Tools of the Trade
Easy Slider – Powerful and Customizable jQuery Slider Plugin
Mar 1st
Recently, I was working on completing my portfolio website. I wanted a slick and impressive way to display my past portfolio work, and I found this little gem known as Easy Slider while surfing the internet.
Easy Slider saved my life. It’s a jQuery image slider that is highly customizable. I recommend it for anyone who needs to create an image gallery or wants to add an interactive element to their website! It was super easy to put up, even for a JavaScript dummy like me. Check out the newer version for added features.
Easy Slider 1.5 – The Easiest jQuery Plugin For Sliding Images and Content
Easy Slider 1.7 – Numeric Navigation jQuery Slider
Check out how I implemented Easy Slider on my portfolio website! 
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Top 10 Web Design Resources Every Designer Should Know About
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Top 10 Web Design Resources Every Designer Should Know About
Feb 14th
Where would web designers be without the invaluable resources provided on the web for us? Design inspiration, stock photos, tutorials, fonts, freebies, brushes, textures … the list goes on. Take advantage of the resources and expertise other web designers offer for free! Here are 10 of my absolute favourites, in no particular order:
Design Meltdown (design inspiration)
Browse thousands of cataloged sites to get inspiration for your own web designs – invaluable for finding inspiration on specific design elements, styles, themes, or colours.
Scrnshots (design inspiration)
Browse screenshots of inspirational web design uploaded by other users or upload your own favourite designs. Very useful for finding inspiration about specific elements since you browse by tags and keywords.
Designer’s Toolbox (design resources)
Provides many miscellaneous design and print resources, including PSDs of HTML form and browser elements for realistic design mock-ups.
Stock Xchng (stock photos)
One of the best free stock photo sites; Stock Exchange provides thousands of super high-quality stock photos for FREE for both personal and commercial use.
Smashing Magazine (interactive design blog)
The most well-known web design blog out there, Smashing Magazine provides TONS of information, resources, tutorials, and tips from industry professionals. Try to soak up as much of their expertise as you possibly can.
DaFont (free fonts)
Browse their huge selection of free fonts to spice up your design. They make it easy to find a specific type of font since you can browse by theme, name, or search for keywords!
Blind Text Generator (dummy text)
Generates highly-customizable dummy text (lorem ipsum) for use in the text areas of your design.
Type Tester (css font comparison)
Preview different web-safe fonts to see what they will look like on the screen and customize the different CSS font options.
Color Scheme Designer (colour palettes)
Highly-customize colour palette generator which allows you to also preview what the colour scheme could look like on a web page.
Design Resources Search Engine (design search engine)
This search engine has endless usefulness – it allows you to do a Google search but only on the selected design-related websites. Great for finding tutorials, resources, and blogs.
What are YOUR favourite web design resources? Comment and let us know!
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Firebug is Every Web Developer’s Friend
GIMP – The FREE Alternative to Photoshop
GIMP – The FREE Alternative to Photoshop
Feb 8th
Let’s face it: Photoshop is freakin’ EXPENSIVE. At a whopping $700 US for Photoshop CS4, you had better hope your parents decide to spoil you and buy it for you next Christmas. Unfortunately, the high price point makes it difficult for beginners and aspiring web designers to get into the business – you had better be darn sure web design is what you want to do before spending $700 on Photoshop. So what are the alternatives?
GIMP is the best Photoshop alternative out there and it’s completely free. It offers many of the same advanced features as Photoshop – for FREE. While, so far, nothing can replace Photoshop as an industry standard, GIMP is certainly a passable equivalent for beginners.
CNET Download.com reviewed it and gave it 5/5 stars:
“One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the upgrades make the GNU Image Manipulation Program eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations such as levels. New improvements include GEGL integration for 32-bit color support, dynamic brushes, and more options for the free select tool. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users.”
So if you’re strapped for cash, give GIMP a go!
Top 10 Best Cheap Web Hosts
Feb 3rd
Trying to find the best web host for your money can be a long and painful process. Many advertise a super cheap price – if you buy three years of hosting. Some advertise unlimited bandwidth and disk space – but then charge you a big chunk of cash to purchase the domain name. Some are just too fishy to even trust with your money! When you choose a web host, it usually means committing for at least a year of hosting, which is why it is such an important decision.
Luckily, Web Hosting Geeks has created a list of the top 10 cheap web hosts based on user reviews. They also offer other “Top 10″ lists of web hosts based on other specifications, like Top 10 Eco-Friendly Web Hosts and Best 10 Dedicated Servers.
Read the reviews, compare prices, and make an informed decision on who gets the privilege of hosting YOUR website.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering – here are the Top 10 Web Hosts:
- Inmotion Hosting
- iPage
- JustHost
- Web Hosting Pad
- Fat Cow
- Green Geeks
- Blue Host
- Host Monster
- GoDaddy
- Yahoo
Wordpress?
Feb 2nd
Wordpress is a great tool to be familiar with. It’s so popular and powerful that businesses use it all the time. Although Commonly used for a blog, it’s possible to create great websites using Wordpress as a platform. Wordpress allows you to install and apply themes so you can quickly get a website/blog up and running instantly, but it’s possible to use your own great designs as well. You can do these by creating and implanting your own custom themes.
So how do you create a Word press theme? Click here for a great step by step resource on how to create custom themes.
Coda
Jan 31st
There are a TON of different text editors out there, everything from Windows’ NOTEPAD.EXE to BBEdit to Coda. BBEdit is great as far as simple text editors go, but it lacks specialization. While it does have autocorrect features, Coda has a comprehensive CSS editor as well as the autocorrect. It also has an organizational feature which, a lot like Dreamweaver, but what Coda has over Dreamweaver is that it is simple, uncluttered, and easy to figure out.
So give Coda a shot if you want to build your alternative suite of tools.
Web Developer Toolbar
Jan 29th
If you have ever developed websites you have to get this Firefox add-on. This tool bar can turn on and off anything such as Javascript, CSS, Images and more. Basically you can test for anything to see if your webpage is stable when people have all those turned off. The toolbar has other features that are handy too. You can test for pretty much anything. Its also great for debugging too.
If your a web developer I would download the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. This is a good add-on.
Firebug is every web developers friend
Jan 29th
Have you ever built an HTML page and styled it thinking it was going to look like the mock up you created just to view it on a web browser and find out that you have block elements going places you never thought possible. This is the point where the browser leaves you wondering “WHY IS THAT THING OVER THERE!”.
Luckily there is a tool out there that can help you see whats actually going on and that tool is called Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for Firefox and can help a ton when debugging or styling a webpage. It gives you a visual of whats going on by hovering over elements. I also use it to optimize my CSS. Sometimes you might have way to many statements telling your <p> tags to do the same thing. That can lead to a bunch of unnecessary code that increases the size of your css files.
Download and install Firebug. Trust me it helps.
The “Ipad” – What do you think?
Jan 29th
There has been mixed emotions about the new Apple Ipad – we want to know what you think! Good? bad? 
Click “Comment” (or scroll down) to leave your thoughts, we want to hear from you!
A nice little wireframing tool online
Jan 29th
For anybody who is looking for a great tool for building wireframes for your website, I highly recommend checking out what Hot Gloo has to offer. The application is strictly online so you don’t have to download anything onto your computer. Some cool features that Hot Gloo possesses is the ability to do collaborative work with other people who might be working on the project. Try it for free until Feb 14. Than you will have to pay for a monthly membership to use.
Check out Hot Gloo now.
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