1stwebdesigner

Posted by ryan | Posted on 18:26

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT

It can often be inconvenient and time consuming to visit each design or tutorial blog to check out whether there’s a new tutorial you’re interested in. Moreover if you’re a beginner you just want to find high-quality tutorials quickly and preferably in one place. Sites like this exist, but I bet most of you haven’t seen anything other than Photoshop Lady. I’m not a big fan of these large search engines, though they can be really useful and handy, and not only for visitors and readers. Having your tutorial published on various sites will generate a lot of traffic and publicity for you. It’s a win-win situation – more people will be able to learn from your tutorial and you will get more visitors to your blog.

1. Pixel2Life

Pixel2Life is the largest tutorial search engine on the web. Here you’ll find almost any Photoshop tutorial you can imagine as well as tutorials for web development, audio editing etc.

2. Good-Tutorials

Good-Tutorials is the largest source of tutorials on the web today. It has been featured on the BBC, SkyNews, TechTV (now G4), in the British magazine iCreate, PC World, and has been linked to by thousands of sites, blogs and forums.

3. PSLover

Although not that big, PSLover is another great resource for finding and submitting Photoshop tutorials. Categories make it easier to find the tutorials you’re looking for.

4. Tutorialized

Tutorialized is one of the biggest tutorial sites on the web and offers a really wide range of tutorials pertaining to graphic design, web development, databases etc.

5. TutorialVault

Tutorialvault focuses on collecting and archiving the best graphic and coding tutorials on the internet. While a large part of their database features tutorials from the Adobe Family of programs, they also have a vast list of CSS, PHP and 3D tutorials.

6. Capital Tutorials

Capital Tutorials is a relatively small community with 5000 Photoshop tutorials submitted.

7. Tutorials Garden

With over 7000 tutorials submitted, Tutorials Garden, is a neat place to submit your tutorials.

8. DesignBump

Des ignBump is a site where you can submit any type of news related to design. However it can be a perfect place for submitting web design and coding tutorials.

9. Tutorials Expert

Tutorials Expert started its operation on 20th Sep 2006 with lightest and fast loading interface design on a dedicated server line. As many similar websites on the web, tutorials expert’s core theme is to provide public users with good quality tutorial links.

10. Photoshop Lady

Photoshop Lady aims to collect the best and free Photoshop tutorials around the internet. All of the high quality photoshop tutorials are categorized into 3D Effect, Abstract Effect, Drawing Effect, Photo Effect, Text Effect, Texture & Patterns and User Interface Design.

11. PSD Top

PSD Top is an internet tutorial index catering to graphic designers, webmasters and programmers, with over 6000 tutorials listed in 40 categories. PSD Top aims to collect the best and free Photoshop tutorials around the internet.

12. FS Tutorials

13. Tutorial Kit

Tutorial Kit is a comprehensive resource of Adobe Photoshop tutorials and tips to help users of all skill levels reach their full potential. The tutorials are updated daily from different authors and sites so that you won’t have to spend hours searching the web for them yourself.

14. Pxleyes

Pxleyes is the place for graphic artists. They are just an awesome community with one common interest – a lot of passion for computer graphics. They have contests, prizes, and of course the reason why I’ve included this site – a tutorial section where everyone can submit their tutorials.

15. Tutorial Index

Tutorial Index is another source for free online tutorials covering Photoshop, Flash, 3D, PHP, HTML, SQL/MySQL and other topics. It’s possible find here some unseen and interesting tutorials/articles.

16. CG Links

CG Links mainly focuses on computer graphics related tutorials however you’re free to submit your photo effect and web design tutorials as well.

17. CG Tutorials

CG Tutorials seek to index all computer graphics tutorials in order to give authors publicity and to give everyone an easy way to find the tutorial they seek.

18. Learn AI

Learn AI is an Adobe Illustrator devoted tutorial search engine where you can find almost any tutorial you need. Though Illustrator isn’t commonly associated with web design they do have a web design category in which you can find some tutorials for creating UI elements.

19. Photoshop Roadmap

Photoshop Roadmap is a Photoshop dedicated website where besides tutorials you can also find resources, brushes and inspiration.

20. Design Float

DesignFloat is a web community for web designers and web developers similar to DesignBump.

21. Tutorial King

Tutorial King aims to collect high quality Photoshop tutorials. With around 200k visitors per month it’s a considerable place to submit your web design tutorials.

22. Toxic Lab

Toxic Lab offers free tutorials and instructions for web development software. They have over 150 000 unqiue visitor each month.

23. Tutorials Room

Tutorials Room is a fast growing tutorial site where you will find hundreds of Photoshop, Flash, coding and other tutorials.

24. Web Design Library

Web Design Library is an internationally referenced resource that provides a platform for the dissemination of design thinking and research. It covers all theoretical and practice-oriented aspects of the effective, efficient and attractive presentation of information on-line.

25. Best Photoshop Tutorials

Best Photoshop Tutorials is an amazing resource for people who enjoy using Photoshop. The site strives to publish the best Photoshop tutorials, brushes, and inspirational articles.

WebResourcesDepot

Posted by ryan | Posted on 13:22

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WebResourcesDepot

475 Free Vector (SVG) Icons – Seven Icon Pack

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 10:04 AM PDT

Seven Icon Pack is a set of 475 high-quality, vector and free icons that has items for actions, social networking, devices and more.

They come in .SVG + in transparent PNG with 32*32px, 48*48px and 100*100px sizes.

And, they are free to be used in both personal and commercial projects.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

Advertisements:
Professional XHTML Admin Template ($15 Discount With The Code: WRD.)
Psd to Xhtml
SSLmatic – Cheap SSL Certificates (from $19.99/year)

Image Watermarks With HTML5 Canvas & Javascript – watermark.js

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 10:50 PM PDT

watermark.js is a JavaScript library that enables us to insert watermarks over images quickly and in batch.

It can target any number of images in a web page that has a specific class and apply the watermark over the original image with the help of HTML5 canvas.

The library normally aims to protect images from being stolen. Although, it is not a perfect solution (just like many others) as the image source is plain-coded, it can still prevent non-advanced users.

On the other hand, watermark.js is very handy when you only want to insert an image over another and position however you want without a server-side solution.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

Advertisements:
Professional XHTML Admin Template ($15 Discount With The Code: WRD.)
Psd to Xhtml
SSLmatic – Cheap SSL Certificates (from $19.99/year)

1stwebdesigner

Posted by ryan | Posted on 17:39

(0) comments

1stwebdesigner

Twitter Marketing Guide: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT

Let's presume you're already familiar with the basics of Twitter and your current goal is to grow your follower count. Want to learn advanced techniques?

Hi, my name is Tim and I'm pretty sure that you've landed here right from your Twitter account. Ok, you got me this time as the above claim does not apply to everyone, but I'm confident that this post is currently hot on Twitter! How do I know that while writing the very first paragraph? C'mon, it's gonna
be a Twitter Guide – I'll just use the tips below to make it go viral :)

Twitter Basics Part 1: Creating a Twitter Account (The Right Way)

Let's presume you're already familiar with
the basics of Twitter and your current goal is to grow your
follower count. Moreover you need those
dedicated followers that read your
tweets and, what's more important,
retweet them to their own followers
making your content spread.

Just in case you're not sure what I mean by basics, here's a quick refresher.

Username: The very first dilemma that most business owners face while creating a Twitter account is whether to use a personal name or a business name. There are pros and cons with both, but I think that having brand name is mostly beneficial for big established brands as people already know them and are willing to follow.

Recently I did some consulting for a website builder company and offered them to switch from a branded account to a personal account of their founder and CEO, as people are most likely to follow an interesting person, who they expect to tweet valuable things, rather than following a 'website builder', which they assume will most likely tweet nothing but spam.

Your Twitter username should be unique and memorable. Remember that people will have to type it in order to mention you – don't make them type too much.

Here's an extra tip from Hubspot:

(though this does not seem to apply to @1stwebdesigner lol)

Bio: There are only 160 characters which you have to fill in to tell the Twitterverse about you, your company and/or what you'll be tweeting about. Your Bio is used all around Twitter next to your profile picture and people READ the Bio section to decide whether to follow you or not. Anyone you follow will receive an e-mail with a recap of your profile including your Bio. Do you think they'll be interested enough to follow you back?

My Bio is probably not the best, but I tried to make it stand out from the crowd. Best Bio practice is to briefly state who you are and what others will get if they follow you.
I often ask myself two questions before following someone:

Who is that person?
How can they be useful to me?

Some people go really far with this incentive tip and use their Bio to suggest a Free E-Book to each new follower, but this sounds kind of desperate to me.

Image: People on Twitter mostly use a personal photo as their avatar. I think this is because Twitter is a powerful personal branding tool and you might want your followers to recognize you.

My vote goes for consistency – if there's a non-photo avatar that you use around the web (forums, comments, guest posts), I think you should use it on Twitter too so that people who have seen your avatar around the web recognize you.

Web Link: Why would you miss an opportunity to promote your website in your Twitter profile? And, besides, here's what Hubspot says about the impact of the web link on your follower count:

Background: You can easily create a customized Twitter background, but is it worth your time and efforts? First of all your Twitter account will become more attractive – but that's pretty obvious, right? What's not that obvious is that with a well designed background you have a chance of appearing in one of those numerous Twitter background showcases. Thousands of people will see your creative profileand they might become your new followers.

Twitter Basics Part 2: Following the Right People

Now, that your Twitter profile is complete and following all the best practices, it's time to follow some people. Following the 'right people" will not only keep you up to date with all the latest news in your niche and help you to network, but it will also affect the way Twitter uses your profile in its recommendation engine. Every time you follow someone, you are being associated with them in some way. With the automatic recommendation engine Twitter uses, I have to assume you'd prefer to be associated with people who you share something in common with. It might be the place you live, the field you work in, or a circle of mutual friends and acquaintances.

Follow the people you know: this is the number one tip. You might be reading some blogs or websites on the topic that you are interested in. Most of the authors mention their Twitter profile at the end of the post. Follow them as they might tweet lots of cool stuff.

Twitter Search: Each term you search on Twitter is now being split into four independent searches: Tweets, Tweets with links, Tweets near you and people. There's even more than that – check this awesome guide by SEJ to become a Twitter search ninja.

Twitter lists: Twitter List is Twitter’s way of allowing users to group profiles (and their tweets) together – you can check the lists that people you follow are listed in. You can also check if you are being listed and see who you are being listed with.

Twitter Directories: There are places where Twitter accounts are neatly organized and categorized. To name a few: Listorious, WeFollow, JustTweetIt, TweetFind. Browse them and I'm sure you'll find some interesting people to follow. By the way, why not add yourself there?

Custom lists: Bloggers always used to create lists: "10 Best Books on Marketing", "20 Coolest Design Blogs", "15 Social Bookmarking Sites" – you all know that sort of stuff. The new trend is top people in each industry to follow on Twitter: designers, bloggers, marketers, seo experts, social media gurus and so on. Do a couple of Google searches for those lists as they may suggest some really cool people to follow. If you can't find a list on your niche, you should definitely create one and maybe you'll get some new followers just for being an author of that list.

Online Tools: There is an enormous amount of Twitter tools to help you find and manage followers. I don't want to promote any of them, so just try them all to see which one works best for you.

(Twitterverse by Brian Solis and JESS3)

Play around: As I've said before, Twitter has an awesome recommendation engine, so once you start playing around with Twitter you'll get lots of recommendations. Definitely check out the powerful "Who To Follow" tool, which speaks for itself.

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 1: Getting More Followers

I want you to check out an excellent study by Ian Lurie on the quality of Twitter followers. He started collecting data after some spammy guy who had 32,000 followers retweeted one of his posts. You might expect that a retweet by a person with such a huge following will grant your URL lots of clicks and further retweets. Well, what Ian got was only three clicks.

I won't tell you the rest of the story, for it is too cool to be rewritten. Twitter power is not about the quantity of your followers, but about the quality of your, and your followers, content. In this part of my guide I will teach you how to gain quality followers.

Think: Yeah, that is my first tip. But I think it's the most powerful one. Think of the way YOU follow new people and think how many of them eventually stay in your Twitter feed. Then do the same stuff that they did to get followed by you. If you ask me I mostly follow people who blog. When I see a smart post, I will do my best to find the author on Twitter, follow him and perhaps even communicate a bit. The second way I may follow people is when they @-mention me in their tweet. I will usually check the profile of that person and if it appeals to me – I'll follow them.

Follow to get followers: This is the best known tactic to grow your follower count and it's based on the newest psychological disorder called ISFBaG (I Should Follow Back Guilt). When you follow someone, they receive an e-mail notification and may follow you back. You can mass-follow people via Twitter interface, use some online tools or even create scripts, which will auto follow people, who tweet specific keywords.

Another study by Hubspot shows that your following to followers ratio dramatically affects your chances to get a follow back. So ideally you need to keep the number of people you follow lower than the number of your followers – this way you are more likely to get a follow back.

People might think that having a large number of followers will add credibility to their account. Well from now on they won't be able to trick you! It's easy to measure the credibility of a Twitter account by comparing the number of followers to the number of the lists.

Rand from SEOmoz has one listing per 7.6 followers ( 24,368 followers / 3,187 lists = 7.6).
If the ratio is more than 10 – that's a signal that a person is a spammer who does a lot of mass-following.

Run a contest: People love contests, freebies – such events always attracts great attention. Classical contests go well on social networks, but if you can think of some extremely unique event, it may do wonders to your social presence. There is an interesting story, I would like to share (little NSFW) how Dutch porn star attracted a lot of people to follow her! She got around 15,000 followers within a couple of days since that claim, but you should think twice before running a contest like that. :)

Know who is sharing your content: Once you publish some content online try to track who is tweeting about it. You already know that those people appreciate your work, so it's usually a matter of a "thank you" message to get a follow back from them.

Promote your Twitter account: That's probably the most popular and most obvious advice, so I've left till last. Use your Twitter account URL everywhere you can: e-mail signatures, social media profiles, forum signatures, blog comments, business cards etc. There's no rocket science here, just use every opportunity you can to share your Twitter account.

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 2: Building Relations

It's cool to have a couple thousand followers, but do they care about you after all? You might have followed my tips to gain quality followers, but still it does not mean that they will interact with you and help you to spread your content. What you need is to build relationships with them so that they know who you are and read your updates.

Reward your followers: You can do that with a follow back or, alternatively, you can just thank them for following you in a reply or direct message. Just don't spam everyone with those automatic Direct Messages which no one cares about. Try sending a personalized message with some information that the recipient may be interested in.

Retweet others: People on Twitter usually keep an eye on their retweets. So try retweeting someone else's tweet and add a personal comment to it – this is a great way to get noticed and start communicating with people that you follow, and your own followers.

Public mentions: #FollowFriday or #ff is a nice occasion to show your appreciation to someone by publicly mentioning their account and providing a reason for others to follow them. However there is no need to wait till Friday to do that.

Twitter lists: When you add someone to a Twitter list, they won't be notified about it, but they may find it out on their own sooner or later. Make respectful Twitter list names to show some appreciation to people you list there. I am really happy each time someone adds me to a marketing related list. (this was a call-to-action :) )
By following other people's Twitter lists you can get some attention too, as people might check who else is following their lists.

Twitter list Ninja Tip #1: follow @listwatcher as it will send you a DM each time someone adds, removes you from their list, or changes their list. Being listed is a reason to get in touch and say thank you, ( or something else, if you were removed :) )
Twitter list Ninja Tip #2: learn how to automate your lists with Formulists online service.

Follow people who @mention you: This is a great way to show your appreciation for being mentioned and, besides, this will make a person to take a closer look at your profile and what you tweet about.

Twitter Favourites: Currently this feature is not widely used, but I think it can be considered as a form of appreciation too. Each tweet that you add to your Twitter favourites is saved in your profile under the "Favourites" tab. I doubt that the author of a tweet will ever see that, but others might find your favourites feed useful and that can be another reason to follow you.

TweetChats: It's a regularly scheduled online event which is perfect for networking. For instance you can check #seochat – this is a search marketing chat which is held every week. If you fail to find a TweetChat on your topic, maybe you should launch one yourself.

Twitter Ninja Part 1: Getting Retweets

Eventually, the aim of every single tweet is to be noticed and get retweeted by others. If you think that your tweets get enough engagement, try measuring the CTR (Click Through Rate) of every link you tweet. This can be easily done with Bit.ly URL shortening service, just add a + at the end of any short URL and you'll see the stats. In most cases you'll notice that the engagement not as good as expected. So what can you do to improve it? Lets see…

Tweet metrics: Almost everything can be measured, including tweets. In his great study Rand Fishkin tried to calculate and improve the CTR of his tweets. This resulted in a few takeaways:

* the average CTR of a tweet is about 1.17% of the followers number;
* shorter tweets get a higher CTR;
* tweets on a topic that people expect from you get a higher CTR.

Ask for a retweet: A study by Dan Zarrella shows that you can easily increase your ReTweetability by simply asking your followers for a retweet. Only five letters can make a change – "PLS RT"

What to tweet: You already know that tweets on topics that people expect from you get a higher CTR. In addition to that, another study by Dan Zarrella reveals the fact that tweets about Twitter perform really well. (Remember I promised this post would be HOT on Twitter? :))

You can also use various bookmarking and news services to discover what's hot and trending and tweet about it: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, TweetMeme.

When to tweet: There are lots of statistics on this one which show different numbers, but in general the best time to get retweets in the US is 4 PM and the best day is Friday. So try to stick to these when scheduling your most important tweets.

Twitter Ninja Part 2: Miscellaneous Tips

Leverage your website: In case you have a website or blog, why not to use it to promote your Twitter account a bit? WordPress users can check this awesome selection of Twitter plugins and the rest can get inspired by the showcase of how people embed their twitter feed into their website design.

Use Hashtags: This feature is used to unite Tweets around a particular topic. I understand hashtags as a search tool. Instead of searching on Tweeter for "social media marketing" you can simply do a search for #smm or just click on a hashtag whenever you see it in someone's tweet. This will list all the tweets that have a particular hashtag in it. So every time you add a hashtag to your tweet, it increases its chances to be found by random people.

Track Google SERP: You can easily get a daily Direct Message of your websites Google position using a twitter bot by TweetedRanks (free tool).

Get your website pages indexed faster: A recent experiment concluded that a tweet which gets 3 retweets or more will help in increasing the time and rate at which the tweeted page gets indexed.

HootSuite Hootlet: I must confess that HootSuite is a tool that dramatically improved my tweeting experience. Specifically I am obsessed with their bookmarklet tool. You just drag it to your bookmarks and when you want to share the post on Twitter you just click the bookmarklet and the message window pops up. What's more important, you can schedule your tweets right from this Hootlet window. This is the best Twitter tool I've ever used.

This is it! The end of my Twitter Marketing guide, but definitely not the end of the creative ideas and ways to use Twitter to market yourself, your content, your company or your products.

I hope you all enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to reading your comments. And don't forget that you can follow me (@timsoulo) on Twitter.

Article written by Tim Soulo, designed by Michael Burns and coded by Ahmad Hania

1stwebdesigner

Posted by ryan | Posted on 18:26

1stwebdesigner

1. Pixel2Life

2. Good-Tutorials

3. PSLover

4. Tutorialized

5. TutorialVault

6. Capital Tutorials

7. Tutorials Garden

8. DesignBump

9. Tutorials Expert

10. Photoshop Lady

11. PSD Top

12. FS Tutorials

13. Tutorial Kit

14. Pxleyes

15. Tutorial Index

16. CG Links

17. CG Tutorials

18. Learn AI

19. Photoshop Roadmap

20. Design Float

21. Tutorial King

22. Toxic Lab

23. Tutorials Room

24. Web Design Library

25. Best Photoshop Tutorials

WebResourcesDepot

Posted by ryan | Posted on 13:22

WebResourcesDepot

1stwebdesigner

Posted by ryan | Posted on 17:39

1stwebdesigner

Twitter Marketing Guide

Bigger Longer & Uncut.

Twitter Basics Part 1: Creating a Twitter Account (The Right Way)

Twitter Basics Part 2: Following the Right People

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 1: Getting More Followers

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 2: Building Relations

Twitter Ninja Part 1: Getting Retweets

Twitter Ninja Part 2: Miscellaneous Tips

Followers

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