So, what happened you ask? Well, first, we went for a trip to one of their startup businesses. (by the way, that was a few weeks ago. I just heard that his business idea is doing well and will be expanding exponentially over the next few years.) We then went for a nice dinner, and we then hit the hotel lounge for a drink. It was interesting to see them chat and drink, and to see what they wear. It is as if they are just ordinary people, not like the rich people you see on TV! Those on the TV wear tuxedos and polo shirts with huge rings and they always look so stressed and professional. But these guys are just plain fun. It came as a shock for me really.

What do CEO’s talk about when they meet up? It’s simple. They talk about their worrying business strategies is what you would be thinking. You are right. However, more than that, they talk bullshit. What I mean by bullshit is politics, their family, and their interests like cars, cameras, etc.

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Sony

This is a great example for displaying products, with focus on latest products. 10 points for the main product feature.

Newspond

Newspond is a news portal - but it stands out design-wise. 7 points for the nice design.

Nike

Nike is another good site to look for ways to feature products. 8 points for the simplicity!

Apple

Everyone knows apple for their minimalist designs, that are also featured packed. 10 points for simplicity!

Tinkernut

This is a good video-blog design. Simple but effective! 8 points for the simplicity.

2advanced

Not really necessary, but still stunning design. The graphics and Flash are heavy, and the website is quite detailed. 7 points for the effort!

Ebay

Ebay is one of the best websites too look at - great for finding shop-related design features. 10 points for the ease of use!

Blackboard

Promoting and explaining services can be a challenge, so here is a good example of how its done. 10 points for ease of use and clean design.

Our World 2.0

Easy-to read blog design - nothing beats that! 10 points for effective use of images.

Motorola

Another website for displaying products. This is a good example, featuring several products in one page. 10 points for the good looks.

That’s all folks!

There you go! That’s all we have this time. Leave some links int he comments below if you know some great websites :)

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Enough talking, so here we go! 19 tools to make your job an easy one!

Website Graphic Tools

Adobe Photoshop
This is probably the best tool for creating and editing graphics for your website. Possibilities are endless with this great piece of software for making websites, although it was initially meant for editing photos.

Adobe Fireworks
This is something all web designers need. It allows you to create web graphics and optimize images easily. Best for rapid development of websites, although it doesn’t have as many possibilities as Photoshop in terms of image editing.

Adobe Flash
The real tool for developing Flash. Benefits experts more.

Swish
This is a great alternative to Flash. It’s great for beginners, with huge amounts of preset Flash effects.

Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing
A free image editor - alternative to Photoshop.

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program
Another free alternative to Photoshop.

COLOURlovers
This is the best place to check out patterns, color schemes and trends. No contest.

Iconfinder
This is a great place to search for icons. It’s like Google, but for icons!

TartanMaker
If you need a pattern generator, this could be it.

Stripe Generator
A stripe generator, for those who are lazy to make their own Photoshop patterns. Very convenient tool.

Image Optimizer
An online tool for optimizing your images.

Website Programming Tools

Firebug - Web Development Evolved
A FireFox Plugin for web development. It allows real-time and easy code viewing. Very useful for troubleshooting errors in your website.

Adobe DreamWeaver
This is a really good time-saving tool for web design. Great for rapid development of websites.

Notepad++
A lightweight but feature-packed notepad with code highlighting capabilities. Great tool for programmers, especially experts.

More Website Design Resources

Free PHP scripts compilation
A directory of free PHP scripts are available here.

Dynamic Drive
A great place to find Javascript and DHTML to speed up your work!

Cross Browser Compatibility & Web Compliance

IE7 - (IE6 Fix)
This beautiful script turns the ugly Internet Explorer 6 into a real browser. There is also a version that fixes Internet Explorer 7 as well.

Browser Shots
Great, helpful website for getting screenshots of your website in many types of browsers. What is it for? To make sure your website looks the same on every computer.

W3C markup Validation

This is a validation service to check your code. Good if your client demands it, but not a requirement as even some popular websites fail it, and no, I won’t mention which ones.

Know more great tools?

Great! Share it by commenting below! I’m sure people will appreciate your kindness!

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CSS Code Optimizers/Formatters

Clean CSS - Optmize and Format your CSS
This is my personal favorite! It has multiple levels of code compression, balanced with readbility.

Pretty Printer for PHP, Java, C++, C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS
This does exactly what the name says. It’s quite good for code formatting, if you’re and efficient (lazy) person.

CSS/XHTML Layout

CSS Creator
Useful tool for quickly creating up to 3 column/row layouts.

CSS Layout Generator
This is an alternative to the above. It looks much neater though.

Rounded Corners Layout Generator

This is a quick and easy tool for making rounded corners in a <div>.

Fonts using CSS

Typetester
This is THE tool for CSS Fonts. It allows you to compare up to 3 CSS font styling, side by side.

Font Tester
This is an alternative to the above tool. Still pretty cool!

EM/pixels Calculator
It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size.

Form Styling & Generators

Form Style Generator
This allows you to easily style your form in real time. After styling, just download the CSS code and apply it to your form!

HTML Form Generator
This is a superb user-friendly HTML form generator. You have to try it! Good if you can’t run PHP.

PHP Form Generator
An alternative to the above. It is much more flexible, with extra’s like Captcha to prevent those spammers.

CSS Hexadecimal Colors

CSS Color Chart
This is a useful color chart - good if you always wonder which color the hexadecimal represents.

Color Extractor
This is a very useful tool, if you wonder what colors your competitors use on their website. Maybe that’s why they’re getting more customers!

Share with us!

I hope you liked the best web design tools list. If you know more useful tools that I missed out, share it! Also be sure to bookmark/share this page :) Thanks for your support!

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Here is the list of:

• The 4 Essential Wordpress Plugins
• 4 Plugins That Bring Back Readers
• 5 Wordpress Plugins to make readers happy
• 4 Plugins That Get You More Readers
• 2 Money Making Plugins for Wordpress

The 4 Essential Wordpress Plugins

These are must-have Wordpress plugins. They speed up, optimize, and backup your blog - which is what blogs need like humans need food, water, shelter and clothes.

WP Super Cache
With Super Cache, the HTML files are ready before you open your blog! This significantly reduces the amount of time taken to open your blog - and as a direct effect, your readers are happier and you dont have to answer to those complaining readers threatening never to visit your blog again.

All in one SEO
Every blog needs this - if it wants to be popular.  SEO is a method of getting visitors to your blog, and with this plugin, you don’t need to know how to SEO. It’s all done for you! Just install and voila! Your blog will be easily search-able by anyone through search engines liek Google, Yahoo, etc.

WordPress Database Backup
This will create database backups of your Wordpress. It doesn’t backup files though, so you will need to backup files manually. But, this plugin still is important since your database keeps your posts, settings and more!

Google XML Sitemaps Generator
This will create a sitemap, which has links to all the pages you have. Why make a sitemap? Well, because search engines need it to understand your website structure and to find all your pages successfully. Letting search engines do that will allow people to find your blog more easily.

The 4 Plugins That Make Your Blogging Life Easy

TinyMCE Advanced
You need this! This adds more functionality to your wordpress content editor (TinyMCE) . You get extra functions like a color picker, clean HTML, insert pagebreak, font-seize, font-family, and more!

WP-ReCaptcha!
Add image verification to your forms - to keep out the spam!

Exec-PHP
This allows you to add and execute  PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. No more FTP programs!

NextGen Gallery
This is THE image gallery. It also has a Flash Slideshow option. Check it out! It also allows easy image uploading with a thumbnail generator.

5 Plugins That Bring Back Readers

Subscribe Me!
This adds a widget so you have a few buttons for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS, Google, Yahoo and more.

YARPP
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of  related posts and/or pages to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Good to let them keep on reading!

Wordpress Thread Comment
I cant tell you enough how important this plugin is.  It puts replies to a comment under it. So what you get is a comments area where people can respond to comments! This plugin is extremely useful for bringing back visitors and also for making heated discussions about your post.

Subscribe to Comments
This plugin allows people to subscribe to your comments via email. Once they subscribe, they get notifications by email every time there is a new comment by other people. It is located under your comments form - well thought of and very useful!

FeedBurner FeedSmith
The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

4 Wordpress Plugins to make readers happy

Gravatar
Globally Recognized Avatar - Every blog should have this. it really gives a sense of community :) People like to be known, you know.

Show Top Commentators
This will surely encourage your readers to comment on your posts. Why? Because you provide a link back to their blog. A nice little treat for your readers. In return, you get an active blog with lots of discussions.

WP-PageNavi
This plugin adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. It is good for easy navigation through your blog.
» Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

Show Number of Post Views
Why install this plugin? It may not occur to you immediately, but it actually helps your readers find good posts in your blog. Naturally, interesting posts have more page views - so your readers might like to see what is so interesting about that post.

4 Plugins That Get You More Readers

Sociable
This nifty plugin adds a few buttons to share your posts in popular social networks like Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more!

Google Analyticator
Enter in your Google Analytics “unique code” to monitor your web site traffic. Google Analytics is the best FREE web site tracking and statistics web site - so you can track every user & where they came from, etc.

Title Tag Plugin
This plugin lets you enter titles for your tags. To view the title, put your mouse over a tag link. Why do this? Well, simply because it gives your blog more keywords for people to find you through search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many more.

Simple Tags
The best  Tags Plugin - ever! It features autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Tags, Mass edit tags !z

2 Money Making Plugins for Wordpress

BankRoll
Google has been penalizing blogs for selling links or text-advertisements. Well, now bloggers have come up with a better way to make money. This plugin lets people buy your posts - or in other words, they pay you to write a post. They will also have the option to write a post ans pay you to post it.

Easy Adsenser
This is the easiest way to add adsense to your blog. Enough said ;)

Do you have a list of great plugins too? Share it!

Well, I really wish this is the Perfect Wordpress Plugins List, but the truth is that nothing is perfect. So with your help, I am going to collect a list of useful plugins and make The Best Wordpress Plugins List. So share whats missing from the above post!

By the way, if you are too busy now, make sure you bookmark this page ( Ctrl + D ) so you dont forget to make your blog the best it can be :)

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Best Content Management System

Content Management Systems are becoming a norm in modern websites on the internet today. These CMSs are used to manage content obviously, but they can actually do a lot more! Some CMSs - like Joomla and Wordpress - are able to be extended to function as an e-commerce website.  This article will be about the CMSs and it will have a countdown to the best CMS!

The Ultimate CMS Countdown

5.  DotNetNuke

Cost: FREE (modules are not) | Open Source | License: BSD | Programming Language: ASP| Website: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ | Demo: http://demo.dotnetnuke.com/

Whats Good

DotNetNuke has a huge member base of over 650,000 people so if you ever need support, it wont be hard to get any. This CMS also seems to be the best CMS written in ASP - good if you prefer developing websites using ASP.

Whats Bad

The modules that are made for this CMS are not free, which means that if you don’t want to pay, you wont get much of a site - unless you write your own.

4.  Wordpress

Cost: FREE | Open Source | License: GPL | Programming Language: PHP | Website: http://www.wordpress.org/ | Demo: here

Whats Good

Wordpress is definitely the most popular and successful blogging system (which is a type of CMS), used by about 60 million blogs. Try google “powered by wordpress” and see for yourself! The CMS is also constantly being upgraded with focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability, making it the most good-looking and highly-functional blog system that even an idiot can use! Wordpress also has about 3800 plugins (easily installable) to make your life easier, and its all a blogger needs!

Whats Bad

Its a blogging system, making it limited to blogs naturally. It can be made to work like a normal CMS but with your own coding or plugins (like the e-commerce plugin).

3. LifeRay

Cost: FREE | Open Source | License: MIT| Programming Language: Java, PHP, Ruby | Website: http://www.liferay.com | Demo: http://demo.liferay.net/

Whats Good

LifeRay has a great online community that is quite active, and there is commercial support for it in case you need help. This is a great CMS portal aimed at businesses mainly, which is where they get their main source of income. There is a total of over 150 plugins offered by the LifeRay team and the community itself. The main feature of this CMS is the ease of use, and the dynamic drag & drop (you ahve to try it!). It is also localized in 22 languages and quite well designed.

Whats Bad

The CMS is not well known because it is aimed at the business community- which makes it have less of a general community to develop non-business features of the CMS.

2.  Joomla

Cost: FREE (except some extensions) | Open Source | License: GPL | Programming Language: PHP | Website: http://www.joomla.org/ | Demo: http://demo.joomla.org/

Whats Good

Joomla is popular for its large community of about 200,000 people and the availability of many extensions (there are over 4200 extensions!). Because of the number of extensions, Joomla can be used to rapidly create simple to moderately-advanced websites with absolutely no knowledge of PHP.  Other than that, Joomla is also great because of the number of free (and decent) templates available. There are over 1500 templates on www.joomla24.com, a free-templates directory for Joomla.  Joomla is simply the easiest CMS to use, with coding as something optional, with all those extensions.

Whats Bad

Not everything is free in Joomla - some extensions/templates require subscription or purchase. Some terminology can be confusing in Joomla, such as ‘categories’ and ’sections’ of the , or ‘plugins’, ‘modules’ and ‘components’. The average person wouldnt know the difference between the groups! The point is, Joomla requires a slight learning curve to understand.

1.  Drupal

Cost: FREE | Open Source | License: GPL | Programming Language: PHP | Website: http://www.drupal.org/ | Demo: here

Whats Good

Drupal is a very extendable CMS, and it is able to function as any kind of website. There over 2000 modules to download and use, and a few theme engines to display pages differently.  Drupal is a great all-round CMS that can be transformed into any type of website you need - ally ou need is PHP knowledge!

Whats Bad

Templates can be hard to find, and there are very little free and decent templates available for use.  Drupal requires at least some knowledge in PHP to use in most cases, making it not very user friendly (compared to Joomla/Wordpress) when it comes to making your own website.  Drupal has a relatively bigger learning curve (compared to Joomla).

Some Other CMSs Worth Mentioning

• Plone CMS
• CMS Made Simple
• MediaWiki
• Typo3
• Pligg
• MovableType

More Resources

This is a list of resources if you need to compare more CMSs

• A list of Open Source CMSs with ratings
• Article - How To Choose a CMS

Conclusion

Well, even if these are the best CMSs around, they might not be the best for you. Depending on what you need, you should choose a suitable CMS for it. Below is a list that will conclude the best CMS for different needs.

CMSs and their best strengths

• Joomla - Recommended for websites that need quick development
• Drupal - Recommended for websites that are very complex and requires a flexible CMS for development.
• LifeRay - Recommended for business websites, because of the community and support services already available.
• DotNetNuke - Recommended if you want to develop a website using ASP
• Wordpress - Recommended for bloggers

Well, that’s it! I hope you liked the article (its the first article on DesignBlab!)

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