Webmaster Tips : Web Development, Design & Marketing

30 Beautiful Holiday Desktop Wallpapers

30 Beautiful Holiday Desktop Wallpapers

The 2013 Christmas and New Year’s holiday season is quickly approaching us and will be here before you know it. For many people, it’s their favourite time of year, filled with lots of festivities and quality time spent with friends and family. If you’re someone who loves holiday cheer and decorations, you’re in luck as there are many free wonderful holiday graphics and wallpapers on the web.

To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of 30 beautiful holiday desktop wallpapers that will not only help to get you into the holiday spirit but will also brighten up your computer desktop.

Merry Christmas Bear

This holiday bear is adorned by a holiday wreath with pine cones and flowers.

Merry Christmas Snowman

You can’t help but think of Frosty the Snowman when looking at this wallpaper, although it looks a little mischievous.

Merry Christmas Ornament

A simple Christmas ornament stocking with a tiny little snowman.

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5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Each of these processes is important, and little inefficiencies in any of them can cause massive delays in finishing your outputs and accomplishing your targets. That is why you must ensure that your operation is organized and streamlined as much as possible.

In this guide, I will share with you six tried and tested strategies that you can use to streamline your web design agency.

Let’s dive in.

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5 Simple and Impressive Content Management Systems For Web Designers

5 Simple and Impressive Content Management Systems For Web Designers

PageLime

With PageLime, you can create multiple sites and assign different users and permissions to each. Your content is edited using a real-time live preview, so you can see updates to your site right away. It also stores versions of your site in case you want to revert back to an older rendition. It also has integrated SEO fields so that you can edit your metadata right from within the editor. Other features include photo editing and resizing, saving pages as templates, and the ability to brand your site with your logo and custom colours.

Surreal CMS

Surreal CMS lets you manage multiple websites with its customizable rich-text editor or connect your already-made websites (via FTP) to edit from within their interface. There are SEO fields that let you edit the page title, description, and keywords, and you can also integrate with Google Analytics in order to track your traffic and views. It also keeps a page history so that you can remove individual revisions if needed. Managing your files and folders is easy with their File Manager; plus, you can edit and resize images using their Image Editor. An impressive feature is the built-in Tidy tool that lets you validate your markup and fix any issues found.

CushyCMS

CushyCMS lets you have unlimited sites, pages, and editors. You won’t need to know any advanced coding or programming – just basic HTML only. It’s extremely customizable with a lot of different possibilities. It offers many branding features, such as a custom logo, custom domain, custom colours, built-in schemes, and custom welcome emails. It also includes a customizable WYSIWYG editor and the ability to add your own custom styles and classes.

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20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

When you are in the web design industry, there is no limit to what you can include in your websites. Really! You don’t believe it? Well, you better do. Because when the top trends are responsive, flat designs and minimalistic effects, there are some websites developed by very creative designers that incorporate complex designs, flash videos and HTML5 snippets to enhance the look of their website and give the user a truly unforgettable experience. 

You can use these ideas as inspiration for your website. If you need to create websites that use Illustration as a factor, here is a beautiful array of websites that use some exceptional Illustrations and effects as a part of their awesome websites:

1. Complete Baltics

2. Startup Film

3. 826LA

4. Pete Nottage

5. Taco Spillet

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20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

These frameworks can help you build completely functional web templates within a few minutes and with minimal knowledge of CSS coding. In this article, we display some of the best CSS frameworks that help web designers and developers all over the world explore their potential to build responsive and beautiful web applications. Please visit this list and share your views with us.

1. Foundation 5:

2. Gumby:

3. Twitter Bootstrap:

4. Skeleton:

5. Pure CSS:

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The Top 8 Color Palette Sources for Web Designers

The Top 8 Color Palette Sources for Web Designers

Luckily, there are quite a few sources for finding beautiful colour palettes or even creating your own using various methods like 3D, blending, uploading images, randomizing and more. So let’s take a look at 8 of the top colour palette sources for web designers and see how each one can inspire you to create brilliant, vibrant designs.

ColoRotate

ColoRotate is a beautifully designed site that lets you browse colour palettes and create your own in 3D. You can spin and tilt the diamond to get different views and create palettes with up to 16 colours each. They also offer a Photoshop plugin that lets you edit colours within a 3D widget and share your palettes online.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a personal favourite because it’s not just a source for colour palettes and patterns; it’s also a great community for designers and other colour lovers. You can browse and create your own colours, palettes, palette templates, and patterns. They also offer several tools to help you build colour palettes, colour schemes, Twitter themes, and patterns.

ColorSchemer

ColorSchemer has a huge collection of colour schemes for download. You can also connect with others in the colour forums. If you want to create your own colour palettes and access over a million pre-made colour schemes, you can download ColorSchemer Studio 2 on your PC or Mac for $49.99. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch app, Mac dashboard widget and Windows colour picker desktop tool.

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Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Responsive Design has become a necessity nowadays instead of a new way of design.  With the mobile market increasing by leaps and bounds, it has become imperative to build websites that scale properly and look beautiful on any and all devices. Hence, we need to design all aspects carefully. That includes how the menu is displayed when the site is scaled down.

Thankfully, there are many ways to shift the menu. We can use Toggle Menus, Multilevel Menus, etc. Many plugins were also developed for the same purpose. However, even with these, it is not completely easy to develop them. This is why we have displayed a list of the best tutorials and plugins for developing amazing responsive menus that scale down beautifully.

1. Trunk.js

2. Codrops – Responsive Multi-level Menu

3. Codrops – Slide and Push Menus

4. Big Menus Small Screens- Responsive Multilevel Navigation

5. Slicknav

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Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

One of the reigning trends of 2014, apart from flat, responsive designs are blurred backgrounds. These backgrounds get the focus completely on the content of our websites. They enhance the emphasis on the objects of our site and hence, provide more impact on the user than the regular designs. Thus, these kinds of designs have become very popular. Not only are they simple, but also they provide a sleek and professional look to the site.

If you do not have an idea regarding these kinds of sites and are interested in using this concept for the design of your site, then here are a few of the most brilliantly designed blurred background sites for your inspiration. Some of them are WordPress themes, some portfolios, whereas others are for mobile websites. But all of them are awesome. Check them out:

1. Vellum

2. Identi-U

3. True Canvas

4. inCreate

5. Suspended Animations

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Image manipulation tools - Alternatives

Image manipulation tools – Alternatives

Photobie
(http://www.photobie.com/):
is a very user-friendly tool for both new bees and also professionals for image editing. This software is absolutely free to use, and you don’t have to pay for anything, even if you have to upgrade.

Photo! Editor
(http://pho.to/editor/): This software comes up with a wide variety of image editing features. If you have a digital camera and you frequently correct the photos you take, this software is an ultimate need for those as it provides great convenience. Like many other image editing tools, you can use the red eye removal features, but the differentiating thing in this software is that you can add different kinds of effects or even funny caricatures. Also, you can enhance the quality of the image by minimizing the blur feature so that you can make a portrait for your home if you want to.

Photoscape
(http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php): This software is one of the most widely use applications for image editing. The interface is very user-friendly, and there are pre-defined effects that you can use to resize images, add brightness or even apply different filters to the software. Also, Photoscape allows you to current images like colour adjustment or light correction so that you can get the optimized image you want.

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Responsive Twitter Bootstrap Skins & Designs

Responsive Twitter Bootstrap Skins & Designs

Twitter Bootstrap skins facilitate easier and faster web development. It is a free resource that contains both HTML and CSS templates for typography, buttons, forms and even JavaScript extensions! It is the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile-first projects on the web. Bootstrap is available on GitHub, the open-source development’s social network.

The following bootstrap skins & designs have a lot of extra features like CSS3 transitions & effects, back-to-top scrollers and Date-pickers, to name a few. All these bootstrap skins are LESS (a CSS pre-processor) customized.

1. Boske:

2. Metro Klass:

3. Kucluk:

4. Flatner:

5. Antagon:

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20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

I know that creating amazing websites that are responsive, minimalistic and snazzy is an intensely creative process and needs to factor in many issues. Now imagine restricting yourself to a single colour.  Seems much harder, right? It complicates the process. It increases the complexity by at least twice as much.

You must be wondering, “So why restrict yourself? Use the complete potential of the colour palette! That is much more sensible”. That may be so. But what if you had no choice in the matter? What if you are working for a company and your client is bent upon a particular colour? They may be fixated because each colour has a significant effect on the consumer, and they want to leave no loop holes in their website. Here is a collection of websites focusing on one such colour that signifies stability, trust, depth, et cetera to the customers.

1. Lovedays

2. Eleks

3. Socialis

4. Soniaby

5. Volkswagen Think Blue

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Best online file sharing alternatives

Best online file sharing alternatives

We are aware of the fact that our email client doesn’t support such a large amount of data to be shared as there is data uploading limit due to which you are unable to share big files through emails. Most of the websites have this restriction of a maximum attachment size of 10MB.

There is an alternative solution through which you can share your data through a hosting account. These websites allow you to upload big files, and once you have uploaded the file, these websites generate a direct link that you can share with your peers and clients.

File sharing through websites has solved a number of problems, and the best thing about these websites is you can share important data with security. Here are some websites which you should be aware of when sharing files.

Stream file: Stream file is a file-sharing system where you can email the direct link to your recipient. The maximum file limit for uploading is 300MB

Pando: Pando is a peer-to-peer software with almost millions of users getting benefits from it. It is used for sharing large amounts of files where the maximum limit is 1GB

Wikisend: Another website where you can upload data. You don’t need to make an account. The process is very simple to upload and share the data.

Pipebytes: if you are looking for media files that are very big in size to share, then this is the best website that actually gives you the freedom to share files with no size limit at all

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Smartly Designed Free Fonts For Your Design Needs

Smartly Designed Free Fonts For Your Design Needs

Every last detail of our design has an impact on the user. Fonts, however, play a crucial role in this matter. The fonts we use may raise our designs to a whole new level or drop them to negative zero. Hence, we need to choose the fonts for our designs with utmost care. Paying for high-quality and crisp fonts may not always be an option.

For this reason, many generous designers have designed fonts that not only look sleek and professional but also do not cost us a single penny. This is not the case for only crisp, smooth fonts. There are fonts for every occasion and event. Not only do they decrease the cost of the design, they also enhance its look.

Presented below are a few of the best fonts that are available for free on the web for everyone’s usage:

1. Streetwear:

2. Helsinki:

3. Sant Joan Despi:

4. Mink:

5. Rambla Alt STD:

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Elegant & Responsive Portfolios for your Inspiration

Elegant & Responsive Portfolios for your Inspiration

Responsive, minimalistic and flat designs reign supreme. Straight lines, fewer elements, distinct colour combinations and unique content should be the focus while designing these kinds of sites.

Leading these designs are simple colour palettes and typography. Displayed below are some of the best portfolios that were launched recently. They are simple. They are responsive. They inspire.

1. GlossRey:

2. Thomas Ciszewski:

3. We are the Swan:

4. Guy Moorehouse:

5. Mike Kus:

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5 Things To Consider When Making a Website

5 Things To Consider When Making a Website

Whether you’re doing it as a hobby project or practising your skills as a web designer/developer, there are no shortcuts on how to make a website that is sleek, professional, and attention-grabbing. Even if you use WordPress or similar software, you will still be bombarded with function and design choices that will require your decision. Here are five things to consider when making a website.

1. Choosing a Hosting Service and Domain Name
Great domain names are catchy, even if they comprise one or two words. Simply look at Google or Yahoo. Both of these one-worded domain names are recognized by anyone with a computer. Aside from a domain name that is catchy and easily sticks to your head, the name should precisely reflect your brand and its product or service.

Finding an appropriate domain name is critical, especially for dedicated business websites. Combining search engine optimization practices, name construction, and brand identity into the domain name can actually yield better chances of being found in search engine results pages. Ultimately, this leads to a higher potential in sales and profit.

2. What’s Your Back-End Plan
It is useless to learn how to make a website without a functional infrastructure supporting the back end. Think of your website as a house. It may have that sleek paint job, luxury windows and doors, and a well-maintained roof, but these are the only parts your neighbours can see. In the tech world, the home’s structure, from the beams to the flooring, serves as the back end of the design. Without it, the design cannot stand.

Fortunately, you don’t have to start from the ground up when making your back-end system. There are several trustworthy engines for eCommerce platforms you can use, such as Magento and WordPress. The latter is the ideal content management system of choice for information-rich websites.

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