Web Design Blog
Thoughts and commentary about web design plus links to helpful resources including fonts, plugins, templates, stock photos, software, scripts, tutorials, and other useful tools for webmasters!
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Breath New Life Into Your Web Page with Facelift
Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) to <span> elements and everything in between!
More About FLIR
Tired of Arial and Times New Roman? I know I am. Up until now you had a choice of using sIFR, or painstakingly designing image headers and adding them to your web page manually. Of course, this gets a little old, especially after deciding to change color schemes two or three times.
Enter facelift. It is the best of both worlds! Create your website as you would normally, and then install the two lines of code that facelift requires. The elements that you want to style will be replaced with an image representation of that text styled with your custom font. And since the text is retrieved directly from the page, you don’t have to worry about updating any images when text changes — it is all done automatically!
Visit facelift.mawhorter.net for details.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Make Your Own Handwriting Fonts For Free
YourFonts.com is a FREE online font generator that allows you to create your own OpenType fonts within a couple of minutes. YourFonts allows you to upload large templates (up to 4000 x 5000 pixels) and it has the most advanced raster to vector conversion algorithm. Together this results in unbeatable high quality personal fonts.
- Your own handwriting turned into your very own font for free
- Optionally include your signature
- You’ll have your very own font within 15 minutes
- Make as many fonts as you like
- Use your fonts on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
- Personalize your digital scrapbook pages
- Make your own “family handwriting history”
- Use your fonts in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and every program that you own
Visit YourFonts.com to learn more.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Streamline Your Web Development Workflow with the 960 Grid System
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. The 12 column grid is divided into portions that are 60 pixels wide. The 16 column grid consists of 40 pixel increments. Each column has 10 pixels of margin on the left and right, which create 20 pixel wide gutters between columns.
Purpose
The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements.
Nine-Sixty
All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.
Learn more at http://960.gs/
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
NicEdit: Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor
NicEdit is a WYSIWYG editor for websites. Its goal is to be as simple and fast as possible for users of your application. NicEdit is extremely lightweight and can be easily integrated in any site with minimal impact while providing visitors an effective means to express themselves in rich text.
Don’t overwhelm your users with “everything and the kitchen sink” editors that confuse and frustrate your visitors and take forever to load. Good things really can be free. Customize your copy of NicEdit and get started editing anywhere today!
Visit NicEdit.com for more information.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Free Wordpress Theme - Magaling
Magaling is a premium quality Wordpress theme with Twitter status integration. Additional features include Featured Post Gallery, Feedburner Email Subscription, Popular Posts, Ajax Tabbed Sidebar, Automatic Thumbnail Resizer, Adsense ready with advertising blocks easily customizable via an Option Page.
Theme details:
- Tested on Wordpress version 2.6.5
- Twitter Account/Status Integration
- Option Page for Easy Customization
- Featured Post Gallery
- Feedburner Email Subscriber
- Popular Posts
- Tabbed Sidebar
- Automatic Thumbnail Resizer
- Adsense Ready
- Advertisement Blocks Ready
- Gravatar Enabled
Download this theme at freewordpresstheme.info
Friday, February 06, 2009
ZinePress: A Wordpress Magazine Theme
WellMedicated.com - “ZinePress isn’t really an overcomplicated magazine theme, but she’s not exactly a run-of-the-mill blog design either. My goal with this design was to create a theme that could present oodles of information to the visitor in a straight forward and non-threatening way. It’s some of my proudest work and I hope you like it.”
Cross Browser Compatible
I’ve tried my darndest to make ZinePress play nice with all the major players. The following browsers have been personally verified by yours truly: Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+ and Chrome 0.2+!
Wordpress Compatibility
I’ve only tested this theme on Wordpress Version 2.6 & 2.7. I’m willing to bet it is compatible with older versions, but to be safe use at least Wordpress Version 2.7.
View a live demo and download this free theme at WellMedicated.com
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
CurdBee: Safe and Secure Web-Based Billing Application
CurdBee is a safe and secure web-based billing application from Vesess. Use it to send clients invoices and then collect payments via PayPal or Google Checkout, billing them easily in the currency you choose. It’s so simple, you won’t believe it till you see it.
How much does it cost?
CurdBee is a free service, and its core features will always be available to everyone, at no charge.
How safe is my information?
Your privacy is of utmost importance to us. We will never share any of the information you give us, or use it otherwise, without your explicit permission. No, really, we promise. Read our Privacy Policy for more details.
Do I have to bill in US Dollars?
Not if you don’t want to! Thanks to CurdBee’s latest update, you can now use ten international currencies. Apart from setting a default currency, you can also specify each client’s preferred currency individually, making it easier to bill around the globe.
Get more details at CurdBee.com
Thursday, January 29, 2009
FREEmium wordpress theme
There are hundreds of premium wordpress themes on the web waiting to be paid for. Some of them are worth it, some are not. FREEmium wordpress theme is definitely worth paying for. But guess what! We’re giving it away for free. How sweet is that? FREEmium theme was designed by Paul Kadysz and developed by Dariusz Siedlecki. Both guys did excellent job. And thanks to freebiesdock.com you can download the theme for free!
FreebiesDock.com is simply a collection of completely free design resources. All the products you’ll see here were created exclusively for FreebiesDock and you won’t see them anywhere else. There are hundreds of “free downloads” websites, but most of them provide poor quality services. We want FreebiesDock.com to be different. We want it to be unique.
Download FREEmium theme
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Syndicate Your Content with RapidFeeds
RapidFeeds gives you the ability to create and publish your own RSS feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. Our members’ only area allows you to log in any time and create new feeds in a snap. Even better, RapidFeeds allows you to preview your feed in your browser before you actually publish it. You can also very easily edit any of your running feeds with a click of a button and make sure they remain updated regularly. It’s all done without you writing a line of code or dabble with any kind of scripts!
Add, Edit or Delete Items from your Feed in no time!
Items or posts can be easily called the soul of your feed, as they’re what make up most of your feed. With RapidFeeds manager adding or editing Items is even easier than creating your feed. Simply clicking on your feed’s title will display a complete list of the Items contained in it. Here you can update your Items from time to time and also delete the ones which you no longer require in your feed.
Update Without Upload - The rules have changed…
Typically when you update your RSS Feed on your web page manually, you have to upload it each and every time you do it. This not only costs you the bandwidth used but also is a big waste of time. Publishing your feeds using RapidFeeds manager ensures you don’t lose any of your precious time or bandwidth, as you can very easily update your feed just by re-filling out an easy form.
Feed Monitoring has a new name - Rapid Stats
Monitoring your feeds’ performance can prove really profitable for your business and drastically help you in improving your content. RapidFeeds helps you in learning more about your readers by tracking each one of your feeds and providing vital stats.
Forget the Bandwidth Costs
A large amount of bandwidth is lost if you happen to host your feeds on your own server. That’s because, as many times as your feed is requested for updates, you lose bandwidth even if it doesn’t change or gets updated. Your bandwidth keeps getting over-used and hence you end up paying much more than needed. However, if you choose RapidFeeds to host your feeds, you can get over this problem and save 100% of your bandwidth! No worries. No headaches.
Ping Your Way To Success With “Easy Pinging”
Pinging is a smart way of informing the Internet world that your feed has been updated and there is something new. When you ping your feed to various RSS feed aggregators and directories they come to know that your feed has been updated, without waiting for them to check for updates. It’s a time consuming process to ping each and every major directory and aggregator individually. But using RapidFeeds “Easy Pinging” you can ping as many as 9 aggregators and directories with one click! What’s more, we keep on adding more new places for you to ping on a regular basis, so that you can concentrate more on important things like developing and marketing your business.
RapidFeeds Browser-Compatible Feed - Add Some Style to Your Feed
Considering RSS is still new with most of the people online, novice users are bound to get confused when they click on your feed link and see nothing but the XML file of your feed. However, RapidFeeds browser-compatible feed solves this problem by displaying your feeds in a readable format, so that when a user clicks on your feed link in the browser, they see a well-formatted page showing the content of your feed, instead of the confusing XML code. Even better, your users are provided with different easy subscription options. RapidFeeds offers you 4 different feed styles to choose from for your browser-compatible feed. You can switch to any one of these styles by simply logging into your members area anytime.
Schedule your Feeds
Publishing a newsletter via RSS or delivering new articles to your subscribers, whatever it is, with our Feed Scheduler you can always pre-publish your content and reap the benefits of automation. By pre- publishing your content, you can concentrate on the other important aspects like marketing, developing and growing your business. With the RapidFeeds Feed Scheduler you can very easily schedule your feeds to be updated on any given date. And our Feed Scheduler will automatically update your feeds on the scheduled date. RapidFeeds makes it ultra simple for you to schedule your RSS feed for any future updates and rightly puts your RSS publishing on autopilot.
Visit RapidFeeds.com to learn more and sign-up for a free account.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Corel Releases Update to CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4
Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CREL; TSX: CRE) has released a new service pack for the award-winning CorelDRAW® Graphics Suite X4. Reflecting the top requests from the CorelDRAW user community, the service pack includes expanded RAW camera support capabilities (including support for Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 1000D/50D), improved Drop Shadows functionality, and enhanced visual feedback for specific suite functions.
“Our CorelDRAW user community is a highly valued source of ongoing feedback and inspiration and we are pleased to deliver an update that addresses their top requests,” said Gerard Metrailler, Senior Director of Product Management, Graphics for Corel. “Our community site, CorelDRAW.com, is a meeting place where CorelDRAW users from around the world can interact together, exchange ideas, and communicate directly with Corel’s development and product management teams, and continues to experience steady growth, month after month.”
Since its inception in June 2007, CorelDRAW.com has been a meeting place for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite users who are passionate about their work and are eager to interact with other users. The site has attracted more than 1.2 million unique visitors from over 220 countries and now has more than 20,000 registered members. In response to community feedback, the site recently added a new wiki engine, enhanced image galleries and forums, and new friends and conversations tools. To learn more about the CorelDRAW community, please visit http://www.coreldraw.com.
The new service pack for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 is available to current users in all languages through the auto-update mechanism in the welcome screen which shows up when users open any of the applications). The service pack can also be downloaded from http://www.corel.com/support. For more information about CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, visit http://www.corel.com/coreldraw.
About Corel
Corel is one of the world’s top software companies with more than 100 million active users in over 75 countries. We develop software that helps people express their ideas and share their stories in more exciting, creative and persuasive ways. Through the years we’ve built a reputation for delivering innovative, trusted products that are easy to learn and use, helping people achieve new levels of productivity. The industry has responded with hundreds of awards for software innovation, design and value.
Our award-winning product portfolio includes some of the world’s most widely recognized and popular software brands, including CorelDRAW® Graphics Suite, Corel® Painter(TM), Corel DESIGNER® Technical Suite, Corel® Paint Shop Pro® Photo, VideoStudio®, WinDVD®, Corel® WordPerfect® Office and WinZip®. Our global headquarters are in Ottawa, Canada, with major offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, Taiwan and Japan.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Move Beyond Traditional Bookmarking with Iterasi
Iterasi is a simple browser-based tool for saving any web page—dynamically generated or otherwise—with the click of a button. The dynamic content is saved immediately—frozen in that moment in time—in an accessible HTML format and stored to a secure personal account. With iterasi, any web page can be saved, searched and shared anytime, from anywhere, forever.
Iterasi defines “dynamic” as any web page that changes from its initial download—either from the server’s knowledge of the user or actions of the user on the site. Today, even the simplest web pages are built and customized on-the-fly using dynamic web technologies like CSS, AJAX and database-driven content. In the early web, pages only changed when the user clicked on a new link. Now, new technologies allow the browser to send messages to the server at any point in time, potentially modifying part or all of the page without requiring specific user interaction. Bookmarking and history only point to the initial state of the page and often not the view that the user wanted to save. Because of this, valuable personal information can be lost forever. When a user asks for the page to be saved by iterasi, the page is captured in its exact state, at that moment, including all personal information.
Bookmarking, Favorites and Browser History provide a way of managing the location of a page. The problem is that these pages can change and no longer represent what the user wanted to save. It is increasingly common for pages to change in meaningful ways based on a user’s interaction. Also, a page may completely disappear over time—a condition known as “linkrot.” iterasi addresses these problems by capturing the content of a page and saving it in its native form so you can search or share your pages at anytime, from anywhere, indefinitely.
Get all the details at iterasi.net
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Are My Sites Up?
Are My Sites Up is a very simple service to help you keep an eye on your sites and warn you if they go down. It is completely free. Sign up for an account, add your sites, and you are done. You can pop back to the site anytime to get a quick look at your sites. By default, you will be notified by email if any of your sites goes down. Optionally, you get an SMS text notification to your cell phone.
How does this work?
Our site tries to load your site. When that happens we get an HTTP Status Code back. If that number is anywhere in the 200’s or 300’s, your site is cool. Otherwise, there is some kind of error resulting in your site being down for visitors, and that triggers our system for handling down sites (you get the email, the light goes red, etc.)
What if THIS site goes down?
While obviously that isn’t ideal, it’s not as bad as you might think. The front-end and the back-end of the site are totally separate. If you aren’t able to load the site, don’t worry! Your sites are still being checked in the background and you will still be notified. Not once has the backend of our service gone down.
Stuff that isn’t going to work.
If your site is behind password protection to see the site at all, like HTAccess password protection, for example, we are going to get a 401 Status Code and your site will appear down. We also can’t monitor subdirectories of sites like http://example.com/sub/. We will tell you it’s up, but if it ever goes down, the site will actually send a redirect code which we interpret as Up.
How often does it check?
We will check your site at least 25 times per day, or a bit better than once per hour. You will get one notification email when a site goes down, and one when it comes back up. The same goes for SMS.
Does it register a pageview on my site?
Not really. If you use analytics software that uses JavaScript (Like Google Analytics, Mint or Woopra) or an image on your page to do its tracking, it probably won’t notice us at all. We are using a Ruby function that is similar to cURL to get our result. If you use server-side analytics software (that actually parses server logs), then you will see us hitting your site.
How many sites can I add?
We have a hard cap at 20 sites right now. Soon there will be an inexpensive premium plan which will allow more than this, along with many other useful features.
Who built this site?
Richard Felix Jr. (Twitter) is the lead developer. Chris Coyier (Twitter) designed it. The service itself is on Twitter as well.
Visit aremysitesup.com to learn more.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Edit Your Images Online with Pixlr
Pixlr is a online image editor, that means that you can upload your images and edit them in your browser. It is built in Flash and you need to have a Flash plug in to get it to work. Pixlr is built for non-professionals, the users that have basic editing needs. It’s not for large RAW images or for printing. It is merely a tool for editing web images to be posted on blogs, news-sites, social networks like Facebook, Bebo, image sites like Flickr, Photobucket etc.
Since it is Flash based the question about how it runs is up to what kind of computer you have. If it is lagging you can try to shut down other web pages that might be running flash ads or close other software on your computer that is taking a lot of CPU. We are constantly developing the application to be more than it is right now. We will release updates as soon as they are ready, so if it doesn’t has a feature right now it will probably be here soon.
Compare Pixlr to any other flash based image editor and you will notice that it starts up in less than 2 seconds. That is our priority! No waiting just a great tool.
For more information visit http://pixlr.com.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Now Anyone Can Create Beautiful Websites Online In Just Minutes
Roxer is an easy-to-use, free online tool that lets anyone create beautiful web pages without programming. Roxer takes a new approach to making web pages, based on the idea that you should never have to bother with code. With Roxer anyone can make visually stunning and fully functional web pages online using only a web browser. Editing is even easier. To rearrange your content, just click and drag items where you want them. To change your text, just click and type. To move content from one page to another, just copy and paste. Best of all, you will be doing these things to your web page from your web page. It’s that easy!
What are some of Roxer’s key features?
- Edit in place - To edit a web page you go directly to it in your web browser and make changes on the spot.
- Click & Drag - Everything on your web page can be dragged into place with your mouse.
- “WebClipboard” - Copy & Paste any content from one web page to another.
- Rich Text Editing - Adjust font face, style, color, size, and alignment.
- Layering - Stack content to get unique visual effects
- Live image resizing - Images can be shrunken or enlarged
- Browser-based - No special software, nothing to download. All works in your web browser.
- Free & Paid accounts - Our Power User upgrade provides professional features at a modest price
What makes Roxer different?
Roxer is different from other products in a few ways. First, we’ve taken a new web design approach which is visual and completely code free. Secondly we’ve packaged everything that people use to make web pages into little things called “Boxes” which are completely portable. This means that you can not only move them around on a web page, but also visually copy & paste them from one web page to another.
Why should I use Roxer?
Roxer brings the art of making Web pages to the people. From now on you and your friends don’t have to be programmers to make great looking websites or spend time copy and pasting snippets of code to do amazing things online. If you can dream it, you can build it.
Who is Roxer made for?
Our goal is to make Roxer the easiest available tool for anyone involved in web design. If you want to make a web page, you should try Roxer before any other web design method. Roxer is not for every type of website yet, but it is an excellent choice for simple website creation. We suggest creating a free account and trying it out for yourself. You’ll know pretty quickly whether Roxer is a fit for your needs.
Get all the details at Roxer.com
Friday, January 16, 2009
Generating Static Web Pages From Your Database Content
WebMerge works with any database or spreadsheet that exports in tab-delimited, Merge, or other tabular format, including FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Access, and AppleWorks. Using HTML template pages you can make with your favorite authoring tool, WebMerge makes a new HTML page from the data in each record of the exported file. WebMerge can also create index pages with links to each of the detail pages. Generated pages can be hosted on any Web server - even AOL - without the need for a specialized database hosting solution.
WebMerge provides support for multi-column index page layouts, a new WM-FieldInclude tag which lets you insert a text file or HTML file referenced by a path in your field data, enhanced support for JavaScript and CSS in navigation tags, and a few other minor enhancements. This version also provides enhanced documentation and examples, addresses all bugs reported to date, and is even faster in some operations than previous versions.
WebMerge requires no DLLs, extensions, CGIs, or other components. Everything you need to start generating pages is included in one easy-to-use application.
A wide variety of businesses, universities, and other organizations rely on WebMerge daily, ranging from Web designers to the US Library of Congress. Most of our customers tell us that WebMerge paid for itself with the first project they used it on.
Learn More about WebMerge.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Create Your Own Website For Free
At Webs, we help you build more than simple, static web pages. We are focused on providing everything you need to grow a dynamic site with an active community. Not only can you create a site, you can connect it to similar Webs sites via “Rings.” Plus, by allowing visitors to contribute to your content by posting their own photos, videos, comments and more, we help you attract, engage and retain an interactive audience.
Grow a Site. Grow a Community.
At Webs, we provide all the tools you need to create a professional-looking website in just minutes. Add a blog, forum, calendar, photo gallery, video gallery and much more. Want to turn your site into a social network? No problem! You also have the ability to add members and create personal profiles so you can turn your site into a community where friends, colleagues and family can connect and collaborate.
Create Your Own Personal Website.
Share your hobby with the world, your wedding plans with friends and family. Tell the tale of your latest trip via a travel blog. Create a family forum where relatives can post their stories, photos and videos. Raise funds for your favorite cause.
Create a Site for Your Club or Group.
Whether you are part of a volunteer fire department, organizing a running club, planning your high school reunion, seeking a spot to post news and events for your local swim team, or looking to connect with fellow Tay Zonday fans, it’s easy for you and your group to communicate online with Webs. Our completely customizable templates and tools help you build a site unique to the needs of you and your members.
Grow Your Business Online.
From Mom and Pop shops to established eBay stores, we help you take your business to the next level. By creating your own unique website, you solidify your business as legitimate and professional - a business consumers can trust. Our completely customizable templates and tools help you build an online business unique to the needs of you and your customers.
Learn more at Webs.com
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Sell and Deliver Downloadable Files with Cerizmo
Cerizmo is a system for selling and delivering downloadable files of all kinds. It is a hosted, on-demand service that provides everything you need to start selling - a customizable online store, a control panel to manage it, payment integration, and automatic delivery of downloads. There’s no software to install or configure - we manage everything on our servers.
And the best part - the money goes straight into your own merchant account instantly when you make a sale. We don’t hold funds in our system or delay them in any way.
Sell any kind of Download
Software, ebooks, digital photos and artwork, screencasts, music, manuals, documents, videos, schematics - if it’s a file, you can sell it with our system. You can even bundle multiple downloads on one item.
Automatic Download Delivery
A secure direct download link is automatically delivered to your customer after they order. The download links automatically expire, and the location of the files is protected from unauthorized access.
Your Own Customizable Store
Sell your digital goods through your store - complete with shopping cart, checkout, and payment integration. Quickly customize the look and feel with your own HTML layout and stylesheet files.
Merchant Control Panel
Setup and control everything from your own private Merchant Control Panel. Setup and customize your store, view your orders and sales statistics, and view information about your customers. It’s all there.
PayPal Integration
Integrates seamlessly with your own PayPal account. There’s no waiting to get paid - the money goes straight into your account when you make a sale.
Support for Seven Currencies
Sell in your local currency! Cerizmo supports seven major currencies: United States Dollar (USD), Great Britain Pound (GBP), Euro (EUR), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Australian Dollar (AUD), New Zealand Dollar (NZD), and Swiss Franc (CHF).
Managed Solution
No software to download or install. No servers to manage. We run it all for you.
Fully Secure
We take security very seriously. Your files and order information are stored on our locked down servers, with firewalls, intrusion detection, and hourly backups to protect your data.
100% Private Label
Use your own domain name (or a subdomain for free). We don’t put our “powered by” or copyright notices all over your store. It’s as private as running it on your own server (except you don’t have to hassle with that!)
Get all the details at Cerizmo.com
Sunday, January 11, 2009
100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates
Smashing Magazine - “If you haven’t taken a look at the XHTML/CSS templates that are available for free from a variety of sources, you may be surprised by the quality you can find. WordPress themes tend to get a lot of exposure and attention in the design community right now, but there is also a wide variety of high-quality XHTML/CSS templates that are free of charge.
In this post, we’ll showcase 100 free high-quality templates. Hopefully some of them will save you some time in your design and development. While they are generally free for personal or commercial use, always remember to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines…”
Visit Smashing Magazine to view the template collection.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Nice and Tidy Website Planning with Jumpchart
Use Jumpchart to quickly plan out the navigation of your site by adding pages, and sub-pages. If you change your mind, easily drag pages to new spots within the site hierarchy. You can use simple Textile formatting to add text, files, special formatting, and even forms to the pages of your wireframe. Wireframes are great, but Jumpcharts are better. A Jumpchart is shareable, exportable as clean CSS, and automatically generates its own sitemap.
Start Websites Right
If you build websites for a living, you know that content organization and approval can be an overwhelming process. We’ve all tried flowcharts, and wireframes, html mocks… even paper. All of these suffer from crucial flaws… They’re not interactive, and they carry no momentum into the build phase.
Show and Tell
Unlike paper mock-ups, and tree shaped diagrams, with a Jumpchart preview, -clients just get it. It’s not an abstract concept, it works just like the website will. Before you push your first pixel, they can click through and navigate the whole website.
Cut the Middle Man
How many emails come through your inbox, only to be forwarded to another party. Copywriters, photographers, programmers, designers, and clients. they all have an opinion on what should go where. Bring everyone together in single place by inviting them to a Jumpchart. Sit back and watch the site unfold before your eyes…
Just Say Yes
Clients change their minds. It’s a simple fact, and there is no denying it. Stop fighting the fact, and start embracing it. Jumpchart makes it easy to move entire sections of the website with a single click. Rename, reorder, and remove navigation buttons with a single click.
Learn more at Jumpchart.com
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
PrestaShop: Open-Source Shopping Cart Software
PrestaShop is professional e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download and use for free.
We grow as you grow
Shop owners appreciate PrestaShop’s easy-to-use Back Office tool for adding and fine-tuning their storefronts (Front Office). With new & sophisticated Back-Office functionality added regularly, shop owners don’t need to rely on others to make their Front Office look and act the way they want it to.
Developers appreciate the clean structure of PrestaShop code that they can easily adapt to their client’s needs for quick turn-around. Thanks to its use of CSS and transplantable module blocks, the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution can be customized for small or medium-sized businesses working within tight deadlines.
The need for speed
Despite its technical sophistication and advanced functionality, the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution is very light (around 2 MB not including translation files), so it’s easy to download, install, and update.PrestaShop is so lightweight and speedy, even customers with slow connection speeds will enjoy buying from you!
Look-and-feel is make-or-break
On the Web, appearances matter. In many cases, you really can judge a Website by its cover! The PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy. PrestaShop guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning intrigued visitors into paying customers.
Free & Open Source
The big advantage of open-source software: you’re never ‘locked’ to expensive commercial software. Our dedicated team and growing user community join forces to fix bugs and add new functionality at a rate proprietary software companies can rarely claim.
Join the Open Source revolution!
Learn more at PrestaShop.com
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Sitonomy Reveals The Anatomy Of Websites
Sitonomy is a free service that allows developers and designers to find out which technologies are used in a specific blog/site. Together with the provided statistic information of popular technologies, this service makes it easier to decide what technologies are suitable to your own site. The best way to use it is to create bookmarklet that allows you in one click to get information about blog you are currently browsing.
Sitonomy service is analyzing over 1000 most popular blogs. Then, collected information is used to make a comprehensive analysis of the specific site.
Visit Sitonomy to learn more.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
SnapPages Takes Online Website Creation To A Whole New Level
SnapPages provides a suite of tools that make creating your own website a breeze. Each of the tools have been developed from the ground up to be as simple and easy to use as possible.
Building and maintaining your own website has never been this easy and looked this good.
Creating a professional quality website used to require a lot of money and a lot of coding, but not anymore. The Website Manager makes it easy to create a great looking website. Simply drag and drop content on pages, or change the way your site looks with different professionaly designed themes.
Professionally designed themes that you can customize to fit your needs and personality.
There is no need to worry about getting a cookie cutter site with SnapPages. Every theme can be customized with different colors, styles and more. This helps to ensure that your website is as unique as you are.
The easiest way to organize and show off all your photos.
With the Photo Manager application, it’s easy to quickly upload photos and organize them into albums. Once your photos are online and organized you can share them with friends through your website or online gallery.
Keep track of all the events going on in your life.
The Calendar Manager application allows you to keep track of all of yours and your friends events in one place. Add events and organize them into color coded calendars to make it easy to see what’s going on.
Connect with all your family and friends in one place.
The Friend Manager is a great way to stay in contact with all your friends and family. You can have online conversations with them, and give them access to areas of your site that others can’t see.
We’re here to make your life online an easier one.
SnapPages was founded in 2007 with a very simple idea in mind: create really easy to use online applications. The online world can be a frustrating one for those who want to use the web for a lot of things but are scared away by how complicated it all seems. It’s our belief that most people don’t want to spend a lot of time or effort trying to figure out how to use an application just to perform what should be a simple task. A good application should handle all the things you don’t want to think about, so you only have to worry about the stuff you do care about.
That’s why we are going to great lengths to make each one of our applications as intuitive as possible for everyone. All the SnapPages applications are created with a user interface that makes all of the core functions easily visible and obvious to use.
Visit SnapPages.com for all the details.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Clicky Web Analytics
Clicky Web Analytics is simply the best way to monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site’s traffic in real time.
What is Clicky?
Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting. Since then, many additional features have been added to Clicky, such as the customizable dashboard full of Ajax love, and our amazing filtering interface that gives you actionable data on any subset of your visitors (see screenshots on the right hand side). These features, along with many others, make Clicky one of the best web analyzers on the planet.
How does it work?
Simply create an account and then add one or more web sites to that account. For each web site you register, you are given two lines of HTML code to place on your web site (this code is unique for each registered site). It’s this code that let’s us monitor all of your traffic and give you the juicy details you crave.
Is it free?
We have a free plan plus several premium plans, as shown below. You also have the ability to create your own custom Pro plan during the upgrade process, with support for up to 200 sites and 300,000 total daily page views.
When you first register, you get a 21 day free trial of the standard Professional service, so you have access to all of our features up front. After 21 days, you can sign up for one of our premium plans, or let your trial expire and automatically switch to our free plan. If you have any sites that get more than 1,000 daily page views on average, premium service is required to keep monitoring those sites after your trial has expired.
Visit GetClicky.com for more details
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Create an Awesome Looking “Coming Soon” Page with LaunchSplash
LaunchSplash aims to provide the tools you need to create an awesome looking Web 2.0 “Coming Soon” Landing Page for your domain quickly and easily.
Announcements
Let the world know what you’re working on. Post announcements to your visitors that are accessible via your Launch Page’s RSS Feed.
Email Signup Form
Visitors will want to know when they can use your product. Your Launch Page includes a signup form so you can let people know when you are ready.
Designs
We offer plenty of great looking “Web 2.0” Designs and color scheme options for each Launch Page. Currently we have over 25 different template options.
CSS Overrides
With a little bit of CSS hacking, your Launch Page is nearly infinitely customizable. Replace any logo, background image, and font on your page with your own.
Traffic Analysis
We’ll let you know how many people access your page each month. For more detailed stats, you can paste your Google Analytics code onto your Launch Page.
Launch Page Feed
Let your users keep up to date on announcements and site launch details via your Launch Page Feed. Integrates easily with FeedBurner.
Domain Mapping
If you have a domain, you can host your Launch Page directly from it via Domain Mapping. All you need is couple small changes at your Registrar, and it’ll be ready to go.
Fast and Friendly Support
We’re here for you if you need anything. We’re a small company and looking to do our best to make every user cheery.
Visit LaunchSplash.com
Sunday, August 31, 2008
CrowdSound - Listen to your Customers
Gather social feedback without sending your users away.
CrowdSound is a social feedback tool; your customers can make and vote on suggestions and you can respond back to them, starting a real dialogue. But with CrowdSound, the users never have to leave your site. Our customizable widget embeds directly into your web site, providing a full set of feedback tools without making them sign up for yet another account or navigate away from where you want them to be.
Customized to fit your brand and needs.
CrowdSound provides a simple intuitive interface for creating custom color schemes to match your company’s branding and website. In just a few short clicks you’ll be able to completely change the look of the CrowdSound widget and easily embed it on your page. You can also customize the ‘Buckets’ that suggestions are categorized into. Don’t like the defaults? Change them! If your site does not require a widget, then you can use our hosted site option.
Organize your users’ ideas.
CrowdSound allows you to give your customers categories for suggestions. Is it a bug? A feature request? Get greater specificity and organization by using CrowdSound’s tools and management interface. Account-specific issue? CrowdSound allows for suggestions to be marked as ‘private’, allowing a customer to submit a suggestion that can only be seen by your company, and also allowing you to take offline sensitive suggestions that may otherwise be visible to your competitors. CrowdSound also has a moderated mode, where every suggestion submitted by a widget user is not published on the widget until you review it.
Manage suggestions on the go with CrowdSound’s iPhone interface.
CrowdSound provides a full-featured iPhone interface, allowing you to manage and respond to suggestions wherever you are. Keep track of what your customers want whether you’re at the office or miles off-site.
Visit CrowdSound.com
Sunday, August 31, 2008
W3Counter - Essential, Real Time Stats for your Website or Blog
You shouldn’t need training to figure out your web stats program. W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them. There’s no installation, no configuration, and tracking starts as soon as you copy-and-paste a snippet of code into your website.
Follow Your Visitors
Since W3Counter’s service is truly real-time, you can follow visitors as they browse your website. See who’s online at any time and their entire path from referring source to the page they’re currently viewing. Plus, view detailed activity for visitors that have recently left your site as well.
Dashboards
A dashboard for each of your websites gives you an executive overview of the key statistics to watch. You’ll see trends in visit and page view activity over the past two weeks, along with your top traffic sources, search phrases, content and visitor locations.
City-Level Visitor Maps
Know exactly where your visitors are located with Google Maps down to the city level. You can even watch visitors arriving at your site in real-time appear as new info markers on the map, with referring source and landing page for each new hit.
Web Stats Widgets
Share your web stats with the world. Embed them in your website or blog with 7 different widgets including visitor maps, top pages, top searches, weekly visit graphs and a live feed of the most recent people on your site. You can even pull up a click overlay of your site without logging in to W3Counter.
Visitor Identification
Label your visitors, as easily as installing a plugin on a WordPress blog or adding a few lines of JavaScript to your membership or customer-based website. Your labels will appear in your reports of online and recent visitors, where you can view all the past activity of each member or customer on your website.
Navigation Tracking
Learn how visitors navigate your website with reports on visit depth, time on site, click lists and overlays of click data for every page. Identify hot and cold spots by overlaying color-coded click data right on top of your own webpage, either through the W3Counter site or while on yours with the Page Stats Widget.
Visitor Demographics
W3Counter captures and reports on key demographics of your visitor audience — languages spoken, browsers used, platforms, screen resolutions, locations, and technology features enabled in their browsers. All reported in simple, beautiful pie charts and lists you can drill down into.
Customizable Tracking Image
Choose from dozens of tracking image options — hit counters, images without counts, or no visible image at all. Counters and badges available in colors to match any website or blog theme.
Get more details a http://www.w3counter.com/
Monday, July 14, 2008
TextureWarehouse Back Online!
TextureWarehouse is back! After several months under reconstruction, Texturewarehouse.com is back online. Featuring hundreds of free, high-resolution texture images distributed under a creative commons license, the folks at TextureWarehouse have worked hard to get the textures you need for your design needs. Whether you’re designing websites, 3D models, or graphics featuring highly textured elements, you can find what you need at TextureWarehouse. Have something they don’t? Feel free to submit your texture images for the greater use of other designers.
Take a few minute to check out the new design, browse the textures, and contribute the textures you have to the galleries there.
www.texturewarehouse.com
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Free CSS Web Page Templates for sNews
DesignsByDarren.com has just release some new web page templates created specifically for sNews. Just upload the “index.php” file and “CSS” folder to your sNews directory and you’re ready to go! We highly recommend that you backup your current sNews directory before uploading any new template. That way you can “rollback” to your original design if you need to.
sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven content management system. Consisting of only one small core file, sNews is extremely lightweight, easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface.
These templates are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. Essentially this means you may use the templates for any personal or non-profit web design project as long as you give credit (attribution). A link back to designsbydarren.com in the footer is required.
If you’d like to use one of the designs for a commercial project, you may purchase a commercial license for just $9.95. The license is good for 1 project / 1 domain. If you plan on building multiple sites from the same template you must purchase a license for each.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Painter Essentials 4
Based on Corel Painter, the world’s most powerful painting and illustration software, Corel Painter Essentials 4 includes everything new users need to set up their own home art studio. Featuring a wide selection of paint brushes, pencils, paper textures and built-in tutorials, Painter Essentials 4 is the perfect program to help users get started with digital art and create stunning paintings—either from existing photos or from scratch.
Working closely with its customers, Corel redesigned the Painter Essentials user interface to make it even easier for users to discover the tools they need to create stunning artwork. Available on the Windows and Mac platforms, Painter Essentials 4 is ideally suited to digital camera users, scrapbookers, arts and craft enthusiasts, art teachers and students of any age. With art tools that faithfully replicate their traditional counterparts, it is easier than ever before for users to achieve more expressive hand painted works of art.
“With Corel Painter Essentials 4, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our customers to tap into their creativity, whether they want to create a painting from a favorite photo or develop a custom piece of artwork from scratch,” said Robert MacDonald, Product Manager, Corel Painter. “By further simplifying the user interface and including new training videos and tutorials, our goal is to educate and inspire our customers while giving them the creative freedom to develop something truly unique.”
New Features
With a simplified user interface, streamlined workflow and even more creative options, Corel Painter Essentials 4 provides the tools and guidance to help users create unique digital art keepsakes that are perfect for framing, using in craft projects and sharing as special gifts with family and friends.
New features in Corel Painter(tm) Essentials 4 include:
• New! Redesigned Workspace—To make it easier for users to get started with digital art, Corel Painter Essentials 4 features two distinct workspaces: Drawing & Painting and Photo Painting. Each workspace is easily accessible from tabs within the application and each presents customers with the tools specifically needed for the task they selected. Both workspaces offer a reconfigured toolbox, making it easier to identify and select brushes, media and paper.
• New! Brush Drawer—The new Brush Drawer makes brush identification and selection easier than ever before. Users can browse all brushes by category, quickly recall recently used brushes and easily add their favorite brushes to the Brush Drawer column.
• New! Color and Mixer Palettes—With the new Color Palette, users can choose a color with just one click. By simulating the traditional experience of mixing colors on an artist’s paint palette, the Mixer palette makes it easier for users to get the precise color they want.
New and Enhanced Tools
• New & Enhanced! Photo Painting System—The Photo Painting System has been redesigned and enhanced, making it easier for users to turn photos into paintings within seconds. Now organized in a separate workspace, all of the brushes within the Photo Painting System now act as cloners that take their color from the source image. As a result, users can now create a painting from a photo in as little as 3 easy steps.
• New & Enhanced! Smart Stroke Technology—The new Smart Stroke Technology paints with brush strokes that follow the forms of the original photo, dynamically changing brush size, stroke length and pressure, based on the detail and focal areas of the photo. As a result, users can quickly achieve impressive paintings or sketches with no prior training or experience required.
New Natural Media Materials
• New! RealBristle Painting System—Introduced in Corel Painter X, the new RealBristle Painting System heightens brush responsiveness and represents a major milestone for digital painting. Corel Painter Essentials 4 includes RealBristle brushes in two different brush categories. By authentically reproducing the sensation of the interaction between paint, canvas and brush, RealBristle brushes take realism to a whole new level.
• New! Pens—Corel Painter Essentials 4 introduces pens in the Pencils & Pens brush category. With new options such as the Scratchboard Tool and Smooth Edge Calligraphy, it’s easy for users to ink their own comic books or do calligraphy.
• New! Paper Textures—Corel Painter Essentials 4 features an expanded selection of paper textures that faithfully reproduce the feeling of using traditional art materials. Users can control the texture of the canvas to achieve the results expected from using traditional media on a given surface- for example pencil on watercolor paper, felt pens on cotton paper or chalk on a sidewalk
Built in Tutorials
• New! Tutorial-Based Guidebook—The Corel Painter Essentials 4 Guidebook provides step-by-step tutorials that help users discover the full capabilities of the software while completing fun projects. With options for both beginners and more advanced users, the guidebook introduces various Corel Painter Essentials media and educates new users about artistic principles and elements.
• New! Video Tutorials—Built in video tutorials by John Derry, noted Corel Painter Master and Ambassador, guide users through a variety of digital art projects, all included in the guidebook.
Enhanced User Experience
• New! Additional Undo Levels—With 32 undo levels, Corel Painter Essentials 4 provides users with maximum flexibility and freedom to experiment with techniques and effects- always confident that they can return to a previous step or design.
• New! Online Print Services—Once users have created their masterpiece, they can order prints of their artwork on canvas, watercolor paper or other fine art materials—directly from within Painter Essentials 4.
• Enhanced! Support for Wacom Products—Corel Painter Essentials 4 fully supports the entire Wacom product line, including the Bamboo(tm) Fun pen tablets, the Intuos pen tablet, the Wacom 6D Art Pen and the Cintiq 21 UX interactive pen display.
For a complete list of new and enhanced features in Corel Painter Essentials 4, please visit http://www.corel.com/painteressentials.
“With Corel Painter Essentials 4, anyone can produce truly exciting artwork even if they have never picked up a sketching pencil or a paint brush,” said John Derry, Corel Painter Master. “With a welcoming interface that encourages experimentation and creative ‘play’, Corel Painter Essentials 4 is designed to help users express themselves in ways they may have never thought possible. The features are easy to find and understand making for an intuitive, fun and rewarding user experience.”
Pricing and Availability
With a suggested retail price of $99 U.S. for the full version and $69 U.S. for the upgrade, Corel Painter Essentials 4 is available starting today through http://www.corel.com and in the coming weeks through Corel’s global channel partners. To learn more about Corel Painter Essentials 4 or to download a free, fully-functional trial version of the software, please visit http://www.corel.com/painteressentials.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Detailed Ultra High Resolution Parchment Textures from Photomorphix
Detailed ultra high resolution parchment textures great for chroma key background replacement and still life photography backgrounds. These Textures can also be used as Photoshop layers to add texture and color to your image.
Another unique, high quality CD from Photomorphix. More info.
About Photomorphix
Photomorphix offers a diverse range of royalty-free Backgrounds,Textures, Patterns and Stock Photos for the digital artist.
You won’t find any filter generated backgrounds here! All of our backgrounds and textures are created using high resolution custom made photoshop brushes one layer at a time.
All images are meticulously hand crafted for balance, color, contrast and content. We offer the most interesting and usable images available today. Our goal is to provide our customers unique, high quality images at a low price.
Please feel free to email us with your thoughts or ideas on our website or image products. We look forward to serving your creative imaging needs.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Build Amazing Forms Online with Wufoo
Wufoo is an Internet application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Because we host everything, all you need is a browser, an Internet connection and a few minutes to build a form and start using it right away.
We believe forms are the starting point for building anything useful on the web. Basically, they’re the most efficient mechanisms for collecting data from people. The problem is creating an online form isn’t very efficient.
The process of creating a form and all the database structures and scripts necessary to make it work (not to mention useful) is a really tedious process that makes what should be a simple task (collecting and understanding information), not really worth the time, effort or cost of the endeavor. The entire process could take you or your IT person days, if not weeks. With Wufoo, you can skip all the hard stuff (because it does it all for you), and start getting things done.
Top 10 Reasons to Use Wufoo
1. Wufoo is easy.
If you’ve ever used a desktop form building application, then you’re familiar with complexity. If you’ve ever hired a programmer to make a form for you, then you’re familiar with delays and communication barriers. Enter Wufoo. Wufoo enables anyone from students to secretaries to office managers the ability to publish an online form within minutes. Your forms, on your terms. Programming experience not needed.
2. Wufoo is fast.
Why wait days and weeks for someone else to build a database and all the scripts needed to just collect simple information from your form? With Wufoo, you can build, design, and collect with professionalism and personality in only a few short minutes.
3. Wufoo is fun.
Just because you’re working with forms and data, doesn’t mean you have to do it without personality and style. Gathering information from your users is exciting, why shouldn’t your tools be exciting too?
4. Wufoo is secure.
We’ve done everything possible to ensure the safe keeping of your data and the data you collect. Our servers are located at 365 Main and backed up onsite and offsite—every 12 hours in Toronto and every 24 hours in Virginia. We also offer plans with 128 bit SSL encryption on form submission. We have the expertise of BitPusher, a company whose founders have experience with Napster and Netcom (among others), to ensure that everything is safe and stable on the hardware end.
5. Wufoo is portable.
Wherever you have an Internet connection, you have access to Wufoo. Plus, all the data you collect with Wufoo can be exported to Excel or CSV so you can take your data offline and with you wherever you may go.
6. Wufoo helps you understand.
Your data is pretty useless if you have no way of organizing and understanding it. Wufoo allows you to filter through entries, create reports, and build graphs based on your collected data. We also give you the power to share and password protect this data, so you’re in control of who can see your information.
7. Wufoo integrates with your web site.
While we do offer hosting of all of your forms, we realize that placing a form on your own site is often a priority. Wufoo offers easy, copy/paste solutions for integrating a Wufoo form into a web page. For advanced users, full CSS and XHTML markup is also included. To simplify the process even further, the intuitive Wufoo theme manager allows you to customize the look of your form with a few clicks of the mouse so that your form seamlessly matches the look of your site.
8. Wufoo is affordable.
Desktop software, outsourced programmers, and even an internal IT department are all expensive solutions for building a form. With Wufoo’s tiered plans, ranging from FREE to $199/month, a more affordable solution is offered to anyone with form building needs.
9. Wufoo talks to you.
Forms are built to collect data, but wouldn’t it be nice to be notified when submissions come in, and have a statistical look on the activity of your forms. With Wufoo, you can have all entries emailed to you, or updated in your RSS feed, as they are submitted. On top of that, each form comes with graphs on the usage over the day, week, month, and year.
10. No long term contracts.
Wufoo costs less than most desktop software and a lot less than hiring a development team. After creating an account, you can leave at anytime without any questions asked. Why not try it out when it costs so little to be the office hero?
Visit www.wufoo.com for a demo.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
RSSWorkbench - RSS Authoring and Publishing Tools for Webmasters
RSSWorkbench.com provides a nice collection of RSS/XML Tools for Webmasters as well as a RSS Feeds Directory. Currently the site contains 140 links to various resources and 196 feeds in 33 different categories. Topics include creating an RSS feed, parsing RSS feeds, combining multiple RSS feeds and ways to display live feeds on your own website. If you’re new to RSS, be sure visit the ‘RSS Basics’ section.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Dreamstime and PixelPerfect Combine to Offer a Picture Perfect!
Dreamstime.com and PixelPerfectDigital.com (PPD) have formed an alliance to make photo shopping easier for the PPD user.
Primarily a free stock imagery provider, PixelPerfectDigital (www.pixelperfectdigital.com) offers high quality stock photos to the design community in addition to providing the latest industry news and links to useful online resources related to photography and design. PPD will expand its service to feature photography, graphics, artwork, abstract sketches, scenic backgrounds and more, as exclusively offered by Dreamstime.
For the window shopper, PPD will now display on its home page select Dreamstime photos that are a “perfect fit” for its existing customer base. In addition to the Dreamstime photos that will appear on the PPD display counter, those PPD members that are in search of a photo-extraordinaire can now enjoy an unlimited photo shopping experience. PPD will provide immediate access to the best-edited gallery of the 2 million-plus images that Dreamstime.com has to offer—increasing PPD’s image library by 99.9%.
“We are excited about our partnership with Dreamstime and the value it brings to our users,” said Darren Hester, President of PixelPerfectDigital.com headquartered in Macon, GA. “We’re confident our users will appreciate the added selection of high quality imagery at such an affordable price.”
“The objective in our partnership with PixelPerfectDigital is two-fold,” added Dreamstime co-founder and CEO, Serban Enache. “On