Design Blog

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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One of the hottest application suites to hit the design community since Adobe was born is now upon us. A.viay.com is a well executed visionary attempt at becoming the ‘CS3′ of web apps. And I’m not sure how it happened, but while Adobe wasn’t paying attention this group may have just snatched the market.

We all love web apps, as long as you’re connected they provide cheap, fast and less resource alternatives to desktop solutions. On top of that they store your data in the cloud, a good place for it if your computer ever crashes or is stolen.

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Image via Wikipedia

Are people getting spoiled?

In the last two years or so, the number of free design ‘instruction’ and resource sites has exploded. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think we live in the Matrix, where ideas can just be downloaded into their heads. Well, it’s 2008 and they haven’t invented that technology yet. Until they do we still have to work to come up with new ideas and to learn how to best execute them.

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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.

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Web applications are a growing trend in cloud computing but what makes the most popular applications, popular? I believe the answer lies in good design.

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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….

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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…

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