Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

If you’re and experienced designer it’s likely that you have a knack for matching colors and building your own custom color schemes. However, for the majority (including myself) you can probably pick out a great color scheme, but would have a difficult time putting one together on your own.

The good news is that there are a bunch of extremely user friendly tools available to help you quickly and easily develop professional looking color schemes on the fly. The following are a list the most powerful resources I have come across.

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The speed of your site, or the amount of time it takes your pages to load, is one of the many important factors to consider when developing websites.

With the release of Google’s new tool Site Performance, available within your webmaster tools account, I thought it would be a good time to provide a few resources that you can use to ensure your sites speed is up to par – the following are five tools I have found particularly useful. Continue Reading

Arguably one of the most important elements with regard to web design is navigation usability. Recognizing this, a great deal of consideration should be put into making sure your website is easy to navigate. After all, if your customers cannot easily navigate your site and find what they are looking for you will risk losing potential new customers and in turn revenue. Can you afford this?

The good news is that it is never too late to improve the usability of your website’s navigation. Whether you are in the process of building a new site or looking to enhance your existing site the following are seven essential usability tips for providing an easy-to-use navigation experience.

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Dec
14

Most designers are just as particular about the way their code looks as they are about the way their page looks. Good thing Dreamweaver offers a tremendous degree of control toward shaping your code just the way you like it.

The basic option, Apply Source Formatting, is found under the Command menu and reformats all the code in your page according to your Preference settings where you can specify elements such as indent, tab size, automatic wrapping, and more.

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Dec
07

When developing websites it’s always helpful to add content to your design so you can see how a site will look as a finished product. To accommodate for this there are many free lorem ipsum generators available, which simply create fake text for use in filling the content areas of your website. This is particularly useful when you demo a website you are working on to a client.

You can search the Web for “lorem ipsum generator” to find sites that generate paragraphs of Greek text and even specific character counts that you can copy and paste right into your website’s design.
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It’s not every day someone tells you that being lazy can actually be helpful, but when it comes to applying the same action in Photoshop to 100 images, being lazy is about the best thing that you can do for yourself. In this post I will teach you how to create a droplet in Photoshop.

Droplets are scripted actions outputted to a file that when any image or group of images is dragged and dropped onto it (hence the name droplet) the recorded action is performed on every image added to the droplet.

With the recent release of PowerGallery, WebAssist’s pre-built PHP photo gallery solution, I thought it would be a good idea to post something on how to batch convert images to create a black and white photo gallery. Keep in mind that the options are endless when it comes to creating custom droplets. Other uses for droplets, are batch resizing, adding drop shadows, borders, image overlays and much more.

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