Smash Design

I once tried Swish templates instead of Flash templates, just for the sake of variety and I wasn’t disappointed. You tend to think that Flash is a perfect solution for outstanding web design graphics and animation, but I believe it is not true any more. The Swish template turned out to be simpler in editing and for me it is a real advantage since the order book of my small web design agency is rather large.

I even used a Swish template for our updated web site. I bought a Swish template at Flashmint, one of the leaders in Flash sites production. Flashmint has recently started producing Swish templates too. If you saw my website, you would never guess what template I used as a starting point. So, I am not going to show you my web site made with one Swish template of Flashmint.com (that will be my own professional secret), but I’ll show you the template. With Swish I was able to achieve what I usually do with Flash, but it took me considerably less time and effort.

4 Designer swish template 2091 - Demo

A must know list of very handy shortcut keys for any blogger or designer that is serious about time…You must learn these shortcut keys!

Quicker Web Surfing Using FireFox Shortcut Keys

CTRL+CLICK: Opens a link in a new tab. SHIFT+CLICK opens it in a new window. A middle mouse button will also allow you to open in a new tab.

CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN: Scroll through all the tabs you have open.

CTRL+T: Open a new tab.

CTRL+W: Close the current tab.

CTRL+F: Search or find text in a webpage. Also press “/” for a quick search version.

PGUP, PGDN: Scroll the page up and down.

CTRL+HOME, CTRL+END: Get to the top of bottom of a page.

F11: Full-screen mode. Very useful to get rid of your toolbars and useful for displaying your work to clients.

CTRL+U: View the page source.

RIGHT CLICK: Check out the right click for heaps of other options.

For more Firefox shortcut keys.

Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

Apple’s official shortcut key page.

Windows Shortcut Keys

ALT+TAB: This is the best shortcut there is as it lets you scroll through your open programs.

WINDOWS KEY+D: Minimize all windows and show your desktop. (My favorite)

WINDOWS KEY+E: Opens My Computer in Windows Explorer. Also very time saving.

SHIFT+DELETE: Skip the Recycling Bin and delete the file for good.

CTRL+SHIFT+ESC: Open the Task Manager. The same as good ol’ CTRL+ALT+DELETE

For more Microsoft Windows shortcuts.

Must Know Text Keyboard Shortcuts

CTRL+A: Select all the text on the page. Combined with CTRL+C (copy) and CTRL+V (paste), you can move large amounts of text very quickly.

ALT+MOUSE DRAG: Hold down ALT while you highlight text lets you highlight text in a block fashion. Great if you have text in columns as you can highlight just one of the columns for copying or cutting.

CTRL+Z and CTRL+Y: Every designer knows of CTRL+Z (undo) however how many of you know about CTRL+Y which allows you to skip forward in your changes that you made when you went backwards.

CTRL+UP or DOWN ARROW KEYS: Move up a paragraph at a time instead of just one like at a time. Usually you would just move one line up but this allows you to move one paragraph at a time.

CTRL+LEFT or RIGHT ARROW KEYS: Move through your sentence a word at a time rather than one character at a time.

CTRL+SHIFT+ARROW KEYS: Highlight paragraphs, words and letters in an easy manner using the arrow keys. Combine with copy and paste.

HIGHLIGHT+TAB: You can move what ever is highlighted several lines over. Highlight the text then click tab. This would be great for any web developers or bloggers.

Originally I wanted to write how to develop a Wordpress theme, but when I’ve done some research I’ve found out that there are many good resources for that for example on wpdesigner, so if you are starting a blog or just redesigning or whatever here’s the list of useful thing and tips you should pay attention to when you are designing & developing your blog.

If your site wants to be successful it should have unique, attractive, user friendly design and color scheme. If you are not really designer, hire someone for that, it’s good investment, because design counts in 5 most important things and no one likes standard templates and your site will end up like the slogan says just another wordpress blog.

Always use valid CSS and xHTML code and while coding it have in mind how Wordpress displays elements, for example all menus in ul, li… and you should code it that way, table less of course because if your CSS, xHTML code is right half of development job is done.

Plan your space at the beginning, of course before this you have decided what your site would be about and what’s your targeted audience and what are people expecting for your site, and think of the things you need/don’t need for example do you need sideblog, what’s the best place for navigation, are you going to monetize your blog , how etc..?

So you should plan this all on the start because for example after a while you start accepting banner advertisement, now you have to rearrange space and people really don’t like this. Bad example of this would be http://xfep.com/ advertisement obviously isn’t planned here and there’s lot of white space for it.

Allow pings and comments, answer people questions, participate in discussions. If number of comments gets large you should use Gravatars to make inside discussions easier. Of course allow people to subscribe and place feed icon somewhere on the beginning of the page, and make it larger than text size, and if you have large number of subscribers point it out it will encourage more people to subscribe. Bad example of this is again http://xfep.com/ icon and text is barely visible and people really don’t like to look for feed icon. And also don’t make your feed icon too large it’s annoying and feed isn’t the main thing of your blog

Socialize, make a friends list – blogroll and participate in their discussions. Use social bookmarking and allow people to easily add your posts to their bookmarks like on Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious etc because usually the most traffic for blogs comes from them.