9 Useful Cloud Apps for Web Designers & Developers | OD Nowadays, web designers are no longer reliant on dedicated development suites on the desktop to create amazing websites. Whereas the past decade was more or less dominated by expensive, proprietary web design and development tools, modern designers are increasingly turning to free and open source solutions that live in the cloud. On-demand applications that are available to anybody with a PC and a web connection make mobile web design and collaboration a reality for professionals on the go. The following cloud applications are a must for any web designer, and they all offer free accounts to boot. Forrst Few if any designers work in a vacuum, and it’s often constructive to reach out to industry peers to draw inspiration from the creativity of others. Jumpchart Storyboarding your website before you get started is the best way to build your layout on a solid foundation. Codeanywhere Adobe Kuler Snipplr MockFlow GridFox CSS Desk Dropbox
Search engine optimization As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic. The plural of the abbreviation SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", those who provide SEO services. History Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. Relationship with search engines
15 sites web developers and designers should know Creating a good website isn't an easy task, but there's a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked. ColorCombos When designing a website, one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme. Color Combos allow you to browse thousand of different colors combinations for getting inspired for your upcomming design. Color schemes can be browsed by colors.Visit colorcombos.com LIpsum Who doesn’t know the extremely popular Lorem Ipsum text? What the font? You just saw a logo or website using a particular font and you enjoyed it. ConvertIcon Favicons are a must have for any website, mostly because on modern browsers as such as Firefox, it is displayed along with the site name in tabs. BgPatterns background Patterns is definitely one of the current webdesign trends. HTML Encoder Test Everything Sprite Generator
Cascading Style Sheets CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.[1] This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. It can also be used to allow the web page to display differently depending on the screen size or device on which it is being viewed. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. Syntax[edit] Selector[edit] Use[edit]
The Ultimate Collection of CSS3 Tutorials for Developers CSS and CSS3 are dynamic to web designing and development. There was a time when developers used complex CSS codes to create a simple design element. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet format, endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that works with HTML documents using simple syntax and various style properties denoted by English language keywords. Most web browsers support CSS3 as it becomes more popular and more web designers implement the use of CSS3 in their layout design. 1. Dark Menu: Pure CSS3 Two Level Menu 2. CSS3 Minimalistic Navigation Menu 3. CSS3 Dropdown Menu 4. Create a Swish CSS3 Folded Ribbon in Five Minutes 5. Create a Unique Contact form with CSS3 Transitions 6. Practical CSS3 Tables with Rounded Corners 7. Easily Turn Your Images Into Polaroids with CSS3 8. Effect Lightbox en CSS3 Grace a Transition 9. CSS Drop Shadows Without Images 10. Creative CSS3 Animation Menus 11. Having Fun With CSS3: Spinning Newspapers 12. Sexy CSS3 Menu 13. 14. 15.
Style sheet (web development) The philosophy underlying this methodology is a specific case of separation of concerns. Separation of style and content has many benefits,[1][2] but has only become practical in recent years due to improvements in popular web browsers' CSS implementations. Overall, users experience of a site utilising style sheets will generally be quicker than sites that don’t use the technology. ‘Overall’ as the first page will probably load more slowly – because the style sheet AND the content will need to be transferred. Holding all the presentation styles in one file significantly reduces maintenance time and reduces the chance of human errors, thereby improving presentation consistency. If a page's layout information is all stored externally, a user can decide to disable the layout information entirely, leaving the site's bare content still in a readable form. While the style specifications are quite mature and still maturing, the software tools have been slow to adapt. Separation of concerns
Progress Bars Design Inspiration - 46 Lovely Examples Progress bars have once been very popular on the internet and you used to see them on a lot of sites at that moment exclusively for loading a site. Since then, designers avoided them a lot, until, once again they became popular. Nowadays, they are not used only for loading a site, but rather an inner page, a video, a song or various other purposes. The new rise in popularity is also caused by the use of jQuery and CSS3 which are making these really cool design elements easy to code and implement within a site without using Flash and causing the site or page to load incredibly slow. Enjoy these 46 lovely progress bars and subscribe to the site via the social media accounts if you want to see more design inspiration like the article presented here.
WYSIWYG WYSIWYG (/ˈwɪziwɪɡ/ WIZ-ee-wig)[1] is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". In computing, a WYSIWYG editor is a system in which content (text and graphics) onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product,[2] which might be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. Meaning[edit] The program on the left uses a WYSIWYG editor to produce a Lorem Ipsum document. WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created. Modern software does a good job of optimizing the screen display for a particular type of output. In many situations, the subtle differences between what the user sees and what the user gets are unimportant. History[edit] These applications typically used an arbitrary markup language to define the codes/tags. Etymology[edit] Problems of implementation[edit] Solutions to this include the following:
7 Websites to Easily Design Your Logos Online A good logo can instantly add value to your brand. But creating a good logo through desktop apps such as Photoshop can be a difficult and time consuming process. Moreover you need to familiarize yourself with the desktop app before you can exploit its best features. Thankfully the case is quite different with web apps because they are easy to use and offer a greater degree of user-friendliness. For readers looking to create a logo using a web app, I have collected 7 of the best web apps for the job. Check them all out below and see which ones suit your needs best. LogoEase is a free to use website that lets you create logos with ease. LogoEase Just like LogoEase, LogoMaker is another web service that lets you create and download logos. LogoMaker CoolText is a highly useful log creator that is extremely simple to use. CoolText FlamingText is a wonderful logo creation website with which you can start by using the existing template. FlamingText LogoYes Logo Creator LogoSnap Online Logo Maker
Web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; interface design; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all.[1] The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines. History Web design books in a store The start of the web and web design Evolution of web design End of the first browser wars
60 High Quality Free Web Templates and Layouts When it comes to building your website with the most perfect design and usability, web templates always come in handy. These ready-made web themes take the pain out of creating a website from scratch and come with all sorts of useful and advanced features. To help you make the best choice among a gamut of different web templates, here are 50 of the best, free and high quality website templates that you can download and customize for your own use. 60 Free Beautiful PSD Website Templates to Download 60 Free Beautiful PSD Website Templates to Download Are you looking for some stunning PSD website templates to give your website a fresh look? App Starter App Starter is a multi-colored, single-page web theme, which works well to publicise your web or mobile applications. Appy Appy, a single-page template that comes with a modern web design. Asymmetry Asymmetry is a web template for creating business and portfolio websites. Avana Bow Boxus Boxus is a colorful template for agencies of all types. Datarc
40 Online Generators for Web Designers Should Bookmark Online Generators for Web Designers can be a great way to save time in your web design projects. High-quality generators can create graphics or code or even layouts in a matter of seconds or minutes, things that might take an hour or more if done by hand. Online generator are those tools that help us to create those popular “XHTML valid” CSS banners, micro buttons or css website templates in seconds. In such cases online generators can be of great help which do the necessary job and some tools don’t have to be downloaded also. We all know that backgrounds play a crucial role in a design. Web Designers sometimes spend a lot of time in making pattern or stripe backgrounds and there are also tool to help you out here. Advertisement 1. XML /SWF charts are used to create attractive graphs and charts from XML data, Create a source either manually or generate dynamically then pass it to the XML chart’s flash file. 2. 3. 4. 256 Pixels 5. 80 x 15 brilliant Button Maker 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 14.
Web Designer Notebook & 90 Beautiful, Useful and Free Icon Sets Resources | July 7th, 2009 Following the previous 20 Gorgeous Icon Sets That You Have To Pay For, here is a massive list of my favourite icon sets that are available for free download. One can never have enough free icons Paid premium icons are usually gorgeous, but we can never say enough to a free and beautiful icon set, can we? There is a possibility that I spend too much time searching for the perfect icon, so I gathered all my links and made this list of my favourite icon sets to share with you. Beware that when using some of these icons you have to credit the designer somehow. General icons These icons sets have the usual suspects that we generally use for everyday projects: warning icons, delete icons, save icons, etc. 1. 2. 512 Pixel LED Icon Set 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Desktop and Apps These icons were made to replace desktop application icons or to use on your desktop. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. uTorrent 21. 22. 23. 24. iConPack – Firefox, Adobe Suite 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.