Design. How do you design something that apeals to the person looking at it and achieves the goal you are trying to achieve? Well, lets look at the goal of a good design, the main goal would be to communicate to the viewer the idea you want to communicate. This may be indirect, very direct, or even hidden. Take the Google home page for example, what are they trying to communicate with the design? Well each person who saw it might tell you what they get, but what I get is “simplicity” the design communicates that to me and I myself like a search engine that is simple so I use Google like so many others. Google Search (Entire page): Yahoo Search (Entire page): If you wanted to communicate that your website has many different services and show that on your homepage, you might get a design like Yahoo where the home page is so loaded that to me it overwhelms me. Someone else who might like lots of links might really enjoy the design. Thats the point, you want to communicate your...

I just stumbled on this great website which has very useful and simple jquery ajax applications. I will review each here in a simple way so you can see all of the useful information. This website shows a video tutorial, a text tutorial and a demo for each of the ajax applications. Please keep in mind that you should use these design elements sparingly and tastefully. Using too many effects in your webdesign can be tacky and detract from the overall design. To begin, here is the website: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/ Ajax image carousel This creates an endless carousel with an html list. It also displays a very smooth scrolling effect. This is very simple to set up and uses jquery. Here is an image showing the carousel. View the code and tutorial here. Ajax smooth slidedown This shows you how to make a smooth div slidedown effect without the initial jump. This can be used for many cool ajax effects. View the code and tutorial here. Ajax smooth data changer This creates a panel that...

Building Rich Internet applications can take a long time for those who do not have whole teams of newly graduated programmers. For those who are trying to put a rich application together with efficiency and in a time frame that is realistic there is a solution. The name of the program is “Flex“. Flex is a flashed based programming environment which uses XML as a main datasource. Once you have mastered Flex, you can build very functional and useful applications that run via the internet. With the advent of Adobe Air, you can also deploy these applications for use on desktops. I do not consider myself and advanced PHP coder and yet I have built some very complex applications. One application that I built was an online course creation system which enabled someone to build online courses without having to know any coding/html. I built this for a company who delivers online courses on many subjects. They privately use it for course creation. I have also built whole admin systems...

 Have you ever wanted to create vector or bitmap graphics but did’t have all of the expensive programs to work in? Well I got wind of this website/project called Aviary which allows you to do just that.  Aviary has created applications mimicking all of the popular graphics programs out there today. I will list the different programs, what they do and some examples of work created by people. I find it quite amazing what you can do with these programs — and they are all free.  Aviary uses names of bird species for each of their programs. Image Editor (Similar to Photoshop, Paint Shop, Gimp, etc.) which is called Pheonix and is depicted by a very nice Peonix icon. Pheonix has all of the basic things you need to edit an image which include: clone tool, magic wand, filters, selection tools, smudge, layers and image resizing. To Give Pheonix (image editor) a try click here. Here are some of the popular images that I really like. These were created in Pheonix by regular users:   Apple...

Creating a good website with wordpress is very easy once you have the right direction. In this article I will give you the basic steps to starting up a website/blog with WordPress. First things first before we begin. WordPress is not the ony content management system for blogs/websites — there are many others. I prefer wordpress over anything else due to it’s simplicity and ease of updating and adding plug in functionality. WordPress was originally designed for the creation of blogs. A lot of websites are centered around the idea of a blog which is new articles published frequently. For most websites to do well they need to provide constant valuable information at a decent rate. If you put up a couple of pages on a website and leave it at that, most likely your website will drop from the search engines and disappear. I love the idea of building a website around WordPress and I am working on numerous other websites using it. WordPress Basics A WordPress website consists of these...