30 Must See Web Generator for Lazy Webmasters Smart webmasters do not work everything out from scratch; instead, we make good use of the free tools available online. There are tons of brilliant web tools available online – it’s a waste not to leverage these tools and save some working time (or, to have more time for beer). In this article, I’m going to share my must-have list of 30 web design tools, I hope you’ll find them useful. On the other hand, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the developers who had done some much and made our world better. 1. QuickRibbon helps generate custom site ribbon. Make some ribbon today at www.QuickRibbon.com 2. Need some cool tabs in seconds? Generate some cool tabs now! 3. Okay, I admit Bullshit Generator is not that useful; but, I am sure we have time for some web 2.0 humor. Start bullshiting. Gender, face features, wearings, skin colors… UNIQUE is a free web tool that allows users to create highly-customizable, human-like, avatars. Create your unique avatar at Unique.RasterBoy.com.
WordPress Theme Frameworks & Blank WordPress Themes When building WordPress themes there is a lot of repetitive code that needs to be added to every project before you can get on with the task of creating the unique theme. It helps to have a set of files and css styles to use as a base, you can either create this yourself or you can use one of the many theme frameworks that other people have kindly created. These can range from the powerfull, feature-laden frameworks like Carrington or Thematic down to simple blank themes that you can customize to your liking. In this post I will be examining what options are open to modern WordPress theme creators. Theme Frameworks Thematic WordPress Framework Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. Carrington Theme CMS Platform The Buffet Framework Hybrid Theme Framework Whiteboard Free Theme Framework Ashford CMS Theme Framework
10 Must Have Online Tools for Web Development There was a time when web development was an extremely tough and time consuming task – a developer had to spend days and nights to create a simple element as they had to create them from scratch all by themselves. Now times and techniques both have changed, new languages and tools have made web development quite easy and quick. These tools help a developer create really awesome stuff just in a few clicks and very quickly. Web development tools are nothing less than blessing for the developers as they make web development easy, fun and quick. Online tools especially come in handy as you don’t have to download and install anything on your PC, but you can easily take advantage of them. So if you are a web developer looking for some really cool and glitch-free tools that will prove to be useful in your work then you are at the right place as today we are going to share a list of 10 Must Have Online Tools for Web Development. Here goes the list… Google Hosted Libraries Tableizer CSS Typeset
Design a graffiti-style screenprint artwork - Classic Photoshop & Illustrator Tutorial Screen-printing gives your designs fantastically rich colour and a quality of image that just isn’t possible with most other techniques – which partly explains why it’s become so hugely popular for designer prints in the past few years. However, creating a screen-printed design isn’t as simple as drawing something and then hitting Print. With screen-printing, your colour palette is limited by the number of inks you can use, which means you need a few tricks up your sleeve if you’re going to create the best images possible. Design studio Waste started making screen-prints with a home-made set-up in their garage, where they produced simple one-colour posters. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to colour up a four-colour design for screen-printing using Photoshop and Illustrator. Even if you’re not going to screen-print your designs, this shows you how to convincingly fake the look. Step 1 Open the file zombie.psd on your cover disc (or from the Zip file opposite) in Photoshop.
17 Excellent Feedback Tools For Web Designers Most of the developers avoid getting third-party feedback on their work, as they think it is frustrating and time consuming. However in actuality, feed-back is one of the most important part of a project and is the first step in improving your overall service and knowledge. This article includes some great feedback tools for web designers. When you organize and gather feedback from users and experienced web designers around the web, it helps you develop new ideas, validate design selections and remove issues. There are different ways of getting feedback, from emailing back and forth to crowdsourcing, but they are very time consuming. Please Critique Me / pleasecritiqueme.com Please Critique Me, a web resource provided by web development firm OnWired, works for both web design projects and print design projects. This website offers a form, which allows you to submit your project URL along with comments you want to share. Five Second Test / fivesecondtest.com UserTesting / usertesting.com
How to Build a Site With Keyboard Navigation: PSD to HTML Today we’ll be looking at how to add keyboard navigation to a website using a few simple lines of JavaScript. First we’ll create a simple site theme in Photoshop and then transform it into a working website that uses keyboard functions to switch pages. Here’s a screenshot of what we’ll be building. Click on the picture to see the live example: Photoshop Work To start things off, open Photoshop and create a new 800px by 600px document at 72dpi. Radial Gradient Next grab the gradient tool and stretch a radial gradient over the background. Type Now grab the type tool and choose a font. Inner Shadow Now place an inner shadow on all the text layers you just created using the settings above. Navigation Key Now create a key to instruct users how to use the keyboard navigation feature. Arrows Grab the custom shape tool (found under the rectangle tool fly out menu) and select an arrow as your shape. Save the Four Versions Now go to “Save for Web & Devices” under the file menu. The HTML Adding the CSS Fin!
New Online Tools Useful For Designers, Developers And Web Entrepreneurs Competing in an online niche is not an easy task and web entrepreneurs are always looking for tools that could get them an advantage that the competition doesn’t have. If you are a web entrepreneur or your client is one, you need to have the newest and best tools that you can find to increase your chances, or your client’s, of getting results. I know it takes a lot of time to build your website, develop your products and also do the marketing for your company because I’m faced with these problems too, and I know that the only solution to have success is to get the right tools that will free up time and let you focus on other parts of the business. In this article you will see tools and apps that will do exactly that and I hope they are what you’ve been looking for. GistBox: personal code library maildropr Clever Elements Oocharts Flow SocialBro Feedback Mailerloop Swiftly Layer Stripe A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enable businesses to accept and manage online payments. Instapaper
Create a Wooden Grunge Portfolio Web Layout in Photoshop In this beginner-level web design tutorial, I’ll show you how to construct a portfolio web layout that has a fixed wooden background with Photoshop. We’ll also use some brushes to accent the design. Preview You can see the final result below. Resources Set Up the Photoshop Canvas 1 The first thing we want to do is create a new document with the dimensions of 1024px x 912px. Add the Background 2 For our background, we want to add a wooden texture. Create the Header 3 Starting with our header on a new layer, we want to use our Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) to make a rectangle selection, filling it with black (#000000). 4 Using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L), make a jagged and organic selection at the bottom of the header background to create a ridged edge. 5 Go ahead and lower the Opacity of that layer to 85% to let the wooden background show through a bit. Create the Site Name/Logo 6 For our site name/logo, we can just go with a simple text logo. Add Links to the Header Make the Intro Box Section