30 Websites To Download Free Stock Photos

Feb 1st, 10 in Resources | 30 Comments |
Delicious 690 hits

Using stock photos in the design can save us a lot of time. Instead of hiring a photographer, you can instantly access high quality of stock photography by browsing through the stock photo websites.

There are a lot of websites offering stock photos. Some of them are free, while most of them aren’t. So, if you are going to use stock photos in your design, you have to be aware of the license and agreement that may be involved.

Today, we are going to share 30 websites where you can download free stock photos. If you found any free stock photo website that isn’t in the list, feel free to send me or add through comment.

1. stock.xchng

Contains over 350,000 quality stock photos. You can easily get a quality and beautiful wallpaper for your desktop, or simply an illustration for your blog. The advanced search feature lets you easily search through the site for your desired image.
stock.xchng

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18 Useful Wordpress Contact Form Plugins

Jan 27th, 10 in Wordpress | 38 Comments |
Delicious 199 hits

Contact Form is one of the most important page for all websites. If you are running an e-commerce website, you need a contact form so that your potential buyers can reach you to get more information. Even if you run a personal blog, you will also need a contact form so that bloggers from same niche or advertisers can contact you easily.

There are some great online form providers such as Wufoo and FormSpring. These services allow you to create contact forms, survey forms and registrations form easily without knowing much about web programming languages.

If you are using Wordpress, then you can use Wordpress plugins to build your contact form easily. However, there are a lot of Contact Form Plugins in Wordpress Plugin Repository. Some of the plugins are rather too old, not able to support the latest version of Wordpress or just having too little features.

So, we decided to gather 18 Best Wordpress Contact Form Plugins that will suit everyone needs. These plugins are tested by us and support Wordpress 2.9.1.

1. cformsII

cforms is a highly customizable Ajax driven contact form plugin. It lets you to create multi page forms or multiple forms on one page easily. They are few more cool features such as Role Manager support, Tell-A-Friend, Fully localization, Backup and Restore. Antispam is also supported by using CAPTCHA or Q&A.
cformsII

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5 Alternative And Tiny CSS Grid Systems

Jan 25th, 10 in CSS | 11 Comments |
Delicious 105 hits

CSS grid system is one tool that facilitates the work of web designers and web developers to develop a website. Advantage of using CSS grid system is you can reduce development time. Grids also provide uniformity and consistency in the placement of HTML elements.

Do you want to know more about CSS Frameworks and grid system? If yes, then you may want to read our previous article that talk about useful CSS Frameworks.

Today, we are going to look into 5 more CSS Grid Systems that are tiny but worth a look.

1. CSS Boiler Plate Grid

As one of the original authors of Blueprint CSS I’ve decided to re-factor my ideas into a stripped down framework which provides the bare essentials to begin any project. This framework will be lite and strive not to suggest un-semantic naming conventions. You’re the designer and your craft is important.
CSS Boiler Plate Grid

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Joomla Showcase: 44 Beautiful Joomla Website Designs

Jan 20th, 10 in Insipiration, Web Design | 13 Comments |
Delicious 35 hits

Joomla, one of the most popular PHP CMS, has been used by tons of websites. It is very customizable and extendable through various plugins. Developers use Joomla to build Company websites, directories, personal blogs, e-commerce websites and etc.

Back to few months ago, we showcase beautiful Wordpress blogs. Some readers ask me to collect beautiful Joomla designs, as not everyone use Wordpress as their CMS. So, we decided to collect cool Joomla designs over the world and present to our readers.

If you are a Joomla designer and are scratching your head for a new Joomla design, then you had reached to the right place. Today, we are going to share 44 beautiful Joomla designs that may inspired you.

omy.sg

omy.sg is Singapore’s bilingual news and interactive web portal leading by media group Singapore Press Holdings Ltd.
omy.sg

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SlideDeck – Cool jQuery Plugin For Slideshow

Jan 18th, 10 in Resources | 5 Comments |
Delicious 6 hits

SlideDeck is a very powerful jQuery plugin to present your content on mobile phones and browsers is a very simple and clean slideshow. This jQuery powered plugin is easy to customize, powerful and able to deliver a better user experience to your readers.

Still remember our tutorial about jQuery Content Slider? SlideDeck brings all these slideshow and content slider to you in no time!

SlideDeck - Powerful jQuery Slideshow plugin
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Image To Icon: 5 Ways to Easily Convert Images To Icon Files

Jan 14th, 10 in Tools | 5 Comments |
Delicious 7 hits

We use icons at a lot of places such as desktop application or favicon for our blog. For those who always change the Windows folder or application icons, you can always search for .ico images format, which is the icon files for Windows.

We had gone through a lot of articles that related to images and icons. But if you are new to our blog, then you may want to refer them back, which i would like to do a summary here:

  • Image Optimization tools: This article shares 12 tools for you to optimize and reduce the size of your images. They may not be important for you, but these tools are essential for bloggers and webmasters. As Google put more weight on page loading speed, it is good that you pay some attention on your image size especially if you have many images on your articles.
  • Free Icon Editors: 6 useful and free Icon Editors for you. Useful when you don’t want to install or fire up your Photoshop. Some of them are even portable, which mean you can carry them along with your USB flash drive.

But, if you want to use your own images as icons, then you may need some software/utilities to convert these images to .ico extension. Today, we are going to look into 5 different methods to convert your images to icon files.

Desktop Image to Icon Converters

1. SimplyIcon

SimplyIcon allows you to create icon files by drag and drop your images on to this application. This is a portable application and it requires .Net Framework 2.0 to run.
SimplyIcon

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33 Beautiful Social Media Icon Sets For Designers And Bloggers

Jan 11th, 10 in Resources | 22 Comments |
Delicious 69 hits

Bloggers, especially web designers use Social Media sites to promote their articles and services. Promote your articles through social media is easier and you can see the results in a short period of time.

So, how to get your readers to promote your articles to their social media friends? One of the best method is integrate these social media buttons to your blog. These buttons should fit well with your design. Although you can hire designer to design unique social media buttons for your blog, but using free social media icon sets is a good choice especially when you are under budget.

In this article, we are going to share 33 Beautiful Social Media Icon Sets and we hope this collection can save your time searching online.

Social Icons Made of Wood

Social Icons Made of Wood
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WordPress Usability: Plugins That Make Your Blog More Visitor Friendly

Jan 7th, 10 in Usability, Wordpress | 15 Comments |
Delicious 37 hits

In a recent post, We touted the benefits of hacking WordPress over the installation of plugins. One of these benefits is that plugins can cause your blog to become bloated. Among other issues, a bloated blog takes longer to load. With the blogosphere being saturated with content on virtually any topic you can think of, making your blog as visitor friendly as possible should be one of your primary design goals.

While I certainly promote the use of hacks over plugins, I know that part of the beauty of the plugin is so that a blogger can create a fully-functional site without having to get their hands dirty with the code that drives their blogging software. Instead of looking at hacking the code, let’s take a look at a few plugins that can help build a more usable blog for your visitors.

Usability

The best definition of usability I have seen comes from the Base One Agency who states that “usability refers to how simple it is for customers to perform the desired actions on a website. Good usability can improve the conversion rate of a web site.” So in addition to how long it takes to load a WordPress blog, to achieve usability, you would need to look first at what the desired goals of your blog are. Is it to drive sales? Then your content needs to establish trust among your readers. For a more detailed look into the psychology behind usability, have a look at our previous post that covered Webpage Usability.

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23 Professional Facial Photoshop Retouching Tutorials

Jan 4th, 10 in Photoshop | 20 Comments |
Delicious 87 hits

Editing and retouching images is now made easy with the use of Adobe Photoshop. If there are fine lines, wrinkles, freckles, and other not pleasing to the eyes which you want to eliminate in your picture, Photoshop can make you look stunning and perfect. It makes the pictures look more beautiful.

If there are fine lines, wrinkles, freckles, and other not pleasing to the eyes which you want to eliminate in your picture, Photoshop can make you look stunning and perfect. Photoshop can also add, reduce or transform parts of your face. If you have no make up and you want to have a make-up on your picture, or if you want to look like a celebrity, or make yourself look like you aged in your picture, then Photoshop is the answer to your concerns!

We had shared a lot of Photoshop tutorials and resources which including Photoshop Text Effect, Layout Design Tutorials, Icon Design Tutorials and even some great alternatives for Photoshop. We hope you like our Photoshop series. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Subscribe to us too.

Below are several Facial Photoshop Retouching Tutorials. Take a look at these pictures and be mesmerized by the amazing transformations.

Super Fast and Easy Retouching

This tutorial will help you repair low quality shots and smooth out the person’s face.
Super Fast and Easy Retouching
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Highcharts – Pure Javascript Charts Library

Dec 28th, 09 in Resources | No Comments |
Delicious 3 hits

Charts and graphs are very important components in order to present your data to the readers. Perhaps our previous post about Javascript Charts Plugins help you in your projects. If none of the plugins or resources meet your requirements, don’t worry. We are going to share another powerful but free Javascript Charting Component to you: Highcharts.

Highcharts

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