Designing for the Mobile Web

The number of users browsing the Web from a mobile device continues to rise, yet most mobile web sites are still sub-par.

The thing is, creating a great web experience for users of mobile devices is much easier than you might think. In this article I'll introduce seven fundamental steps that, if followed, will help you avoid the pitfalls that have caused many other mobile sites to fail. By the end of this article you'll know exactly where to focus your efforts in order to build a successful mobile site.

A Guide to Mobile Web Design Tips and Tricks

mobile-web-mashHaving a mobile-optimized web site can really make your site stand apart from the pack. Even though smartphones like the iPhone and Google Android devices can display “the full web,” having a web page formatted for smaller screens and with features that can take advantage of a touch screen, geolocation, or address book functionality can make the mobile web browsing experience that much better.

How to serve the right content to mobile browsers

The modern web is viewed on many different devices, so it is getting increasingly important for us to think about how to create our web sites so that they will serve the right content to users, no matter what device they are using. We have many technologies at our disposal, including media types, media queries, and browser sniffing, but what's the best way to handle this?

Return of the Mobile Stylesheet

The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple´s iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google´s Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called “full web” browsers (Nokia´s S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox´s mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users´ experiences, giving them access to websites formerly off-limits to most mobile devices. Indeed, as a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report highlighted, mobile devices have increased traffic by an average of 13% across several popular websites.

Mobile Web Design Trends For 2009

Web designers know that the industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of skills is required in order to stay up to date. In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change has been the amount of Internet users who are accessing websites via phones and mobile devices. As a result, Web designers have a growing need to be educated in this area and ready to design websites that accommodate this audience.

Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions - Smashing Magazine

Mobile forms tend to have significantly more constraints than their desktop cousins: screens are smaller; connections are slower; text entry is trickier; the list goes on. So, limiting the number of forms in your mobile applications and websites is generally a good idea. When you do want input from users on mobile devices, radio buttons, checkboxes, select menus and lists tend to work much better than open text fields.

http://theymakeapps.com/

Featured Mobile App Makers | TheyMakeApps.com - Home of the Finest Mobile App Makers

Quick Tips for Creating a Mobile Optimized Site

Last year mobile web usage increased 148% worldwide. In the near future as smarthpones become more and more ubiquitous this number will continue to shoot up. As a developer, the time has arrived for you to seriously consider whether you should begin accommodating your mobile audience.

5 Can´t-Miss Usability Tips for Mobile Website Designs

Finding your way around a majority of the mobile websites that exist has become a nightmare with the lack of proper usability being implemented into their designs.

This has caused the quality of designs (especially the mobile usability factor) to decrease on a larger scale when compared to the sites that not only practice good mobile aesthetics, but allow their users a smooth transition between the regular site to an enticing experience on their mobile devices.

Because of the instability in a lot of the mobile web design information that is being distributed on the web, a lot of websites have very poor mobile interface designs. Below, we’re going to cover a few simple, yet prominent steps to designing a much more effective interface and increasing the quality of a mobile websites usability.

40 Detailed and High Quality Mobile Phone .psd Source Files

psd source files are truly amazing and unique resources – not only do they showcase the talents of the artist, but they also offer the opportunity to dig deeper and discover how they were created. They give you the chance to learn, unlike tutorials which are step-by-step, with a .psd file you roll your sleeves and you get your hands dirty delving into its inner workings.

Whether it is for learning new techniques, for wireframing your latest mobile app or if you are just curious about the design, all of the .psd files below have one thing in common – They are highly detailed and of the highest quality. Thanks to all the artists.

Coding for the mobile web

Good evening — in this article I will aim to demystify the world of mobile web development, or in other words, developing web sites so that they will provide an acceptable user experience on mobile devices. I’ll run through how “the mobile web” differs from the normal web, the basics of techniques you can employ to make your sites work sucessfully on both mobile and desktop browsers, some general DOs and DON’Ts for mobile web design, and numerous resources where you can go to find out more information.

http://mobilewebbook.com/

A web standards approach for delivering content beyond the desktop

Much has been written about mobile devices. Plenty has been written about developing websites for the so-called “standards era” of the web. However, little has been written about the two colliding. This resource aims to fill that void.

Determine iPhone orientation using CSS

With the beta of Firefox 3.5 showcasing 35 new features over 35 days, the article on CSS3 media queries stuck out, the orientation detection really got my attention and immediately put my thought process to mobile devices, in my case the iPhone. I thought this is great maybe this has been snuck into the iPhone 3.0, unfortunately for us it wasn’t. That didn’t stop me and I got thinking about how it could be done if at all on the iPhone without using JavaScript.

Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone

Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.

iPad CSS Layout with landscape / portrait orientation modes

The iPad has finally launched in Australia today, hooray! I will probably get one soon so I can continue to optimise my CSS layouts for as many devices as possible. But in the mean-time I will continue using the iPad emulator that comes with the iPhone SDK.

Prototyping for the iPhone using Fireworks

So, you are a designer. A concept-, interaction- or visual designer and you use Adobe Fireworks for sketching, wireframing, visual design and of course prototyping. Great choice. I have been working with this program for many years. I think it is the most efficient tool for creating anything based on pixels and consisting of more than one screen. In this post I use Fireworks CS3, but you won’t have any problems creating something simular using CS4.

Optimizing Web Content for the iPhone

The first step in optimizing web content for iPhone OS is to separate your iPhone OS-specific content from your desktop content and the next step is to tailor the web content for iPhone OS. You might want to follow these steps even if iPhone OS is not your target platform so your web content is more maintainable in the future.

I have often seen developers asking where to find the jQuery UI Library and the jQuery UI Themes on Google CDN

Using jQuery to pick up where CSS leaves off

In the following lecture by Chris Coyier, he gives a beautiful, and funny (which is great), introduction to jQuery and explaining how to benefit from including it in our workflow with HTML and CSS. Enjoy!

How to create drag & drop interaction with jQuery

One of the more interesting actions in visual interfaces is the ability to drag an object and drop it on a selected target. Pretty much like what we do in real life at the supermarket. Grab a beer – drag to cart – drop it in the cart. But there are attributes in the product that it would be interesting to unveil in an application. For example, when you grab a beer you can feel if it´s cold or not, and when you get to the checkout you pay the price of the bottle, which is a hidden attribute of the bottle. Today we will learn how to create drag & drop using jQuery and adding hidden attributes to the draggable items.

How to select and reveal elements with jQuery

One user asked the other day on the jQuery Tabs tutorial how to highlight the particular tab we selected. In this tutorial we will see some way to select different elements using jQuery, from a basic multiple selection, a multiple selection revealing content and a excluding selection revealing content. See the three examples and read on.

A jQuery Twitter Ticker

In this tutorial we are going to create a pure jQuery & CSS twitter ticker which utilizes Twitter´s Search API. It will show your or your friends´ latest tweets, and will not require any server side code or databases. As a result, the ticker will be easily included into any web page and easily modified to your likings.

Slick content slider

Web masters constantly search for ways to optimize the way content is presented on their sites. With the advent of terms like “above the fold” it is ever so important to provide eye-catching and functional user interfaces.

In this tutorial we are going to make a slick content slider for a computer shop, with the help of jQuery and the MopSlider plugin. The slider is going to be generated with PHP and we are using a plain txt file as a data source for the notebook configurations.

Making our own twitter timeline

Twitter has grown into a real social phenomenon. This is an incredible achievement for such a simple service. But as you know, great ideas are not necessarily complex.

This time we are going to create our own twitter-like timeline, where you can view and post your tweets. You can use the code I´ve provided here for all kinds of purposes and be sure that the possibilities are endless. So grab the demo files and start learning!

jQuery & CSS Sprite Animation Explained In Under 5 Minutes

Today we´re going to take a look at sprite animation. There´s been a lot of talk this year about the future of technologies like Adobe´s Flash and for good reason – with the performance of JavaScript frameworks having come so far since they were first conceived, it´s now possible to create equally as powerful animations and effects without needing to use any third party plugins.In today´s screencast I´m going to show you what a sprite is and just how easy it can be to create an entire animated scene using jQuery, CSS & Sprites. You´ll also get to see some pretty cool out-in-the-wild examples of jQuery Sprite Animation in action, so why not check it out in my screencast below!

30+ Useful Jquery Tutorials Using Advance Techniques

Although there are many great techniques already but hopefully these listed jquery tutorials will help you too and it will also give you a more professional feel and you will get latest techniques for modern design requirements of Web Developers.

In this our first jQuery Tutorials article, we will presenting some really useful trainings about how to learn jquery techniques step by step and also will productive in your websites developments.

Hope you will like these listed tutorials and leave your comments.

jQuery if / else Statements

Recently, someone was looking for some jQuery to solve their problem. Instead I gave them a snippet of ‘normal´ javascript as a solution, however the person wasn´t happy with this and insisted on using jQuery.

jQuery Notification Plugin with jQuery UI ThemeRoller Ready

Pines Notify is a JavaScript notification plugin for the jQuery JavaScript library, developed by Hunter Perrin as part of Pines. It is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL. It is designed to provide maximum flexibility, while still being easy to use and easy to implement.

AeroWindow jQuery plugin

AeroWindow - Plugin for jQuery - Windows Aero Style for Web sites

AeroWindow create pop-up window in the Aero style, inspired by the style of Window7. The popup window offers the usual options and full functionality similar to Windows windows.

Pines Notify jQuery Plugin

Pines Notify is a JavaScript notification plugin, developed by Hunter Perrin as part of Pines. It is designed to provide an unparalleled level of flexibility, while still being very easy to implement and use. It uses the jQuery UI CSS library for styling, which means it is fully and easily themeable. Try out some of the readymade themes using the selector in the top right corner of this page. It is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, which means you are free to use, study, modify, and freely redistribute it under the same license.

Fluid Navigation – How to create an informative menu-bar with jQuery & CSS

After a few weeks away in the US, I´m back with a brand new jQuery post – this week taking a look at a new style of navigation menu. jQuery has made it simple for developers to define an idea or wireframe for a component and then implement it reasonably quickly, which has certainly helped it become the most popular JavaScript Framework out there at the moment. I feel like some of the navigation options out there right now don´t provide you with enough information about the sections of a site you can visit, so today we´re going to learn how to create a menu that solves this problem.

Zoom-Info – How To Create An Informative Image Gallery With jQuery & CSS

Question: Have you ever wanted to neatly display a few lines of text about an image in your site but didn´t want to compromise on the design of your overall layout? In today´s post I´m going to show you how to create a useful information-rich jQuery Image Gallery that solves that problem. The best part of it is that it´s so simple to write up that all you´ll need are jQuery´s excellent .hover() and .animate() functions to get it up and running.

8 jQuery Performance & Optimization Tips You Need In 2010

Great topic today!. Performance optimization. Performance optimization is an important aspect of any type of coding project, including those that use jQuery. Today I´m going to go through some quick useful jQuery coding and performance tips that I think are important for every JavaScript developer to bare in mind when writing their projects using the jQuery framework. Some of these are going to be a little obvious whilst others are things that you might not have considered doing before.

Why and how to create Microsoft Office Minibar with jQuery and CSS3

Although many will argue that Microsoft products are an example of a good design, Minibar was one of design refreshments that came out with the Office 2007. It is a variation of a toolbar that exposes context-related functionality. In case of MS Word, context is a text selection. Since Minibar always pops up near the mouse pointer it enables users to quickly perform actions related to a selection.

jQuery vs. JavaScript – The Masters Share Their Views On Vanilla JS

We´ve got a really great post for you today guys. We´re going to explore whether it´s fundamentally important for designers and developers to understand how to use vanilla JavaScript and not just it´s derivative frameworks and libraries such as jQuery and MooTools. You might be asking ‘why?´, but read on and you´ll find out!. Because this is a topic that can invoke passion on both sides of the debate, I´ve asked a few familiar names to join the discussion including David Walsh, Chris Coyier, Marco Kupier, Janko Javanovic and James Padolsey. All of these authors use jQuery regularly and are in a good position to advise on the pros and cons of knowing vanilla JS.

20 Awesome jQuery Enhanced CSS Button Techniques

With all the talk of CSS3 at the moment, its easy to overlook the impact Javascript, especially jQuery, can have on the appearance of the basic web button. As such, we have collected 20 useful CSS buttons techniques that have all been improved and enhanced by the sooper-dooper power of jQuery.

BounceBox Notification Plugin With jQuery & CSS3

Earlier this week, while working on ZineScripts‘ coupon code system, I found the need to be able to dynamically create and present a message box to Zine´s visitors. The usual routine would include digging through jQuery´s plugin repository and ending up with using a lightbox alternative, but I decided to take the time and build an one-off notification solution, which I am sharing with you today.

10 jQuery Plugins to Help with Web Page Layouts

Every now and then a web project will come up that has special and unique layout requirements, and the current capabilities of CSS just aren´t enough. With projects such as these, jQuery can be your best friend. So here are 10 jQuery plugins to help you out with page layouts.

jQuerify Bookmarklet: allows load jQuery for pages that don't have it - Useful for developers.

A long time ago I built myself a little bookmarklet to load jQuery on pages that don't already have it. The idea was to allow me to play around with any page on the web, using jQuery in the Firebug (and now Safari or IE8) console. I blogged about it, got lots of great feedback, and then blogged about an improved version. Now that a lot more great feedback has come through the comments of the updated bookmarklet post, I've decided to update it one more time.

How to select and reveal elements with jQuery

One user asked the other day on the jQuery Tabs tutorial how to highlight the particular tab we selected. In this tutorial we will see some way to select different elements using jQuery, from a basic multiple selection, a multiple selection revealing content and a excluding selection revealing content. See the three examples and read on.

How to create drag & drop interaction with jQuery

One of the more interesting actions in visual interfaces is the ability to drag an object and drop it on a selected target. Pretty much like what we do in real life at the supermarket. Grab a beer – drag to cart – drop it in the cart. But there are attributes in the product that it would be interesting to unveil in an application. For example, when you grab a beer you can feel if it´s cold or not, and when you get to the checkout you pay the price of the bottle, which is a hidden attribute of the bottle. Today we will learn how to create drag & drop using jQuery and adding hidden attributes to the draggable items.

Using jQuery to pick up where CSS leaves off

In the following lecture by Chris Coyier, he gives a beautiful, and funny (which is great), introduction to jQuery and explaining how to benefit from including it in our workflow with HTML and CSS. Enjoy!

How to avoid double clicking with jQuery

There has been always one troubling issue regarding web forms and user interaction: when the user double clicks the submit button. Detecting and preventing it or disabling the button is an expensive operation in terms of computing. Fortunately, jQuery has a neat solution. As usual.

SliderNav: iPhone Style Contact Lists Using JQuery and CSS

This effect is actually from Techi.com, a new blog launched by the guys at WebDesignerDepot, where they use it to display their popular tags in the sidebar. I wanted to see how easy (or hard) it was to recreate using JQuery and CSS, and it turns out that it´s pretty simple to do. I´ve packed it into a neat little plugin so you hopefully you can make some use of it!

Sliding Panel Photo Wall Gallery with jQuery

Today we will create a stunning full page photo wall gallery. The idea is to have a whole page full of thumbs with a nice light effect when we hover. When an image is clicked, a panel slides up from the bottom revealing the full picture. When clicking on the full image, the thumbs panel slide back from the bottom. This effect will give the impression that we are stacking the panels on top of each other every time we change the mode. In the full picture view we add some nice transition effect when we browse through the photos.

50 Fundamental jQuery Controls and Rich UI Components

Every seasoned developer has one and every young and upcoming developer should be thinking of building one – a good and concise collection of UI controls, components and plugins that you can always rely on in times of need.

HoverAttribute jQuery plugin/a>

HoverAttribute is a jQuery plugin that allows you to make (link-)elements more dynamic by making an attribute of that element show up on hovering. This is foremost intended for tags residing within full-width elements, such as headings or list entries. Amongst several options, it is possible to choose any attribute (href by default, see Usage) of a given tag. The functionality is implemented like:

4 Creative and Fresh jQuery Tutorials

Sometimes the basics of web design are simply not enough, and sometimes your creative needs demand that you “work out of the box” and build a web page that breaks normal convention. Enter jQuery, the modern days web design super-hero, to your creative rescue.

Seek Attention jQuery Plugin

The "seekAttention" plugin gracefully get´s your users attention by fading out a definable area but leaving the target element (the element which is seeking attention) un-faded and thereby focusing the users attention on it.

Griddy – Customizable Grid Overlay jQuery Plugin

Griddy is a small JQuery plugin thats creates a simple, customizable grid overlay on top of any element. It can also calculate row heights and column widths automatically based on the number of rows/columns and gutter space. There are few options, including: rows, row height, row gutter, columns, column height, column width, color and opacity.

The rapid growth of RIA technology into the lives of every day people just a few years ago has carried both the usability and user experience industries to a new high in popularity. The success of software (particularly on the web) has driven both of these terms into our vernacular, and yet they are still often confused or thought to be synonymous. This post is meant to help those new to the field or unfamiliar with the intricacies of design to understand the differences between the terms.

A crash course in usability

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. (via Wikipedia)

When it comes to web design, usability, in essence, is how easy your users can get around your site. It all comes down to you making your users think about what they have to do as little as possible. When the user has to think about something as basic as getting around a site, it can become tedious and can turn your user off your site.

Factors that Affect Usability

If trending topics surrounding design blogs are any reflection of trends in design, then usability is what coffee is to freelancers. Usability is a study of human-computer interaction that helps designers analyze our users´ patterns as they use our creations. While we cannot fully predict our users´ interactions, we are able to brace for them through how we style and place elements on our page.

Creating a Timeless User Experience

If we could tear into the fabric of time and look a decade into the future, what kind of experience might we find? It´s easy to imagine the technology would be much more advanced. Something out of a film like Minority Report with holographic touchscreens, or so advanced of an A.I. (artificial intelligence) that the application anticipates solutions without the user having to do much else.

In reality the kinds of products, websites, and applications that survive and continue to be effective are those that that focus on the user experience. The digital world evolves continually, but we need to manage this by making sure we don´t leave the people who use our applications and websites in the dust. In this article we will explore creating a timeless user experience.

10 Simple Web Accessibility Tips You Can Do Today

One of the most overlooked aspects in designing a website that we often brush off is web accessibility. There´s a misconception that web accessibility requires sacrifices to aesthetics, or that it´s not worth the effort.

But, with a growing number of ways that users access the web, creating highly-accessible and universal designs that can be viewed in as many ways as possible is critical to the success of a website.

And here´s the good news: it isn´t as hard as you think.

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

The web has become a part of our lives. Folks from all walks of life, from upscale parts of New York to dirt road villages you probably will never hear of in Burundi, are all a part of what we call "the internet". The reasons they use the web is highly varied: it could be to search for news articles, directions to the nearest pub, the winter/fall clothing trends, post-grad research, or shopping for a handbag, the list is endless. It could be anyone too. It´d be impossible to try to classify web users in any particular demographic range.

On top of the web´s ubiquity, the web has gotten to an interactive all time high. Users don´t just seek information, they interact with it in more novel ways than we can ever imagine.

And it´s only going to get better: we are seeing a myriad of emerging web apps and website trends that are revolutionizing the way we use and obtain information on the web.

With this concept in mind, usability, how effortless it is to interact and use your website, is critical to its success. This article discusses five important usability tips that your site can´t live without.

What have we forgotten about UX?

Maybe I´m not very smart (don´t answer that!). Possibly it´s because I got my Graphic Design degree almost 20 years ago. Or maybe it´s because most of what I´ve learned about UX design is geared toward eLearning, where the overriding goal is to make sure the user has the best possible chance of absorbing whatever content is presented. But I seem to have some concepts about what constitutes good usability that are at odds with what I see demonstrated on websites that are about UX and design or are by people who are using their sites to market their UX design services. Before I get specific about what I´m seeing in these sites, I thought I´d outline what the criteria are for me for good UX.

• Content is first. Every element should support the user´s ability to read textual content, listen to audio content, view graphical or video content, etc.
• Navigation should be clear and intuitive, and there should be just enough of it to make sure the user is always aware of where they are and why they are there.

And that´s really it. I haven´t found anyone advocating illegible text and sites where you can´t tell what´s going on (or, conversely, you can easily tell what´s going on but it takes you several extra clicks to get there), but in site after site devoted to design and UX, I am seeing some disturbing trends.

The Kano Model and the Importance of User Experience

I´d like to focus this post on one study QFD adapted for its purposes focused on requirements. The research team examined the requirements businesses produced for their projects and identified three main categories: normal requirements, expected requirements and exciting requirements. Understanding the differences in these types of requirements really crystallized for me the importance of UX testing and why UX professionals are so valuable. The team was lead by one Professor Noriaki Kano, and so this model became known as the Kano model of product development and customer satisfaction. Professor Kano´s team was not doing research for QFD itself, but the QFD institute has adapted his methods and uses this model in their larger view of customer satisfaction. This oft-referenced graphic sums up the model well:

User Experience Of The Real Time Web

There has been much talk about all of the businesses that are sprouting up in regards to the real-time web. But, it can be confusing for the user because there is so much out there. They key for users is to first recognize what they are looking to do on the real time web. Once that is known, it is important to know where to go to get the information that is being looked for. The rewards can be plentiful as the real time web offers outstanding resources once the user becomes experienced with how to use it.

Below, you’ll find the user experience of the real time web based on some set of functions which is easy to understand and convenient to apply as Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience.

Better User Experience With Storytelling – Part One

Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.

Today we communicate a bit differently. Our information is fragmented across various mass-media channels and delivered through ever-changing technology. It has become watered down, cloned, and is churned out quickly in 140-character blurbs. We’ve lost that personal touch where we find an emotional connection that makes us care.

What to Expect in 2010: UX/UI Design Simplicity

In January of each year, we flip over the hourglass and, once again, we have everything in front of us. The new year gives us a clean slate, a chance for change and encouragement to evolve the way we do things. In the past, we’ve yielded to client and user requests to pack our website designs full of unrelated features and countless pages of duplicate information. The change we have been waiting for has come - our users have matured. 2010 is the year of Design Simplicity.

With more than 7000+ plugins, WordPress is the most extendable Content Management System available; in fact, "WordPress is infinitely extensible" as Matt Mullenweg says. In this post, we'll examine twenty-one really useful plugins to take your blog to the next level.

37 Cool WordPress Hacks And Tutorials You Should Try

You know WordPress comes with standart functions and we use many plugins or codes to give our blog a different look or functions.Of course we have to use these kind of plugins and hacks if we definetely need them.For a beginner the WordPress Codex is the best place to learn basic things but day by day as we improve ourselves in WordPress we look around for more functional codes.Today i want to share some WordPress Hacks and Tutorials which i’ve collected from many WordPress related blogs.I’m sure you will see many interesting hacks and will use them.

Notice:Don’t use them directly,i mean first back-up your database and files or just try in a test blog like me.So take no risk.If you need help about these hacks or tutorials just leave a comment in the original hack page.

7 Awesome WordPress Plugins To Give Your Dashboard A New Look

If you are a regular user of WordPress like me then you might get bored of the default user interface of WordPress. Although the User Interface of WordPress is good but there is always room for improvement. Automattic the company behind WordPress has decided to go for Open Source Design Contests to make the User Interface of WordPress even better.

How to easily create a Thematic child theme

Are Theme Frameworks the future of WordPress Themes? In this article, I’m going to show you how to easily create a child theme for the popular Thematic WordPress Theme framework.

WordPress SEO Tips: Benchmarking Matt Cutts Blog

Matt Cutts writes one of the most successful and widely read blogs in the SEO field. What can we learn from taking a close look at his blog? What lessons can we apply to making our own blog a success? Keep reading as we take benchmarking to a whole new arena.

10 WordPress dashboard hacks

The dashboard is a very important part of a WordPress blog. In fact, it allows you to control your posts, your blog design, and many more things. When building a site for a client, it is especially important to be able to control WP’s dashboard. In this article, let’s have a look at 10 extremely useful hacks for WordPress’ dashboard.

Top WordPress hacks of 2009

2009 has been a very prolific year for WordPress hacks. In this article, I’ll show you the most useful hacks I came across during the whole year. Enjoy!

For Your Clients: How to Use WordPress

Here at Paper Leaf, we do a decent amount of WordPress blog design & implementation for our clients. While WordPress is super easy to learn, you can’t just build your clients a blog, send them the login information and then disappear off of the face of the earth. Where’s the customer service, people?!? Ideally, we sit down for a half hour or hour with our clients to show them the basics of how to use their new blog (writing a post, adding categories, checking stats, uploading photos, adding users). However, sometimes a face-to-face meet up isn’t doable; we offer graphic & web design in Edmonton, but many of our clients are outside of the city.

55+ Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

There are times when you come across a feature in a blog, and you just start thinking to yourself: How can I get this in my WordPress blog/site as well. Everybody have experienced this feeling. Sometimes you know you want it, and don’t know where to look for, or even what to look for. In this article we will be sharing some of the most wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks, and Hacks that you will definitely find useful.

More Resources

• wpbeginner.com
• wprecipes.com
• WordPress Codex
• WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Themes

Go to any PHP help forum and you’ll be sure to see many bad practises, innocent misconceptions and blatant no nos. None of us are perfect and none of us started off writing great code. We have all had that moment where we looked back on a script that we wrote years ago and thought “what the hell was I thinking?”. But it is a process. You make mistakes, you learn from those mistakes and then you move on. From my experiences of modifying other people’s code, helping people on PHP help forums and making my own (many) mistakes, I hereby present this list:

Pivot tables in PHP

In my work as developer I normally need to transform data from one format to another. Typically our data input are a database and we need to show database data into a report, datagrid or something similar. It’s very typical to use pivot tables. It’s not very dificult to handle pivot tables by hand but the work is always the same: groups by, totals, subtotals, totals per row …. Now I want to write a class to pivot tables in PHP with the most common requirements (at least for me). I know we can create pivot tables with SQL. Group by and some other database specific commands like oracle’s GROUP BY ROLLUP/CUBE can do the work, but I like clean SQL querys. The business logic must be in PHP and SQL must be as clean as we can.

Common PHP Based Interface For Cloud Services

The Simple Cloud API is an open source project providing common PHP interfaces for File Storage, Document Storage, and Simple Queue cloud services. It will enable you to easily connect your application with a new service without having to learn their specific API. Primarily developed as a new Zend Framework component called ‘Zend_Cloud’, you can use it independently of Zend Framework.

Practical Php Pattern series

• Practical Php Patterns: Singleton
• Practical Php Patterns: Decorator
• Practical Php Patterns: Composite
• Practical Php Patterns: Bridge
• Practical Php Patterns: Adapter
• Practical Php Patterns: Creational patterns summary
• Practical Php Patterns: Prototype
• Practical Php Patterns: Factory Method
• Practical Php Patterns: Builder
• Practical Php Patterns: Abstract Factory

Design and Build Email Newsletters Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)

This article gives you the information you need to plan, design and build an HTML newsletter that renders well and is actually useful to recipients. It’s a quick and dirty guide to effective email newsletters.

• Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention.
• Ask nicely first.
• Focus on relevance.
• Design with a goal in mind, so that you’ll know if it worked.
• Make unsubscribing easy.
• Code like it’s 1999 (literally) and use inline CSS.
• Always include a plain text version.
• Don’t assume that images will be viewed.
• Follow the law.
• Test everything before sending, because you can’t take it back.

30 Cutting Edge Examples Of CSS Navigation

Navigation is one of those things you have to get right in order to provide your users with easy access to your website’s content. Today we’ll take a look at 30 well-designed navigation menus. Some of them use CSS sprites, some use jQuery or another library, and others take advantage of the great properties available in CSS3.

CSS only bar charts

For a project I am working on right now I needed to have really fast bar charts that don't need any plugins or rely heavily on JavaScript. This is why I've put together some bar charts in pure CSS. Try this - move your mouse over the bars:

Optimise Your WordPress Themes With Better Author Pages

Recently Ajay D’Souza asked how we made our author archive pages here on BloggingPro. I personally am a big fan of displaying content differently on different sections of blogs and also think that archives should be more informative than be just a collection of excerpts.

Because I personally believe that an ‘Author Information’ block below every entry overkill is, the author archive is the right spot to display more information about every author and also display the entries written by authors in a short and concise way.

10 Awesome Image Optimization Tools

There are a lot of online photo editing tools are available on the internet where you can resize and crop without knowledge of program like Photoshop.

I have collected ten best and most powerful online Image Optimization. I think you should be already familiar with some of tools so you have to find out new ones. if you think i missed something you can tell in the comment box.

10 Pitfalls to Avoid When Using Stock Photography

Stock Photography is a tricky beast.

The presence or lack of good stock imagery can make or break a design. My best advice is to use custom photography/artwork whenever possible. However, I’m a big fan of stack art because there are tons of scenarios when it makes good sense to purchase someone else’s work over taking the time to create your own. To keep it classy, here are ten things to avoid when you’re working with stock images.

The State of Freelancing: 2010

Last month, I started a Freelance Switch Forum discussion on jobs. The context for this discussion is the high unemployment in the United States and many other countries.

In the U.S., there has been a lot of talk about putting people back to work. In early December, President Obama held a Jobs and Economic Growth Forum at the White House and in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Americans have also been encouraged to host their own forums.

In light of the feedback to my November 2009 Freelance Switch article, “Finding Jobs vs. Finding a Job,” I don’t think the solution lies entirely in creating employment. Many Freelance Switch readers report that they’ve been able to earn a good living without a job. More than a few say that they’re doing much better as freelancers than they were as employees.

Which leads me to this, the State of Freelancing: 2010 Edition. What follows is a brief look at where we are, and what we can expect to deal with in the months ahead.

15 Resources for Easily Creating Web Forms

The resources featured in this post include some free options and a number of paid options. Most of the paid options include a lot of features, and in many cases the ability to integrate your forms with PayPal or other payment gateways.

The Demise of CSS: Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph

"It is my opinion that these [tools like Sass] are only really of benefit to people who haven’t yet mastered writing CSS properly from the outset…" Harry Roberts (CSSwizardry.com) Huh? Sass - Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets Sass only really benefits people who haven’t mastered writing CSS properly? Excuse me? I am a very experienced CSS developer and I find Sass quite valuable having written CSS for a living for many years now. While I won’t claim the level of mastery that an artist like Michelangelo achieved in painting, I can say that I wasn’t born yesterday either. I write all my CSS and HTML by hand. I haven’t used tools like Dreamweaver in nearly a decade.

MySQL utility commands

This post is a summary of MySQL posts from this blog relating to MySQL utility commands, such as describing table structure, dropping columns from a table, and so on; and server settings.

offline web applications

The network is a key component of any web application, whether it is used to download JavaScript, CSS, and HTML source files and accompanying resources (images, videos, …) or to reach web services (XMLHttpRequest and forms).

Yet having offline support for web applications can be very useful to users. Imagine, for example, a webmail application that allows users to read emails already in their inbox and write new messages even when they are not connected.

The mechanism used to support offline web applications can also be used to improve an application’s performance by storing data in the cache or to make data persistent between user sessions and when reloading and restoring pages.

The rules of email engagement

Bulk email is dead. OK, some people might still be doing it, but does that mean it works as well as it could? Just look in your own junk folder to find the many emails you have opted into but no longer reach your inbox.

Make Your Web Applications Addictive: 5 Lessons to Learn from Foursquare

I like to stay up to date with the up-and-coming web and mobile applications out there. It is important to see what is working or not for the folks who develop them as their apps succeed or flounder. Recently I started using an app called Foursquare; perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s one of the apps in the latest crop of location-based applications that have been popping up of late. Despite having launched less than a year ago, Foursquare has had incredible success so far, securing some hefty funding and hitting some pretty impressive benchmarks.

Follow the resources.

• @smashingmag
• @NETTUTS
• @DesignerDepot
• @DesignerDepot
• @onextrapixel
• @catswhocode
• @catswhocode
• @behoff
• @wpengineer
• @tutsplus
• @tutsplus

CSS

• The 1KB CSS Grid
• 15+ techniques and tools for cross browser CSS coding
• Better CSS Font Stacks
• Override Inline Styles with CSS
• 35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome
• 5 Advanced CSS Techniques To Increase Your Skill Set
• 15 Extremely Useful CSS Grid Layout Generator For Web Designers

Start a web application from scratch

• Part 1 – Planning the App: Basic Idea and Design
• Part 2 – Planning the App: Database Architecture and Development Approach
• Part 3 – Designing the App: Workflow Map and Photoshop Design
• Part 4 – Designing the App: HTML and CSS
• Part 5 – Developing the App: User Interaction
• Part 6 – Developing the App: Adding AJAX Interactivity
• Part 7 – Developing the App: List Interaction
• Part 8 – Security & The Future
• Part 9 – Bugs, Security, and Other Tweaks
• And finally…. the application! Colored Lists

Worpress

• 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9
• 10 Easy ways to fix common WordPress headaches
• 20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress
• 45+ Essential WordPress Plugins for Pro Blogging
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS
• 13 Simply Useful WordPress Plugins That Can Make Lives Easier
• WordPress Theme Frameworks – A Comprehensive Overview
• 20+ Brand New and Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins
• Stupid WordPress Tricks
• 12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks for WordPress
• 16 WordPress Sites to Help You Build a Better Blog
• 10 Must Have Hacks For WordPress Development

Php

• Getting Clean With PHP
• phpanywhere.net
• PHP: Display Adobe PSD files on a web page
• 43 Must Read PHP Articles and Resources
• 16 PHP Frameworks To Consider For Your Next Project

User Experience/User Interface

• 5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience | Spyre Studios
• UX pattern Explorer
• Factors That Affect Usability
• 10 Signs of a User-Focused Design
• UX Booth
• Inline Validation in Web Forms
• 10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To
• Forgiveness in UI design
• Usability tips for visualizing Ajax requests
• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• Create and collaborate interactive UI mockups for your software and websites.

Web Design and development

• Beautiful Hand Drawn Websites
• 50 Inspiring Examples of Minimalism in Web Design
• What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect!
• 60 Trendy Web Design Interfaces Created In October
• 75+ Truly Remarkable Typography Resources
• Quick reference search in HTML, CSS, JS, Ajax and other developer documentation
• Firediff is a Firebug extension that tracks changes to a pages DOM and CSS.
• The Evolution of a Website Design
• 50 Helpful iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers
• Creating a Usable Contact Form
• Speed Up Your Website with Better Image Optimization in Photoshop
• 22 Awesome Adobe AIR Applications for Designers
• 50 Creative and Inspiring 404 Pages
• 50 Brilliant Design Articles of 2008
• 10 short 'n' sweet tips on how to design for web
• [PDF] 25-point Website Usability Checklist
• 40+ Beautiful Patterns and Textures
• If Content is Really King, Then What is Design?
• The Benefits of Experimentation
• 25 Must-Read Blogs for Freelance Designers
• Pagination is dead
• Use Sprites to Create an Awesomeness-Filled Navigation Menu
• Create a Twitter-Like "Load More" Widget
• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
• 40 Beautifully-Designed Navigation Menus:
• Usability testing userfly.com
• 35+ Horizontal Websites for Your Design Inspiration
• CometChat is the first integrated inline chat script which works straight from your website
• More Stencil Fun For Designers
• 25 Awesome Facebook Apps for Designers
• Minimalist Web Design: When Less is More
• Solutions to 5 Common Ajax Problems
• http://zentextures.com/
• How important are web standards?
• ColdFusion Coming Back???
• On Web Typography
• 10 Tips for a Fast Website | Layers Magazine
• Designers Predict Design Trends for 2010 - Part I
• Logo inspiration gallery
• 13 Must-Have Add-ons To Strengthen Firebug
• The Unusable and Superficial World of Beer and Alcohol Websites
• Web Application Interface Design Guide

Tutorials/Tips/Opinions

• Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process
• Everything You Ever Want to Know About Creating Seamless Patterns in Illustrator
• 5 Articles To Understanding Your Websites Bounce Rate
• Adaptable view - how do they do it?
• 7 Tips To Make Your Web Site Mobile-friendly
• Fireworks vs Photoshop Compression
• The Future Of The Web: Where Will We Be In Five Years?
• 15 Helpful Blogs No Freelancer Should Forget
• Ultimate Guide To Grid-Based Web Design: Techniques and Tools
• ColoRotate: browse and create your color palette in 3D
• How to manage a small web project: a simple approach
• Search Engine Optimization 101
• Real-Life Twitter Business Success Stories
• Benefits of Increasing Communication in the Development Process
• http://www.prettyloaded.com/
• Love what you do and they will listen – my Pecha Kucha talk for Webdirections East in Tokyo
• Web Design is Dead! Introducing a much improved web design process.

Tools

• 25 Free Must Download Design Programs
• Website Analytics Toolbox
• Here's an nteresting drawing application called LiveBrush (free download):
• 20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier
• Don’t Be Stupid - Typographic Poster for Download
• Typekit looks sharp! Some really cool fonts as well
• ui-patterns.com - design patterns
• ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• open source data visualization
• 35 Absolutely Useful Firefox Plugins For Web Designers And Developers
• Adobe Browserlab An easier, faster solution for cross-browser
• Site-Specific Browsers: Turn Websites Into Desktop Applications
• An open source web application meant to help manage & create invoices in a simple, straightforward way.
• 10 Amazing Tools for Sharing Visual Inspiration through Screenshots
• Tracker is an story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate in real-time.Links for today
• Eight Robust Tools To Simplify Developer’s Worklife
• Pencil an animation/drawing software

Wireframing/ Prototyping

• Mockingbird Wireframes on the fly.
• The Importance Of Wireframes In Web Design And 9 Tools To Create Wireframes
• The Guided Wireframe Narrative for Rich Internet Applications
• 20 Steps to Better Wireframing
• 21 Prototyping, Mockup, and Wireframing Tools for iPhone App Development
• Online wireframing tool with a core strength in content formatting and page structure.
• A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources
• 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources
• Practical Prototyping Tips

Flash

• Away 3d Realtime 3d Engine for flash
• GeneralRelativity Flash Animation Library
• Why Flash Might Not Be Good For Your Website
• Client-Side File Generator with Javascript & Flash 10+
• AS3 tween Engine
• Swiz is a framework for Adobe Flex that aims to bring complete simplicity to RIA development.

Javascript

• Ajax Push Engine - Real time data streaming
• Learning Advanced JavaScript
• Tiny JS is an online directory of small but powerful plugins for popular JavaScript/Ajax libraries
• 7 Powerful image carousels for web designers
• Produce Interactive Charts of Time Series with dygraphs

Productivity

• 10 Ways for Designers to Boost Productivity
• 27 Must-Have Starter Kits For Web Designers
• How to Effectively Organize your Photoshop Layers
• Reinventing the Color Picker
• 100 Terrific Web Design Cheat Sheets that Will Save you Time, Money and Mistakes

Iphone

• iUI: iPhone User Interface Framework
• 43 iPhone Development Resources
• UI Stencil Kit for iPhone App Designers
• iPhone App Site Design Trends

• Gmail/Facebook Style jQuery Chat
• A jQuery Plugin for Zoomable, Interactive Maps
• Sexy Drop Down Menu w/ jQuery & CSS
• A jQuery inline form validation, because validation is a mess
• Smart Columns w/ CSS & jQuery
• Stupid jQuery Tricks
• Flot Pure Javascript Plotting Library for jQuery
• How to Turn Long Web Form into a Wizard with jQuery
• 15 jQuery Plugins To Create A User Friendly Tooltip
• Making an Interactive Picture with jQuery
• jQuery Tools is a collection of the most important user-interface components for today’s websites.
• jQuery Infinite Carousel
• The bug Jquery List
• Making a Content Slider with jQuery UI – Me Likey!
• 20 Fresh jQuery Plugins to Enhance your User Interface
• Making A Cool Login System With PHP, MySQL & jQuery
• A Beautiful Apple-style Slideshow Gallery With CSS & jQuery
• 12 Excellent jQuery Plugins for Enhancing Forms
• 12 Useful jQuery Plugins for Working with Tables
• The Best jQuery Plugins of 2009
• 30 Jquery plugins
• 10 jQuery snippets for efficient developers
• How to Implement Docking Functionality with jQuery
• Create YouTube-like adaptable view using CSS and jQuery

Why Flash Might Not Be Good For Your Website

Factors That Affect Usability

Client-Side File Generator with Javascript & Flash 10+

From http://css-tricks.com Creating a webapp from scratch series
Part 1 – Planning the App: Basic Idea and Design
Part 2 – Planning the App: Database Architecture and Development Approach
Part 3 – Designing the App: Workflow Map and Photoshop Design
Part 4 – Designing the App: HTML and CSS
Part 5 – Developing the App: User Interaction
Part 6 – Developing the App: Adding AJAX Interactivity
Part 7 – Developing the App: List Interaction
Part 8 – Security & The Future
Part 9 – Bugs, Security, and Other Tweaks
And finally…. the application! Colored Lists

Eight Robust Tools To Simplify Developer’s Worklife

35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome

The Benefits of Experimentation

Solutions to 5 Common Ajax Problems

Produce Interactive Charts of Time Series with dygraphs

Flot Pure Javascript Plotting Library for jQuery

10 jQuery snippets for efficient developers

Stupid jQuery Tricks

A Beautiful Apple-style Slideshow Gallery With CSS & jQuery

Making A Cool Login System With PHP, MySQL & jQuery