Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here’s fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.
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Web applications are the commodity to deal in on the internet these days but what makes them successful isn’t always their function, often times design plays a huge role. Today I’m taking a look at five apps that exemplify various aspects of great Web App design.
One critical factor many new start-ups forget is that half of creating a successful web app is making sure that its well designed and easy to use. In this part of our series we’ll continue looking at well designed web applications….
Web applications are all the rage these days as cloud computing becomes the standard way of doing things. Whether it’s Facebook apps, Web clients, Flash, Adobe Air Apps or anything else that’s becoming ubiquitous, a huge part of the development of these applications is design and what you an learn from the design of quality web applications is priceless. In this series of posts, I’ll spotlight five well known web applications and share the design aspects that I think make each unique.
Snipplr.com is like del.icio.us for people who write a lot of code. Whether you develop for Ruby or Django, hack WordPress or MovableType, or if you just write XHTML, you probably keep a “Code Diary” full of useful tricks, hacks and hints that you’ve used in past projects. Snipplr exists to let you share that code with other developers just like yourself. It’s become indispensable to my work flow since I found it!
Although I love design and web development, there are some days when I hit something akin to the writer’s wall. There really are days when I would rather bang my head against the wall than try to conjure up something new an exciting for a new client. I wrote about some places that I find inspirational a few weeks back at Smashing but that’s just me getting wanderlust. So where can you get inspiration when you’re fresh out of ideas and kind of sick of being creative?
Extensible Hypertext Markup (XML) has changed the web as we knew it and helped to make websites rich, well designed and fast loading. It’s become an integral part of Web 2.0 that won’t be going away any time soon. So what’s next for CSS? Mozilla and the Opera Software company give us some clues as to what features from the new CSS3 markup that may be incorporated into the next generation of web browsers. Here are some highlights…
Designers these days tend to rely on ‘the cloud’ as much as they rely on their desktop applications. This means they turn to Web Apps and Google whenever possible. It’s often cheaper, faster and more useful to work this way, especially for the little guys who may not have access to all the tools that more established designers have.
The type foundry used to be a high cost, highly skilled operation. Now neither is the case as a few web apps have made it incredibly easy to make your own fonts. Here’s a look a few of them:
Designers are always looking for new ways to make their portfolios stand out from the pack. One method that Adobe is promoting is the new feature in Acrobat 9 for PDF Portfolios
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which allows users to organize a variety of files and compress them as portable PDF documents.
What sets PDF Portfolios apart from other solutions like Powerpoint, Keynote, Illustrator and Word is the ease of navigation and customization it applies to ‘files’, where as most other solutions only let you embed content, offering little control over how it’s displayed once embedded. Click the image for a live demo.
I was recently mucking around with some new web hosts trying to find one that offered advanced features that most others don’t (specifically Subversion, Rails and Django support so if you have any leads please share). While I was doing this I began to notice that most web host companies employ godawful design schemas, usually purchased from sites like monstertemplates.com. So I made it my task to find a few web hosts that offer the best services, while still managing to look pretty gd good!
