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 , 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 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 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 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 , 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 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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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 .

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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 Facebook, 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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Wishing MAGIC this Christmas and always

25 Dec, 2009 | rajat
Topics: Mini Blog

ChristmasGreetings.jpg

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Don’t Let WordPress Scare Your Clients

21 Dec, 2009 | Igor
Topics: web design


wordpress-for-clients.jpg

Image Credit – Twimg.com

is an excellent CMS and one of the most popular platforms available. is , open-source, extremely extendable and it gives the clients control over the content of their own website. It is quite user-friendly, it provides flexibility, you can use hundreds of plugins and last but not least it has a huge support community. With all those positive attributes how can you not simply like it. However it can be a little bit different for your clients. While you are probably fully comfortable in managing, editing, and adding content, most of your clients probably will be regular people not technically savvy and may find hard to use. So part of our job would be to make things easier for these people for their better overall user experience with .

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15 Websites That Offer Free Font Download

11 Dec, 2009 | Igor
Topics: Free

1. 1001 Free Fonts

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A few mistakes that beginning bloggers should be aware of

7 Dec, 2009 | Igor
Topics: Blog Traffic, Blogging Tips

Blogs are everywhere. Blogs are about literally everything. People write a for a variety of reasons, as an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, to promote a business, as a way to reflect on life or for a plenty of other reasons. Blogs are a great to express your opinions and attitudes, but when writing a you have millions of competitors. In order to build an audience, you have to avoid few things that can seriously hamper your progress toward your goal.

1. Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your , think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about traffic but focus on quality contents.

2. Ignoring Search Engines Optimization

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

3. Off to a Vacation Every Week!

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your more often, post on weekdays, because there are more readers and than post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still be available for your readers most of the time.

4. Terrible

There are two things that your should not be: complicated and visually unappealing. If your is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

5. Not Spreading the Word About Your

Don’t just post on your and leave it like that. Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums, submit articles and post a reviews to newsgroups. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave trackbacks, simply you should become part of the community.

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