July 30, 2009 — Creating personal portfolio website is probably the most challenging task for designers as it should reveal the talent and some special unique style of its author. Beautiful portfolio is like a good setting – it makes design works sparkle and grabs visitors’ attention immediately. Read more…

July 29, 2009 — Since the official announcement of W3C to stop working on the development of XHTML 2 in the end of 2009 and increase resources on HTML 5 instead, there has been a lot of confusion and various debates about the “proper” markup language for modern and future web-development. Read more…

July 29, 2009 — Most bloggers and website designers understand how difficult it can be to attract visitors to a website. In fact, most websites have just moments to attract potential readers. Several factors contribute to how well a website attracts its readers. These factors include well-written headlines, interesting content and design quality. While all of these aspects are important, today we will focus on a very specific and sometimes overlooked element in a website’s design: the “Read more” or “Continue reading” link that follows a headline or summary of an article. [Links checked February/11/2017] Read more…

July 28, 2009 — MooTools is a JavaScript framework that focus on being flexible, modular and compact. While still not on par in number of resources with other JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, the MooTools community has generated a large number of articles, tutorials and third party plugins that can be considered and mature and sophisticated enough for most needs. Read more…

July 27, 2009 — Since the recommendation of CSS2 back in 1998, the use of tables has slowly faded into the background and into the history books. Because of this, CSS layouts have since then been synonymous with coding elegance. Read more…

July 27, 2009 — Fireworks was originally created as an image editing and web design application by Macromedia, for quick web mock-ups, and optimizing images for the Web. It has since been transformed into a powerful environment for designing and prototyping applications that integrates easily with Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop &ndash making it, perhaps, the most powerful (that’s controversial) and versatile graphic editor. Read more…

July 26, 2009 — Choosing a domain name for a new client is a difficult task. Domain names are the crux of a website’s existence. A bad name can create a negative impact on branding and the ability to strengthen the domain value. A good domain name is essentially priceless (tacky but true) in name, branding, ease of understanding, and catchiness. Read more…

July 25, 2009 — This post is a second part of the article Clever PNG Optimization Techniques that we posted last week. As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format. As a Photoshop (or any other image editor) user you might think that there is not that many options for PNG optimization, especially for truecolor PNG’s (PNG-24 in Photoshop), which doesn’t have any. Some of you may even think that this format is “unoptimizable”. Well, in this post we’ll try to debunk this myth. This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll talk about grayscale, how to use fewer colors for optimization and also about reducing detail to minmize the file size. You may want to take a look at the following related articles: * Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques * Clever PNG Optimization Techniques Read more…

July 24, 2009 — Space has many beautiful mysteries hidden inside. Many people have tried and are still trying to uncover those mysteries. In this inspirational post, we present beautiful photographs from space explorations: nebulas, comets, stars, planets, etc. Hopefully, these beauties will inspire you to create beautiful artwork, Web designs, graphics, wallpaper, illustrations, etc. All of the images are linked to their sources. Click on them to get the high-resolution versions. Read more…

July 23, 2009 — Comments sections are neglected on many blogs. That is definitely a bad thing, because comments represent interaction between you and your readers. In this article, we’ll have a look at 10 great tips and hacks to enhance your blog’s comments section and give it the quality it deserves. Read more…