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Web Designer Wall

A wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.

3D Spiral Component GiveawaysJanuary 1

Hello 2009 and Happy New Year to everyone! To celebrate the new year, I have 5 copies of 3D Spiral from Flashloaded to giveaway. 3D Spiral is a Flash gallery component that displays images on an interactive 3D rotating spiral using the Papervision3D engine. It has various parameters that allows you to customize the layout of the spiral. The viewer can navigate through the gallery images with the mouse or arrow keys (check out the samples: Demo 1 and Demo 2). As usual, simply enter a comment in this post to enter the contest (before January 14, 2009). (more…)

Fonts and the WebDecember 15 2008

Guest Post By: Juul Coolen

The web, and consequently its visual appearance, is dynamic by nature. For one, browsers interpret pages and show them accordingly. In a standards-compliant world every browser would adhere to the standards as set out by the W3C so pages look the same in any browser, but we all know the actual state of affairs. Granted, things have significantly changed over the last couple of years. ‘Bad’ browsers are phasing out (albeit slowly), handing over control to the designers by means of CSS. Which doesn’t mean total control, though. Especially when (enviously) looking at the area of print, there is one facet in particular we would love to be able to borrow: typography in all its glory. Or the way Jeffrey Zeldman puts it:

"The less sophisticated lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts."

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Best of CSS Design 2008December 5 2008

Last December, I posted a list of the best designs in 2007. Now, it is time for — Best of CSS Design 2008 (a new list of 50 websites hand-picked from Best Web Gallery). This year, more designers are using the large background technique and utilizing Javascript frameworks (such as jQuery and MooTools) to enchance the user experience. I also came across a few designs that mixed Flash with CSS; perhaps a new trend we should look for in 2009? (more…)

Exporting and Importing WordPressNovember 21 2008

In the last two chapters, I talked about Installing WordPress Locally and Building Custom WordPress Theme. This chapter will cover exporting your local WordPress to a web host. Assume you are done with the local WordPress development, it is time to learn how to export and import WordPress. Then you can keep the local version for backup purpose and future development (ie. testing new themes, plugins, and upgrades). (more…)

Building Custom WordPress ThemeNovember 17 2008

This is the Chapter II of the Complete WordPress Theme Guide series. This chapter will show you how to build a custom WordPress theme. Although the Codex site provides very good documentations on how to create a theme, but I find it too complicated for a beginner. In this tutorial, I will explain the basics of how WordPress theme works and show you how to convert a static HTML template into a theme. No PHP skill is required, but you need Photoshop and CSS skills to create your own design. (more…)