The Standard Non-Compete Clause
The idea behind non-compete clauses grew out of employers wanting to make sure that when an employee left the company, he didn’t take any clients with him. Most clauses are phrased so that the (...)
From AllThingsD:
Twitter CEO Evan Williams did not announce the new ad platform the company is working on today.
Read the rest of this story »
See Also:Here's What Twitter's CEO Was Trying To Tell You About @Anywhere When Umair Haque Wrecked His SXSW KeynoteSXSW Attendees Rip Into Twitter CEO's KeynoteTwitter Announces "@Anywhere" For Deeper Integration With Third Party Sites
a (...)
Twitter founder Evan Williams was widely expected to announce an advertising platform at the SXSW conference yesterday, but while he announced something with dozens of major media partners, it wasn’t an ad platform — it was something called @anywhere. And what is @anywhere? Good question. In fact, that’s just one of the many good questions that attendees hoped in vain would be asked by Umair Haque of Harvard Business Review, whose interviewing skills received less than critical acclaim during (...)
I can’t see this on my own Facebook profile yet, but we’ve gotten a number of tips in our inbox in the past 10 minutes so it’s safe to assume it’s not a hoax or anything: Facebook appears to have started enabling users to generate custom two-dimensional QR codes.
From the looks of the screenshot embedded above, there are two types of QR codes: a personal barcode or a “status QR barcode”. This also seems to appear on Facebook Fan Pages.
Judging from the tweets about this, the QR codes don’t (...)
Regular readers of Think Vitamin may know that Carsonified, the company behind the blog, also run a number of web related events in Europe and the USA. We thought you might like to know that we recently launched our free to join event affiliate program. Here’s how we describe it on the web site:
The Carsonified Affiliate Program allows you to earn money. Every time a ticket to an event is purchased thanks to someone clicking on your affiliate link or banner we pay you £20. Sell five (...)
There’s a well-known statistic that says you need to get your message in front of your target audience seven times before they’ll take action. In the old days (10-15 years ago) that took a lot of time and money. To get someone to see or hear your brand on TV, radio, and in print for [...]
In part one you learned the important concepts and steps for installing and integrating CrawlTrack into your website. In this part you will learn how to maximize the use of CrawlTrack in dealing with website statistics. You will also learn how to maximize the security of your website....
Business Productivity Online Suite From $10 per user per month. Includes a 12-month subscription. Min 5 (...)
Back in the summer of last year, I did a little roundup I called The “Light” CMS Trend. Ironically enough, one that wasn’t included was LightCMS. I’ve been checking it out (yes, this is a sponsored review) and it definitely fits the category, with some features that set it apart.
LightCMS is a Light CMS
Really easy updates. That is the whole point of a “light” CMS. They don’t have as many features or as much extensibility as a “full” CMS (e.g. WordPress), but they do make the job of editing content (...)
(Editor’s note: Don Rainey is a general partner at Grotech Ventures and author of the “VC in DC” blog. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)
Throughout the financial crisis of 2008-09, most venture capitalists wisely advised startups to hunker down. The best bet, they said, was to lower expenses and, above all else, avoid fundraising in 2009, since all eyes were on 2010 as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
The advice, as it turns out, was somewhat short-sighted.
We are now (...)
Selling advertising deals is one of the most profitable ways to monetize your website. Some time ago I wrote an article titled How to Find Advertisers for Your Website, where I covered the pros and cons of using this method, what you need to have in place before getting started, how much you should charge and so on.
The most difficult part of the process, however, is to actually find the advertisers. I included some places where you can look for in that article, but I felt that it would (...)
by Stoney deGeyter
The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L'Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.
Copywriting
No SEO is complete without good content. You can stuff keywords into the text all you want, (...)
The Chromium folk have posted about JavaScript conformance as they release a test runner for Sputnik, that allows you to easily run the complete test suite from within your browser:
Sputnik touches all aspects of the JavaScript language defined in the 3rd edition of the ECMA-262 spec. In many ways it can be seen as a continuation of and a complement to existing browser conformance testing tools, such as the Acid3 test. While we are always focused on improving speed, Sputnik is not about (...)
AOL (NYSE: AOL) has to prove its mettle this year in full public view, in more ways than one. And 2010 may not be a great year for compensation increase for the top execs. In line with that, the company has decided to not increase based salary this year, according to a SEC proxy filing this morning, same as 2009. However, as always, other perks more than make up for it. Interestingly, Ted Cahall, till recently the CTO of AOL, got a secondary retention payment 10 days before the company (...)
1. Back Up All Your Files Now
"Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday." – Napoleon Hill
I’m sure that you’ve heard this over and over again but how many of you have actually taken the time to actually do it? Just a few days ago, I read about a designer on Twitter who lost some of his files due to some of his hardware malfunctioning. That is such a bummer. Let’s learn from his experience and (...)
Press Release
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By Neil Skirrow
As web technologies constantly advance, the skills a developer is expected to have are constantly increasing. Web users are beginning to expect Ajax interfaces, charts and graphs and a whole host of other tricks and features. This means web developers not only have to be skilled with HTML and a server-s
It’s important to promote your design business. This is especially true when economic times are challenging, you’ve got news to announce, or you’re simply hungry for growth. Many forms of promotion are available to the modern designer – with banner ads and Google AdWords among the most popular. In this digital age, it’s ea
Showcase of 40 useful and powerful CSS tools and generators. These tools can really relieve developers work in many ways – I understand you like always to do everything by yourself but it’s not the best way in the most cases, because it really takes time and such liberty we don’t always have.
This is considered to be really complete list about everything CSS related, as CSS lover myself I really evaluate good automated ways so I can focus on things I enjoy the most – creating elegant, usable (...)
This article is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) for much cheaper prices & offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.
In the process of launching an e-store, when it comes to choosing the right solution, you will get puzzled by the hundreds of solutions available.
The options range from simple and free shopping cart systems to complex and paid e-commerce softwares which can charge you for both getting (...)
A tutorial demonstrating via JavaScript how to place ad or feature blocks between paragraphs in older Wordpress posts.
This is our weekly Twitter Design News Round-Up, a collection of fresh design related resources that we have shared via Twitter in the past week.
Just in case you are not one of our Twitter followers, click here: twitter.com/speckyboy, and you’ll be kept up to date with loads of design news and resources.
As always, if you have any cool links that you would like to share, do not hesitate to share them here: Submit News. Thanks to everyone that has been emailing. Inspirational CSS:
Opera (...)
Time for some more learning!!! Photo manipulation is a technique of editing the images so as to produce a kind of illusion or deception. Its amazing usage and ethical concerns made it a marvelous subject of interest for everybody. It has opened doors to unlimited creativity and innovation. There can be a great combination of two opposites in a single image. You can modify the image in any way you want. So, BestPSDtoHTML decided to give its readers a collection of cool Photo manipulation (...)
View catalinuta.com at Design Shack
Lumzy is a Mockup and Prototype creation tool for websites and applications. By Mockup, we mean that quick sketch that gives an idea of what the site or application you are planning to build will look like.
Further more with Lumzy, you can create prototypes of how the site or application will function by adding events within your Lumzy controls. For instance, what happens when the user clicks a button? You can create Message Alerts, Page navigation or Links to external content, when your (...)
Photoshop is the tool of choice for web designers. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up 20 of the latest Photoshop tutorials for designing websites. The end results produced by these tutorials are great looking designs, but keep in mind that it’s not meant for you to reproduce an exact copy and use it as your own. Instead, follow the tutorials and learn new techniques to incorporate into your own designs. Create a Clean and Classy Web Design in Photoshop
Create a Gnarly Snowboarding Themed (...)
Today we’ve got three copies of the new eBook from Rockable and FreelanceSwitch, How to Write Great Copy for the Web, to give away. Entering takes seconds, just leave a comment below and three lucky people will be selected. Win How to Write Great Copy for the Web About the Book
How to Write Great Copy for the Web is the latest book from Rockable Press. You may not know this, but Rockable is Envato’s book publishing house! This book takes a concise and practical approach to writing (...)
I almost titled this post “5 Hot Color Trends for the Web”, but the truth is that I’ve never really considered myself “trendy”- and I’m not sure if trends are something we designers should give much importance to. With design- especially web design- we want to innovate, whether it’s a new spin on a vintage look or a modern design sitting on the cutting-est of edges.
If, like me, you spend an inordinately large amount of time over at COLOURlovers, you’ve probably seen some of these color palettes, (...)
Well yeah, yet another social media icons pack :), but this pack rocks because you not only get icons for : Reddit, Youtube, GoogleBuzz, SlideShare, Blogger, Digg, yahoo, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Delicious, Feedburner, Wordress, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, RSS and Linkind . But also get them 4 shapes: Egg, Beads (those stuff in the abacus), Button, and an Apple :).
The icons are in vector format for you to manipulate as you wish and in 32, 64 and 128px (...)
Last week I spoke with Mark Bole from BigMouthMedia, about the recent merger of LBi and Obtineo (BigMouthMedia's holding company) and €40m more capital. I wanted to get a bit more detail about what the deal means for search marketers and get a sense of whether this was a strategic or reactive response to changes in the market.
Click to read the rest of this post...
This post is supported by Webdesigner Depot, a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.
Getting a user to visit your site is only step one. If you’re interested in maintaining a long-lasting relationship, it’s going to take some commitment.
By now you’ve probably seen showcases of well designed registration forms, but that’s really only half the story. Effective (...)
If you haven’t gotten around to creating yourself a website or online portfolio, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. In today’s YTD post we discuss the importance of web promotion for graphic designers with David Airey, the famous brand identity designer, blogger and internet marketer extraordinaire. His self-titled website, www.davidairey.com, draws thousands of readers a day and made headlines when the international online community rallied to support his stand against an unscrupulous (...)
Going Digital
People are consuming information much differently these days and it’s your responsibility to make sure your content is available for the most popular forms of consumption. Here, we’ll take a look at distributing content through everything from Zinio to Amazon’s Kindle to Apple’s iPhone.
Personally, I’ve been a fan of the “digital movement” for years and I believe that Adobe has realized that while print is king, the future is digital. Some will argue that paper will never go away (...)
We frequently publish posts on this blog that feature tutorials for learning how to do various things with Photoshop, but we have rarely focused on just the basics. This post is intended for designers or aspiring designers who either want to get started with Photoshop or have limited experience and are looking to improve.
While there are plenty of great learning resources available online, it’s often difficult for beginners to know where to get started because everything seems to be (...)
Microsoft’s Office suite has long been the king of productivity software. And with good reason—it is the most full-featured office suite available. Not only is MS Office deployed extensively throughout enterprises, but many consumers rely on it for their day-to-day word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation needs, too.
But Microsoft Office isn’t cheap. Office Home and Student 2007 sells for $149.95 at the Microsoft Store (the 2008 Mac version is the same price). There are some discounts (...)
Have you ever visited a website with expectations about what you would find only to discover that site held none of the information you were looking for? That site might have had exactly what you’re interested in, but there was no clear path to find it. The site may have been organized in such a way that led you to believe it was about something other than what you were hoping to find.
How long did you stay on that site? Did you take any time to explore it or did you quickly conclude it (...)
WordPress’s popularity and usefulness as a multi-purpose content management system, continues to grow, and the more people flock to using this CMS the more an understanding of some of the basics of how it operates becomes necessary.
In that vein, I have put together this post that examines the WordPress template hierarchy and the use of conditional statements. Technically you only need two files for a WordPress theme to work, index.php and style.css.
However, if you would like to make your (...)
If you strive to be a great designer (like most), then you’re more than likely to know that a web application or websites success many times rely solely on how well designed the User Interface may be. As you scale the web and even read books, there can be an influx of misleading information pertaining to the way you should design your UI.
When in reality you should do what works best for you and your users. Below you will find a variety of excellent User Interface resources that will allow (...)
The natural world will forever be our greatest source of color inspiration. Not a day or season goes by without being able to find a profound experience of color: After the white snow melts away taking with it the stark contrasts of bare tress and black shadows, the grass's green becomes richer each day, until one day. And as quickly as the first transformation happens, an opposite and equally powerful transition takes place. The green retreats, fading into shades of grey and making way for (...)
The jQuery Project is very excited to announce the dates for our first-ever San Francisco conference. The conference will be held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Research Center in Mountain View, California on April 24th and 25th, 2010.
The San Francisco conference is the second of four events planned by the jQuery Project in 2010. The first was the jQuery14 event, and additional conferences are being planned in Europe and on the East Coast for later this year.
This venue is the largest (...)
A popular design phenomenon is that of “office porn”. No, it’s not anything sexual or sinister, but the seemingly never-ending desire of every designer out there to have an office that’s slicker, sexier, and more loaded than technology than the last. From Flickr home office competitions to design firms loaded with Mac Pros and 32 inch displays, the design industry has a major crush on shiny high-performance equipment.
Unfortunately for newbie designers, furnishing a swanky design office (...)
The upcoming radical reboot of the social news site will pull in data from Twitter, Facebook and other powerful tools to help connect users to the stories most relevant to them at any given time. Digg CEO Jay Edelson lays out the master plan.
The entertainment and CGI world has been fawning over the movie Avatar for months, and it seems you can’t watch any entertainment news program without hearing about James Cameron’s groundbreaking 3D epic.
And even if Cameron went home last week without the armful of Oscars he expected, directing the highest-grossing movie of all time probably takes the sting out.
But despite the movie’s brilliant effects and the unique world it creates, you’ll likely feel as if you’ve heard its underlying (...)
CSS is a wonderful language for presenting web pages. It’s not too difficult to learn, though like most things, it does have a learning curve. Where many people seem to get tripped up is in specific solutions to specific problems. Fortunately there’s a good chance that someone before you has already had the same problem and even better has found a solution.
Here are 47 of those solutions. 47 CSS Tips, Tricks, and Techniques to add to your CSS toolbox. Some you may be familiar with while (...)
How to steer clear of toxic questions like "why does this always happen to me?"
Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything. Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year - is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application (...)
In this tutorial, we’re going to paint a cartoon version of the ‘near-iconic’ Stephen Fry. The cartoon is styled in a comic book fashion but however, there’s still some painting to be done and this in the end, will be make the final image quite detailed.
Step 1
Starting off with a sketch of a younger Stephen Fry, I sketched out his prominent features such as his hair, slightly narrowed nose, dreamy eyes and chubby cheeks.
Step 2
Select the Pen Tool (P) and make sure the “paths” is chosen. (...)
When you're working on creating a print style sheet, you should be aware of the @page rule to help you provide specific styles for the pages. Just be sure to test any CSS you add to print style sheets with the @page rule, as many browsers still don't have good support for it. Learn More About CSS Printing and the @page Rule The @page Rule CSS2 Media Types Create Print-Friendly Pages CSS 3 size Property CSS 3 marks Property
The @page Rule Helps with Printing originally appeared on (...)
