Users should be able to simply, quickly, and intuitively use any web app, like with any tool in life, be it a car, phone, or anything else. After all, a useful web app doesn’t do much good if it’s a pain in the butt to use – many users will eventually give up and go to an easier-to-use alternative. So how do you maximize usability in your web app? In this article we share 10 Web Application Usability Guidelines that [...]

This is the second part of our website speed series where we closely look at the techniques employed to make a website run as fast as possible while still maintaining it’s stunning look and feel.
Images can make or break a website, whether that be adding a humanist feel to a site, adding animation and mouse over effects or finalizing that amazing design that just can’t be achieved with CSS alone. Yet all these images could cost the biggest price of any website, loss of visiting traffic. If a website takes too long to load or is unusable due to all of the images then it’s game over as the user will quickly go back to Google and search again.

This is our weekly column were we share our favorites design related articles, resources and resources all from the previous week. If you would like to be kept up to date with loads of fresh design news and resources, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Stumbleupon or by subscribing to our RSS feed.

Freelancing is the kind of work pattern that gives you the flexibility and margin to do self-employed projects, and earn a good deal as well. However, no matter how much good freelancing reaps you, it is certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. Therefore, to launch a career in freelancing it is advisable to start it on a part-time basis. Freelancing has a number of benefits ranging from personal comfort to financial gain and individual recognition. Even so, I have seen [...]

When coding WordPress themes, especially if you do it regularly, its really useful to have a selection of code snippets in your toolbox to just ‘copy-n-paste’ as and when the functionality needs. Not just your most commonly used code, but also some snippets that can, when required, extend WP even further. A few months back we published the post 20 Plugin Replacing Tutorials, Tips, Snippets and Solutions for WordPress, which provided snippets of code for replacing some of the most [...]

For this weeks Competition Sunday from JustProto, an amazing and feature-rich web app for creating and managing prototypes, we have five year-long licenses for our first place winners. To enter this competition, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. Our winners will be chosen completely at random, and will be notified via email within a couple of days of the competition ending. This is JustProto speaking: “How can I help you?” Create image of your [...]

This is our weekly selection of our favorite web designs from the past week, thanks to everybody for their recommendations. Feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

WordPress keeps every single scrap of information that is fed into it in a MySQL database, whether that be posts, pages, comments, blogroll, the plugin settings… everything. Yes, the WordPress admin backend is fantastic and it does allow you to control and edit all aspects of this information with ease. Up to a certain point anyway. Say you have hundreds or even thousands of posts all within that database and you need to make site-wide changes. Going through each record, [...]

Walking the path of a web designer is one challenging road. There are many techniques to be studied and the vast wealth of knowledge available can just slightly ease the burden. The most popular study commodity were books, but with the Internet’s evolution it is now easier than ever to learn the principles of web design in just a few days. I’m hoping to outline a few useful sources for those interested in further expanding their knowledge in design. Ranging [...]

This is our weekly column were we share our favorites design related articles, resources and resources all from the previous week. If you would like to be kept up to date with loads of fresh design news and resources, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Stumbleupon or by subscribing to our RSS feed.

Photoshop is near-ubiquitous with graphics design. Even if you don’t consider yourself a graphic designer, having some Photoshop skills can really come in handy with your poster design/photo/text/etc. work. And tutorials take a lot out of the learning curve, since you can just follow the steps and get up to speed fairly quickly with a certain technique or style. This article shares with you the 30 New Photoshop Tutorials for Graphic Designers. Specifically, it covers photo manipulations, photo effects, painting, [...]

Typically, the timeless and always popular grunge design style is characterized by its aged and fading visual graphics, with either broken or misshapen design elements and is entirely inspired by industrial architecture, urban decay, or in its simplest form, graffiti. To effectively recreate the grunge style you could of course design all of the elements yourself, which would be time-consuming and certainly repetitive when you consider the high quality and volume of freely available grunge brush sets. So, if you [...]

Another Sunday and we have yet another fantastic competition for you: Pixmac.com, the microstock photo site service, has kindly given us three $199 subscriptions to giveaway to three lucky readers.. All you have to do for the chance of winning one of these $199 subscriptions is leave a comment below telling us a little about yourself (name, company, current project…). That is all you have to do. Winners will be chosen at random and will be notified via email within [...]