Freelancers: How to Deal With Insecurities

The taste of success in the life of freelancers is much sweeter, if they can overcome the barrage of insecurities scattered on their path to success. Take a peep into the life of a freelancer, and all may look hunky-dory: freelancers seem to work on less than what a full-time employee would, they seem to sleep a lot, and most importantly, they get work based on their own convenience. Those who are not freelancers are particularly impressed by the laidback style that defines the working life of freelancers, which may in turn spur them to decide going down the same path.

Full post: Freelancers: How to Deal With Insecurities

Quick WordPress Theme Switcher Plugin Tutorial

In this tutorial I am going to explain how you can dynamically switch WordPress themes based on various conditions allowing you to provide the best possible user experience. Before we dig into dynamic theme switching, let’s see how WordPress changes its menu in the admin dashboard.

Full post: Quick WordPress Theme Switcher Plugin Tutorial

Highly Configurable Zebra Datepicker jQuery Plugin

Zebra Datepicker is a small, compact and highly configurable datepicker jQuery plugin, meant to enrich forms by adding the datepicker functionality to them. This jQuery plugin will automatically add a calendar icon to the indicated input fields which, when clicked, will open the attached datepicker.

Full post: Highly Configurable Zebra Datepicker jQuery Plugin

23 Inspiring Logos

From simple and clever logos to those that use negative space, logos can be a great source of inspiration. Since logos need to be so precise in sending a message and representing a brand, it’s always nice to see how designers are approaching a design. Today we gathered 23 inspiring logos to show you. In this collection you’ll find a variety of styles, from minimal to bright and coloful.

Full post: 23 Inspiring Logos

45 Great Free Navigation Menu PSDs

Having a great and user friendly navigation menu is important for any website to give visitors a good experience and to help them navigate to the content they need. When designing a website it is useful to look for Navigation menu PSDs as a source of inspiration and to find usable design elements. This may speed up the design process and also help overcoming design of difficult elements by having a look at how others solved it. Besides doing the hard work yourself it is also an option to pick a ready to use CSS navigation menu plugin that should work on any type of website. WordPress user are typically spoiled as there are so many nice simple WordPress themes with great looking navigation and WordPress navigation plugins.

Full post: 45 Great Free Navigation Menu PSDs

30 Sets of Free Box Icon

Here are the 30 Sets of Free Box Icon which you can download in different sizes and file formats. Check out this list and find a box icon which you can apply in the design projects you are working on right now. Have fun browsing!

Full post: 30 Sets of Free Box Icon

A Fierce Collection of Shark Logo

By making use of the illustrations of untamed animals in your company logo, you possibly can come up with a logo symbol which appears to be frightening and threatening to the competing firms. This also enables you to communicate to everyone around you that you mean business and you are here to stay. Utilizing wild animals in your business trademark builds fear and calls for automatic respect as well which can be good for the hyped-up battle in the industry nowadays. In today’s post, we are going to showcase several great designs of shark logo. A shark portrays violence and temper which is ideal for anybody who is aiming to scare a rival sports team. It is also perfect for creating a logo symbol for a private investigation firm.

Full post: A Fierce Collection of Shark Logo

15 Free WordPress Business & Corporate Themes 2012 (Part 4)

We have posted quite a few free theme roundups lately as it seems more and more people are releasing them – looking great for the WordPress community. We last took a look at free business themes back in March of this year so I thought it was time to revisit. In this roundup we have 15 quality WordPress themes for your business – incorporating sliders ( a standard feature nowdays?), responsive design, custom homepages to display your products or services, custom widgets and more …

Full post: 15 Free WordPress Business & Corporate Themes 2012 (Part 4)

Social Networking Vs. Social Media – Understand The Difference

People feel a natural need to hook up and increase their relationships. There is an in-depth based need among human beings to share.

Just as the online world has changed, the scene of people to buy music, arrange holidays, and research at school projects, has also changed the way of how they interact and gather socially. With the use of public networking, individuals can exchange pictures and videos, share their thoughts at the weblogs, and participate in conversations organized by online boards. Social media and social networking allow companies, organizations, individuals, authorities, and the parliamentarians to reach thousands of individuals.

Full post: Social Networking Vs. Social Media – Understand The Difference

Give Your Customers Driving Directions With the Google Maps API

Instead of just showing your business location on a Google Map, why not offer your users the opportunity to get driving directions on the same page? No need for them to open up a new browser window and find it themselves, we can do better than that!

Full post: Give Your Customers Driving Directions With the Google Maps API

30 Architecture Business Cards

As an architect, clients are the lifeblood of your business. Your reputation and your business are largely based around your clients. Marketing yourself as an architect can be challenging though. You can try getting a domain related to your business, such as something like http://www.mortgages.co.uk/, or you can have a creative web design.

Full post: 30 Architecture Business Cards

Website Navigation Trends for Various Layouts

 There are always some key aspects in designing a website which you have to give full attention. Site navigation is one of these important features which is found in every single layout design. Nav links generally lead to the most important pages in your website and help visitors get around quicker. You’ll often find these above-the-fold where the page cuts off at the bottom of your web browser.

Full post: Website Navigation Trends for Various Layouts

18 Free New Icon Sets

Icons are most important in a website. Designers are always looking for appropriate icons for their website design. In this post, I’ve showcased some recently released free icon sets.

Full post: 18 Free New Icon Sets

Thursday Roundup # 9

WebMatrix is a brand new web development tool from Microsoft that includes everything you need for website development. Start from open source web applications, built-in web templates or just start writing code yourself. It’s all-inclusive, simple and best of all free. Developing websites has never been easier.

Full post: Thursday Roundup # 9

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial: Create a Printer Illustration

In the following Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a detailed printer illustration. We’ll start with two simple rectangles and some basic vector shape building techniques. Once we have our starting shapes we’ll continue with some Pathfinder options, a bunch of complex linear gradients and some simple effects. For the highlights we’ll use some simple blending techniques along with some new effects and pixel perfect vector shape building techniques.

Full post: Adobe Illustrator Tutorial: Create a Printer Illustration

Effective Uses Of Parallax Scrolling Effect In Web Design

You may have noticed that different elements of a website scroll along different site lines. This is called as parallax scrolling effects and this trend is gaining popularity day by day. Using such effects in website design allows the viewers to get an increased sense of depth in the design. This is the main reason why majority of the websites have now incorporated parallax scrolling elements in their designs not only to grab the visual interest of the users but also to fascinate as users scroll down.

Full post: Effective Uses Of Parallax Scrolling Effect In Web Design

Build Web Apps from Scratch with Laravel – The Eloquent ORM

In this Nettuts+ mini-series, we’ll build a web application from scratch, while diving into a great new PHP framework that’s rapidly picking up steam, called Laravel.

In this lesson, we’ll be working on an integral part of any web application: the Models. Along the way, we’ll learn about Laravel’s amazing ORM implementation: Eloquent.

Full post: Build Web Apps from Scratch with Laravel – The Eloquent ORM

Life Beyond WordPress: Showcase of Blogging CMSs

When it comes to content management systems and/or blogging platforms, we know that WordPress leads the race by a mile. Hardly any other CMS comes close to WordPress in terms of popularity and ease of usage. Yet, it is always useful to know your way around an extra platform or two. Therefore, in this article, we shall take a look at some of the ‘other’ blogging CMSs, apart from WP itself.

Full post: Life Beyond WordPress: Showcase of Blogging CMSs

Useful Tips To Get New Web Design Clients

Many freelancers begin their careers without a formal marketing plan for their web design business. The truth is that sales and marketing is a crucial part of all businesses, and that is why your clients hire you. Today’s business owners know a great website is an important part of their marketing toolkit, and since this is your career you should have an awesome website yourself. While a great site is critical for a web designer, don’t depend on it as your only marketing tool.

Full post: Useful Tips To Get New Web Design Clients

Responsive 3D Panel Layout

Today we want to share a creative grid layout with you. The layout will contain slides where each one consists of up to four panels. When navigating through them, we’ll animate some separation lines (the “grid”), adjusting the size of the next slide’s panels. The panels will appear with a 3D effect which we will define for each panel.

Full post: Responsive 3D Panel Layout

Quick Tip: Saving a Default Post Thumbnail

This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a Default Post Thumbnail from the core. Many tutorials demonstrate how to check if a thumbnail exists in a post and then render one if no thumbnail exists. This tutorial will show you how to avoid saving a post without a thumbnail, in the first place.

Full post: Quick Tip: Saving a Default Post Thumbnail

Do-It-Yourself Caching Methods With WordPress

There are different ways to make your website faster: specialized plugins to cache entire rendered HTML pages, plugins to cache all SQL queries and data objects, plugins to minimize JavaScript and CSS files and even some server-side solutions.

Full post: Do-It-Yourself Caching Methods With WordPress

Open Source Code Editor Built on Top of HTML, CSS & JS

Brackets is an open-source editor for web design and development built on top of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The project was created and is maintained by Adobe, and is released under an MIT License. What makes Brackets different from other web code editors?

Full post: Open Source Code Editor Built on Top of HTML, CSS & JS

85 High-Quality Fabric Textures for Designers

Designing entails usage of different tools and materials. Some of these tools and materials are used occasionally, while others are used more often than the rest. One of these frequently used items in a designer’s resource box is texture. It is used to add realism and depth on the design and make it more visually appealing as a whole. The range of applications of textures on the other hand is varied and they are found in graphic works such as website backgrounds, business card designs, in navigation menus, in photo manipulation and a lot more.

Full post: 85 High-Quality Fabric Textures for Designers

Interview with Michael Hutagalung, Founder of ColorLabs & Company

ColorLabs & Company are a commercial WordPress theme company, based in Indonesia, that put out some great looking themes in all sorts of flavours – responsive, e-commerce, business, magazine, classifieds, restaurant, real estate and so on. They are always running special deals so keep an eye on their site and twitter account where they hold a regular auction for their themes as well.

Full post: Interview with Michael Hutagalung, Founder of ColorLabs & Company

15 Free HTML5 Video And Audio Players

HTML5 audio has become the new standard way to show video and audio online. It supports browsers like Firefox, safari, google chrome. This post rounds up 15 of the best sites that offer HTML5 video playback, embedding and/or customizable HTML5 video players. Enjoy!

Full post: 15 Free HTML5 Video And Audio Players

12 Useful Code Editors for Windows

There are many code editors for windows out on the web today so it can take a while to find the right code editor that works best for you. Here's a collection of useful code editing software primarily for window users. This collection features both free & premium editors.

Full post: 12 Useful Code Editors for Windows

Smarten Up a Slick Login Form With CSS3

Let’s create a minimal and slick login form using basic HTML5 then enhancing it with some CSS3 techniques. Time to transform some simple elements into something beautiful..

Full post: Smarten Up a Slick Login Form With CSS3

20 Beautiful jQuery Image Sliders

jQuery image slider plugins are very popular these days and found on many websites. I especially designed this collection for those people or developers who are in search of some innovative and fresh jQuery slider plugins. Here is the showcase of some of the best and the latest jQuery slider plugins that you will find very useful.

Full post: 20 Beautiful jQuery Image Sliders

Custom Functionality Plugin for WordPress – Pros and Cons

The evolution of WordPress creates a lot of opportunities for developers to make really unique sites and apps. But with uniqueness a problem arises - you have to organise your code wisely and in a future-proof fashion.

Full post: Custom Functionality Plugin for WordPress – Pros and Cons

20 Useful And Free Hi-Res Cardboard Textures

Choosing the right type of texture can make a huge difference in your design. This time we are presenting some high quality and free to download cardboard textures that can be employed in several ways and give you design a more realistic and raw feel. Cardboard textures are ideal to be used for the backgrounds, overlays and you can also add them to your Photoshop brushes and start creating appealing designs.

Full post: 20 Useful And Free Hi-Res Cardboard Textures

Use Blog Comments to Increase Return Visitors and Build Relationships

Blogging is an amazing way to help increase traffic to your website. I remember writing about Blogging for Business in my Honors Program Final Project about 7 years ago now. Since then many website owners have realized the power of blogging for growing website traffic, and thus, their business. By using tools like Google Analytics website owners can track how many visitors to their site are returning visitors and how many are new visitors.

Full post: Use Blog Comments to Increase Return Visitors and Build Relationships

Capabilities and Nonces

In this previous article I looked at helping keep your theme or plug-in secure through appropriate data sanitization and validation. In this article, we’ll be looking at another important aspect of WordPress security: capabilities and nonces.

Full post: Capabilities and Nonces

Architectural Artistry: Showcase of Architectural Photography

With so many architectural marvels all around us, photographers often turn their lenses towards these structural models, and the results are often as wondrous as the architectural artistry they are capturing. So much tone and mood can be given to these lifeless constructs through the photographers’ skillful compositions or knowledgeable enhancements. Which is what we are showcasing today.

Full post: Architectural Artistry: Showcase of Architectural Photography

Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.138)

This is our weekly column were we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool tidbits from the past week. Enjoy :)

Full post: Weekly Design News – Resources, Tutorials and Freebies (N.138)

5 WordPress Comments Section Hacks

One thing that makes WordPress so dynamic is the ability for readers to easily post comments. This interaction between you and the readers is therefore an important element in your website and should be given the same attention as other sections of your website. So what can you do to improve the comments section on your WordPress website?

Full post: 5 WordPress Comments Section Hacks

WordPress Gamification: Techniques, Examples and Free Plugins

You may or may not have heard the term “Gamification” being used lately, but what exactly does it mean ? From Wikipedia :

Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used.

Full post: WordPress Gamification: Techniques, Examples and Free Plugins

12 Free New Stylish Fonts to Download

Typeface is very vital part of any design. With the right type you can improve the visual aesthetic of your design. Choosing the right font is another step towards perfecting your artwork. In this post we take a look some recently released fonts that you will enjoy. You must create a free account on Font Squirrel to download their fonts.

Full post: 12 Free New Stylish Fonts to Download

Interface Trends for Designing a Social Network

Since the initial launch of Friendster in 2002 we have seen dozens of new social networks cropping up everywhere. There are the obvious popular choices such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But we don’t often consider some of the newer social networking websites which have launched over the past couple years.

Full post: Interface Trends for Designing a Social Network

30 Minute Redesign #95: Simple Indian Mom

Today I’m going to be redesigning Simple Indian Mom, a personal blog aimed at teaching all elements of being a mother, from health, to home finances, parenting and more!

Full post: 30 Minute Redesign #95: Simple Indian Mom

10 Ways to Keep Your WordPress Site Updated and Fresh

The best way to keep people coming back to your site is by providing them with fresh new content on a regular basis. There are a number of ways to do this, such as blogging, posting tweets, and building a forums section that will have people contributing content for you. In this list, we’ll look at some of the most popular and effective ways to get unique content that have been specially designed for WordPress, and of course we’ll take a closer look at the pros and cons for each. I may cover a few things that you think are common sense to use and implement, but trust me there are still a lot of people out there who haven’t taken advantage of them yet, and you still might get a great idea for something new.

Full post: 10 Ways to Keep Your WordPress Site Updated and Fresh

Animating Colored Ajax Comments with jQuery

There are plenty of social networking websites today where you can find dynamic Ajax-based comments. This system is more usable because you don’t need to refresh the page every time you post something new. However setting up a whole database for user comments from scratch can be difficult.

Full post: Animating Colored Ajax Comments with jQuery

40+ Fresh & Free High Quality PSD Files For Download

PSDs are like a great treasure for the designers because high quality PSD files not only assist in the designing process but will also save plenty of time. Since Adobe Photoshop is an ultimate designing tool without which most of the designing work cannot be completed, many designers prefer to keep a good collection of high quality PSD files that they can easily integrate with their Adobe Photoshop.

Full post: 40+ Fresh & Free High Quality PSD Files For Download

Timed Notifications with CSS Animations

A quick tip on how to create some simple timed notifications with CSS animations. The idea is to show a notification with a progress bar for a specific duration and then make it disappear.

Full post: Timed Notifications with CSS Animations

How to Add an Awesome Parallax Banner for Your WordPress Site

The parallax effect has been used in the movie industry for a long, long time. Also, cartoons make great use of this simple technique. The general idea is to have 2 overlapped items moving in different speed ratios, to create an illusion of depth.

Parallax effects can work great even for websites. We can see many uses out there, and today we’ll take it a little deeper and create a banner making use of this technique.

Full post: How to Add an Awesome Parallax Banner for Your WordPress Site

WordPress dashboard hacks for developers and freelancers

The dashboard is an essential part of WordPress, as it is the place where you write posts and install plugins. But as a developer and/or freelancer, you have to be careful about what your clients are doing on the dashboard of their WordPress powered websites. Today, I have compiled 10 super useful hacks to customize, modify or enhance WordPress dashboard.

Full post: WordPress dashboard hacks for developers and freelancers

Create a 1990′s Era Mobile Phone Icon in Photoshop

In this tutorial we will explain how to create a 1990′s era mobile phone icon in Photoshop using a photo as a reference. Let’s get started!

Full post: Create a 1990′s Era Mobile Phone Icon in Photoshop

Marquee in CSS – Beginner’s Guide

Marquee was first introduced in Internet Explorer and was very popular in the ’90s before W3C ultimately decided to exclude it from the HTML standard element due to usability issues. Web designers were encouraged to not use the tag.

Full post: Marquee in CSS – Beginner’s Guide

Building a Responsive Layout With Skeleton: Widescreen

It’s time to pick up our Skeleton layout once more, this time to approach layouts larger than the standard 960px width. Skeleton throws a few curve balls our way when it comes to extending the framework – let’s take a look at those difficulties and see what we can do to get around them.

Full post: Building a Responsive Layout With Skeleton: Widescreen

Create QR Codes Online (Generators, JavaScript Plugins & Code Libraries)

QR Codes, a tracking code technology which was created in 1994 by Denso<Toyota to keep track of vehicles, is now a standard being used everywhere from websites to magazines, apps or stores.

Full post: Create QR Codes Online (Generators, JavaScript Plugins & Code Libraries)