Over 100 Amazing Wordpress Resource / Tips & Tricks

Below are some amazing resources for wordpress designers and developers. Please feel free to add any another resource links on the comment box.

Improve Your Blog

• How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog
• What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories
  
• The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs
• The Ultimate PageRank Sculpting Guide for WordPress SEO
• How to NoFollow a link
• How to Find and Fix 404 Errors
• What to do if a Plugin Deactivation Breaks Your Blog
• Integrating Forums Into A Wordpress Blog
• How to Add Breadcrumbs To Your Site
• How to Add A Store to your Wordpress Blog
• How to Make Your Old Posts New Again
• How to Turn Off Post Revisions in WP2.6+
• How to Set Up Your Wordpress Permalink Structure
• How to Switch Your Wordpress Permalink Structure
• How to Show Only A Post Excerpt In Wordpress
• Why It’s Important to Always Remove The Wordpress Version Code
• 7 Principals of Clean and Optimized CSS Code
• 30 Ways to Improve Readability
• How to Install DOMTabs on Wordpress
• Should The Sidebar Go On The Left or the Right?
• 7 Elements To Make Your Blog Look Great
• Why It’s Important To Make Your Blog Unique

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Inspirational Designers, and how to get recognized as a Web Designer

Want to get recognized in the graphic and web design world? Here are some tips on how to get yourself out in the design spotlight and promote your work. We’ll also be looking at some of today’s most inspiring designers, and what makes them famous.

1. Focus on your strengths. Are you better at illustration? Designing web layouts? Creating graphics? Try to pick your strongest skill and use it to your advantage. This will help you stand out and better display yourself. Of course you never want to spend too much time on one thing and leave no time for anything else, but if you can use your strengths to your advantage you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.
2. Eliminate your weaknesses. Surround yourself with people who are good at what you’re not. Have them help you get better in those areas. Ask for resources you can use to get better at those things that have always frustrated you. The worst thing you can do is avoid something simply because it’s challenging.
3. Challenge yourself constantly. Always go a step further to learn a more advanced technique. One new technique may open up thousands of possibilities in your work. If you always take the easy way out, you won’t learn as much, and you’ll never try anything new.
   
4. Broaden your skills. Even if you’re exceptionally good at one thing, if you don’t try to learn new things you’re going to run into a lot of walls down the line. Broadening your design skills can be an easy and fun process if you use the right resources and put your mind to it. Also, being stuck with an obsolete skill will get you nowhere.  Web and graphic design is constantly changing, and if you can’t keep up, you’re going to be left in the dust.

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Tags: attractive websites, awesome design, design success, enhance your site, famous, famous designer, guide to succcess, inspiration, rock star designer, web advertising, web recognition

Color Branding and Corporate Identity

Color is a very important factor in design can be quite significant in defining the identity or branding of a company. Companies use colors to brand their products so that we are reminded of the product simply by recognizing a combination of colors. Not only these large companies but many designers and small companies use colors to identify themselves to stand out. Here are some examples of websites where the color contributes to the company’s identity:

Apple

Apple has always been known for their use of silver, both in their products and their advertising. The Apple website clearly displays this by the use of a silver gradient navigation, and light grays and white for the rest of the site. With their common use of silver computer casing, Apple has indeed branded themselves with the color silver. Apple also uses bright colors for some of their product lines, including the iMac and iPod shuffle/nano.

(For an interesting article documenting the change in Apple’s design between 1977 and 2008 click here) › Continue reading

Tags: apple, attractive websites, brand, color, corporate, Design, design success, ebay, enhance your site, Marketing, nintendo, sprint

2009 Website Trends

Web and Graphic Designers such as ourselves are very creative and always looking for new and exciting ways to dazzle our viewers. This in turn creates many new trends as more and more designers pick up these techniques. We are going to show you some of the biggest of these trends for 2009 and explain the advantages to using these techniques in your own work.

To begin, typography and font trends are becoming more and more prevalent.

Embossing letterpress in order to give titles a “pressed” look has rarely been used until now. This technique adds a refined style to titles, and gives it a solid look that really looks nice.

Embossed Lettering

Embossed Lettering

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Tags: 2009 web deisgn, alex buga, attractive websites, delete, design success, dragon interactive, I am second, logo design, mobileme, rustin jessen, trends, Typography, web advertising, Web Design, web design companies, web sites

Tips on what to Include in a Web Design Proposal

A website proposal contains many aspects different from other graphic design proposals, in that technical elements must be addressed along with creative ones. While print proposals do address items such as printing procedures, website proposals must specify web hosting, systems for maintaining content, programs or programming languages to be used and other technical specifications.

Outline of Content

A website proposal should clearly spell out what will be included on the site. This can be done in a standard outline format, or visually, to show what sections and features you intend to build for the client. An outline serves to both let the client know your ideas for the site (which should be based on meetings with them) and protect you from rounds of changes and additions not initially planned for. By including the outline in the proposal and eventually the contract, you are making it clear what is included for the price and therefore what additional services can be charged for.

Method of Building Site

It is important to decide at the start of a project what system or method will be used to build the website. Some sites are built in static HTML, meaning each page is created manually, and updates are done manually as well. Other sites are built in HTML but utilize a content management system (CMS) that stores the content in a database and allows for easier updating. Sites like WordPress and Blogger offer a simple CMS included for free with your site, while other CMS packages are installed on web servers and completely customized for the project, offering countless feature options. Another option for building the site is within Flash, allowing for a rich multimedia experience and a lot of development time. Regardless of the method chosen, it should be explained in the proposal so you and your client are in agreement as to the best way to build the website.

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Tags: web contracts and proposals, web tips, webdesign proposal