Pro Blog Design

Wordpress is arguably the most popular and the best blogging platform out there. You might have installed Wordpress on your site, but you might be scared to experiment with Wordpress worrying that you could break your site and Wordpress.

Experimenting is one of the best way to learn new things and if you break your site, you probably might not want your visitors to see the fault as it might leave a bad impression. So, it is necessary to have the ability to learn WordPress and try new themes, plugins and other items without putting it online where people can see.

So, the best solution is to install WordPress locally on your computer. It will save you quite a bit of time since you can just put your files inside your WordPress folder without having to upload it to FTP. You can do anything you want with WordPress without a worry which surrounds you when you put it online. The possibilities are endless. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to install WordPress in localhost using XAMPP. I hope it will become a great use to you.

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In this review, we’re going to work through a website (FreePixels.com) as a case study, looking at its design and seeing what we can learn from it and what we could improve on.

So to start off, let’s take a look at Free Pixels. They offer almost 4000 extremely high quality images, for free. All you have to do is leave the small watermark in the corner, or create your own link back.

That makes it a very handy site for bloggers! Now load up the site in a new tab, and let’s start our case study!

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I don’t know what to do.

The iPad came out last week and, well, I want one. But that’s a standard side-effect of a Steve Jobs keynote; you always end up wanting one.

There’s been a lot of talk about shortcomings of the device, and a lot of the points have merit. Enough merit to stop me from getting it though?

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Color is difficult to get right. There’s a near infinite number of combinations out there, but only a few that will actually look right for your project. Because it’s so important to a design’s success, it’s worth taking a little time to work out your palette.

There are a lot of online tools to help out with this. They all vary slightly to suit designers with different preferences on how they work. We’ve collected together 25 of the best here, with a quick overview on each to help you decide which to try.

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An events list is just what you would expect; a list of upcoming events, ordered by the date they are taking place on (Not the date they were written on!).

In this post, we are going to create our own events list that will let us add events simply by writing posts and assigning them to an “Events” category. It can’t get much easier than that!

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With 2010 started, the new decade has begun. But how did we get to here?

In this article, we’re going to look at the major events from each year in the past decade that have helped develop the web design industry. Try keeping a tab on how many affected you, I bet you’ll run out of fingers quite quickly!

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Flash isn’t something you often see in use on a blog (aside from the WP-Cumulus tag cloud plugin). The majority of our animations and other effects tend to be done with JavaScript.

When Trenty Fox of Flashmint.com got in touch with me a few days offering to give away some of their products in a competition (Which we are doing at the end of this post!), my initial reaction was that Flash wasn’t a big thing for bloggers though.

What changed my mind was when I rolled over the Christmas logo on their site (Not going to tell you what happens, just go try it out, it’s cool!). It’s a small touch, but it made a big difference for me.

With this post, I’m going to fire out some other ideas for how using Flash in small doses could add to your blog. Let me know what you think, or where you use it!

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