Article on Web Design Ledger

“Typography plays an important role in every website design and we don’t even think of an artwork without any text on it until its not something out of the box we are working on. Everyday we (designers) search for new tips and inspiration relating to website design such as color theory, new scripts, designs, textures, stock images, typography, etc.” Read more on Reencoded.com

Article by Darren Rowse on Pro Blogger

Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around. Focus upon into two parts – offsite and onsite search engine optimization techniques.

Off site SEO techniques
It is generally agreed that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing Search Engines results pages, basically every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site. Ideally Speaking the best inbound links have 3 main qualities.
01. Higher ranked sites than your own
02. Relevant to the topic you are writing about
03. Link to you using relevant keywords to your page

On site SEO techniques
Things you do on your blog that help build a higher ranking
01. Keyword rich content
02. Themed sites
03. Site design
04. Interlink your site
05. Update regularly
06. Outbound links
07. Choose your domain name wisely
08. Register domain for lengthy period
09. One topic per post
10. Write optimal length posts
11. Avoid duplicate content
12. Ping
13. Submit your RSS to MyYahoo
14. Quantities of content
15. Submit to search engines

More articles about optimization on Pro Blogger

Article on Noupe suggest 30 different themes for WordPress, osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded. It also analysis the advantage and disadvantage of each content management system.

Article on Yoast

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.

Find your Google Analytics Account ID from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

Article on Make Use Of

File Syncing

You also want to make sure that all of the most recent changes to those files are with you. You can do this by “syncing” (or synchronizing) them. Here on MakeUseOf, Shankar has written an article showing how easy the process can be. Just make sure that when you return to your computer, you sync the USB files and the originals on the computer.

Portable Applications

Portable applications are programs that you can install on an external hard drive to be run on almost any computer with a USB port. All parts of the program are typically located in one folder and therefore it is portable.

Virtual Operating System

Mojopac offers a solution you may like. It’s almost like Windows XP installed on your external hard drive. This means that you can have your OS settings, programs, and files just the way you like running on any computer that has an external hard drive

Operating system boot from external drive

Making your computing portable is to install an operating system that can be booted straight from your thumb drive.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the most common application to style web pages written in XHTML. Find this article by Dave Shea on A List Apart, even though it’s written 5 years ago and I think it’s good to know how’s web developers handle image for web when high-speed internet wasn’t popular.

Image sprite example

I still remember a decade ago when I slice and dice a huge image in Adobe Image Ready and use table in HTML to put the images into places, since CSS is introduced, we don’t have to slice images into pieces, instead we can store all buttons/navigation items/whatever we wish in a single master image file, along with the associated “before” and “after” link states.

Building up a website is always fun, during the process of creating wireframe, user experience testing, interface & interactive design, then HTML markup, CSS styling and adding behavior with JavaScript. No matter the structure of the site is small like a wedding site or huge like Amazon.ca, testing the website in different browser is one of the most important procedure you have to beware of, just because it is the final stage before you deliver the product to your client.

Below is the online applications for browser test
Adobe recently came out with a new service called BrowserLab which lets you view a snap shot of a website via URL in different browsers. It’s fast, free and gives you a couple different viewing options to compare different browser versions.

Browsershots.org is the same idea has Adobe BrowserLab but with several differences. You can test way more browsers on more platforms with more options like screensize, color depth, javascript, flash, etc. The downside is that the service is a little slower and isn’t nearly as nice of a UI.

Article on Mashable

It’s now generally assumed that Apple is set to launch a tablet computer, with an announcement as early as September and availability in November. An article in the Financial Times last month claimed the company was rushing to roll out the device in time for the Christmas buying season, while a Barron’s article this week quoted an analyst who claims to have tested a prototype of the machine. Read more…

Article on Noupe

“Javascript is the perfect place to start to learn scripting because it is generally less complex than other scripting languages, and is client-side – meaning that you will be able to test your scripts on your computer as you script it, in real time, without setting up servers or putting forth any more effort than you really need to. However you code pages now is great – don’t do anything differently to accommodate Javascript – she’s easy to get along with.”

Websites teach JavaScript
Tizag | W3schools | About.com | Academic | Webucator

Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) is one of the building blocks of modern web design. With time, the quality of CSS tutorials out there on the web has increased considerably.

Here’s the lists of examples with tutorials:
01. Slide show – cross browser
02. Lightbox without JavaScript
03. Animated rollover menu
04. Tree like navigation menu
05. Gradient text effect
06. Menu list
07. Footer stay at bottom
08. Pullquotes
09. Stacked bar graphs
10. Hover effect for list of links
11. Multi-column lists
12. Date display technique with sprites
13. Date badges & comments
14. Image viewer
15. Image preloader

Article on Active.Tuts+

With the advances of ActionScript 3 and the ability to code away from the timeline, SWCs have become commonly used items on large projects, so what are SWCs? SWC stands for ShockWave Component, it is a zipped up package of files generated by the Flash IDE. They contain visual assets (such as MovieClips, Buttons, Graphics and Fonts) as well as code.

SWC separate the design from the development, designers can design the interface, cut it up and then pass a SWC to the developer who ties it all together, this creates a simple workflow. Unfortunately SWC only work in Flash Player 10 and it only has about a 75% penetration rate, it might not be the best way for development at the moment.