1stwebdesigner

Posted by ryan | Posted on 17:02

Posted: 04 Apr 2010 04:00 AM PDT

As you may notice 1stwebdesigner has started to change a lot throughout past few months. We will also start to cover Design Community news and do monthly (maybe weekly in future) reviews of top design links, articles, websites. Now you may find it all only by reading your feed regularly, checking Twitter daily and being constant visitor of social news sites – Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious. We want to give you some relief and do this time-consuming part ourselves and put it in easy to read and scan article.

This is only the first article, in future we will also ask for you help and assistance finding all those great new articles which may slip our eyes, we have a long way to grow – but let's start enjoying little things!

1. News In Design Niche

Smashing Magazine Needs Could Use Your Help Today

There was huge buzz around SmashingMag when they asked for help and redirected all their posts to sales page. Such move of course got big attention, many opinions and a lot of loyal readers responded! For me it was interesting experiment from SmashingMag side, however I am not sure if they were expecting such attention, but discussion evolved. Visit their article and few more articles discussing this topic and sharing interesting opinions:

Presenting the Great New Features of jQuery UI 1.8

The final version of jQuery UI 1.8 just got released a few days ago. This article will go through all new features and also show you some examples with the new widgets.

MediaLoot Site Launched!

New premium design resource toolbox site launched by Spyrestudios. Read what they are saying about themselves: "MediaLoot was created by Jon and Mason because they got tired of buying dozens of individual graphic resources. It was their dream to build a single collection of awesome resources that would be the ultimate designer toolbox." I think their product is great success already!

Adobe Creative Suite CS5 – Sneak Peek Videos

Adobe Creative Suite CS5 will launched on Monday, April 12,2010!! Get some sneak peek videos about all suite softwares and also read comprehensive article from DesignShack just about new Photoshop – Photoshop CS5: A Sneak Peek to learn more.

BuySellAds is 2 years old!

In two years one gathers more than just days and months. Visit their site to see collection of events, facts, impressions, gigabytes, followers, links, features, countries & a lot more in the first BSA infographic.

FindIcons – New Free Icon Download Site Launched

FindIcons has really huge icon collection and sophisticated search engine, icons are very easy to find and download – my favorite site lately.

Wordpress 3.0 Features Walk Through

In May 1, 2010 we can await for new release from Wordpress announcing version 3.0. What changes and improvements we can expect? Ready for some sneak peek insight? In screenshot below you can see new Wordpress default theme called "Twenty Ten". Read more in original article!

Update – WordPress 3.0, Beta 1 is out!!, download and check out all upcoming features now live!

2. Blogging Tips, Ways Of Thinking, Freelance

52 Weeks of UX

Want to learn everything about UX, head out to this site where experienced Joshua Brewer the Director of User Experience at Socialcast.com will teach you it in 52 weeks! Love the idea and site!

What Every Designer Should Do Right Now

5 really well explained must do things right now to be up to date, be organized and competitive! Very good!

10 Kick Ass Presentation Techniques

If you want to create really interesting and unique presentations, you must read this post! Watch also presentation video at the end of article, Alex Hunter really knows what he is talking about.

Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels

This is the first part of explaining how to use Google Analytics more effectively, I bet you will learn something there!

Client Tactics: Maintaining Existing Clients, How to Spot a Deadbeat Client, Making an Impression on a Client

Learn everything about tactics you need to use to successfully deal with your clients.

To Sketch or Not To Sketch – That is the question

Dedicated and uniquely design page just to answer this long-lasting question.

Books in the age of the iPad

What is happening and what's gonna happen? "Print is dying, digital is surging – everyone is confused" – very thoughtful article.

Tumblr: An Introduction Guide For Microblogging – Part 1

Tumblr is set to become the blogging tool of 2010 with its massive growth, yet still many people don’t fully understand what Tumblr does, or how it works.

11 Wordpress Plugins To Manage Your Ads Banners

Handy Wordpress plugins for advertisements, you have great chance to read explained reviews about each banner to easily pick one the most suitable for your site.

5 Kinds of Blog Posts That Attract Clients

Kind of short article, but very easy reading to understand how to write valuable blog post from marketing point of view as well.

March Interview Madness

Brian Mclovin is going mad into interviews, he will do 55 interviews in upcoming months. Head out to his site to 26 interviews already, I am reading each interview with excitement. While you are on his site, I suggest you to read also Killing The List Post article and discussion in comments.

3. Inspiration

HTML5 Gallery

Want to see beautiful and inspiring sites designed in HTML5? Visit this new web showcase site.

33 Letterpress Business Cards for Inspiration

Letterpress type appearance in printed business cards is simply amazing! Get inspired and have your own business card created!

38 Mobile (iPhone) Sites

Mobile world is used more and more, designers need to think about this format as well – let's see creative and well done examples of such designs!

4. Web Design Tips&Tutorials – HtML5,CSS3 And More

HTML5 Rocks My Socks Off

Read about new HTML5 features and improvements you can do now! Tutorial and tips type of article.

Opera Logo With CSS3

Looks like now designers will code all images they do in Photoshop ;D Cool article and tutorial recreating Opera logo using just plain CSS3.

Empathizing Color Psychology in Web Design

Learn about color perception and color psychology in website design, the way different brands use colors and what’s their message.

Know How To Plan Your Website Redesign & Get Inspired

Understand how to plan your website redesign in right and planned way! This article will help you make clear your goals and get you inspired with successful redesigns.

How Accessible is Your Website? 8 Tools to Analyze Your Website's Level of Accessibility

Creative Button Animations with Sprites and JQuery (Part 1: Photoshop)

Two part article, which leads you though designing stylish button in Photoshop and then continue with CSS and even add spice with jQuery. View finished demo here.

Techniques for Squeezing Images for All They're Worth

Image saving and squeezing without loosing quality is very crucial part in web designs, learn how to lower file size and decrease page loading times using CSS sprites.

Fight Div-itis and Class-itis With the 960 Grid System

Learn how to take good things from 960 Grid system and other CSS frameworks, but to remember about clean code in the same time too. Frameworks always offer more, because it is meant to cover almost everything you could use – understand what it represents and what you really need to use!

Quick Tip: How to Target IE6, IE7, and IE8 Uniquely with 4 Characters

In short 4:12 min video you will learn about new CSS hack how to target IE8 and lower versions, which may be not the best practise, but fun to do!

CSS In Depth Part 1: Margins, Padding & The Box Model

There are four parts published in Spyrestudios explaining some simple and advanced features in CSS – must read all four!

47 CSS Tips & Tricks To Take Your Site To The Next Level

Here are 47 of specific solutions in many common problems you may face in daily development proess. 47 CSS Tips, Tricks, and Techniques to add to your CSS toolbox.

10 WordPress query_posts tips you probably don't know

If you want to create unique wp themes, it's necessary to know how to call out different arrangements of posts from WordPress database. Read this article for learning what query_posts command in WordPress is and how to use it in your upcoming theme.

Advanced Wordpress Comment Styles and Tricks

Read this in-depth article to learn the advanced techniques on styling of WordPress Comments sections.

Creating a Tumblog with WordPress

Even wondered how to create WordPress blogs which have Tumblr functionality in them? Learn the basic techniques used behind the recently released Tumblog themes from WooTeam.

5. Social Media, SEO

Why I Don't Get SEO

"I don't get why people invest in SEO. I am not trying to start an argument. I just want to explain my doubts so somebody can correct me." – interesting way of thinking from Paul Boag and I completely agree with him – read there why you don't need to invest big money in SEO, why it's just not worth it.

Find Your Favorite Design Communities on Facebook

Find several Facebook fan pages and communities now and also read several short tips how to promote your Facebook page. By the way, 1STWD has it's own fan page as well, we are not promoting it a lot for now though

Social Media is Bullshit

"Social media is just a buzzword until you come up with a plan. Using a word is easy — coming up with a plan past "register for this site" is not." Interesting reading.

40 of the Most Useful Social Media and PR Blog Posts of Q1, 2010 (Jan – Mar)

Adam from SocialMediaToday has pulled together extremely useful list of must read articles if you want to get better on social media, blogging, Google and more.

6. Coding Resources, Examples:

Curtis CSS Typeface

This version takes form in CSS. All shapes are rendered by the browser, using a combination of background color, border width, border radius, and a heavily reliance on absolute/relative positioning. You can get a better idea of how the letters were formed with the Inspect display option.

22 Handy HTML5 & CSS3 Tools, Resources And Guides

HTML5 and CSS3 are bringing new features to us and in this article you'll be able to find some great tools, cheat sheets and much more you could need to master these new features.

jQuery Bookmarklet Generator

This is a pretty handy tool for bookmarklets that need jQuery to execute their function. It helps in situations where you don't know if the specific minimum required version of jQuery will already load in the page.

7 Secure, Lightweight, and Easy to Use PHP Frameworks

An awesome write up by Noura Yehya on comparison of different PHP frameworks. If you are a beginner then I will highly suggest you to read the article.

43 Essential Controls for Web Applications

Designing a web application? Familiarize yourself with Rich Internet Application technologies and the best UI controls for creating your application.

100 Essential Web Development Tools

Huge list of webdev tools showcased in 10 categories, very easy to scan and useful for later reference.

CSS3, Please! The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator

Beautiful idea and CSS rule generator, where you can modify CSS3 rules and see preview right away on the box. Very good tool to test and understand new CSS3 features.

10 Examples Of Futuristic CSS3 Techniques

Jean-Baptiste Jung has collected stunningly creative examples of CSS3 use in modern webdesign.

20 jQuery Cheatsheets, Docs and References for Every Occasion

Speckyboy always offer great and useful list articles, which can help greatly in your daily development process. Need some help with jQuery in order to remember some short code snippets or read guides as references?