Design Shack — Web Design Gallery, Articles & Community

Create an Awesome 3D Slideshow With Cu3er: Part 2

Today we’re going to finish up our two-part cu3er tutorial.

For those who don’t know, Cu3er is an awesome 3D image slider that’s free to use and easy to setup.

This section will examine how to tweak your slideshow using some of Cu3er’s many customization options. We’ll mostly be editing an XML page but don’t worry about it getting too techie. Even if you don’t know what XML is, it’s all pretty straightforward and easy to understand.

Create an Awesome 3D Slideshow With Cu3er: Part 1

Today we’re going to build a simple web page with an amazing and free tool: Cu3er.

Cu3er is a really neat 3D image slider with crazy visual transitions and lots of customization options. Though it’s built with Flash and JavaScript, you don’t really need to know either of these to use it.

In this article, we’ll get the page built and the slideshow up and running. Next time we’ll return and see how to customize some of Cu3er’s many features and variables.

30 Free Video Tutorials for Learning Web Design

Getting started in web design can be quite difficult. For readers, there are tons of great free tutorials online. However, some people find visual instruction to be more effective for their learning style.

Instructional videos are an incredibly rich learning tool and could be just what you need to finally learn web development properly. We’ve compiled a list of over 30 excellent screencasts for beginners across a number of web technologies and disciplines.

Why You Should Build a Front End Package

How do you begin building a website?

The majority of developers probably start from scratch or pull in a few resources from previous sites. The more organized among us have developed a custom toolbox from which to begin a site that proves to be an essential part of their workflow.

Today we’ll discuss why you should consider building your own front end package to serve as a starting point for every single site you create.

Four Quick and Easy Ways to Embed MP3 Files Into Your Site

Once upon a time I was in a rock band. When I was building our website, I naturally wanted to put some music up so visitors could listen before purchasing our songs on iTunes. After a bit of research I found out that there are a million ways you could go about it, some better than others. Sadly, after two albums and lots of good times, my band The Van Buren Regulars no longer exists. Fortunately, what I learned about embedding music lives on and is easy enough to pass along.

Today we’re going to look at four easy ways to embed MP3 files into your website. All of these methods are free and take mere minutes to implement. Let’s check them out!

20 Simple jQuery Tricks

jQuery has quickly made it’s way into nearly every web developer’s bag of tricks. The simplicity with which jQuery allows us to handle complicated events and perform smooth animations makes it the perfect tool for both beginners and experienced developers to add professional flair to their sites.

Here are 20 simple jQuery tricks to get you on your way to JavaScript bliss. The keyword here is “simple” so even if you’ve never used jQuery before, this is the perfect place to start!

How to Use TypeKit on Your Site: Step-by-Step

Several options have cropped up recently for adding custom fonts to your website by utilizing the @font-face selector. TypeKit is an exciting new player in this game because it stands out in two key areas: ease of use and richness of fonts available. This tutorial will take you through several small, super simple steps to get TypeKit up and running on your site. You won’t find any advanced techniques or scripting here, so even if you’re a novice web designer this should be a cinch!

Detecting Location Using Google AJAX API

There are times when one needs to find out which part of the world a particular visitor is coming from. There are plenty of IP-to-Location lookup providers out there, who offer this service at a reasonable cost (depending on how much detail you require).

Google’s AJAX Maps API offers this look up for you free of cost (so long your needs are non-commercial). You can even use the latitude and longitude information returned by the API to plot the user’s location on a Google Map. Nifty eh? Let’s now look at a simple example – we will be detecting the user’s location based on his IP address and rendering it on a map.

Before we begin, you might want to check out the demo.

Creating a Shaking Login Form

Tired of the plain old boring login forms? How about we add some jazz! If you have ever typed in your password wrongly on your Mac, you would have seen that the login screen will vibrate and kinda shriek to indicate that the password you entered is wrong. I always found that rather cool! It’s surprising how little this trick is being used in web applications today. So, I thought I will write up a tutorial on how to get this going.

Best of 2008 – JavaScript

In the last part of our summary series, it is time to see some of the JavaScript Goodies of 2008. Some of the following are resources, some are useful tutorials, some opinions and others just plain fun interesting stuff.

There is always a lesson or two to take away from these, and it could help you enter the New Year with a variety of new skills in your portfolio.