Twit Taboo

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To the graphic designer, it is not sufficient just to have a diploma or knowledge in designing. In addition to this, their career is greatly dependent on their graphic design portfolio. This is because it is based on the material produced in the portfolio that you get your future job openings.

When creating your portfolio, you have to concentrate on showing your work to its best advantage and not distracting with too many distractions in it. Of course, you will have to use a clever layout in your designs. However in the process, you have to remember not to forget the purpose of the portfolio, which is to display your work and not divert attention from it.

Variety adds spice to your portfolio

Create a graphic design portfolio with various pieces of your past work. It is better to choose pieces where you have used different concepts and design skills in creating your work.

Remember that variety is an asset for a portfolio as this is the best way of giving an employer an idea of what you can do for them. So, if you have the talent, don?t hide it but flaunt it. But if you don?t have it, don?t despair, work at developing one.

One important trait you have to develop to create an effective graphic design portfolio is to be able to look at your work critically. Don?t add work that is not of good quality; remember that the portfolio is created to reflect your ability in producing high quality designs and in deciding what a high quality design is.

Use expert opinion when creating your portfolio

If you find it difficult to choose the pieces of work to include in your graphic design portfolio, you could consider getting some expert opinion. Many a time, an honest but brutal critique proves great in creating the perfect portfolio.

When creating your portfolio, it is better to include all the best works you have done so far. And if you are a newbie in the field, you may have to include everything you have done so far in the portfolio. Even things you have done for friends and family can be included in the portfolio, so long as the work is something that is complete and clear to look at.

Use the internet to create an online portfolio

You could consider enlarging your graphic design portfolio by volunteering your services for local, non-profit organizations. These organizations are usually more than happy to get some of their work done for free.

And to make things beneficial to you, you could request to have your business name and phone number added in the finished work you do for them, as advertisement of your work. This way, both you and the organization benefit, and you have extra pieces to add to your graphic design portfolio.

With the internet at your finger tips, you can create an online portfolio. This way, people and employers from all over the world will be able take a look at your graphic design portfolio, and decide on the feasibility of hiring you.

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Photoshop layers allow you to experiment with textures. Learn how to work with layers to create flesh texture in Photoshop in this free Photoshop tutorial from a professional graphic designer.

Exp…

Basics for creating two flexible columns in a web page with CSS.

www.2webvideo.com/video-produc tion: Creating zoom-in, or zoomer, in any webpage is not difficult. This video shows how to use jQuery plugin to create zoom-in like a small window that magnifies the…

We will create an amazing music player coded in xHTML & jQuery that made use of mouse gestures and hotkeys. You can Click & Drag with mouse to interact with interfaces music player or use direction…

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WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.

Whether users are working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give them the know-how to effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling them to have full control over their site’s design and branding. Users only need to be comfortable with the basics of web development and this book will take care of the rest.

What you will learn from this book

Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design
Create detailed designs and code them up
Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics
Debug and validate your theme using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation tools
Customize and tweak your theme’s layout
Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms
Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme
Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox
Add interactivity to your themes using Flash
Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0’s template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions

Chapter 1 introduces you to the WordPress blog system and lets you know what you need to be aware of regarding the WordPress theme project you’re ready to embark on. The chapter also covers the development tools that are recommended and web skills that you’ll need to begin developing a WordPress theme.

Chapter 2 looks at the essential elements you need to consider when planning your WordPress theme design. It discusses the best tools and processes for making your theme design a reality. The author explains her own ‘Rapid Design Comping’ technique and gives some tips and tricks for developing color schemes and graphic styles for your WordPress theme. By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a working XHTML and CSS based ‘comp’ or mockup of your theme design, ready to be coded up and assembled into a fully functional WordPress theme.

Chapter 3 uses the final XHTML and CSS mockup from Chapter 2 and shows you how to add WordPress PHP template tag code to it and break it down into the template pages a theme requires. Along the way, this chapter covers the essentials of what makes a WordPress theme work. At the end of the chapter, you’ll have a basic, working WordPress theme.

Chapter 4 discusses the basic techniques of debugging and validation that you should employ throughout your theme’s development. It covers the W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation services and how to use the FireFox browser and some of its extensions as a development tool, not just another browser. This chapter also covers troubleshooting some of the most common reasons ‘good code goes bad’, especially in IE, and best practices for fixing those problems, giving you a great-looking theme across all browsers and platforms.

Chapter 5 discuss how to properly set up your WordPress theme’s CSS style sheet so that it loads into WordPress installations correctly. It also discuss compressing your theme files into the ZIP file format and running some test installations of your theme package in WordPress’s administration panel so you can share your WordPress theme with the world.

Chapter 6 covers key information under easy-to-look-up headers that will help you with your WordPress theme development, from the two CSS class styles that WordPress itself outputs, to WordPress’s PHP template tag code, to a breakdown of “The Loop” along with WordPress functions and features you can take advantage of in your theme development. Information in this chapter is listed along with key links to bookmark to make your theme development as easy as possible.

Chapter 7 dives into taking your working, debugged, validated, and properly packaged WordPress theme from the earlier chapters, and enhancing it with dynamic menus using the SuckerFish CSS-based method and Adobe Flash media.

Chapter 8 continues showing you how to enhance your WordPress theme by looking at the most popular methods for leveraging AJAX techniques in WordPress using plugins and widgets. It also gives you a complete background on AJAX and when it’s best to use those techniques or skip them. The chapter also reviews some cool JavaScript toolkits, libraries, and scripts you can use to simply make your WordPress theme appear ‘Ajaxy’.

Chapter 9 reviews the main tips from the previous chapters and covers some key tips for easily implementing today’s coolest CSS tricks into your theme as well as a few final SEO tips that you’ll probably run into once you really start putting content into your WordPress site.

For more details on the book please visit http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-theme-design/book.

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Months ago I found a tutorial on how to create a tsunami with flash (link below). So I decided to make a easily customizable script with jQuery and this is what I got.

http://www.actionscript.org…

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Is it possible to create a one page website?

One that can provide relevant information on your chosen topic and yet still be lightweight and easy to write AND feature well in the search engines?

Well the answer is undoubtedly yes! And here’s where I will tell you how.

We’ll go through the entire site step by step.

1. Get jquery at www.jquery.com!

What is jquery?

Jquery is a super-lightweight multi-functional javascript library which allows you complete control over every aspect of your web pages (CSS and HTML).

It’s a simple include that you provide in your web page…

eg. “<script type=”text/javascript” src=”jquery.js”></script>”

Check out the jquery.com website to get more details, but for the time begin, just understand that we need this to dynamically “call in” content to our one page site.

2. Get a template for your site!

Try http://www.freecsstemplates.org/ for some great free web templates.

Pick a template you like and create the file index.html.

This will be your “one page” site and all content will be “pulled” into this page.

3. Create your content area

You must now create the DIV tag where your content will be placed.

A line of code something like…

“<div id=”content”></div>”

is required in the middle of your page.

This is where jquery will place your content.

4. Create small files to hold your content.

You’ll need to create files that will hold your content in basic HTML format.

For example, aboutus.html may contain…

About Us

WebCom Systems has been in the internet business

for over 10 years now and has vast experience in developing

every type of site from basic advertising sites to large ecommerce software applications for a variety of businesses.

5. Create a menu to call in the content

Now this is where the jquery magic begins! We now need a simple menu to drive the website.

First we need a javascript function to call from our menu, here it is…

“<script>function Call_content(url){$(”#content”).fadeOut(’fast’).load(url).fadeIn(’slow’);}</script>”

So, your menu that call this javascript function should look a bit like this…

About Us

So there we have it! You can now add as many content files as you like and add them to your menu!

Easy eh?

Now to complete the whole setup, remember to

-> add your site to Google webmaster tools
-> add relevant keywords and description to your page

-> add in Google Analytics for site stats
-> maybe add in a few adsense adverts!

And there you have it, a one page website!

Please feel free to visit my company website at http://www.webcomsystems.biz to see a working example of this.

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