Four Different Ways of Implementing Twitter on your Site
October 26th, 2009 — 20 Comments
Twitter has become one of the most popular forms of social media in use on the web today and it has been widely adopted by web designers and developers alike. There are many ways of integrating Twitter onto your site.
By integrating Twitter with your site, you can get a community discussing your brand or service which doubles up as a great way of promotion. Here is a look at some of the most useful and interesting methods to get you started.
Read more...Advanced Photoshop Techniques that you may not be aware of
October 22nd, 2009 — 87 Comments
Photoshop is one of the most widely tools used for web design. Most web designers don’t use all of the great things that Photoshop can do. It’s easy to get stuck in your ways but instead you should be looking to further improve your skills and learn new techniques to improve your web design work, work flow and productivity.
The following are advanced Photoshop techniques that can help with your day to day use of Photoshop.
Read more...How to Design Buttons to Help Improve Usability
September 10th, 2009 — 64 Comments
Buttons can play a big part in how visitors interact with a website. They come in varying shapes, sizes and styles but there are a few things to consider when designing buttons:
- Use of Icons
- Look and Feel
- Behaviour
- Importance
- Consistency
Use of Icons
Using icons as part of buttons can help improve usability by providing a visual aid making it more obvious to the user as to what function the button provides. Below are examples of buttons incorporating icons and shapes to do just that:
7 Very Simple Tips and Tricks for getting More out of WordPress
August 27th, 2009 — 50 Comments
WordPress is a very powerful blogging and CMS tool but as with all content management systems it needs tweaking to meet certain needs. Here are seven things you can do to get more out of WordPress with very little effort.
Read more...A Look at Some of the New Selectors Introduced in CSS3
July 27th, 2009 — 46 Comments
Everyone who has been using CSS is immediately familiar with selectors as they are what is used to target elements on a page and style them. CSS3 brings even more options as far as selecting elements goes. It will allow designers and developers to implement designs much easier and quicker than before.
Here is a run-down of just some of the things that is possible with CSS3 selectors. Of course CSS3 isn’t supported at all by any IE browsers including IE8 but all latest versions of Safari, Firefox and Opera support most, if not all of them.
Read more...Create a Button with Hover and Active States using CSS Sprites
July 21st, 2009 — 62 Comments
THIS TECHNIQUE IS NOW OUTDATED! It’s better to create buttons with CSS
Too many designers neglect the click state (active: property in CSS) in web design, either because they’re unaware of it, underestimate the importance of it or are plain lazy. It’s a simple effect that improves usability by giving the user some feedback as to what they’ve clicked on but can also add depth to a design.
First, a look at the working button.
Read more...Animate a Contact Us Slide-Out Area using jQuery
July 14th, 2009 — 49 Comments
Contact us pages are usually boring static pages with a form, not very exciting so what we’re going to do is place the contact us form at the top of the page and create a button that slides out and reveals the form when clicked. All with the help of our little friend, jQuery.
View the Demo Download Files (.zip)
Read more...