Should You Keep Your Website Open Source?

When you enter the world of web hosting, you will find yourself inundated with options. Choosing a hosting company is only the beginning. Even after you have a domain, hosting account, and all of the preliminary tasks out of the way, you still have to build a website…. read more

Win $1,000 in PSD to HTML services!

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An Introduction to Concrete5 CMS — Part I

When we talk of CMS, the options are plenty. For a start, we can opt for some of the biggest names in the game – WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! However, in this article, we shall take a look at one of the fastest growing and light-weight CMS, that is, Concrete5…. read more

How Commercial Plugin Developers Are Using The WordPress Repository

A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can put together a great readme.txt for the WordPress plugin directory. In addition to using a WordPress readme as a tool to help out your users, you can use it to promote your commercial products and services. While commercial theme developers… read more

We have $700 worth of services from PSD2HTML.com to giveaway

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If you’re a busy web designer or web developer, this week’s competition is the perfect solution for your PSD to HTML slicing needs. PSD2HTML.com are giving away $400 worth of services for the winner and $300 for the runner-up.
All you have to do… read more

Usability Design for Online Web Forms

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Designers aren’t just creating pleasing graphics for the Internet anymore. As a web designer you need to consider other properties of user interaction and coding. UX design is possibly the most important topic to cover, and this is especially true designing web forms. All webmasters should… read more

HTML & CSS Blog Layout – Theme Implementation for WordPress

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In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to adapt a simple HTML blog layout into a WordPress theme. We’ll be using this static page as starting point.

Grab the code from Github

The Brilliante Layout project source code for this theme is available on Github, including the… read more

Zurb’s newest offering for developers: Foundation

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Ten Alternatives to WordPress as a Blogging CMS

We all know that WordPress is an awesome Content Management System cum Blogging Platform. In fact, it is also the most popular blogging tool all over the internet. Name any other CMS – WordPress eats them all out for lunch!

However, as a web designer/developer/enthusiast, being knowledgeable about an extra CMS… read more

44 Photoshop Web Design Layout Tutorials

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In this roundup we have collected 44 outstanding photoshop tutorials. Enjoy these over your holiday!

Design a creative portfolio in Photoshop

How to create a colorful business web layout

Create A Detailed Solid Dark Layout In Photoshop

How to create a One-Page Website Design in Adobe… read more

Best of the Week #202

It’s time for our best news of this week. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to keep you updated about what’s… read more

Best Of 2011: 45 Photoshop Web Design Layout Tutorials

Photoshop is a well-liked web design instrument. With it, you can generate web design mock-ups that can later on be transformed to a practical and efficient HTML / CSS template. In today’s collection of tutorials, we are featuring some top-notch techniques on how to generate your own web design layouts… read more

Christmas & New Year Special Giveaway: Prizes Worth Over $20,000

The end of this year is almost coming and Christmas is already on our doorsteps. It’s never too late to hang your stockings, keep milk and cookies and wait for Santa to drop in at your home with lots of gifts and Christmas cheer. It’s time for Santa’s gifts, for… read more

50 Fantastic Premium Business WordPress Themes From 2011

Whilst Joomla and Drupal are popular amongst website designers, WordPress is by far the number 1 used CMS in the world. Which is one of the reasons that WordPress themes are seen as such a hot commodity these days in the design world.

It’s popularity amongst design firms could explain the… read more

Dear Drupal: Season’s Greetings. Love, Smashing WordPress.

Every day I work with WordPress in one way or another. My Twitter feed is full of WordPress types, and I’m a regular at my local WordPress meetup. I’m a WordPress fan.

The developer across the hall from me works with Joomla. His Twitter feed is full of Joomla types, and… read more

Is Drupal Good for Design? What do you think?

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Drupal has a reputation for being strong in functionality and having a strong community, but weak when it comes to design. In deciding which cms to use, it is important to make the right decision, especially when considering design features. The following will cover how… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, December

Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers… read more

Optimizing your Website for Social User Experience

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Social web 2.0 trends have taken over many of our modern static websites. Nowadays it’s difficult to find a company who isn’t on Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare, or any of the other increasingly popular social networks. It’s important to consider this experience and how you… read more

Turning Small Projects Into Big Profit, A Case Study

In the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web presence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce new coffees, events and… read more

Web design predictions for 2012

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A Comprehensive Checklist To Creating The Perfect WordPress Website

There is no doubt that WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) for your website. Sure, countless CMS’ are available, ranging from open-source to paid, and you’ll hear evangelists on all sides swearing that their choice is the best. But Drupal, Joomla or any other CMS doesn’t hold a… read more

Best Free and Premium Drupal Themes (Templates)

Best Free and Premium Drupal Themes (Templates)

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Review: Radiant CMS — A Simple, User-Friendly CMS

Radiant CMS is a simple Content Management System built using Ruby on Rails. It is licensed under the MIT Licence, which means it is freely redistributable and can be employed for both commercial and non-profit usage. Radiant CMS is ideal for small enterprises and teams.

INTRODUCTION

Radiant has a fairly simple and… read more

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal: What Makes These CMS Different

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal: What Makes These CMS Different

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What designers can learn from different animals

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7 Essential Features a CMS for Beginners Must Have

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When you are looking for a CMS, there are many factors to consider. Obviously, the feature it has is one of them. However, you also need to consider your skill level because when you are a beginner, you can’t take advantage of all the advanced… read more

Drupal Facebook Templates: Innovative Solution for a Fan Page Creation

Drupal Facebook Templates: Innovative Solution for a Fan Page Creation

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How to Design Functional Sub-Navigation Menus

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JavaScript libraries such as jQuery have fundamentally shifted the course of web development. It is now easier than ever to prototype UI functionality, animations, slideshows, and of course dynamic navigation. I feel this tremendous growth is allowing for developers to build page elements with less… read more

How WordPress Took The CMS Crown From Drupal And Joomla

Market Share

According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPress. WordPress is a darn fine CMS and is stable and easy to use, but so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have… read more

Backup Machine: Automated Peace of Mind

You know that sinking feeling you get, when you realize something has just disappeared from your grasp forever? That stomach twisting pain at something that cost so much money, or so much time, something that’s practically irreplaceable just disappearing into thin air. I hate that feeling.

The proliferation of digital goods… read more

32 Nice Event Websites

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Today we are featuring 32 nice event websites. Enjoy! If you like these designs you might also want to check out our previous posts below.

38 Beautiful Ecommerce Websites

40 Beautiful Illustrations in Web Design

thecombine

drupalcampatlanta

busesatthebrewery

frontend2011

immovingtoboulder

dartstlouis

ifperformance

tribecon

cumbrelideres

flowfestival

socialsummit

boudinandbeer

drupalcamp24x7<br… read more

3 Mistakes Web Programmers Need to Stop Making

Jonathan Goldford is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence. You can connect with Jonathan on the JG Visual Facebook page.

Sometimes as programmers, we forget that 99.9% of the population doesn’t care how a piece of text,… read more

BlozZit – Free Professional HTML/CSS Template (+Full-Layered PSD Files)

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We have a fantastic freebie for you today, you’ll love this. The kind people from More than Themes have kindly offered their beautifully crafted HTML/CSS template BlozZit to all of our readers. It comes in two color variants (light & dark) and has been built… read more

Propeople sessions for DrupalCon Denver 2012

Propeople sessions for DrupalCon Denver 2012

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Eight Different Sites That You Can Build With Drupal CMS

Eight Different Sites That You Can Build With Drupal CMS

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How Freelancers Can Network Better at Coworking Space

Credit: Charleston's TheDigitel on Flickr

Freelancers have long been drawn to coworking spaces because of the opportunities to network and work alongside others from different or complementary industries and creative fields, sharing the working space and resources. However, what sets coworking apart from mere shared office space is its focus… read more

Reviews Of Blog Designs In The Wild

Like any designer, no website is without its merits and flaws. It is through critical analysis and thoughtful conversation that we grow as individuals. If we do not talk about our work and the work of others, then we will not grow as creatives.

We have evaluated each website in this… read more

Top 10 content management systems

There are dozens of great CMSs out there. Regardless of what type of site you’re building, there’s probably one perfectly-suited to it.

The problem is that most designers and developers don’t want to spend time learning a bunch of different CMSs. They want to learn one, or maybe… read more

Best Premium Joomla Template Providers

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Why would I use premium Joomla Templates while tons of free Joomla templates are available out there? You may be one of the people to ask this question.

If you notice, most Joomla providers offer both free and commercial templates; however, the number of purchases is… read more

Focusing on Good Design, Not (Just) Good Decoration

Time and time again, we mistake good decoration for good design. When we are looking for inspiration, we go to the same websites and the same showcases trying to get that added push necessary to create something we love. Now this isn’t a huge deal (especially if we are looking… read more

10 Killer Apps for Freelance Bloggers

A freelance blogger is a jack-of-all-trades. This person has writing, design and coding skills, all used to create inspiring content. Besides, blogging requires a lot of responsibility, perseverance and diligence dealing with web media on a daily basis.

There are plenty of tools that facilitate blogging and allow freelancers… read more

Teaching Yourself Web Design While You Freelance

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There is plenty of opportunity to make a decent living online. The field of web design is extremely popular in the current information age. Everybody needs to have a website up and you can always find a few solid business clients. But what about building upon… read more

30 Fresh Minimal WordPress Themes (2011 Edition)

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Minimal is the timeless web design trend of basic styling a web page and stripping out all non-essential elements allowing the reader to focus solely on the content with absolutely no distractions. Achieving the balance between content and minimal design is not easy, but in… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 2, October

Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers… read more

Markup-Service Competition: $700 Worth of Services Up For Grabs

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This weeks fantastic giveaway will come in useful for web designers and web developers who are short on time and want to convert their designs into high quality, semantic and valid markup. Markup-Service is giving away free services to two lucky winners! First prize is $400… read more

10 Free Android Apps To Boost Your Productivity With

Having a smartphone in your pocket has somewhat become a style statement, but apart from its appearance and style appeal, it allows you to perform all tasks that you would perform with your laptop or computer. This is the main reason of smartphone popularity.

For the designing fraternity, there are plentiful… read more

20 Beautiful and Creative Free Drupal Themes

20 Beautiful and Creative Free Drupal Themes

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Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 1, October

Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers… read more

MediaWiki: The Definitive Wiki Engine

By now most everyone online has heard of Wikipedia; the online encyclopedia that boasts millions of articles in dozens of languages. It revolutionised the way content was delivered online and popularised the word ‘Wiki‘. According to Google, it is the 6th most popular website in the world.

What you may not… read more

Artists’ Digital Masks Move With Your Face [VIDEO]

Maybe you haven’t always wanted to substitute your face for that of Brad Pitt or Paris Hilton, but you might soon be able to — at least digitally.

Artists Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro have created a face-substitution program that makes it look like your face has morphed into… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 4, September

Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers… read more

Best of the Week #190

It’s time for our best news of this week. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to keep you updated about what’s… read more

How Drupal CMS stands above the rest

As a site developer, web designer or site administrator, you’ve probably had to go through the process of choosing between platforms. But maybe not recently—if you’ve been designing and developing web sites for very long, chances are you’ve already got your favorite go-to platform that you always use. And if… read more

Upcoming Web Design and Development Conferences in 2011-12

We spend a lot of time learning and thinking about the designs we see online, yet what we miss quite often are practical insights into the design process and workflow of our colleagues. This is why conferences are great for our industry. We meet people who think very much like… read more

Why to Choose Drupal for Large Websites Development?

Why to Choose Drupal for Large Websites Development?

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Traits of Successful Website Welcome Pages

Many websites these days have some form of welcome area on their homepage. Welcome pages generally act as an introduction for new visitors, explain the website and often prompt an action on the part of the user.

Website welcome pages are typically more prevalent at personal websites, portfolios, and traditional businesses…. read more

Getting Started With The PayPal API

PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments today. The ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account with a traditional payment gateway is probably the number one reason for its popularity, with a close second being the comprehensive API that… read more

15 Free WordPress Themes with a Responsive Layout

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The most popular topic of discussion at the moment, amongst web designers anyway, is undoubtedly responsive web design. This is in response to the popularity, over the past couple of years, of visitors opting to use a mobile device of some sort (Android, iPhone, iPad..) to… read more

Sites of the Week #169

For this Sites of the Week we have selected some great sites such as Eeharbor and Drupal Camp Atlanta. Also we’re featuring the beautiful LeaderBe website, and much, much more! As usual we would love to hear from you, keep sending your suggestions to us and we will be more… read more

Surviving Design Blog Saturation : Is The Future in the Niche?

One of the topics that the design blogging community touches on from time to time, concerns the saturation levels of the blogosphere with regards to design blogs. There are so many design centric blogs filling the landscape that the chances of capturing enough of the available audience out there so… read more

Find a Job in Social Media, Marketing or Design

If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable‘s Job Lists section gathers together all of our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles on How to Leverage Social Media… read more

Best of the Week #185

It’s time for our best news of this week. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to keep you updated about what’s… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, August

Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated staff and volunteers… read more

8 Simple Ways to Improve the Speed of Your Drupal Site

8 Simple Ways to Improve the Speed of Your Drupal Site

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Bumpin Social Bar And Shoutbox Adds Social Interactivity To Your Site

Gone are those days when you would just publish a blog post and wait for readers or visitors to hop over it. This is the age of social media where content is discovered, shared and distributed through “people” who love reading your content and are pleased enough to recommend your… read more

Newbie Tips For Optimizing Your Blog For Mobile Devices

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Websites are now no longer viewed primarily on large-screened devices like desktop and laptop computers. In a world that has gone crazy for smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices, they are now increasingly viewed on screens that measure only 4″ diagonally. This presents some unique… read more

Our favorite tweets of the week Jul 25-Jul 31, 2011

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The Open Source Movement

The open source movement or philosophy is something that I am truly passionate about, and something that can have beneficial effects for all industries related to technology and its use. In this article, I’ll outline information about the philosophy, what it means for the web design industry, how you can… read more

8 Things Newbie Web Designers Should Know About SEO

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Even the most SEO obsessed web site owners still want a site that looks good. Design aesthetics play a huge role in the success or failure of any site. Elements of design can impact conversions, credibility, and engagement. But some designs can also limit a web… read more

Managing Your Time with Freelance and Personal Design Projects

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Providing your services as a freelancer is hard work. It will require a lot of your time, patience, and gratitude towards your customers. Set aside the fact you’ll be slaving away on many projects just to pay bills, all the while often ignoring your own creative… read more

Getting Started with WordPress Shortcodes (+Examples)

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Shortcodes were introduced in WordPress 2.5, and help you to create macro codes to use within your content. If you think about it, this is a great way to create something like a dynamic ad spot or a call-to-action button in your posts.

If we use the… read more

10 Most Powerful Drupal Distributions

10 Most Powerful Drupal Distributions

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Why and How to Choose PSD to Drupal Conversion Service Provider

Why and How to Choose PSD to Drupal Conversion Service Provider

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Choosing Media Temples Dedicated-Virtual (dv) Service as Our New Host

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Media Temple is one of the more popular premium web hosting services out there. Media Temple is also pretty divisive – some swear by its quality, others claim it’s nothing but overpriced style-over-performance. Regardless, you can’t deny that it’s used by some big websites and bloggers… read more

Improve Your Site’s SEO with Simple Drupal Modules

Improve Your Site’s SEO with Simple Drupal Modules

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Performance tips for Drupal Theming

Performance tips for Drupal Theming

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How to Create a Basic WordPress Theme with Gantry Framework

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Gantry Framework is a WordPress theme framework that, unlike most of its modern counterparts, allows the user to construct a layout and color palette from within the WordPress admin backend itself. It’s powerful and flexible enough that power users can harness Gantry to achieve much greater… read more

Create a Facebook Recent Activity Drupal Module

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Enhancing Drupal’s built-in functionality with new modules is one of the features that attracted a lot of developers to the platform and made it extremely popular. This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a Drupal module, using techniques recommended by Drupal gurus. Before getting our hands dirty, let’s take… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 4, June

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Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated… read more

Email marketing services reviewed

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Quick Look: Socialbar

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Socialbar. The developer describes Socialbar as a toolbar for your website that offers more than… read more

Useful Resources, Tools and Services for Web Designers

Productivity is a crucial asset of professional Web designers and developers. We regularly look for new resources, tools and services to make the search of these ever-growing techniques easier. Once we have a reasonable number of useful resources, we prepare them in a handy overview for your convenience. In this… read more

Sean Hodge Takes Over as Editor of FreelanceSwitch

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For those of you in the know, you’ve probably noticed that Amanda Hackwith has moved to the Rockable Press side of our business following the release of her successful book Freelance Confidential: The Whole Truth on Freelancing. She’s still a full-time Editor at Envato, but is… read more

Useful, Free Smartphone Apps and Resources for Developers

Smartphones are everywhere, and people all over the world are using them because of the many useful and amazing features they have that people love. People use smartphones for their daily work because smartphones have loads of advantages over a PC or Laptop, portability being a major one. Smartphone based… read more

A Review Of Customer Service And Support Models Of Premium WordPress Shops

The WordPress eco-system has changed so much in the past few years that keeping up with all of it has become a challenge! It’s been so encouraging not only to see WordPress themes and plug-ins increase in quality and use, but to see the overall appeal and acceptance in the… read more

Understanding Copyright And Licenses

The Web is full of creative and practical resources that we can use to improve our projects. Photography, fonts, music and code are perfect examples. Finding stock objects and existing implementations is often quicker, cheaper and more practical than producing your own.

Whether free or not, these resources normally come with… read more

10 WordPress Plugins to Help Optimize Performance

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One of the biggest reasons behind WordPress’ popularity is the vast number of plugins that can not only extend its functionality but there are also many plugins that will improve the performance of a site. These plugins have the capability to make a site faster, that… read more

How To Embed Practically Anything On Your Blog or Website

If you want the hands-down, easiest way to embed practically anything on your blog or website, have we got a tool for you!

The nature of the web is such that sharing and republishing content is common — and often even encouraged. The problem is, we increasingly store… read more

Ask FreelanceSwitch: Moving from Full-time to Freelancing

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In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at moving from full-time to freelance. Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email… read more

45+ Useful Yet Free eBooks For Designers And Developers

Internet has made the world of knowledge and information so much open than it ever had before. With thousands of tutorials available online and proper standards in place, it just takes few days of study to master even the most complicated skills.

Designing community always require useful resources and new techniques… read more

Freebie: 40+ Awesome Textured Icons

Icons are very essential in almost any web project. Effective use of icons can easily help bridge connection between the user and the website. Websites, specially blogs and community sites, normally use icons.

To continue our grateful attitude to our readers and community in general, we are glad to release yet… read more

21 Examples of Parallax Scrolling in Web Design

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Parallax is a difference in the in the apparent position of an object viewed along different lines of sight. The term derives from the Greek word parallaxis, meaning alteration. In web design, the parallax effect is a relatively new trend. The effect itself has been around… read more

Photos Come Alive: Thinglink Tags Music, People & Products in Images

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Thinglink

Quick Pitch: Thinglink changes how people interact with photos by transforming them into… read more

Top Freelance Jobs from Job Board – Week 3, May

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Looking for a new client? The FreelanceSwitch job board is a great resource of freelance gigs and opportunities. These opportunities are in various fields, from development to writing to design, and come from a wide range of potential clients. The job board is hand-moderated by dedicated… read more

Examples of Blue in Web Design

In current day web design blue has become a dominate color.  In the following examples, we will show you how blue can help make your website stand out from the crowd.

Postbox

Courier for Mac

Awesome

Hull Digital Live 10

Capo – Learn Your Music

Foundation Six Web Design Studio

Rockstar Business

Marie Catribs

WVA 2011

Olioboard… read more

Top 10 PSD to Drupal Service Providers

Top 10 PSD to Drupal Service Providers

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Best of the Week #170

It’s time for our best news of this week. We have a lot of graphic and web design, a bit of architecture, ads, tech news, awesome reads and other crazy stuff! So take a look at the links we’ve selected for your inspiration and to keep you updated about what’s… read more

Advanced commenting systems for WordPress

Source

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Enchanting drupal premium themes for your inspiration

Enchanting drupal premium themes for your inspiration

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How to Create a Basic Drupal Block Module

How to Create a Basic Drupal Block Module

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