Why Web Designers are becoming WordPress Designers?

17 Aug, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

web10 Until late 90’s, online publishing wasn’t as easy as it is in current times, it was the evolution of Blogger that started to make this space easier for common person who are technically challenged. Although, it were CMSes like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla & various other open source systems that upped the game by giving more power in the hands of publishers at much lower cost as the whole platform is completely free, the only cost involved is customization of the platform and the way content is displayed which is nothing if we compare the power and flexibility we get using these content management systems.

It was the evolution of blogging that brought many significant changes in the web ecosystem and one of them is that there are far more webmasters now and hundreds of them are becoming professional webmasters every day. I personally believe that its that has contributed significantly in this space. Its user friendly, has great documentation and has awesome community around it. is fast becoming the first choice for every publisher, people are shifting on it and this increase in demand is making web companies adopt and one of the reason why we see so many companies offering premium templates and companies offering services.

With that, we thought of coming up with a resourceful post that’ll help the new Web designer turned designers in making their lives easy -

Resources for Coding

aptana

WordPress Codex: What can be better than the official codex itself? The documentation itself is wonderful and that is one of the reason why developers were quick to adopt .

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has lots of posts with codes and lots of posts with tips that are surely going to help beginners. It’s a must bookmark for all those who want to learn coding in .

Cheat Sheets: Dainis Graveris has listed 23 extremely useful cheat sheets for programmers and designers. This is one resource that you will love to the core.

Tutorials for Developing WordPress themes: Vandelay has posted a fantastic list of tutorials that help newbie’s in understanding theme designing.

Coda Clips: Coda is a text editor for web developers (mac only), it supports keeping small snippets for faster and quicker development. To support that, they started Coda Clips that features frequently used snippets and is regularly updated.

WordPress Mailing lists: official mailing list is the best place to keep yourself up to date with that is happening around and what are the new changes or requests made by the community. It’ll not only keep you up to date with the current status, it gives you the idea about what may be the next big feature of .

WordPress plugins to help WordPress Designers – We’ve featured 9 plugins for that will surely help all the beginner’s in quicker development of themes.

Theme Frameworks

framework

A theme framework is the flexible foundation, that can be used to build themes faster and quicker, without worrying about coding various basic functionalities. Someone with prior experience in CSS would be able to quickly adapt to designing. We are listing some of the most popular theme frameworks over here.

Thematic – Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and development professionals.’’

Theme Hybrid – Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. Like , this theme is completely free and open source. You can use it for your client work or for a about your grandchildren. It is continuously being developed and has a community growing around it.

WP Framework – WP Framework was created to serve as the starting point in theme development. It accomplishes this by providing you with commonly used functions and features that modern themes should have. So when you start a brand new project, using WP Framework you’ll already have the basic functionality set so you don’t have to worry about mundane task like creating the loop, or recreating all the standard template files.

Carrington – Carrington is a CMS theme framework for from Crowd Favorite, that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates.

Books for newbie designers

There are various books written for and many are yet to be published. There are some fantastic books for , although I would like to mention these books for those who seriously want to be designers.

  • Rockable Press – How to be rockstar Designer is a fantastic e-book as it is focused on those who want to shift from regular web designing and want to become designers.
  • Vladimir Prelovac (not an affiliate link) – Vladimir has created lots and useful and some of the most popular plugins for . He’s a great authority in plugin development. This book should be in arsenal of those who want to develop plugins.

I hope these resources will be useful for anyone who wants to be a pro Designer. If you know any more resources, then please point them to us and we’d be more than happy to include them here.

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9 Plugins for WordPress Design & Development

11 Aug, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

One of the biggest factors for fame is the amount of development happening around this ever so wonderful content management system. The flexibility it gives to designers and programmers helps them generate inspirational WordPress design. If you would like to learn how to develop themes and create wonderful designs then you should head over to Small Potato’s ultimate tutorial series on how to create wordpress themes. Apart from that there are various plugins that’ll help you in development, lets check them out -

1. Theme Switch & Preview

Nicolas Kuttler has created various small plugins, however this one is my favorite as it allows you to tweak the template online without breaking stuff for visitors. There is a widget and a shortcode to make switching easily. The plugin gives various options and as a developer you’ll surely love them.

2. Maintenance Mode

development should be done in such a way or locally [how to install WordPress locally] that it shouldn’t impact the development, however there are times when the site can look weird, while enabling the new theme on live environment. This is where, Maintenance Mode plugin comes in handy. It allows you to create a custom message that’ll be displayed to your visitors while you get to access the as normal.

3. User Switching

This is a fantastic plugin that lets you easily switch between the multiple users. In the past there have been few of our clients who allowed various low level user accounts and didn’t want them to see various settings in the dashboard, this is where this plugin can come handy. It allows you to quickly switch between users with the click of a button. It’s up to date and supports older and new versions alike.

4. Get the image

Get the image is a plugin that grabs images for you. You can grab the image and display it around the post using custom fields, WP’s post image feature or you can even extract it from the post itself. If you are playing around with post images, then this plugin can surely help you in easing the task. You can go through its implementation and frequently asked questions over here.

5. Query Posts

This plugin is like a dream come true for those, who aren’t loved by PHP. This plugin creates a widget that lets you display the posts the way you want. This is the widget that keeps users out of the code and gives them the ability to display items on their site how they want. It supports categories, tags, custom taxonomies, author, date, time- and a lot more.

6. NextGEN Gallery

I personally feel that this plugin should become part of Core. Not only this plugin is a complete CMS in itself for images, it has its own plugins too! I would say that this should become your must install plugin for WordPress, no matter if you are using it for development or using it personally! It’s just too good to be true! This plugin powers our WordPress Design Portfolio.

7. YD Network-wide Options

YD Network-wide options plugin lets you easily replicate or plugin settings across the network of blogs on 3.0. It maintains backward compatibility with MU and is constantly updated by the author. This is a fantastic feature as it allows you to easily maintain the settings and update them regularly across the whole network install in 3.x.

8. Members

Just like User Switching, members is one plugin that lets you manage the member roles in . This plugin lets you manage the scope of roles. You can give and take features from roles, create new roles etc. This ensure that members will get only those privileges that you want them to have. A must have plugin if you want to use as CMS.

9. Custom Post Type UI

Custom Post Type UI plugin gives you easy to use interface for maintaining custom post types and taxonomies. 3.0 features better support for Custom post types and taxonomies and this plugin improves the interface tremendously. It’s a fantastic plugin and must be in every designer’s arsenal.

I hope you find these nine plugins useful enough for and development. We’ll continue featuring these kind of plugins and various other tips. Please share the posts on Twitter, or any other social network using the buttons on the left.

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10 Must Follow Resources for WordPress Design Inspiration

5 Aug, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

 is considered to be God-send CMS for designers & programmers. It gives enough flexibility for designers to not worry about what all can be designed and can be run on . We’ve compiled the list of those resources that list some of the most beautiful designs made to run on .

These galleries and posts are great for the designers and if you are planning to get your designed then you should check out these resources to

Inspiration Galleries

1. We Love WP

we love wp wordpress design

We love WP is probably the best and most up to date gallery. It’s fantastic to see some good work constantly featuring in this web gallery for designs. One of the best part is that they’ve categorized the designs nicely thus making it easy to navigate industry specific designs. Guess what! They’ve featured us on their website as well :)

2. WP Candy

wp candy wordpress design

WP Candy has a gallery. It hasn’t been updated since some time however; it remains one of my favorite destinations for inspiration. WPCandy not only features the awesome designs, it also has great tips in its .

3. CMS Designs

cms design wordpress

CMS Designs is an inspirational showcase and gallery website with collected and submitted well designed blogs and websites powered by popular Open Source content management systems like . CMS features some good examples. It is updated slowly but regularly. There are some designs that are treat to watch. http://wordpress.cmsdesigns.org/

4. WordPress Showcase

wordpress showcase wordpress design

What can be better than the official directory of designs that rock! Team selects some of the coolest websites/blogs running on . It’s a great inspiration resource for designs as well as programming.

5. WP Garden

wordpress garden cms design

It’s a nice little directory run by Sadish Bala, a fan. I was personally not impressed by WP Garden’s own but it certainly features some really nice designs across various categories. http://wpgarden.com/

6. WP Float

wp float wordpress design

WP Float has a good collection of Designs that give inspiration. They’ve even kept their tag line as inspiration. They’ve got pretty long list of various categories and have got loads of sites in each of them. Overall it’s a fantastic resource to get inspiration.

Lists that feature great Designs

7. Hongkiat – 100 nice and beautiful designs

WordPress 100 WordPress design inspiration

Hongkiat has listed some of the best designs across the internet in a post. 100 designs in a row is definitely an art work, all of the designs are inspiring and mostly are on . Even if they are not, what can’t be made in WordPess?

We spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting . We marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here we bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful .

8. SixRevisions – 45 beautiful and creative Designs

45 creative and beautiful wordpress design

Jacob Gube from Six Revisions has done a fantastic job by listing some of the greatest designs made that are running on . It is truly an amazing resource for creative inspiration. Well not just that he even lists 25 outstanding WordPress designs in another post and that is also a true gem.

provides designers utmost control over a theme – resulting in unprecented flexibility in the layout and direction he or she can take.  – in the title – is inside parentheses because the designs you’ll see below are wonderful designs despite of the publishing platform they use (which just so happens to be ).

9. Instant Shift – 55 excellent site for inspiration

WordPress Design inspiration

Daniel Adams has listed some unique and beautiful looking site . The collection in that list is fresh and inspirational. It’s a link that should be in stored in your bookmarks. I’m sure you’ll find it as one of the best source for inspiration at all the times.

Anders Ross has also created a similar list that features 70 brilliant for inspiration. It’s another wonderful resource that you must check out.

In this designs showcase we trying to present you exemplary trends, new practices, creative ideas and designer’s skills. There are so many different designs out there that it’s always hard to decide which one to select. We spent last few weeks to compile this list of highly beautiful, creative and most importantly inspirational site designs over web which might help you to get inspired with their work.

10. Blog Design Studio – 35 Best Websites

WordPress Blog design WordPress design

Our last post was a super hit where we’d listed 35 websites that are using , MU or BuddyPress for running fantastic designs and use as CMS instead of just a software.  We listed only those websites that had fantastic and great programming.

Popularity of WordPress is clear in its own way, however it becomes crystal clear when we see small businesses, professionals or even big corporations are giving preference to WordPress over other CMSes. WordPress as a CMS has evolved and is used to build beautiful and professional websites.

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The 35 Best WordPress Design Websites

28 Jul, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

Popularity of  is clear in its own way, however it becomes crystal clear when we see small businesses, professionals or even big corporations are giving preference to over other CMSes. as a CMS has evolved and is used to build beautiful and professional websites. Lets check out the following 35 websites that are powered by , BuddyPress, MU and aren’t used just as .

1. h Mag

h MAG is a high end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market. They print 15,000 copies that are placed in every room at The W Hotel, delivered to every doorstep in town, distributed to over 100 retail establishments and handed out at the Path and Ferry stops. h Mag uses BuddyPress & MU to publish variety of content and is a highly interactive site and .

2. Creative Ad Awards

Creative Ad Awards

Creative Ad Award is a fantastic advertising archive, serving advertising fans with high quality ads. They provide world’s most sophisticated, creative and fresh ads. Creative Ad Awards has highly customized to achieve this kind of .

read full article →

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Matt Mullenweg – The super hero who changed the Internet!

13 Jul, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Blog Marketing

Matt Mullenweg - The Super Hero!

If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating , I would not have been here writing at this and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article. At the age of 19, he invented the core of , and later when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing – a blogging platform. He is also the founder of , the business behind as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.

Read this amazing piece at Skidzopedia – 17 people who changed the internet. Although, I would surely love to include the name of Max Levchin, Paypal’s founder; Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Skype’s founders. I’m sure there must be more people on that list, still I would say that the list is pretty neat. I’m happy that people realize Matt’s hard work & contribution to the internet as he definitely deserves these kinda titles! What Say?

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Feedburner sucks! So what are the alternatives?

8 Jul, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Blogging Tools

Alright! Looks like the rant time is back in blogosphere and I’m joining the party against feedburner, that has given very pathetic service lately. Over a period of time, the service of Feedburner has gone down the hill and there are many bloggers like Jean-Baptiste Jung, Jeff who are frustrated that they don’t get to know the exact number of the feeds. Although, Jeff has asked the question that if Feed subscriber count is of any use in these times or not?

1400 subscribers! Yipieee!

I would be honest, its been some time since I checked our subscriber base and the core reason was that had been acting stupid, although I know that its been hovering around 1400 since some time. It’s helpful that I have the rough idea, however its difficult to digest that a service, owned by Google has been failing to provide good and dependable results. Many bloggers aren’t happy, some have accepted the service as it still gives a rough idea although on the other side some have shown a decline in interest as in current scenario there are other ways through which visitors can subscribe to their content. These days, most of the bloggers are  focusing towards either email marketing or towards increasing the twitter or fans.

What are the alternatives?

has been a great service and one of the only service that gives you the stats, helps you make money through Adsense and doesn’t charge a single dime. They offer so many features that others have failed to offer till date, however its the inconsistency in the service that made Jean & Samir Bhardwaj to look for alteratives. These are some of the alternatives that I liked -

  • Feedblitz – This is definitely second most popular service. Feedblitz is very stable and has got good reviews lately. It is popularly praised for its email newsletter service and looks like a pretty good alternative to . It comes at a price although, it shouldn’t be an issue for professional bloggers if they are still interested in RSS stats.
  • WP FeedStats – This is a free plugin that displays the RSS subscription stats of your blog. The plugin displays the hits all the versions of the feed, be it RSS2, RSS or ATOM. The plugin looks decent I haven’t checked it personally, however, if we go by Samir’s judgement then it shouldn’t be a bad alternative to those looking for a free solution.
  • Aweber & MailChimp – These two email subscription delivery services have gained a major chunk of market share as more and more bloggers have realized that email subscription is still best suited for marketing and advertisement for subscription. These email subscription tools offer great features and are at par with rss subscription services.

It’s pretty strange to see that there are hardly any decent alternatives to and probably one of the reason, why Google isn’t putting the heart and soul towards the service as much they’ve been doing for various other properties. And one of the reasons we don’t see many alternatives is because services like and Twitter have acted as a source of stats as well as good amount of traffic. What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think if feeds are relevant anymore or not?

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Improve the way you give feedback on websites

13 Jun, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

As a web studio, we give and receive feedback on the website/ every day. We make our lives simple by using Evernote’s premium accounts so that our clients get the ability to edit the notes that we share them for the feedback and we do the same while giving the feedback to our Ninjas! This certainly isn’t Evernote’s real function, however its been doing pretty well for us. However, it’s not as good as Notable, which is built to address this particular issue.

Zurb, a well-known company in the silicon valley that has worked with some of the top companies like , Ebay, Yahoo is behind Notable, an app that they built for internal use. Notable is a web-based application and great for designers and agencies who work from remote locations.

Notable - Easy collaboration for designers

The application works on Firefox, iPhone and of course, the browser-based functionality is available for all the platforms. You can clip any page on the browser and add notes on specific areas that you want to point out for the feedback. Once the feedback is uploaded on their servers, it can be discussed by team members using the comment form. All of this is part of the visual section, however since it’s focused towards the web agencies and freelancers, Zurb has taken care of the code and one of the best feature is that you can point out on the search engine optimization of the page as well!

Notable's Workspace

I was mostly impressed by Notable’s simplicity, its user interface is simple and without complex features that may confuse people. Its got the most important features packed for collaboration and notification, it allows you to restrict the collaborators to let them add notes or just view it.

Overall, I was fairly impressed with the application as it delivered all the features that we were looking in such an app. Notable certainly saves time as the feedback ends up being more contextual, visually accurate as it forces feedback givers to be specific. I would certainly suggest this app to all the freelancers who are into web designing as they’d find this app irresistible!

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