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8 Free Design Platforms To Build Your Own Site

8 Free Design Platforms To Build Your Own Site
Website builders have been gaining more popularity and traction lately, thanks to services such as Wix and Webnode. These online website creators allow you to create a full website, free of charge, directly in your browser without any prior knowledge of website development. Many of these services also offer premium packages with additional features, for a small cost per month, if you desire additional tools. The biggest advantage in using these services is the unbeatable development speed, as it all happens in your browser with click-and-drag functionality. If you’re not a web designer or a creative person but need an easy and affordable solution to creating a website, try one of these free programs. Wix Wix offers a simple, yet powerful online platform to make Flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. The design interface is sleek and quick (on a high-speed connection). Weebly Webs (formerly FreeWebs) It’s worth noting the ability to integrate your site with Paypal or Google Checkout. Jimdo

Premium WordPress Themes and Web Templates 12 Useful Web Tools for Designers - Six Revisions When it comes to design, there’s a plethora of free web-based tools to help you accomplish tasks such as color palette selection, creating unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography. In this article, you’ll find a bunch of handy online utilities for designers. kuler Create kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes. pixlr pixlr is a web-based image editor with a Photoshop-like user interface; pixlr has similar features like layers, filters, and even a Clone Stamp tool. Wellstyled Color Scheme Generator Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator is a simple web tool that helps designers produce color themes. FontStruct FontStruct is a web-based tool created by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing, and sharing fonts. Typetester Typetester allows you to test, tweak, and compare screen typography. TypeNavigator TypeNavigator is a very clever web tool that can help designers identify typefaces. Dummy Text Generator BGPatterns Dabbleboard PicMarkr

Anticipate Readme | ElegantThemes Uploading and Activating The Anticipate Plugin Using the Anticipate plugin is quite simple. The first thing you will need to do is upload the plugin files to WordPress so that it can be activated. To do this, log in to wp-admin and click on the Plugins > Add New link. Once the page loads, click the "Add New" followed by the "Upload" link. Here you can browse your computer's hard drive and locate the AnticipatePlugin.zip file. After the plugins has been uploaded, click on the "Plugins > PLugins" link and locate the "ET Anticipate Maintenance Plugin" box. Using The Anticipate Plugin The Anticipate plugins works by serving your visitors an alternate "Coming Soon" theme. Once you activate the plugin, you will need to configure a few settings. Configuring the Countdown To configure the countdown, all you need to do is choose a time of completion from within the plugin's options page. Defining a Custom Logo Image Configuring the Slider

21 Best Icon Sets for Designing Web Apps | Web Design Ledger When designing a web application, it’s important to make sure the user interface is easy to use. Using icons along side navigation links is one key ingredient to achieving this. But Instead of creating icon sets from scratch, which can be very time consuming, why not use icons that have already been created for you. Here are some of the best icon sets out there for use in web application designs. Jonas Rask Design Icons for Developers ASP.NET Icons Tango Icon Library Aesthetica Icons Diagona Icons by pinvoke Fugue Icons by pinvoke FAMFAMFAM – Silk Web Application Icons Set Coquette Icons Free web development icons #4 SE Developpers Icons Knob Buttons Toolbar icons Simplistica Icons Function Icon Set Milky Simplicio Fresh FAMFAMFAM – Mini Crystal Clear Monofactor Vector Icons IVista Icon Pack 2 About the Author Henry Jones is a web developer, designer, and entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience. Related Posts 142 shares 9 Free Icon Sets to Diversify your Library Read More 464 shares

Website Templates 20 Websites to Help You Master User Interface Design - Six Revisions By Jacob Gube As web technologies progress, websites and web applications are becoming more responsive, providing us with more ways and techniques to interact with the users. Form, more than ever, has been superseded by function. The following websites deal with interface design, user experience, user-centered design, usability, and everything in between – all with the goal of enhancing the user’s interface. 1. Boxes and Arrows Boxes and Arrows is a peer-written journal and a premier source for information on interaction design, usability, and information design. 2. UX Magazine deals in the topic of user experience. 3. UXmatters is a non-profit web magazine devoted to sharing information on effective user experience techniques and becoming a leading resource for User Interface (UX) professionals. 4. A List Apart – the leading resource on standards-based design and development articles – has a User Science topic that covers various parts of designing the user’s interface. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Razer Nostromo: свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих / Железо Игровые кейпады занимают особую нишу среди компьютерных девайсов. Назвать это клавиатурой язык не поворачивается, до джойстиков они не дотягивают, а до полноценных «мышек» им тоже очень далеко. Отличительные черты кейпадов — удобство управления, эргономичность и компактность. Добавим ко всему этому дополнительные опции, вроде возможности создания макросов и ряда дополнительных клавиш — и получим весьма необычное устройство. Последнее слово в мире геймпадов — Razer Nostromo. Историческая справка Все новое — это хорошо забытое старое. Вполне вероятно, что девайс был назван в честь здвездолета из кинофильма «Чужой». What's in the Box Внутри коробки помимо самого кейпада нас ждет стандартный набор: каталог продукции Razer, мануал и фирменные наклейки. Технические характеристики Nostromo: На лицо ужасные, добрые внутри Основа Nostromo выполнена из глянцевого пластика, клавиши и подставка для кисти — матовые и мягкие за счет прорезиненного материала. Настройка Тестирование Консоли Подводим итоги

» 10 Brilliant Multi Level Navigation Menu Techniques Web-developers can create user-friendly horizontal or vertical navigation menus using CSS. Javascript makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible navigation to any website. Today we wanted to highlight 10 brilliant Multi Level Navigation Menu Techniques built using different Javascript Libraries including jQuery, Mootools along with some CSS magic to give us what you see below. 1. Almost the same top navigation implemented on Vimeo.com is created by Janko. The base for this tutorial is simple CSS drop down menu based on unordered list. As you can see the UL has four items. Demo | Download source code 2. This menu does not only separate HTML from CSS, but even CSS definitions are categorized into structural and thematic types. Features Include: The code and files are well organized. Horizontal Menu Demo | Vertical Menu Demo | Download source code 3. This multi-level drop down menu script weighs in at only 1.2 KB. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. jQuery File Tree

Подборка генераторов CSS / Каскадные Таблицы Стилей Не секрет, что писать CSS для многих стандартных кнопок, макетов, etc. бывает весьма лениво. Ниже представлена подборка генераторов CSS (и не только), которая, возможно, в некоторых случаях сможет упростить кому-то жизнь. Многими генераторами можно успешно пользоваться даже без глубоких познаний CSS. (Осторожно! Собственно, сам список генераторов, картинки кликабельны. Button Maker Online Этот сервис предоставляет средства для создания небольших кнопок 80×15, также доступен размер 88×31. CSS Generator Позволяет выбрать стиль для веб-страницы. Кроме стандартных возможностей типа редактирования цвета, позволяет изменять оформление ссылок. CSS Font and Text Style Wizard Сервис предоставляет возможности для редактирования свойств шрифта и оформления текста. Cascading Style Sheets — CSS – Generator Немного устаревший (но годный) генератор, возможно, кому-то он понравится. Cascading Style Sheet CSS Generator Неплохой сервис для работы со стилями. CSS Layout Generator CSS Menu Generator CSS Form Code Maker

9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To Advertisement By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them. 1. Hyperlinks are designed to be clicked, so to make them usable, it makes sense to ensure that they’re easy to click. Here’s an example of the same interface element, the comments link, but this time with a much larger clickable area: Newspond comments link. Why would we want a larger clickable area? <a href=" style="padding: 5px;">Example Site<a> You can read more about padded link targets for better mousing in a 37signals article on padded link targets. 2. Pagination refers to splitting up content onto several pages. 3. 4. The Basecamp landing page. 5.

Fontdeck webfonts: Real fonts for your website Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch - Nettuts+ Have you ever wanted to design a beautiful website but just didn't know how? To be honest, a few years ago, that happened to me too. While browsing the web, I saw so many nice looking websites and wished I had the skills to create such designs. Today I can and I'm going to teach you how to do so too! The designs I create are nearly all based on the 960 Grid System. Before we open our PSD grid template and begin drawing, we first need to define the structure of our site. After we've defined our site structure we're ready to move on. Now pick the Rectangle Tool and draw in a rectangle the full canvas width and about 80px high. Create a new layer above the rectangle and set Layer mode to Overlay. New layer. With the Rectangle tool selected, draw in a big box around 500px underneath the top rectangle. Now we are going to create the same light effect as described in Step 5. Create a new layer above all the current layers. Create a new layer and draw in a big rectangle about 400px high.

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