Now that November is winding down it’s time to take a look at the best items from the month. I hope this re-cap provides you with some new and helpful content that you hadn’t seen before.
Web Design and Development:
CSS Tip #1: Resetting Your Styles with CSS Reset – Six Revisions
Getting Ready for WordPress 2.7: Really [...]
A few months ago I published a collection of 45 Photoshop tutorials for creating wallpaper. Since then I have come across many other quality tutorials on the same subject, so I put together a second collection of wallpaper tutorials.
Typography Wallpaper in Photoshop
Comment design can either help to give a blog theme a creative look, or it can be an afterthought that doesn’t get much attention during theme design and development. Avatars are now being used by a lot of bloggers (partly due to easy integration with WordPress) to make the comment section more personal and to encourage discussion.
In this post we’ll look at about 20 examples of blogs that are using avatars in the comments. Hopefully, these examples will give you some ideas in case you want to use avatars in your own work.
Last week I published a collection of over 50 excellent navigational menus for your design inspiration. Because I found more examples than I used in that post, and because others seemed to share my appreciation for menu design, I’ve decided to put together a second collection.
The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off
If you’re looking for a new theme for your WordPress blog or website, you’re in luck. Nick Roach of Elegant Themes has offered to give four one-year memberships to readers of Vandelay Design.
I’m sure many of you are already familiar with Elegant Themes, but you may or may not be aware of their business model and how it differs from most premium themes. With Elegant Themes you can pay $19.95 per year for unlimited access to their marketplace of themes. There are currently 16 themes available, some with multiple color schemes to choose from, and more themes are being developed.
When I’m looking at excellent websites for design inspiration, one of my favorite aspects of design to notice is the navigation menu. While I enjoy seeing excellent designs of all types (minimal to artistic to colorful to dark) and various aspects of the site (including headers and footers), a well-designed and well-executed navigation menu can have more impact on my appreciation of a site than any other single piece of the design.
In this post I’d like to take a look at more than 50 stellar examples of navigation menus that positively impact the design of a website. The list includes a great deal of variety. Regardless of what you personally prefer, there should be some inspirational examples in here for you.
Those of you who have been around the WordPress community for a while are no doubt familiar with Brian Gardner and his popular line of Revolution themes. The Revolution themes have been incredibly well-liked by bloggers, website owners and designers, and they’re probably the most recognizable of the premium WordPress themes.
In recent weeks Brian and Jason Schuller have taken some bold steps with the new generation of Revolution themes, Revolution Two. These high quality themes are now free and open source (the original Revolution themes are no longer available). Since WordPress is an open source platform, the idea was to align the focus of Revolution with that of WordPress in general.
One of the most important responsibilities of a website is to communicate with its visitors. Regardless of whether the site is a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site, or an e-commerce site, it exists to communicate with visitors.
The communication in some cases is two ways (blog comments are an example), but in many ways the website is communicating to visitors before they even offer their feedback. In order for the site to communicate effectively the designer and site owner need to clear purpose of what messages should be evident to visitors.
In my opinion, improving the communication is an ongoing process. As I evaluate my own sites, or those of clients, these are some of the factors that I consider.
Photoshop is an excellent tool for creating attract websites. Fortunately, if you’re looking to brush up your skills or learn some new tricks for creating layouts and designs in Photoshop, there are plenty of tutorials specifically for this purpose.
The 35 tutorials featured here will each take you through the process of creating an example website design in Photoshop. The are all different types of websites and styles of design represented, so you should certainly be able to find some useful tutorials from this group.
Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch
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