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The “Contact Us” form too often gets thrown in as a quick afterthought rather than an element that sets the tone for the communication. Today we’ll take a look at several easy techniques you can use to take your contact forms from boring to brilliant.
Along the way we’ll see several examples of great contact forms along with resources on how to recreate the effect on your own site.
Today we’re talking with Alen Grakalic, of CSS Globe. He’s a talented designer, an amateur triathlete competitor, and has recently launched an interesting JavaScript framework!
We’ll also take a look at the tools and workspace Alen uses to get the job done, along with a few pointers for places to find inspiration online.
I’m pleased to announce that we’re giving away a copy of CSSEdit to one lucky reader. CSSEdit is a brilliant piece of software for dealing with style sheets on your Mac, with visual editing, live preview, an “X-Ray inspector”, and a thorough selector builder that can save you a headache.
All you need to do to enter is follow @designshack on Twitter, and post your username in the comments. It only takes five minutes, and we’ll be announcing the winners in one week – on the 19th December.
Good luck, and thanks for reading Design Shack!
This is the second article in our series on making money selling WordPress themes. In this post we’ll look at what kind of features users look for in a professional WordPress theme.
Read through the list and use the comments below to let us know what features you think are most important in a WordPress theme.
WordPress is to professional blogging what Photoshop is to design. Sure, there are widely used alternatives, but it’s definitely the standard to beat. This post will examine how to sell, price and promote your WordPress themes.
Learning to write clean, optimized CSS requires lots of practice and an unstoppable compulsive desire for neatness. Keeping your CSS trim and tidy isn’t all about feeding your crazy psychological need for cleanliness though, in the case of particularly large websites, the payoff is faster loading pages. Faster loading times equals increased usability and higher user satisfaction.
This post will examine several techniques you can use to optimize your CSS as well as several online tools that can automatically compress your code.
Every blogging platform has a built-in blog editor, some better than others. However, you’ll be hard pressed to find an online editor that can offer the richness found in many desktop applications. Features like offline editing and posting to multiple blogs at once make desktop solutions a must have for professional many bloggers.
Here’s a list of 20 applications that allow you to create blog posts from the comfort of your operating system environment, no internet connection required.
Today we’ll be looking at how to add keyboard navigation to a website using a few simple lines of JavaScript. First we’ll create a simple site theme in Photoshop and then transform it into a working website that uses keyboard functions to switch pages.
Once upon a time, designers would lug unwieldy physical portfolios from interview to interview to showcase their work. This tactic is steadily being replaced with sending out emails containing links to an online portfolio. A portfolio website is becoming an essential marketing tool for every designer and can be the single biggest impression upon which you will be judged and hopefully, hired.
This article contains several tips and examples to help you create an amazing single page portfolio.
Tumblr is an easy to use, fast-growing blogging platform with a strong emphasis on simple, no hassle content sharing. I would describe Tumblr as much more attractive and streamlined than Blogger and a lot simpler than WordPress (though not as powerful).
Like other blogging platforms, Tumblr makes it really easy to change themes on the fly without messing up previously posted content, and with over 275 themes to choose from, you get a lot of variety. However, sorting through hundreds of mediocre themes to find those few golden nuggets of design goodness can be quite the mundane task. That’s why we’ve done the work for you and created this collection of 30 beautifully designed Tumblr themes.
Today we’re going to create a working horizontal CSS menu from scratch. We’ll be using transparent PNGs (sorry outdated browser users) to create a glossy horizontal bar, the color of which can easily be changed using only CSS. Before we get started, check out what we’ll be building in the live demo.
Usability isn’t an exact science. What one visitor considers helpful another considers annoying. Despite this uncertainty and complexity, you should always strive to make your site as accessible as possible to the people you’re trying to reach. You’ll find that a little bit of catering to the special needs of a minority of users can drastically improve the function of your site for all users. Here’s our list of twelve accessibility pitfalls to avoid along with some examples showcasing sites that either excel or fail miserably in these areas.