Website Design Blog: discussion, Inspiration and More... » Freebies

Weebly Theme Contest

Designussion — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:01:06 +0000

I thought this was pretty cool. Weebly is having a contest and giving away $13,000 for the best theme you can create with their platform. Designers – get over there, the $13,000 is yours!!

http://themes.weebly.com/contest/

ManageMe & Google Wave Invites GiveAway

Designussion — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:28:53 +0000

Today at Designussion we are giving a little something back to the community. We have been fortunate enough to have been contacted by the guys over at ManageMe who have been kind enough to give away three paid subscriptions of Plutus 6(priced at $12) for free to the winners of the giveaway. Designussion also has 23 Google Wave invites that will be given out which contain full access to Googles new real-time communication and collaboration tool.

What Is ManageMe?

manageME7 helps you to manage your money 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Just as the expenses do not stop, neither should money management. And with money being a limited commodity (for most of us), it is important to use it judiciously. manageME7 is developed to help everyone who has the need for financial management (and that includes everyone who indulges in economic activity of any nature).

What Is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborativeand real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

How Do I Enter?

Entering is simple. Follow the following instructions and you will be entered and in with a chance to win either a ManageMe paid subscription of Plutus 6 or a Google Wave Invite. The giveaway will be ending on the 15th January and decided up on the comments received.

Subscribe To Designussion – Subscribe to Designussion to receive an update on the lucky winners of this giveaway (15th January). You can do this by either subscribing using your favourite RSS reader or by opting to receive an update by email. Both of this links are also available at the top of our blog.

Tell Us Why You Deserve To Win – Leave us a comment telling us what and why you deserve to win either of the giveaway items.

Retweet This Giveaway (optional) – Appreciate this giveaway? Why not promote it so that our sponsors can receive that little extra credit and support.

Good Luck

Neil Kornswiet

12 Remarkable Web Based RSS Readers

Designussion — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:49:32 +0000

Keeping up with the your reading is an essential part of growing and learning as a designer. Using a web based browser allows you to keep your favorite blogs all one in central location even when moving from one device to another. In this post, Designussion showcases 12 awesome web based RSS readers which allow you to customize, organize, search and catagorize articles.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

Google Reader

Google Reader, the most popular RSS reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 throughGoogle Labs

Mysyndicaat

mySyndicaat is a news mastering tool that allows you to retrieve, filter, mix and monitor content from remote content sources available on the web. Collected content is cached by mySyndicaat and can be retrieved later on either by using mySyndicaat content viewer, or by subscribing to is using any RSS 2.0-compliant RSS aggregator.

Bloglines

Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. With Bloglines, there is no software to download or install — simply register as a new user and you can instantly begin accessing your account any time, from any computer or mobile device.

Lazyfeed

Lazyfeed is all about letting you watch live updates on every topic you care about. Just add the topics you are interested in and start watching. Real-time updates on those topics will continuously flow in automatically. Don’t surf. Let the web come to you.

Feedly

Based on Google Reader and Twitter, feedly organizes your favourite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

Fastladder

Fastladder is a free web-based RSS/Atom feed reader.It enables you to read latest entries from your favorite blogs or news so efficiently.
Comparing to old reading style, visiting one web site to another, you can get much more information in much shorter time.

Superfeedr

Set up by a bunch of 20 and 30-something hackers who think real-time technologies are about to change the web. Superfeedr is capable of accepting RSS and Atom feeds, parsing them and sending you the new entries.

Collected

Collected is a service where you easily gather feeds and news sources in to collections where you (and others!) can get a good overview and follow them on a daily basis. You can even export your collection to a new feed that you can use in your favourite reader such as Google Reader, Net News Wire, etc.

My.alltop

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.

Newsisfree

NewsIsFree is a web site designed to let you access thousands of news sources with a powerful and flexible portal for browsing, indexing and publishing news headlines.

Feedbucket

FeedBucket provides a quick and easy way to view RSS feeds. No need for any fancy software or programming — just enter an address above to view the headlines.

Protopage

Protopage is your own personal page, which you can access from any computer or mobile phone. Use it to read your own selection of news and blogs, keep bookmarks, to-do lists, sticky notes, and much more.

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30 Impressive Twitter Status Designs And How To

Designussion — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:50:00 +0000

As Twitter continues to grow people are finding new ways to take advantage of its API and improve the way they communicate with others. Many bloggers are now displaying their tweets on their website and some have taken it further than others. To keep on top of the game and readers interested, some talented and creative individuals have chosen to spice up their micro blogging updates and create some impressive twitter status update designs to match or stand out from their original blog design.

In this post, Designussion showcases a number of impressive twitter status designs. You’ll also find some informative tutorials on how to do this yourself so you can keep up with the rest.

elitistsnob

madfrogdesigns

productivedreams

thedesignsuperhero

chrisbewick

pasqualedsilva

thatindiedude

vikiworks

komodomedia

olliekav

wearenotfreelancers

athenaemily

bigod

dezinerfolio

fabio-carneiro

gabediaz

hunsonisgroovy

larissameek

chethstudios

flisterz

jayhafling

sproutventure

webjackalope

callmejeffrey

Tutorials

Customizing Twitter Status on Your Blog

jQuery plugin for Twitter

How To Make a Unique Website For Your Twitter Updates

Use PHP to add your Twitter feed to any page

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410 Free Christmas Wallpapers For A Festive Desktop

Designussion — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:17:04 +0000

With the festive spirit upon us and many white Christmases around the world its hard not to feel the festive spirit. As always, the design community comes together at Christmas to provide something a little special for their readers such as a giveaway, free graphics or a fun blog post. In this post, Designussion showcases a huge number of free Christmas wallpapers so that you can spice up your screen with a little Christmas spirit.

Wallpapers of the Week – Christmas (10)

35 Beautiful Christmas Wallpapers

2009 Best Free Christmas Wallpapers (20)

101 Most Popular Christmas Desktop Wallpapers Of All Time

25 Well Designed Christmas Wallpapers

15 Free Christmas Desktop Wallpapers

40+ Beautiful Christmas Wallpapers

29 Beautiful Christmas Wallpapers

45 Exceptional Widescreen Christmas Wallpapers

50 Free Christmas and Winter Holiday Wallpapers

40 Free Christmas Wallpapers for your Desktop

20 Articles To Help You Grow As A Web Designer

Designussion — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:27:42 +0000

As a designer, there is always room for improvement, growth and inspiration. To achieve all three, it is often best to go out and read what other designers are doing as they provide a great source of inspiration and growth to others . So in this post, Designussion showcases 20 articles that will help you grow as a web designer. If you enjoyed any of the posts showcased in this post, please visit the original article and leave a comment.

Can You Be a Web Designer?

The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Design and Converting it to HTML and CSS

In Defense of The Jack of All Trades

The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

22 Really Useful Online Tools for Web Designers and Bloggers

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

Styling Post Headings That Stick Out

47 Useful Adobe AIR Apps for Web and Graphic Designers

Content Heavy Websites with Beautiful Structure, Layout and Hierarchy

30 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Layouts and UIs

Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices

15 Time Saving CSS Tools You Should Be Aware Of

A Round-Up of Useful Web Apps for Web Designers

75 PSD to HTML Resources for Web Designers

63 Popular And Promising Web Design Blogs

Creative Uses of Illustration in Website Design

14+ Web Development And Design Blogs That Are Worth To Follow

The Most Common Design Mistakes That Web Developers Make

How to Code a Clean Portfolio Design (Plus Free Five-Page Template)

The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property

12 Of The Best Free Website Analytic Tools

Designussion — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:03:15 +0000

To most serious webmasters website analytics are a major part of their life. Knowing who is coming to their website and how they got there is an important factor to building a successful website but being able to make changes because of access to this data is even more important as it will bring both growth and profit.

Without the creation of such informative and helpful software, webmasters would be clueless on how their website is doing and what they can improve on. Obviously, different software supply different features and at the end of the day its down to a webmasters preference to which software they use.

In this post, Designussion are showcasing what we think are the best free website analytic tools available on the Internet.

Visistat

VisiStat is a suite of powerful, easy-to-use Website tracking tools that provide lead generation, and measure the effectiveness of your Website performance, from pay-per-click & online marketing to search engine optimization. Real-time & presentation ready…no experience required!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Sitemeter

Site Meter’s comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With our detailed reporting you’ll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

Mint

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don’t let you see what’s happening “today” until the day after.

Live Stats

LiveStats is a real-time traffic monitoring app for small and medium sized websites. It lets you see every visitor currently browsing your Site along with info on how they’re browsing (what browser, operating system, screen size, etc.), which language they’re speaking, and what city they’re from.

Mochibot

MochiBot is a Flash traffic monitoring tool (similar to a hit counter) that tracks the performance of individual Flash content files (SWFs) no matter where they end up on the web. If your SWF is on 5 different servers, then MochiBot will count the number of views that SWF got for all 5 servers. It’s perfect for tracking how viral your Flash content is.

Going Up

With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools… are you GoingUp?

Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate measures your influence on the web in real-time. Gain up-to-the-minute insight into your audience, then adapt to meet their needs and watch your site grow.

Webtrends Analytics

Webtrends Analytics 9 delivers the industry’s most accurate picture of what’s happening on your web site, along with the data analysis and integration tools to help you turn even the largest stockpiles of online and offline records into understanding of your customers and business.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! has integrated its acquisition of IndexTools, a leading provider of web analytics software, with its own systems to provide a free full featured enterprise analytics solution which also now provides insight into the demographics and category interests of your website visitors.

Design Blogs With User Communities To Submit Too.

Designussion — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:44:59 +0000

Many blogs out on the web have started providing communities for their readers. Webmasters are allowed to submit their own article links to the community essentially promoting their article and receiving targeted traffic. In this post, Designussion showcases a number of design blogs running user communities that allow others to submit their links too.

Designussion

Abduzeedo

ColorBurned

Designm.ag

Instant Shift

Crazy Leaf Design

Vector Tuts+

PSDTuts+

Noupe

Fuel Your Creativity

Knowtebook

Brush King

Creativity Wall

PSD Learning

Design Shards

Specky Boy

PSD Fan

Dev Snippets

My Ink Blog

Web Design Tuts

Spoonfed Design

Web Design News

Win A PSD To XHTML Service From ShopHTML

Designussion — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:32:59 +0000

In conjunction with Designussion, ShopHTML are giving away a PSD to XHTML service to two lucky readers. If you have never heard about ShopHTML before, they offer standard XHTML/CSS along side Wordpress and Joomla conversions.

ShopHTML are known for their cost to quality ratio and offer some of the best prices available on the Internet which can be seen on their Site and Twitter

*Update – Winners

Thank you to everyone who participated aswell as Shophtml for providing the winning goods!

The two winners after random number generation are comment numbers 2 and 12

Matt
Lorilee

Thank You

Contest Details

Starts: 7th September
Ends: 11th September
Prize: Two PSD to XHTML conversions

How Do I Enter?

Entering is simple, all you have to do is Retweet and leave comment on this post with a valid email address and we will do the rest for you. We require a valid email address because if you win, how else are we going to contact you? You wouldn’t want to miss out on this free service would you? Why not follow ShopHTML on Twitter too? They are always posting promotional codes and interesting links!

How Is The Winner Chosen?

The winner is chosen by using a random number generator. Each email will be assigned to its comment number and when the giveaway time is up they will all be put into the generator and randomized 2 times to produce our two winners.

When does the giveaway end?

The PSD to XHTML service giveaway will end on Friday 11th September. That gives you one whole week to set aside a little time and leave a comment on this post. On the 11th September, the two winners will be contacted by email for verification and then sent details on receiving the PSD to XHTML service. Announcements on who won the service will be posted shortly after.

Still Not Convinced?

Are you still not convinced to enter? Here are some testimonials from previous ShopHTML customers and look how happy they are!

“ShopHTML provided the work above expectations as usual. Very recommendable and serious honest team, always ready to provide help and answer project daily basis questions. Thanks for great work again.” Joe Mac, Que Systems

“We really enjoyed working with ShopHTML on this project. They responded to all of our comments quickly and effectively and blew us away with the final product. Highly recommended.” Craig Davis, SL Powers

17 Noteworthy Typographic Tutorials

Designussion — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:44:02 +0000

Typography is the art of arranging type by location, font-family, font-style, color and size which all determine the message it is designed to portray. In today’s world, Typography is not only used to present information but also to create images and messages for others to read. In this post, Designussion showcases a number of great typography tutorials to get you started.

Tutorials

Fresh Typography Tutorial

Nik Ainley of Shiny Binary shows you how to add the wow factor to 3D text using Photoshop’s art tools.

Creating a Typographic Wallpaper

Learn how to create a fantastic looking typographic wallpaper tutorial. There is more to it than you think, it isnt just simply placing words within a number….

How to Create Explosive Typographic Effects in Cinema 4D

In this tutorial GoMediaZine will walk through the steps they used to create this illustration to bring alive the word “collide.”

Smoke Type in Photoshop in 10 Steps

In this tutorial Abduzeedo will show you how to create a smoke typography effect playing with some brushes and adjustment layers. It’s a very easy tutorial and you will be able to do the whole process in 5-10 minutes.

Graffiti with Photoshop

Create graffiti from home. Load up this tutorial and spray your tag on any wall!

Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text

Take typography one step further by having text falling from the sky in a burning inferno. Yes, this is the text-on-fire tutorial to end all tutorials.

The new way to create 3D text

3D text needs the right depth, lighting and texture. Nik Ainley tells you how to do this without re-rendering nightmares

Trendy Graffiti Text Tutorial

Create trendy graffiti text in illustrator. PDF formate required to view tutorial.

Candy Coated Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial Gosdot will teach you how to make a web 2.0 logo so damn sugary sweet it’ll give your website a cavity.

Colorful Typography

Create a colorful piece of typographic art with this fantastic tutorial. Learn how to use textures and other important photoshop functions.

Photorealistic Perspective

Sometimes, flat just doesn’t cut it, and we need to find other, more attractive ways to present designs to our customers.

Ancient Typography with Dry Soil Texture and Floral Brushset

In this tutorial, PSDvault will show you the steps I took to create this cool, ancient-style typography using dry soil texture and floral brushset in Photoshop

Designing a Typographic Concept Poster

Create a fantastic typographic concept poster that is explained in both writting and video. A great tutorial from the guys over at PSDtuts.

3D Bulge Text Effect Tutorial

Create an awesome 3D text effect with various photoshop filters (Plastic wrap, Blur, Sharpen) and other tricks that will make you a text effect master!

Decorating Text

Creating text and then decorating it is often a daunting task, not knowing what colors to use and how to achieve effective results with the resources you have is often hard to overcome. Keeping your text simple but still having it stand out is an art in itself.

Create a Spectacular Grass Text Effect in Photoshop

Ever wanted to make text out of grass? Well with Photoshop you can. In this tutorial we’ll create a rather cool-looking grass-text effect using a photo of grass, the Pen Tool and a bit of patience.

Simple Burnt-in Text Effect

Create a burnt text effect with thie great typographic tutorial provided by Photoshop Point.

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