Google Chrome OS - Visual Tour

Google's Chrome OS was shown for the first time Thursday, where the company gave a brief demo of the operating system. [Detail]

RingCentral Office

RingCentral Office delivers a virtual PBX, VoIP phone service and full-featured IP phones as one complete system. It eliminates the need for complex hardware, lengthy installation and technical expertise, making your business communication easy, affordable and accessible from wherever you need to be. [Detail]

How to Convert a Netbook Into a Touchscreen PC

If the buzz is to be believed, 2010 will be the year of the touchscreen tablet PC, with multiple major manufacturers lining up products that they claim will give us a carry-anywhere way to read e-books, watch movies and surf the Web.

And while I suppose I could just buy one of these machines, I thought it’d be more fun to make my own touchscreen PC out of last year’s “it” computer: the lowly netbook. The advantage: Unlike these new tablets, my creation would also have a keyboard, making it far more practical for typing-heavy tasks like e-mail and running Word. The project’s total cost: less than $500, including the computer. [Detail]

Google says PC will start in seven seconds or less

New Google Inc software will start up a computer as fast as a television can be turned on, the search company said on Thursday as it showed off its Chrome operating system designed for PCs that do their work on the Web.

Google gave the first public look at its Chrome OS four months after declaring its intention of developing the PC's main software, a move that pits it directly against Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc.

True to Google's Internet-pedigree, the Chrome OS resembles a Web browser more than it does a traditional computer operating system like Microsoft Windows, matching Google's ambition to drive people to the Web -- where they can see Google ads.

Google said the software will initially be available by the holiday season of 2010 on low-cost netbooks that meet Google's hardware specifications, such as using only memory chips to store data instead of slower hard drives, the current standard. [Detail]

Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work. [Detail]

Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics

Now is an exciting time to be creating CSS layouts. After years of what felt like the same old techniques for the same old browsers, we’re finally seeing browsers implement CSS 3, HTML 5 and other technologies that give us cool new tools and tricks for our designs.

But all of this change can be stressful, too. How do you keep up with all of the new techniques and make sure your Web pages look great on the increasing number of browsers and devices out there? In part 1 of this article, you’ll learn the five essential characteristics of successful modern CSS websites. In part 2 of this article, you’ll learn about the techniques and tools that you need to achieve these characteristics. [Detail]

Showcase of Web Design in Ireland

This post is the second article of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started last week with Russian web design. We continue now with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso).

If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details.

Ireland. The land of the leprechauns, green fields and Guinness. But what about the web industry in Ireland? There have been a host of interesting things happening both North and South of Ireland recently. Nicholas Felton talked in Belfast, Ze Frank talked in Dublin, FOWA came to Dublin for the first time and FOWD came to Belfast. Are all these high profile events an indication that there are exciting things happening throughout Ireland? [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 23rd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Mark Jardine, Mutant Labs, 8Interactive, Purple Raincloud and Ballpark. [Detail]

The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property

Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. Since columns are necessary in virtually every CSS layout, this property started to get used — and even overused — prolifically.

The CSS float property allows a developer to incorporate table-like columns in an HTML layout without the use of tables. If it were not for the CSS float property, CSS layouts would not be possible except using absolute and relative positioning — which would be messy and would make the layout unmaintainable. [Detail]

10+ jQuery Form Enhancement Plugins

Easy user interaction and data collection is really a key functionality on most websites and web applications. Providing users high quality and intuitive input forms may be just what is needed to make your users take the time to fill in and submit the information you’re trying to collect. In this article I have collected a number of really essential jQuery Form Enhancements. [Detail]

Showcase of Web Design in Russia

This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed for more similar posts.
If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details. [Detail]

Top 20 Ways for Web Developers to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

Climate change is greatly affected by our carbon footprint. As web developers, it may not seem that we make huge "footprints." We read our mail and news online (no paper), communicate with instant messenger and Skype (no stamps or letters), and many of us relax by watching video or TV shows online (no renting/buying physical DVDs). As a whole, web developers do a pretty good job reducing their carbon footprint.
Yet there are plenty of ways that we can reduce our carbon footprints even further and treat Mother Nature a bit better. After all, every little bit helps when it comes to becoming more environmentally responsible.
So here are the top twenty ways that web developers can reduce their carbon footprint each day. They're simple changes, but in the end they make a huge difference. [Detail]

5 New jQuery Plugins I bet You have not seen before

jQuery is very popular and there’s a lot of plugins available to solve both simple and complex tasks for us in a snap. While there a many articles listing great jQuery plugins we have seen many times before I have decided to create a list of brand new and worth investigating plugins that havejust been released only hours to days ago. Go check out latest updates on jQuery plugins ... [Detail]

10 Very Useful jQuery Plugins for Web Developers I wasn’t aware of

Query as a development platform is great and we see the result of this every day. It is almost hard to believe but every time I decide to look up a new jQuery Plugin to solve a task I find that the community is constantly providing new high quality solutions for free. The number of really bad contributions that I fell I waste my time on is very limited and this makes me come back for more. I guess most web developers fell this way right? Great thanks to everyone spending their precious time creating stuff we can all use. Below I have listed 10 great plugins I wasn’t aware of that I stumbles over today. [Detail]

7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good

Everyone and their grandfather (and dog) seems to have a website these days. The Web is getting more crowded by the day, with literally dozens of websites being added as you read this article. It is becoming harder and harder to get noticed among the masses.
“Fortunately” for us designers, not everyone seems to understand what makes or breaks a Web design. Granted, Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes. [Detail]

Free Slideshow, Gallery And Lightboxes Scripts

For Web design projects, you may find yourself sometimes scrounging around for a simple yet useful image gallery and slideshow. But imagine having a huge collection of AJAX, JavaScript, Lightbox, CSS and Flash-based image galleries at your fingertips. Hopefully, this post will do the trick and provide all the resources you might need. [Detail]

Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices

Comment forms are an essential part of our blogs, social networks and websites. Comment forms are our websites’ communication channel. Through these forms we get feedback on our content; therefore, it’s necessary to design them in such a way that they are easy to understand by our user base.
A good comment form should align with our website’s main design, but at the same time it should be interesting enough to encourage easy commenting. It must be usable and accessible if we want to capture all of our visitors’ feedback. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 16th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from 53mondays, Site Wave, Julio Fragoso, Andries Reitsma and Okay. [Detail]

CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

One of the most bizarre statistical facts in relation to browser use has to be the virtual widespread numbers that currently exist in the use of Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8. As of this writing, Internet Explorer holds about a 65% market share combined across all their currently used browsers. In the web development community, this number is much lower, showing about a 40% share. [Detail]

Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices

Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now!") or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. "Learn more…") that asks the user to take action.

How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click? We’ll try to answer this question in this post by sharing some effective design techniques and exploring some examples. [Detail]

10 Very Useful jQuery Plugins for Web Developers I wasn’t aware of

jQuery as a development platform is great and we see the result of this every day. It is almost hard to believe but every time I decide to look up a new jQuery Plugin to solve a task I find that the community is constantly providing new high quality solutions for free. The number of really bad contributions that I fell I waste my time on is very limited and this makes me come back for more. I guess most web developers fell this way right? Great thanks to everyone spending their precious time creating stuff we can all use. Below I have listed 10 great plugins I wasn’t aware of that I stumbles over today. [Detail]

5 New jQuery Plugins I bet You have not seen before

jQuery is very popular and there’s a lot of plugins available to solve both simple and complex tasks for us in a snap. While there a many articles listing great jQuery plugins we have seen many times before I have decided to create a list of brand new and worth investigating plugins that havejust been released only hours to days ago. [Detail]

Introduction to Ajax with jQuery

jQuery is one of the most popular javascript frameworks out there and for good reason. It has a plethora of features that make it a pleasure to work with. One of these is Ajax. Ajax is a way of sending information to the browser and retrieving it without loading the page. So, we can use this when we submit a form, everything happens without the page refreshing. With normal javascript this is nothing short of a nightmare but with jQuery it’s much easier. For this lesson’s purpose I’ve created a simple form that asks the user for their name and password, and will then display it on screen. However, whatever you want to do with the data, the Ajax is exactly the same. [Detail]

Best of the Web: September

September was yet another exciting month for web developers. New Javascript libraries, major acquisitions, and monster open source projects were some of the things that happened as Summer died out. And that's not including the usual plethora of excellent tips and articles published from top-notch web development sites. [Detail]

Tips for Designing an Awesome Coming Soon Page

Unlike the traditional under construction pages from the early days of the web, coming soon pages can nowadays prove to be handy tools when launching a new website. Forget yellow hard hats and flashing signs, let’s take a look at what benefits can be seen from some of the best launching soon pages. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 9th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Nosotros, Boompa, Freelenz, Monk and Anthony J Zinni. [Detail]

Microsoft to introduce free version of Office

Microsoft is to include a free, stripped-down version of Office on new PCs from next year, abandoning Microsoft Works after years of service.

Office Starter 2010, which will be supoorted by advertising, will include Word 2010 and Excel 2010, dropping PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 - the other applications that will be bundled with the lowest-priced package, Home & Student - as well as Outlook 2010, which is part of the next-level-up Home & Business edition.

Office Starter 2010 will not be a trial edition that times out, said a Microsoft manager today. "Office Starter is different than a trial, in the sense that there's no expiration," said Scott Kahler, the test manager for the new suite, in a video posted on a Microsoft blog. "You can continue using it until your needs exceed what Starter can give you."

At that point, Microsoft hopes that users will pay for a more substantial version. "We insure that when you've upgraded, all your documents come across," added Brian Albrecht, Office's group program manager, in the same video clip. "There's no conversion or anything that needs to happen, and everything's there for you." [Detail]

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design

Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.

Below are 15 of the most common mistakes that e-commerce sites make, as well as advice on how to avoid or fix them. Take the advice under consideration before embarking on a new e-commerce project or when thinking over your current ecommerce site, and make efforts to follow the recommendations outlined here. [Detail]

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.

We recently faced this very challenge while designing two Web-based applications, including an enterprise-level content management system. What follows are several techniques that have helped us streamline complex applications into lightweight user experiences. [Detail]

Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag

Web development is time consuming and quite challenging. There are many ways to help combat that challenge, helpful applications from security to traffic analysis as well as CSS-concepts to give us clean, condensed code and faster load times, reducing time efforts and assisting designers and developers with critical improvements to workflows.

Below, we present 30 extremely useful development tools, templates, generators, and security suggestions, hoping you are inspired to utilize these handy tools to make your life easier. Enjoy this fresh Web development goodies bag. [Detail]

Freelance Contracts: Do’s And Don’ts

In the world of freelancing, the entrepreneur has to take on a number of tasks for themselves that would normally be handled by a separate department at a bigger company. Most of these tasks are not part of the creative processes that freelance workers are used to, but rather are more tedious, left-brain paperwork. Right-brain creatives often shudder at the thought of these forays into linear domains. Such detail-ridden tasks would strain any freelancer who wears multiple hats, but they must be completed. [Detail]

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

CSS has become the standard for building websites in today’s industry. Whether you are a hardcore developer or designer, you should be familiar with it. CSS is the bridge between programming and design, and any Web professional must have some general knowledge of it. If you are getting your feet wet with CSS, this is the perfect time to fire up your favorite text editor and follow along in this tutorial as we cover the most common and practical uses of CSS. [Detail]

30 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Layouts and UIs

Photoshop is great for many projects like retouching photos, but it can also be used to create website layouts. In this post I’ve collected 30 of the best website layout Photoshop tutorials. Some of them are geared more towards bloggers while others have a more corporate feel to them.

Those tutorials would be a great starting point if you’re looking to perfect your Photoshop skills or simply need a web layout to later code to html/css. I hope you enjoy this post! [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 2nd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Ride Oregon, 31Three, Agami Creative, Odopod and Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin. [Detail]

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: October 2009

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. [Detail]

Search Results Design: Best Practices and Design Patterns

If you’ve been assigned to design or provide the architecture for a large e-commerce project or other information-heavy website whose success depends on content findability, it is vital that the design and layout of the search functionality for that website is considered carefully.

The search results page is the prime focus of the search experience, and can make or break a site’s conversion rates. Therefore, bridging the gap between a user and the content or products they seek is a crucial factor in the success of any large website. The responsibility to design an effective search results page is best considered after a thorough examination of some of the features and functions found on search results pages from a number of popular niches.

In this article, we’ll look at a number of trends and practices incorporated on a variety of websites. From this examination, we’ll conclude with a summary of the best practices learned from the examples those sites have set. [Detail]

jQuery Tools: The missing UI library for the Web

jQuery Tools is a collection of the most important user interface components for the web. These are tabs, accordions, tooltips, overlays and scrollables. They can dramatically improve the usability and responsiveness of your site. They mainly focus on presenting information and visual appeal. After all, this is exactly what most websites desperately want: to present their content to the reader in an easy and visually pleasing manner. [Detail]

Inspirational Showcase of Business Card Websites

The term ‘business card website’ has become widely associated with the popular style of website that has cropped up on the personal domains of designers and developers. The site is essentially a simple, single page design that displays personal information, contact details and links through to other social profiles, much like a traditional tactile business card is used to display basic information.

Business card websites come in all shapes and sizes, but popular charactersitics include a compact, lightweight design, often small in size. Business card sites also tend to make use of Javascript to enhance the user experience and are commonly designed with a fresh take on the interface, taking inspiration from the clean style of Apple’s OSX.

Let’s take a look at an inspiring collection of examples, each with an individual twist on the original business card idea. [Detail]

How To Find Time For… Everything!

Time management is one of the most important skills a freelance worker can learn. With a good time management system you can easily find the time to do the things that are important to you, whether in your professional or personal life.

Successful time management can be challenging, especially to those who are new to freelancing or being self-employed. When you have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it by, it’s much easier to prioritize and figure out what needs to be done and when. But when you’re not only dealing with client deadlines but also all of the day-to-day parts of running a business, on top of trying to maintain some sort of life outside of work, time management gets a whole lot trickier. [Detail]

Beautiful Examples of Kinetic Photography

When you hear the word ‘kinetic‘ for the first time, probably the first thing that comes to your mind is motion. Kinetic Photography, also known as ‘camera tossing‘, is a technique of shooting photos with the actual physical movement of the camera. However, it does not necessarily involve tossing of the camera — you can also shake, bounce, swing or spin it; the goal of the technique is to obtain unpredictable results which are sometimes fascinating, always abstract and rarely boring. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 25th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Rick Nunn, Ride Oregon, Toggle, May and Subernova. [Detail]

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. [Detail]

Back-to-School With 40 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Learning is a process which continues throughout the life of an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator. Along the way, designers find the task of mastering Adobe Illustrator a large obstacle which requires practice and experience in using the vector-based application. Practice comes in the form of tutorials, which offer tips, tricks, and artistic styles from other designers who have mastered certain techniques based on their experience.

From these tutorials, a designer can polish their skillsets on a variety of topics which will strengthen their own artwork. Sometimes a simple tutorial has tips which may have been overlooked based on the subject of the tutorial. By looking past the subjects of the tutorials, an endless array of learning opportunities exist. Essentially, the tutorials become not only a teacher but a “class” which a designer can repeat as often as necessary to refine their skills. [Detail]

35+ Create Amazing Image Effects and Sliders with These Awesome jQuery Plugins

JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, prototype (and script.aculo.us), Dojo and mootools have become very popular because they are making the creation of dynamic effects much easier without using fx. flash. jQuery has become one of the most used JavaScript libraries today and can be found in the core of popular products like Wordpress and Drupal. The community is providing a huge amount of free plugins making it possible to find good solutions to nearny any need you may have. This article will introduce you to more than 35 jQuery plugins providing enhancements to how you can display images on your web pages. This is essential for creating dynamic state of the art web solutions. Lets get started! [Detail]

Intel's Multi-tasking Concept Laptop Brings You Three More Screens

Sitting in the coffee shop with forty Firefox tabs open on your laptop, wishing you had one more monitor? Or three? Today at IDF, Intel introduced a multi-tasking concept PC that allows users to work on their main screen while providing three small auxiliary screens above the keyboard for organizing and accessing smaller, snackable chunks of info from their PCs.

The concept PC was developed with an eye toward future-gen laptops--on which you can organize more information while still reducing the size of your notebook. Without affecting the information or activity on the main screen, you can access information--say, a phone number in your address book or a reminder you’ve placed in your sticky notes--while keeping the desktop as clutter-free as possible. [Detail]

Create a Horizontal Scrolling Website

You’ve probably seen a few sites that scroll horizontally and wondered how it’s done? This tutorial by Tom Walker, takes you step by step through the process. Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’ll be ready to add your own twist and make it your own. [Detail]

Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How -to

Simplicity in website design doesn’t necessarily equate with a minimalist design aesthetic. Simple sites just remove all unnecessary elements from the design, content, and code. While minimalist sites generally fit this criteria, there are plenty of sites that wouldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered “minimalist” that still fit the definition of simple. [Detail]

Styling Design Elements: 5 Beautiful Post Headings

We will start a new set of posts that will demonstrate different way of creating and styling various design elements. Today our focus will be on “Post Headings“, how to style and markup this important block that comes before any post. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 18th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Branded07, CoTweet, Hull Digital, Yellow Bird Project and Trent Walton. [Detail]

Audio labels speak to the blind

A device that allows blind people to attach and read audio labels on everyday objects has gone on show.

The PenFriend uses minute barcodes which - when scanned by a digital pen - trigger MP3 files recorded on the unit.

It has been developed by a UK firm together with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). [Detail]

Portfolio Design Study: Design Patterns and Current Practices

In our recent study on Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices, we asked our readers about case studies they would like us to conduct. One of the most popular suggestions was a detailed case study of portfolio websites. Following the requests of our readers, we have carefully selected 55 design agencies and Web development agencies, analyzed their porfolio websites and identified popular design patterns. The main goal of the study was to provide freelancers and design agencies with useful pointers for designing their own portfolio. [Detail]

Color Trends for Fall 2009

Although the Web Design industry doesn’t follow the color trends that fashion and furniture follow, I thought it was time to give you a little color inspiration that you can use in your next web design projects. Here are the 10 hottest colors of the Fall 2009 season!

The thing with these colors that I found most unique is that they weren’t your typical fall colors such as pumpkin, brown, beige and other warm neutrals. There is quite a variety! Maybe this is a way to liven things up in a down economy. [Detail]

30 CSS Best Practices for Beginners

CSS is a language that is used by nearly every developer at some point. While it's a language that we sometimes take for granted, it is powerful and has many nuances that can help (or hurt) our designs. Here are thirty of the best CSS practices that will keep you writing solid CSS and avoiding some costly mistakes. [Detail]

7 Steps for Systematizing The Design & Build Process

Systemization is basically what it says on the tin, i.e creating a series of processes or a pre-defined set of steps to speed up and quicken a laborious and or repetitive task.

So how can you systemize the design & build of websites? The day to day nuts and bolts of your business?
Below are 7 steps you will need to create systems to fulfill repetitive and dull tasks so you can save time for creativity to flow. [Detail]

Max99 - Mobile Instant Messenger

Max99 is a global community software that lets you keep in touch with your friends and family and make New Ones right on your mobile.

Max99 messenger is cheaper and consumes less battery and with smaller download size as well as it has got Chatrooms and group chat features. It is comparable to any other PC instant messenger.

Pakistani net users can get MiM (Mobile Instant Messenger) Max99, compatible with most of the GPRS enabled mobile phones, pocket PCs and other mobile devices.

Features of Max99

Download Max99

The Z-Index CSS Property: A Comprehensive Look

Most CSS properties are quite simple to deal with. Often, applying a CSS property to an element in your markup will have instant results — as soon as you refresh the page, the value set for the property takes effect, and you see the result immediately. Other CSS properties, however, are a little more complex and will only work under a given set of circumstances.

The z-index property belongs to the latter group. z-index has undoubtedly caused as much confusion and frustration as any other CSS property. Ironically, however, when z-index is fully understood, it is a very easy property to use, and offers an effective method for overcoming many layout challenges.

In this article, we’ll explain exactly what z-index is, how it has been misunderstood, and we’ll discuss some practical uses for it. We’ll also describe some of the browser differences that can occur, particularly in previous versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. This comprehensive look at z-index should provide developers with an excellent foundation to be able to use this property confidently and effectively. [Detail]

12 Tips for Creating a Great Portfolio Site

If you’re a designer, artist, or photographer, chances are you need to display your work online. And while there are sites out there that will host your portfolio for you, their solutions are often not quite what you were looking for.

Below are twelve tips for creating a better portfolio site. These suggestions apply to all kinds of portfolios, no matter what your particular artistic field. Also included are examples and a gallery of excellent portfolio sites, with what they’re doing right and what could use some improvement. [Detail]

70+ Awesome Free Icon Sets and Icon Collections for Web Designers

Icons are images specifically designed to deliver a message and good Icons are simply awesome to for that purpose. For that reason Icons can be really handsome when you’re designing a web site or a blog and can kick start or support the creative process. There are thousands of free Icons available which is very good but it can be hard to find the Icon Sets suitable for use in web design. This article gives you one of the largest compilations of Free Icon Resources and Icon Sets aimed for use in web design. Please let me know if any Resources or Icon packs that should have been included are missing. Always make sure you read the license before using any Icons as this may change rapidly. [Detail]

Search Engine Optimization 101

Your website may be top notch but what's the use of an online presence if no one can find it? In this quick start guide to search engine optimization we'll review an assortment of tactics to increase your page ranking. [Detail]

Data Visualization and Infographics Resources

Data visualizations and infographics can make complex datasets easier to understand and comprehend. By creating a graphical represenatation of data and statistics, complicated concepts and information can make more sense in less time.

Many visualizations focus on representing a specific set of data or statistical information. Others focus on less-concrete topics, providing a visual representation of abstract concepts. Generally speaking, the first type appear more like graphs or charts and the latter are often more creative and imaginative. [Detail]

CSS Wishlist: New Ideas, Debates and Solutions

The future of CSS is arriving fast, and many tools, languages, and solutions have been developed that make CSS a job not just for Web designers but developers, too. In many ways, the job could become more complex and confusing, but in many other ways, the new changes will provide more opportunity and better technology for the future of the Web. [Detail]

50+ jQuery Plugins for Form Enhancements

Easy user interaction and data collection is really a key functionality on most websites and web applications. Providing users high quality and intuitive input forms may be just what is needed to make your users take the time to fill in and submit the information you’re trying to collect. In this article I have collected a number of really essential jQuery Form Enhancements. A few cheat sheets have been added as well. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 11th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from CoTweet, Odosketch, Paul Barlow, Camp Creative and Giant Creative. [Detail]

Chit Chat for Facebook

Chit Chat for Facebook is a free instant messenger that allows you to chat with all your Facebook contacts.

Chit Chat connects to Facebook Chat and removes the need to use a web-browser to communicate over Facebook Chat.

[Download]

Benefits of Chit Chat for Facebook

* Fun and Free - Convenient and fun way to chat with your Facebook contacts without the hassle of surfing Facebook
* Free Your Web-Browser - No need to keep your web browser logged into Facebook
* Easy To Use - Download, install and then login with your Facebook username and password- easy!
* Popular? - Swift and fast tabbed chat Interface making it easy to talk to many friends at once
* Instant Message Notification - Let's you know when you receive an instant message.

Beautiful Black and White Photography

Today, in the era of digital technology black and white are often awake nostalgic feelings of the 20th century, the good old times when the television was just invented, when people read colorless printed newspapers and when people were just imagining cell phones equipped with photo cameras. But still, dozens of years later, many artists still use black and white photography for artistic purposes. It is one of the best and cheapest types of photography for the beginners to test their creativity. This showcase is a tribute to this often forgotten and underrated art of photography. [Detail]

10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery

With jQuery, selecting HTML elements is laughably easy. But at times, we may wish to further refine the selection, which can be a hassle when the HTML structure is complicated. In this tutorial, we'll explore ten ways that we can refine and extend a set of wrapped elements that we wish to operate upon. [Detail]

10 Beautiful jQuery and MooTool Calendar Plugins

Calendar is one of the famous form element. It helps to reduce human error. Instead of letting users type the date in certain format, you let them choose it from a calendar. It solves formatting problem, and it's user friendly and easy to understand.

So, here we go, 10 jQuery and MooTool Calendar Plugins and some of them are really really well designed and skined. [Detail]

Big Free CSS Templates Collection

Yes, it is the time to share with you another amazing collection of free CSS-based web templates. CSS templates are giving you the abilityt o create amazing look web sites as will as the abilityt o edit it dynamically and easily. [Detail]

11 Classic CSS Techniques Made Simple with CSS3

We've all had to achieve some effect that required an extra handful of divs or PNGs. We shouldn't be limited to these old techniques when there's a new age coming. This new age includes the use of CSS3. In today's tutorial, I'll show you eleven different time-consuming effects that can be achieved quite easily with CSS3. [Detail]

40 Creative and Inspiring Website Backgrounds Techniques

Web designers compete to impress visitors with distinctive and appealing visual elements. Background images are one of those visual elements that when designed properly, can create an amazing atmosphere and convey the style the designer has chosen. [Detail]

Object Oriented Programming in Javascript

Object-Oriented Programming is currently one of the most prominent aspects of programming. Many programming courses teach OOP, and PHP5 supports proper OOP. While Javascript as a language is not inherently well-suited for full fledged OOP, it is possible to make it work. [Detail]

How to Shoot Eye Catching Night Scenes

Looking for inspiration, and spot of photography? Well why not try in the middle of the night! Ok it may look a little dodgy wandering about with a camera in the dark, but some of the best shots can be had while out and about in the witching hour. [Detail]

A simple AJAX website with jQuery

This time we are going to create a simple AJAX website with jQuery and the right amount of PHP & CSS. It is going to have a few pages loaded by AJAX from the PHP back-end, and a complete support of the browser history – a real pain for any AJAX or Flash site. [Detail]

15 Great jQuery Plugins For Better Table Manipulation

Table is the most difficult object to be styled, due to its browser compatibility and markup. Most of the designers and developers will use div to replace table because it is much more easier to style div than table. [Detail]

LG system lets 11 users share one PC

LG is demonstrating a software system at IFA that lets users share a PC to lower power consumption and cut costs.

The Network Monitor system uses software installed on a host computer connected to one of LG's monitors to enable up to 11 users to share one PC within 10 meters.

The latest version of the system is available in the US and will go on sale in Europe in September. The next generation of the system will increase the number of users to 30 and remove the distance limitation by connecting the monitors to the host PC via an Ethernet network, according to Heinz-Dieter Speidel, technical marketing manager at LG in Germany. It will go on sale in early 2010, he said.

Besides power savings, another advantage of the system is that IT departments have to patch, update and install software on one machine rather than multiple PCs. The system also leads to lower ambient noise, according to LG.

The software that makes it all possible is vSpace from NComputing, which is installed on the host PC and also allows the administrator to set up profiles for each user and decide which programs each is allowed to access.

Current performance limitations make it best suited for simple applications such as Microsoft Office, according to Speidel. Typical users would be schools and training facilities, he said.

The host PC needs a quad-core processor at 2.66 GHz or higher with 4GB of memory to handle the maximum number of users.

The system supports both Linux and Windows and is based on the vSpace software from NComputing. The total cost per user is between €240 (US$340) and €280.

What is LG Network Monitor?

Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices

The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design. It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to facilitate content browsing. The dominance of horizontal navigation over vertical (i.e. down a sidebar) is obviously due to the design and content limitations of the latter. Notably, CNN discovered those limitations before switching from vertical to horizontal a few years back. [Detail]

40 Super-Neat JavaScript Plugins

The right combination of JavaScript plugins can turn a simple website into a fantastic one - all while requiring minimal work on your behalf. Today, we'll review forty of the most popular plugins available. If we missed some, let us know in the comments! [Detail]

3 Easy and Fast CSS Techniques for Faux Image Cropping

This article is a summary of a 3 fast and easy CSS techniques you can use to display only a portion of an image in your content. All techniques explained here actually need only couple of lines of CSS. However, it is not cropping in a real sense of the word, we are not cutting the image down to a certain size (CSS can't do that yet) we are merely hiding the "extra" and displaying only a part of the image we want. That's why I call it Faux Image Cropping.
These techniques can be very helpful if you need to keep images at a certain size, i.e. thumbnails in the news section or something similar. Being able to use CSS to control which portion of image to display is a great bonus. [Detail]

Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops

E-Commerce websites are often thought of as typically being unattractive or poorly designed. In this post we will feature 35 appealing designs of online shops. Those featured in this post include examples from a variety of different industries and showcase several different styles of design. [Detail]

Creative Business Card Design Inspiration And Print Solutions

Business identity is most important it definitely should not be forgotten, creative business card designs make people remember you most often. In this post I have compiled the best creative business card designs and online printing solutions for every business, these business card designs are of differnt shapes and textures and are truly inspiring and creative. This list comes in handy when you print your business cards, get the designer design for you or DIY. This list contains the best business card designs you probably have never seen before. Go ahead and Enjoy [Detail]

Inspiration Served, Beautiful Letterpress Business Cards

It’s no secret around here, that I like letterpress design, and think that it’s a growing trend (and it would seem that I’m not alone on that. I even wrote a tutorial on how to achieve the look in Photoshop. Around the design community, you can also find a tutorial on how to create the look using CSS, and plenty of letterpress design inspiration [Detail]

54 Best Inspirational Night Photography Shots

Some of the world’s best photographs are taken at night. Although its not an easy task to take good quality pictures at night. But some artists do it very well. Here I have collected some of the best night photography shots from different sources taken by some best artists. [Detail]

82+ Beautiful Windows 7 Wallpapers

The truth is that W3Mag was not designed for publishing wallpaper work but…this wallpapers are indeed beautiful and many designers worked hard to build them. That’s why I have choose to share with you some of them. Windows 7 has a pretty nice design and if you are one of its thankful users you will appreciate this list. [Detail]

40 Exceptionally Beautiful Wordpress Themes

Wordpress is regarded as the most widely used CMS platform. Although it is predominantly used for blogging, with some creativeness it can be turned to a full blown site especially when good design and powerful jQuery scripts are integrated into it. We have compiled a list of exceptionally creative themes from around the globe that [Detail]

Showcase Of 40 Website Designs Featuring Clouds And Skies

Maybe it’s because we’ve had a not-so-awesome summer here in Montreal but lately I’ve been more and more interested in website designs that make good use of weather elements like clouds, skies, suns, earth, stone, etc… So I figured, why not try to find some of the best designs and start with the ones that feature clouds and skies? [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 4th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Imaginaria Creative, LemonStand, Legacy Locker, Kris Colvin and CK Editor. [Detail]

45 Brilliant Examples of Photo Manipulation Art

Photo manipulation is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. One of the main reasons for that is its ability to blend real photos with vibrant colors and digital painting to emphasize some beautiful details which makes this software ideal for this kind of work. Here are 45 incredible examples of Photo manipulated images from extremely talented Photoshop artists. [Detail]

Professional Team Management Tips For Creative Folks

Management is a vast subject, with several sub-categories, such as product, team management and project management. While all are interesting topics, this article focuses mainly on team management and offers some useful tips and ideas to promote discussion and help improve the performance and happiness of your teams.

There seems to be in creative sectors a fear of management and a great divide between creative and “business” people. This is often because the people doing the managing are not business-minded or business school graduates but are rather designers or developers. Managers in creative industries tend to be staff who have moved up within the company; for example, a junior designer who reaches mid-level, then senior, and eventually ends up running their own team; or a developer who works for himself but gets a series of major contracts, and before they know it they are the Managing Director of a small company. This type of team has many benefits but also some downsides.

Some of these ideas are not new or indeed particularly innovative, but they are often overlooked or even ignored. Below is a selection of key items for discussion within your team. The snippets cover a variety of topics to help managers in creative industries who may not have a managerial background. You may agree with some suggestions and not others, but the aim is to gain a basic understanding of key issues so that you can look at how to improve your team. After all, if you spend all your time producing great work and no time creating a great team, the first will be harder to achieve. [Detail]

50+ Science Fiction Art Sci-fi Wallpapers

Here is some inspirational stuff from some famous resources fantasyartdesig, pc-wallpapers UK & spacejetters UK Science Fiction Art Sci-fi 3D images Wallpaper science fiction picture, we offering free stuning desktop backgrounds. 3D science fiction and fantasy pictures in listed post, you may get better ideas about Science Fiction Art. we listed some of Spacejetters where you’ll find science fiction wallpaper, 3D wallpaper, fantasy wallpaper, sci-fi art galleries, art tutorials & free 3D sci-fi. [Detail]

The most stylish websites of August 2009

Our editor team has chosen the 5 most beautiful websites in AUGUST.
We congratulate the winners - they get our CSSstyle.me GOLD DESIGN AWARD for good and creative design. [Detail]

50 Beautiful Wallpapers

These are 50 beautiful, creative and inspiring wallpapers from some of the most dedicated designers around the world. In this post we have collected 50 beautiful wallpapers for all those who are looking out for inspiration. Go ahead and check out these wallpapers and let us know your best pick! [Detail]

100+ Must Have Cheat Sheets For Web Designers & Developers

Cheat sheets are really helpful and easy way to remember things. In this list we have got the most used cheat sheets for web designers and developers, this list covers all areas of designing and developing. However comment and let us know your favourites and if something we missed out. [Detail]

Backgrounds In CSS: Everything You Need To Know

Backgrounds are a core part of CSS. They are one of the fundamentals that you simply need to know. In this article, we will cover the basics of using CSS backgrounds, including properties such as background-attachment. We’ll show some common tricks that can be done with the background as well as what’s in store for backgrounds in CSS 3 (including four new background properties!). [Detail]

Learn 3 Excellent JavaScript Libraries at Once

Let's go with a hands-on approach today. We are going to write a tiny snippet of code in jQuery and then port it over to several different libraries. Outside of that chunk, we are going to look at how to implement some basic, necessary functionality in each of these libraries. Sounds fun? Let's dive in! [Detail]

95+ Exceptionally Useful jQuery Plugins, Tutorials and Cheat Sheets

If you’re serious about creating state of the art dynamic web solutions using jQuery this is the right place for you! Fortunately for all of us highly skilled developers have dedicated their precious time and passion to create open source frameworks that encapsulate most of the browser related difficulties and in many ways these make difficult parts of client side scripting fun and it is not a nightmare any more. This article will briefly introduce you to the Javascript framework jQuery and then provide excellent examples of the low hanging fruits waiting for you if you’re starting to use jQuery. jQuery is just one of several frameworks that all have powerful features. Why focus on Javascript frameworks anyway? Because they provide NEED TO HAVE functionality out of the box that can be accessed so easily you wont believe it. Trust me the effects you’re going to roll out soon will impress your co-workers, friends and most important your customers! I’m not going to make any judgement regarding what framework is best as it would be wrong. We should just be grateful that they exist and that skilled developers keep maintaining them and because good alternatives means competition and in the end better solutions. Please comment if some great resources is missing and I’ll add them at once. [Detail]

225+ Ultimate Drupal Theme Collection

Since you are here reading this article you may know it already. Drupal is CMS – Content Management System. Content managed in Drupal is called a node. A node is the smallest chunk of information in Drupal, and typically it is representing a web page like the one you are reading just now (but OK I’m using Wordpress).You can create nearly any type of web site with Drupal like fx. Personal website, Company website, a Weblog etc. It all come down to the content you put in and the look and feel you decide to use. Look and feel on a Drupal site is controlled by themes and there are plenty to choose from – even free high quality ones. [Detail]

Really Useful Tutorials You Should Have Read in August 2009

This update covers tutorials, how-to, screen casts, tips and techniques that you should have read in August 2009. Featured authors include: Soh Tanaka, Matt Aimonetti, Enrique Ramirez, Giulio Bai, Dario Gutierrez, John, Kevin Liew, Christoph Dorn, Pallav Nadhani, Cameron Chapman, Vasilios, Satbir Singh, Michael Owens, Lam Nguyen, Chris Spooner, Jean-Baptiste Jung, Janko Jovanovic, Chris Coyier, Jeffrey Way, Ibrahim Al-Rajh, Jon Phillips, Curtis McHale, Jacob Cass, Inayaili de Leon, Alex Coomans and Nuno Franco da Costa. [Detail]

Elegant Brochure Designs for Inspiration

Brochure designs are always creative and inspiring with lovely graphics and typography used in appropriate ways to make it attractive and creative at the same time. Here in this post we present cool brochure design inspiration for better designs, I have also included links of the post talking about brochure designs. Enjoy [Detail]

50+ Exciting Firefox Wallpapers

Firefox is one of the coolest browsers, we have crawled over the web and picked up some of the finest firefox wallpapers to fire up your desktop. Go ahead and check them out. [Detail]

Weekly 30 inspirational websites #41

The first and last sites on this list are my favs for this week. Ffive for its illustration and iamrockstarninja for its idea. Somebody should give those guys an award or something. In some areas they had as inspiration the Chuck Norris facts, but damn… they adapted them in an excellent way. [Detail]

How To Create Your Own Dual Monitor Setup

Recently I wrote a post for The Web Squeeze about my essential ‘Tools of The Trade’. One of my biggest recommendations in that article was for web designers to get an extra monitor and hook it up to their computers. The TWS editors have now very kindly asked me to come back and give you a more in depth look into the world of dual-screen setups, and how you can create your own!

Although still quite a rarity outside large corporate companies and graphic design studios, dual monitor set-ups have actually been around for quite some time. Support for up to three monitors has been standard in Apple machines since 1987 with the launch of the Macintosh II, but wasn’t made a default feature of Microsoft’s flagship operating system until Windows98. [Detail]

Desktop Wallpaper Calendars For September 2009

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. [Detail]

10 Tools For Finding, Registering And Managing Domain Names

A domain name is the starting point for our online brands and identities, be it for a company, online application or a personal website. Some of us may own only one domain for a portfolio site or blog, whilst others have to manage domain names for clients or all kinds of projects. But even if you do not yet have a personal domain, as the Web becomes more pervasive in our lives, finding yourself a real home on the web becomes more of a neccessity. [Detail]

If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers…

Styles in design are described and classified in many ways. Sometimes they are given a moniker, like “Web 2.0,” other times they are referred to by their appearance: grungy, minimalist, retro, big type. The people (and brands) to which modern design styles are attributed are as numerous as the styles themselves. Many designers look to a brand such as Apple as an example of great modern design because a designer’s sensibility is infused into everything it does. [Detail]

Top 10 Most Usable Content Management Systems

There are plenty of options when it comes to picking a content management system for a development project. Depending on how advanced you need the CMS to be, what language it's built in, and who is going to be using it, it can be a nightmare trying to find the "perfect" CMS for a project. [Detail]

10 Data Backup, Storage and Sharing Solutions

In an increasingly digital age, data backup, storage and sharing is more important than ever. However, today's data backup and storage solutions have evolved into much more feature filled services that let you share and access your data easier and from pretty much anywhere while still affordable. [Detail]

20 Vital Techniques & Best Practices For Effective Web Design

Creating beautiful, unique websites seems to get harder every day. There are so many amazing website designs out there that coming up with something fresh and different is getting close to impossible. And even if you’re not looking for something entirely unique, creating beautiful designs that don’t look dated is a constant challenge. [Detail]

35 Websites To Teach You How To Use CSS Effectively

CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets) are the modern standard for presenting website. Combined with structural markup language like HTML, XHTML – CSS fully take care about presentation part, creating that good concept – HTML = Content, CSS = Presentation. If you know CSS, you can really do everything controlling spacings, borders, positioning, margins, paddings, colors, fonts, background images, hover effects and more presentational effects. CSS is really easy to understand, and in my opinion every graphic designer should have at least simple coding skills with HTML and CSS, because CSS is really still design part, not really coding. [Detail]

50 Beautiful Wallpapers

These are 50 beautiful, creative and inspiring wallpapers from some of the most dedicated designers around the world. In this post we have collected 50 beautiful wallpapers for all those who are looking out for inspiration. Go ahead and check out these wallpapers and let us know your best pick! [Detail]

25+ Beautiful Flash Websites

Flash is the powerful tool in making highly interactive user interfaces, Flash is developers favorite as it allows them to develop extremely complex and dynamic web applications. Here we have rounded up 25+ beautiful flash based websites, each website is unique in its own way, the interactivity in each case is very creative and impressive. Go ahead and check out these websites and list out your favourites ENJOY! [Detail]

How To Create a Pure CSS Polaroid Photo Gallery

Magical things can be done by combining various CSS properties, especially when some of the new CSS3 tricks are thrown into the mix. Let’s take a look at building a cool looking stack of Polaroid photos with pure CSS styling. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for August 28th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Things That are Brown, the Energy Cell, Elegant Themes, Travis Neilson and Ronnie Morales. [Detail]

20 Beautifully sculpted Sand Sculptures

Anyone who has visited beach would have tried to sculpt at least a simple sand sculpture of some sort. With the right sand consistency and a few simple tools, the possibilities of building spectacular sculptures are endless. This articles illustrates 20 beautifully sculpted sands sculptures [Detail]

25 Outstanding Flash Website Templates

The choice of a well-designed template for your website can turn out to be a difficult thing today, since the large amount that exists on the Internet. So I thought to make a list of 25 outstanding website templates made exclusively in Flash, that are very easy to use and to understand. The templates are selected from Flash Components website. [Detail]

15 Ways to Optimize CSS and Reduce CSS File Size

I have gathered a long list of CSS optimization and file size reduction techniques that have been using by most designers/developers. Depend on the complexity of your CSS code, these techniques might greatly reduce your CSS file size, or maybe just a few kilobytes.

Also, you might also want to read my previous post regarding CSS - 15 CSS Tips and Tricks to learn how to write more efficient CSS code. [Detail]

22 Non-Profits Looking Good, Doing Good

Even for a non-profit a website is a very important marketing tool. An essential way to share the non-profits goals and way to garner contributions. It also provides an easy way to share with contributors what they have accomplished with the money they have raised.

Below you’ll find a collection of great looking non-profit websites, although having a great looking website doesn’t ensure the non-profit is doing great things, but it does make it easier as you surf their site to find out what they are doing. [Detail]

30+ Websites for Teach yourself about Photography

If you thinking of taking up photography as hobby, you may learn from listed photography tutorial websites, you can create beautiful photography through your digital cameras, there is listed very much professional and beginners level photography, we getting all inspiration from photography-colleges. [Detail]

Website Background Images : Examples and Implementation

We all know how fast design industry is growing. Everyday we have new amazing stuff up on web such as online tools, free apps or unbelievable code development. Background images are one of the core features in web design that help make a website design visually interesting. Whether you are using a standard header background, a basic body background or a full body backgrounds there is great scope to come out with an amazing result.

Here are some great examples of background images used in Website Design. I hope it will be inspirational for all you designers out there. [Detail]

5+ Tutorials & Resources on jQuery

Hi! Last time we learned about basics and advanced techniques of HTML and CSS. Now moving forward here are the amazing tutorials on jQuery for beginners to get started as well as for intermediate and advanced developers. So get your feet in the jQuery. [Detail]

45 Inspirational Corporate Website Designs

As you already seen in our previous showcase of Corporate Website Designs that a perfect layout, A good design and nice resources can produce a creative output. Layout, textures and patterns are used more often than one may think but the outcome of different combination can result verity of excellent designs. However, When it comes to corporate website design you need to take care about many things which includes simplicity, readability, presentation and accessibility.

In this presentation, you’ll find variety of highly-creative, beautiful and most importantly inspirational corporate designs which is easy to accessible and convenient to approachable. The main purpose here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire your imagination to design or redesign your work site to show your skills to potential clients. [Detail]

Action! LifeCam Cinema Introduces 720p HD Widescreen Video

Widescreen technology is everywhere these days, built into virtually every new notebook, desktop monitor and flat-panel TV,1 and today Microsoft Hardware sets a new standard for webcams with the launch of LifeCam Cinema, the first consumer webcam on the PC to offer widescreen video with a native 720p sensor.2 The timing couldn’t be better, with more and more people going online to share videos with friends and family; in fact, more than 10 million videos are uploaded each month to Facebook alone.3 LifeCam Cinema webcam’s 720p widescreen sensor will deliver clear, quality videos — without leaving anyone out of the shot. [Detail]

25+ Great HTML 5 Resources to Get You Started

HTML 4 has been around for nearly a decade now, and much have happened since HTML 4 landed. The way we use the Internet have taken dramatic turns and the I think the most significant turn is the trend of desktop applications and games going online running in browsers. Many people don’t use email clients any more and simply use online services as gmail or hotmail. The average Internet user today expect seamless embedded media, flexibility, responsiveness, ease of use (usability), off line capabilities etc. in ways we couldn’t imagine 5-10 years ago. Keeping up with users demans isn’t always as easy as it should be and this is where HTML 5 is expected to kick in with a helping hand.

HTML 5 introduces many new interesting elements for example canvas that makes it possible to do new exciting things from javascript, that make it much easier to structure pages and new elements that significantly improve the use of video and autio. We are all excited about the possibilities going to offered in HTML 5 and to get hand on with some of them but there’s a lot to learn and HTML 5 is still in draft status. This means only a few of the new elements have been implemented in latest browsers and you need to be careful how to approach this. Knowing that HTML 5 will eventually hit us keeping track with the new goodies coming up and how HTML 5 develops can’t be waste of time – and even fun. According to W3C News Archive, XHTML 2 working group is expected to stop work end of 2009 and W3C is planning to increase resources on HTML 5 instead.

In this article tripwire magazine provides you with the resources you need to get overview of what HTML 5 is, to get started and to understand how you can benefit from it at this early point in time. [Detail]

45+ Really Essential Free HTML [Form] Enhancements

Easy user interaction and data collection is really a key functionality on most websites and web applications. Providing users high quality and intuitive input forms may be just what is needed to make your users take the time to fill in and submit the information you’re trying to collect. In this article I have collected a number of really essential enhancements to basic html forms. The article content has been split up into 7 sections to help you find what you need faster. The tools included in this article are all free, good quality, documented and not to hard to set up. Lets get started there’s no time to miss … [Detail]

Webdesign Trend Hunting – 27 Bright Websites Using Popping Colors

Design Fetish, our Trend Hunting series continues with a big roundup of cool websites designed with bright colors in mind. And in the eye :] Please leave your comments below, suggest other websites, and tell us what do you think about this trend. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for August 21st 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Remix, SixCentral, Envato, Jared Digital and Paul Carbo. [Detail]

Corporate Blog Design: Trends And Examples

With tens of millions of blogs online today, major corporations have started to recognize the value of a corporate blog for communicating with customers. However, corporate blogging is far different than the more traditional blogging that most of us encounter on a daily basis. Corporate blogging brings its own unique set of challenges and opportunities that must be considered and addressed by the company in order for its users to have a positive experience.

In this article we’ll examine the issues that face corporate blogs, we’ll observe some current trends, and we’ll look at a large sample of blogs from companies of various sizes in a wide variety of industries. [Detail]

20 MySQL Admin and Development Tools and cheat sheets

MySQL is a very feature rich relational database management system (RDBMS) which has more than 11 million active installations and 60,000+ downloads/day. MySQL is commonly known to be an open source project available for free under GNU General Public License – this version of MySQL is called Community Server. MySQL Community Server is very often used in a development stacks consisting of Apache with the popular mod_php module interpreting PHP code running on Linux (LAMP – Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP). All very successful free open source projects that together serve millions of websites today and the number is growing rapidly. Popular open source systems like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPbb and many more all run on this software stack.

MySQL is also offered in a version called Enterprise Server allowing companies to get Enterprise scale database software at a reasonable price (subscription based). See a comparison table here. The free community server is an excellent RDBMS but the tools you need as an DBA/Web site administrator or developer are only available if you subscribe to the Enterprise Server. Even though MySQL Enterspise Server is cheat compared to other high end database servers it is typically not an option for a blog or a small comapany website. Luckily there are other options and you can easily find free or cheap software providing the features you need.

If you’re using the MySQL Community Server or if you’re expecting to start using ityou need to find yourself some tools to support your management and development of your databases. As MySQL as open source roots there are many high quality 3rd party tools available and if you find the right match for yourself it may give significant advantages. It is always useful to know what tools you have available and what features they offer.

In the overview below tripwire magazine present some of the most useful and most popular MySQL Admin and Development Tools that both beginners and professionals can benefit of. Please drop a comment if an useful MySQL-tool is missing in the list and it will be added ASAP. [Detail]

Beautiful Single Page Website Designs: 65 New Examples

As you already seen in our previous post about Single Page Website Designs that showcase your work in single page design is a hot trend now days. It’s kind of ironic to see what designers can do with single pages as modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of trends emerge.

In this presentation, you’ll find a variety of highly-creative, beautiful and most importantly inspirational designs which is following the same trend of single page designs. The main purpose here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire your imagination to create your own design trend because your website represents you and your brand. [Detail]

21 Good Examples of Pink in Web Design

The use of pink in web design isn’t always seen with good eyes, but used in the right places and in right quantities, it can help create the right visual impact! Follow me in this great list of 21 good examples of pink in web design! [Detail]

60+ Unusual Business Card Ideas & Designs

Most business cards tend to be forgotten, which is why they are not effective. Business cards can become great interactive elements with the added ability to have custom shapes, different materials and matte finishing along with a great design idea. [Detail]

Top 6 Search Engines For Designers To Find Icons

Here i have listed the top 6 search engines which can be really helpful for you in your icon hunt. [Detail]

75 Free Useful Icon Sets for Web Designers and Developers

Icons are the basic requirement of any web related projects and good icons are like a treasure for web designers.

The demand for good icons are too much in these days and finding the best icon sets from the pool with tens of thousands of packs is not a easy job to perform. Being a successful creative web artist has a lot to do with the way you work. Sure, you can’t teach good design in some lessons or you can’t create icons for your daily needs, but it never hurts to pick a few free icons which are always available free to grub.

Below, you’ll find some of the Best Free Useful Icon Sets around for your design enhancement related needs. [Detail]

5 Ways to Make Ajax Calls with jQuery

There are at least five ways to make AJAX calls with the jQuery library. For beginners, however, the differences between each can be a bit confusing. In this tutorial, we'll line them up and make a comparison. Additionally. we'll review how to inspect these AJAX calls with Firebug as well. [Detail]

Massive Regular Expressions Toolbox

Regular expressions (”regex’s” for short) are sets of symbols and syntactic elements used to match patterns of text and they are pretty powerful. Regular expressions have been around for a very long time (in computer industry scale) and was first introduced as part of the powerful UNIX search tool grep.

The regex syntax used commonly today is compliant with Extended Regular Expressions (EREs) defined in IEEE POSIX 1003.2 (Section 2.8). EREs are supported by Apache, PHP4+, Javascript 1.3+, MS Visual Studio, MS Frontpage, most visual editors, vi, emac, the GNU family of tools (including grep, awk and sed) as well as many others. Extended Regular Expressions (EREs) will support Basic Regular Expressions (BREs are essentially a subset of EREs). The BRE syntax is considered obsolete and is only still around to preserve backward compatibility.

I believe mastering at least the most basic elements of regex is essential for any programmer. Further I know that having direct access to references, examples, ready to use patterns etc. is essential to speed up your work.

This is a toolbox for getting started and/or becoming more serious about regex. It provides details on commonly needed regexs that you can just pick up and use right away. Lets get started! [Detail]

What’s in your Cart? 30+ High-Quality Shopping Cart Templates

Finding the right theme can be a long and arduous process – a process that becomes more important when we’re talking about Shopping Cart or eCommerce themes. There are two big differences between picking a theme for your Dallas-Cowboys-bashing blog and the theme for your custom furniture shop. [Detail]

CSS Fundamentals

This article is excerpted from Speaking in Styles: Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers by Jason Cranford Teague. Copyright © 2009. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.

Syntax is how you put words together to create meaning: Punctuation and parts of speech are placed in a specific order to describe something. How you combine these elements has a direct effect on the meaning of what you are trying to communicate.

To describe your Web designs, you need to understand the syntax of CSS. [Detail]

Interesting list of tutorials and codes to build a rounded corners with Javascript and CSS

If your are web designer, maybe you have ever gotten headache by how to build a rounded corner box or button. In this post, I want to share you a list of tutorials and code projects help build a rounded corner easily. This list focus on javascript method, but in some of them, it contains CSS implement. Please create an addition if you guys know any scripts elsewhere. [Detail]

IBM scientists to use DNA to make chips

Scientists at IBM are experimenting with using DNA molecules as the basis of smaller, more powerful computer chips.

The company is researching ways in which DNA can arrange itself into patterns on the surface of a chip, and then act as a kind of scaffolding on to which millions of tiny carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles are deposited. That network of nanotubes and nanoparticles could act as the wires and transistors on future computer chips, the IBM scientists said.

For decades chip makers have been etching smaller and smaller patterns onto the surface of chips to speed performance and reduce power consumption. The fastest PC chips today are manufactured using a 45 nanometre process, but as the process dips below 22 nanometres in a few years, the assembly and fabrication of chips becomes far more difficult and expensive, said Bob Allen senior manager of chemistry and materials at IBM Research. [Detail]

25 Clouds Background for Your 3D Renditions

Clouds background are one of the most sought after types of textures. From colorful sky to smoky and dark sky, these textures are very useful for 3D artists and to those who need to incorporate some cloud textures in their designs. High resolution clouds background can be applied to a sky dome and can alternatively be used as a background pass in 3d render composites or as subtle elements in all kinds of interesting images. This roundup includes different weather conditions ranging from stormy and overcast to clear and sunny. These pictures were also taken at different times of the day from morning to afternoons and sunset and features different types of clouds from cirrus to stratus to cumulus and nimbus, etc. Now Sky is your Limit to create the wondering realistic clouds for your 3d scenes. (Most images from this set are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Please check out the individual terms of use of these clouds background before downloading them). [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for August 14th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Midtone Design, Sketchen, Fudge, Virb and Etnies. [Detail]

Mastering CSS, Part 2: Advanced Techniques and Tools

CSS is one of the most basic building blocks of modern web design. It creates the structure and style that surrounds your content and is capable of making your site a joy to use or a pain in the neck. Mastering CSS is one of the most important things a web designer can do, and has really become an essential criteria for being a successful designer. [Detail]

8 Regular Expressions You Should Know

Regular expressions are a language of their own. When you learn a new programming language, they're this little sub-language that makes no sense at first glance. Many times you have to read another tutorial, article, or book just to understand the "simple" pattern described. Today, we'll review eight regular expressions that you should know for your next coding project. [Detail]

Excellent Free Editors and IDEs for Developers

Most developers have picked their favourite editor and/or IDE and use it many hours every day (and night). Still it can be quite useful to know what the free alternatives are. Some of the free editors and IDEs available are really high quality and may be worth investigating. If your manly using a large IDE it is likely that having a simple editor as well may improve your efficiency when just editing sigle files. The free alternative IDEs are also very powerful oprions and may beat some commercials competitors easily when it comes to feaures and easy of use. In this article tripwire magazine provides a list of more than 20 free Editors and IDEs useful for most developers. Let us all know if I missed a great product by posting a comment. [Detail]

25 Detailed Tutorials for Coding Up Your Web Designs

One of the best ways to get into web design is to learn the process of transforming your Photoshop concept into a fully working coded website. Luckily there are various handy tutorials from across the web that document the process of writing a site with HTML and CSS in a step by step guide. This post pulls together the best PSD to HTML conversion tutorials to help you along your way to becoming a CSS master. [Detail]

45 Most Creative Blog Designs from blogosphere - Let’s get inspired!!

Belonging to this amazing world of blogging, we all keep on discovering new blogs every day. However, there are millions of blogs on net but only few of them are exclusively creative and deserve a second look. [Detail]

Bandwidth Test

http://www.beelinebandwidthtest.com/
http://www.gambitdesign.com/bandwidthmeter/results.php?kbps=717.3&downloadtime=6.114&KB=535.375&recorded=1

Creating Flash Charts From Google Spreadsheets

With Google docs gaining popularity, it is anticipated that in the near future there will be a great demand for connecting it to external systems for various purposes such as data interchange, data visualization, etc. In this article, I will show you how to connect Flash based charts (FusionCharts) to Google Spreadsheets and plot live data using JavaScript. [Detail]

8 Business Card Designs

A good business card is an essential tool in any freelancer’s arsenal. When you’re at a function networking, meeting new clients, or your work comes up in a conversation, your card is the anchor to make sure the discussion doesn’t come to nothing. [Detail]

25+ Create Amazing Image Effects with Some of the Best jQuery Plugins Available

JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, prototype (and script.aculo.us), Dojo and mootools have become very popular because they are making the creation of dynamic effects much easier without using fx. flash. jQuery has become one of the most used JavaScript libraries today and can be found in the core of popular products like Wordpress and Drupal.The community is providing a huge amount of free plugins making it possible to find good solutions to nearny any need you may have. This article will introduce you to more than 25 jQuery plugins providing enhancements to how you can display images on your web pages. This is essential for creating dynamic state of the art web solutions. Lets get started! [Detail]

20 list of Contact us page with gorgeous styles

In modern websites contact forms are also modernize and created with effects of course with the used of jQuery modern form validation. In this post I will share a 20 list of contact us page with gorgeous styles from 20 different websites online. [Detail]

Mega CSS Resource Roundup

In this article you will get access to one of the largest collections ever of CSS Tools, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets etc. You may have seen some of these before but here they are all put together

CSS is a key part of web design and it is really essential for web designers and developers to be comfortable with it. CSS is not too difficult to code and at the same time it is extremely powerful if you know how to master it. On the other hand getting started can be quite hard as you need to understand how CSS integrates with other web technologies and how the most fundamental parts work fx. CSS selectors.This article will give you techniques and tools enough to get started and to also to start using more advanced stuff. New to CSS? First thing you need to do is to pick a favourite cheat sheet and print it for quick reference. There are many details that can be hard to remember in the beginning and this is where cheat sheets comes in handy. Then dig into some of the Getting Started Resources to get yourself ready for the many really useful CSS Techniques found here. [Detail]

7 New Essential CSS 3 Techniques Revealed

There are several new and exciting functions and features being thought up for CSS3: text-shadow, box-sizing, opacity, multiple backgrounds, border-radius, border-image, etc… [Detail]

Google launches Chrome gallery

Google now offers a gallery of themes for its Chrome browser. [Detail]

The 10 Most Common Mistakes Web Designers Make

There are plenty of mistakes web designers (especially new ones) make when designing websites. Everything from poor design to simple oversight happen every day. But with a little diligence, they can easily be avoided. [Detail]

ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly

ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. The first assembly in the list of input assemblies is the primary assembly. When the primary assembly is an executable, then the target assembly is created as an executable with the same entry point as the primary assembly. Also, if the primary assembly has a strong name, and a .snk file is provided, then the target assembly is re-signed with the specified key so that it also has a strong name. [Detail]

What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope

Understanding scope in programming is key to appreciating how your variables interact with the rest of your code. In some languages, this can be quite straightforward, but JavaScript’s anonymous functions and event handling features, along with a couple of little quirks, mean that handling scope in your applications can become frustrating. [Detail]

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: August 2009

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. [Detail]

33+ Online Resources to Learn CSS

Before going into detail let’s learn about CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. In layman’s language CSS is a language that adds style to your document like colors, borders, margins and borders. Basically CSS is the style sheet language used to describe the overall presentation of a document like the appearance and presentation of a document written in markup languages, especially in HTML and XHTML. Cascading Style Sheets are designed to separate the contents from the presentation of a document. [Detail]

Exceptional macro water photography!

Nature can be extremely beautiful at times, the closer you look the more detailed and intricate it becomes. Two thirds of our planet is covered with water yet only a few photographers really appreciate the beauty of it. This post contains some truly breathtaking photographs of water close up. The authors should feel very proud of their impressive work. Hope you enjoy! [Detail]

Search Engine Optimization – Guides to Improve your Site Rankings

The higher your site is displayed in search results, the more clicks and more visitors to your website you will get! To have your site come up higher in FREE search results, you may optimize it and improve its rankings. [Detail]

Post Pic Roundup of CSS Grid Generators & CSS Grid Layout Generators

There are a lot of useful web code generators and graphics generators out there on the web, but did you know that there are also css layout generators too? Today we are focusing on CSS grid layout generators. These tools will help you create and visualize different web design layouts and draw grids in various ways to assist you in your design process. [Detail]

8 CSS-Only Images Tutorials

This round up of tutorials focuses on using images with css in different ways to achieve awesome decoration of your website. [Detail]

Things To Remember, While Coding A Website, To Make It Search Engine Friendly

Over 80% of consumers use search engines to find products and services.
These days, no website owner can afford not to have a search engine friendly website. There are a lot of things which one should do to achieve high ranking like search engine friendly code, Link building, submit website to various directories, Sitemap, Meta tags etc.
Writing quality code is the first step in making website search engine friendly. [Detail]

Creative Paper Inspired Website Designs

Utilizing paper in web design is a very popular design trend. Paper can not only be used in backgrounds but you will see many examples of paper used in navigation bar, content areas and all sorts of web page parts. [Detail]

18+ Handy Tools To Check Cross-Browser Compatibility Issues

Browser Compatibility issues have always been one of the major problems when designing a website. The fact that there are so many browsers on the market and nearly of them have different layout engine, which render webpages slightly different from each other. You just need to take a look at this list to get an idea of the many browsers which are available on the Internet. [Detail]

Pro-Environment Green Web Designs that shows Natural Beauty

Earth is a beautiful planet, and we often ignore that in our dreams of success. With so many issues going around related to Global-Warming and the environment, I have decided to create a list of website designs that reminds us of the beautiful nature. We have seen more and more corporates shifting toward having green aspects in their business, how about having a green aspect in the web design? Sit back and enjoy these refreshing green website designs. [Detail]