More and more clients are using WordPress as their CMS. As a designer or developer, you should really get into WordPress coding. To get started, you can read my WordPress theme guide and hacks. Now, I would like to recommend a resourceful WordPress site to you called WpRecipes. This post contains over 20 recipes that I hand picked from WpRecipes. If you have any good WordPress code or hacks that you want to share, feel free to send them over and I will post it. (more…)

The Breadou giveaway is back! This time, I’m giving out donuts. For those who have no clue what is Breadou about. It is a memory form wrist rest that looks, smells, and feels like a real bread. I own two Breadous. They are fun to use or show off to your friends. Submit a comment in this post before Jun 26^th, 2009 to win a free Breadou Donut for yourself now. (more…)

Introducing a revolutionary analytic tool — Clixpy — it captures everything your visitors do on the site including: mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, and form inputs. For this review purpose, I tested it on IconDock and the results are impressive. Instantly, I can watch what my visitors did on the site. Clixpy is extremely useful to analyze the feedbacks on new sites and site updates. See it in action now or sign up to get 10 free captures for a test run.

Giveaway: Make a comment in this post (before Jun 12, 2009) for your chance to win a free “600 captures” promo code. I will be giving out 10 promo codes in total. (more…)

Guest Post by Webcopyplus

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated "poor visual presentation" as the number one element that drives them away from websites. Only 6.6% of web users who participated in a similar 2007 online poll indicated "poor visual presentation" as the main reason to abandon a website. That equates to a 267% increase during the two-year period. (more…)

First of all, I would to thank Porter Novelli, the PR firm representing Adobe in Canada, for offering a copy of Adobe CS4 to do this review. CS4 has been out for quite a while and I hope you have already upgraded because the new CS4 is all about maximizing your productivity and making your work easier. In this post, I’m going to write about my experience with using the new features of Photoshop and Illustrator. (more…)

Hi guys! I have these amazing giveaways for you, sponsored by Microsoft. Before I go to the prizes, I would like to mention that Microsoft is having a web event called Make Web, Not War ‘09 in Toronto on Jun 10th (full day), and Vancouver on Jun 2nd (half day). Visit their site for details and registration. Write a comment about the event before Jun 12, in this post, for a chance to win: Microsoft Expression Studio, Gears of War 2 (Xbox game), or 250GB LaCie External Drive. (more…)

Guest Post by Joel Reyes

Web designers always have to strike a balance between usability and visual appeal when designing a website. Without this balance, a website might be nice to look at or difficult to navigate. Or, it might be easy to navigate, but not easy on the eyes. With this in mind, balancing attractive navigation with usability does not need to be overly difficult. To help you generate new ideas and inspiration for user navigation, here are 30 great examples of attractive and usable navigation. (more…)

By now, I think most of you should know that WordPress can do more than just a blog platform. With WordPress, plus some plugins, you can build almost any type of websites. To show you what I mean, I have collected 30 websites that use WordPress for different purposes — from general websites to portfolios, ecommerce and corporate sites. Hope this post will open up more ideas for you to use WordPress. (more…)

As requested by some attendees at the WordCamp Toronto 2009, I’ve uploaded my presentation slides: "Various Ways of Using WordPress." The slides can be downloaded at SlideShare and I’ve also embedded them in this post. If you missed the event, this post is a quick recap of my presentation. You will learn how I use WordPress to manage my sites: Web Designer Wall (blog), Best Web Gallery (gallery), and IconDock (eCommerce/blog). Get ready and learn more about WordPress theme coding. (more…)

Usually, we create hover effects by changing: font color, font styles, border styles, background, and etc. But there are a lot more that we can do with hover. We can use hover to beautify design, minimize clutter, and display additional information. In this article, I’m going to provide various examples of websites that maximize the use of hover. Also, I will provide several quick tutorials on how to create different mouse hover effects. So, read on. (more…)