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“Ninja Training for Web Designers”

Your Domain Says What?

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

This one brings LOLs.

You would be surprised at the number of webmasters that don't spend quite enough time thinking about their domain choice. This lack of thought leads to some pretty misinterpreted domains.

Your Domain Says What? 9 Hilariously Misleading Websites from WebUpon

Hand Coding HTML Is Still in Vogue

Monday, April 28, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

It's therefore rather amusing to recognize that after 14 years of such editors - FrontPage, PageMill, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and many others, with few surviving the hecatomb - hand coding still rises to the top as the preferred method of building pages.

Hand Coding HTML Is Still in Vogue from TidBITS

Top 20 Free Vector Resources for Designers

Monday, April 28, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Top 20 Free Vector Resources for Designers from Speckyboy

Everything About Firebug - 22 Great Resources

Monday, April 28, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

“What is Firebug?” you may ask. Firebug is an excellent Firefox browser extension that is great for troubleshooting, editing, monitoring, and debugging. It is free and open source. It is one of my favorite web development tools.

I was going to write an article on Firebug but looks like it's been done over and over again.

Everything About Firebug - 22 Great Resources from Veanndesign Blog

Calculating Hours - the Client Factors

Monday, April 28, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Pricing for services is one of the vital realms where design professionals do not often possess significant skill. And this is a shame because price estimation skill is often directly tied to a designer’s ability to keep clients happy and derive a sense of satisfaction from the work; important stuff. So in this article I want to examine some of the common but not oft-cited factors that affect project hours’ calculations and how these factors affect our pricing considerations, all in an effort to help designers avoid pricing mistakes.

http://www.andyrutledge.com/calculating-hours.php from Design View

Collection of Web Developer Tools, per Browser

Sunday, April 27, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

With so many browser out there in the wild, working as a Web Developer certainly is not an easy job these days. Thankfully, over the last years, decent tools have been developed by bright people that make developing and debugging of code easier for the developer. But sometimes, it is not easy to keep track which tools are at a Developer’s disposal (and which are actually usable). The following article seeks to list the best tools available and quickly describing how to activate/install/use them.

Collection of Web Developer Tools, per Browser from Klaus Komenda

Best Practices When Moving Your Site

Saturday, April 26, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site's performance in Google search results?

Best Practices When Moving Your Site from Google Webmaster Central Blog

Poynter's Eye-tracking Follies

Friday, April 25, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Poynter released their EyeTrack ’07 study findings some months ago and while this effort was not a completely useless study like their previous one, I thought it would be good to revisit how these sorts of studies can unnecessarily distract us in our design efforts.

I have to agree with Andy with this one. Designers have the power to control how users focus using strategically designed elements.

Poynter's Eye-tracking Follies from Design View

Logo Design Basics: The Five Types of Marks

Friday, April 25, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Logos come in all kinds of shapes and sizes however they typically are one of 5 different classifications. Designing a logo is about much more than an exercise in aesthetic. A logo must be a positive depiction of the product or service it represents. When designing a logo, knowing which type of mark would be the most appropriate for the application will help you achieve a stronger solution.

Logo Design Basics: The Five Types of Marks by Anthony J. Zinni

On Choosing Type

Thursday, April 24, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Typography is not a science. Typography is an art. There are those who’d like to ‘scientificize’; those who believe that a large enough sample of data will somehow elicit good typography. However, this sausage-machine mentality will only ever produce sausages. That typography and choosing type is not a science trammeled by axioms and rules is a cause to rejoice.

On Choosing Type from I Love Typography

Four Bad Designs

Thursday, April 24, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Four Bad Designs by Jacob Nielsen

NyroModal - jQuery Plugin

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Learn how to use jQuery modal windows thanks to Nyro Dev!

Designers seem to like using modal windows more and more, as they provide a quick way to show data without reloading the entire page. It's easy to use and easy to design.

NyroModal - jQuery Plugin from Nyro Dev

Kwicks for jQuery

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

If you're wondering what "Kwiks" is, it's this effect.

Kwicks for jQuery is a plugin that simulates the insatiably attractive Mootools effect of the same name.

Kwicks for jQuery by Jeremy Martin

Learning jQuery: A Roundup Roundup

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

I’ve been really getting into this jQuery phenomenon lately. jQuery is tightly tied to CSS, so if you are already comfortable with CSS and are looking for ways to expand your possibilities, jQuery is the place to be. You can achieve so many cool effects with it, and there are so many good learning resources out there for it I think it makes sense for serious web designers to start getting their hands dirty with this. In the past few weeks, I’ve come across some great tutorials and roundups that have been helping me learn, so I thought I’d share.

Learning jQuery: A Roundup Roundup from CSS Tricks

GridFox - The Grid Layout Firefox Extension

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.

Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.

GridFox - The Grid Layout Firefox Extension by Eric Puidokas

14 CSS Tools to Save You Time

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

As a web designer/developer you must continue to find ways to reduce the time it takes to design/develop websites. This is very important to improve your productivity and to maximize your profits. The CSS Tools below, which are categorized by function, are here to save you time designing websites.

14 CSS Tools to Save You Time from WebTecker

Footers in Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

According to classic principles of web design, everything at the bottom of the page isn’t that important. Most users think like that. And most designers are convinced that this is true. Site elements at the bottom of the page aren’t really able to catch visitors’ attention which is why footers are often forgotten or ignored and not given the attention they deserve.

Footers in Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas from Smashing Magazine

Pure CSS Animated Progress Bar

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Here's a simple demonstration of how you can create animated progress bar using pure css. The trick is very simple. We need 3 elements, one container and 2 nested elements.

Pure CSS Animated Progress Bar from CSS Globe

50 Ways Your Web Site is Discouraging Conversions — and How to Fix It

Monday, April 21, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

There are many sexy websites but then there are websites that aren't as sexy but are more effective. Are your sexy websites effective?

If your Web site gets great traffic but no sales or sign-ups to back it up, it's time to take a good, hard look at it. Chances are, your site is scaring off customers. Follow these tips to make your Web site more friendly to customers and encourage better conversion rates.

50 Ways Your Web Site is Discouraging Conversions — and How to Fix It from Inside CRM

9 Best Practices for Email Design

Monday, April 21, 2008 - Lawrence Hsu | BC

Designing for an email is still quite far off from designing for a browser. In fact, email reader standards are pretty historic in the sense that (a) it requires designers to degrade their modern coding practices and (b) there really are no true standards.

Outlook 2007 and Gmail are the bane of my existence.

9 Best Practices for Email Design from Vdot Media

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