*when HiFi is just not an option

In the UK, we have a derogatory term for newspapers: chip wrappers. No matter how good, today’s front page wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips.
Bloggers can relate. You slave for hours to write a stellar article that bursts into the limelight for only a few days, or even hours, before it’s forgotten. Readers who find you [...]

With photo illustrations, and manipulations, you can express yourself in a unique way. Letting your imagination run wild and putting your creatively in digital artwork. In this post, I will share with you 35 mouth watering photo illustrations that will be sure to impress even the experienced artist.

Adidas About to Blow 2012

In this PSD/HTML conversion tutorial, we will take a PSD web design template that I showed you how to construct in a previous tutorial and turn it into a functional HTML/CSS template.

This is the second part of a tutorial on building a clean business website. This second part will focus [...]

By Aquil Akhter
Urban decay photography is the form of photography that deals with the techniques of taking pictures of deserted buildings. Although the buildings have been abandoned for more than a few years or mo…

Sponsor: Submit your site to 70+ quality design galleries with Gallery Rush

Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world’s most popular blogs – Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to … Continue reading →

I updated my Emergency WordPress access script today, because of some issues we'd discovered at OrangeValley and some bugs submitted by users. When I updated the post, I realized I should be emailing all the commenters, as some of them had had the same issue, and most of them would want the updated script. Quite [...]

Emailing your commenters is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

concrete5, an up-and-coming open-source content management system, has offered to give a lucky blog reader an eCommerce and discussion forums license package! The total value of these two licenses is $145.

Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr. was arguably the greatest American fiction writer of the last half of the 20th century.
Fortunately for his book sales, most think of him as the archetypal drunk, misanthropic male pig.
Don’t let the hype fool you, though. Bukowski possessed the secret to something nearly every blogger wants: what makes truly [...]

Inkd has offered to give away a free one year subscription to its entire print design library. That includes 50 template downloads per month and access to new content added during your subscription period (a $399 value)! To enter, just follow @inkdtweet on twitter and tweet this post with the hashtag #Inkddmagcontest. We’ll announce the winners next Wednesday-so be sure to tweet away!

As web professionals, we’re always looking for ways to improve our knowledge and skills. Tips, tricks and checklists are often one of the most underused yet potentially useful models of providing great, quick and easy to follow pieces of useful information.
You may or may not know some of the tips below — and you may [...]

Sponsor: Submit your site to 70+ quality design galleries with Gallery Rush

Photoshop is powerful tool that can add wings to your creativity. With Photoshop manipulation tools, you can create and edit images for Web and print. Every industry needs poster designs for promotion of their prod…

When you're developing XML sitemaps, no matter on what platform, it's pretty hard to debug them sometimes to be proper XML. You have to validate all the time and you can't do a quick “glance” over to see whether your sitemap has the URL's you were expecting. As mentioned before I'm working on my WordPress [...]

Debugging your XML sitemap with an XSL Stylesheet is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

By Tim Mercer
Matte painting is a technique often used to create landscapes, sets and scenes for movies, TV and print when building a physical set or traveling to a particular location to film is either cost prohib…

Clients and stakeholders — every project has them, and as much as some designers love to hate them, we need to ensure that we can work constructively with them.
The better we can work with our clients and stakeholders, the easier the relationship will be, the more we will enjoy working on the project, and the [...]

I think that, like me, a lot of people out there actually learn most of what they know about Photoshop by teaching themselves. Even if you do take a class, it will likely focus on the basics, and just won’t have the scope to dig into all of the finer details of the application. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, and I think that the best way to learn anything is to get your hands dirty and dig into it yourself.

Recently, however, I was at a Photoshop seminar in which the instructor, Dave Cross, was discussing this very thing. He said that there is one significant problem with being a self-taught Photoshop user, and that that problem was the teacher. The comment was perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and intended to draw a chuckle from us, but there’s definitely some truth to it.

To take another of Cross’ lines: would you trust a “self-taught” surgeon?

Anyhow, this idea became apparent to me just over a year ago, during a discussion with a friend with whom I regularly share tips and suggestions for using Photoshop. Though I cannot recall his exact phrasing, he basically asked me what I thought of the Clone Stamp tool, and whether it was something worth using.

What did one Grateful Dead fan say to the other when the drugs wore off?
“Man, this music sucks!”
Jokes aside, no one can argue the cultural influence of the Dead and the legions of loyal Deadheads who continue to love the band. And a big part of how it happened was due to the band’s pioneering [...]

Sponsor: Submit your site to 70+ quality design galleries with Gallery Rush

Concrete textures are great for adding some character to your web and graphic design projects. In this post we’ll feature 35 concrete textures from various sources. If you see something you like, click on the image and you will be led to the source. Be sure to read the license or terms of use, especially if you are planning to use it for a commercial project.

Remember when mom always told you to eat your vegetables? Little did you know she was giving you fantastic advice for managing your Web strategy. In these days of Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs and more, it can be tempting to skip over the basics and dive headfirst into an oh-so-tempting dish of social media or [...]

When it comes to Flash, there are some conflicting views. There is a misconception that that Flash web pages are not seen by search engines and can’t be indexed at all. Others reckon that Flash sites are not user-friendly and load for ages.
If you are one of those individuals who’ve overlooked and ignored Flash as [...]

When it comes to Flash, there are some conflicting views. There is a misconception that that Flash web pages are not seen by search engines and can’t be indexed at all. Others reckon that Flash sites are not user-friendly and load for ages.
If you are one of those individuals who’ve overlooked and ignored Flash as [...]

This guest post was written by Matt of MattDunlap.org, where he writes about how to increase your conversion rates with a smarter blog. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been focusing on traffic building, link building and SEO [...]

As the web evolves, new technologies are emerging and uniting in remarkable ways. The combination of Ajax and jQuery, in particular, is one of the most powerful unions to date.
The purpose of this article is to give a brief and generalized overview of both Ajax and jQuery, and also discuss how jQuery has made Ajax [...]

Put yourself in this scenario. You are invited to several job interviews, much of them for the kind of jobs you have only dreamed about getting. The kind you jokingly told your friends about when you figured out what you wanted to be when you grew up. You want to impress your future clients. Personally, you are filled with confidence for what you do having been to the best schools, and have spent many years perfecting your profession. You eat, sleep, and breathe the job that you do. Getting ready for the interviews, you realize you haven’t been to anything formal in a very long time. Your old moth eaten clothes wont come back into style for a few more decades. Money has been a little tight right now, I mean lets face it, schooling is expensive. That’s why the thought of washing your dandruff salt and pepper hair, getting a haircut, and buying a nice quality suite are things you are more than willing to do, because if you get this job, it will set you free financially. And you know if you show up looking like old, smelly, Rip Van Winkle, you will get escorted from the party faster than it took you to find directions on Google Maps. The only thing your potential employer is going to know of you is your lack of personal hygiene, not your outstanding qualities for the job he was going to offer you.

To most of us, we know the importance of first impressions, and going to a job opportunity under dressed is something we would never do. However, did you know if your website is dressed with an ugly out of date, eye sore logo design, you are in fact showing up to many job opportunities like the man from the scenario? Everyone who visits your website, could be that one contact that would be able to give you the job that you have always wanted, but at the same time could immediately be turned off from their first impression your logo gave about your business. Whether your business is a multi-million franchise, or your basic ‘Ma and Pa’ family company, it always helps to look professional in all angles of your profession. Here are some quick basic, yet vital tips to know about what makes an attractive logo design. We will compare them with logo’s that don’t have these elements, you be the judge!

1. Clean

Sometimes less is more. Most great logos are very simple.

Few things in life are guaranteed. This is especially true if you are a writer.
But this one rule — The Rule of 24 — is guaranteed. Iron clad.
Doesn’t matter who you are, what you write, how you write, or how hard you try to prove this wrong.
You won’t.
You can’t. [...]

By Aquil Akhter
Robots have become popular in art because they represent the vision of the futurism. We always try to visualize future by watching 3D robotic artworks to image what will come next. In the field of …

Sponsor: Submit your site to 70+ quality design galleries with Gallery Rush

Most web designers rely on inquiries from their portfolio website to produce a decent portion of their business. Contact forms can be very simple, collecting a name and contact information, or they can be much more detailed, providing enough information to get an estimate. While the primary purpose of the contact form on our website has always been to make it easy for potential clients to contact us about web design projects, there are also a number of other reasons that visitors use the contact form and a one-size-fits-all approach has its drawbacks. We recently changed the contact form to include some conditional fields that make the form more customized according to the reason the visitor is contacting us, and in this post we’ll go through the process of creating this type of form.

The form we’ll be creating will contain some basic fields (name, email, phone, website, and message) that are shown to all visitors who are filling out the form, but based on the reason they are contacting us they will also see a few other more specific fields. If the visitor selects “Web Design Services” as their reason for contacting us they will be prompted to tell us if it is a new website or a re-design, enter a budget, and tell us how they found us. If they select “Content Development Services” they will also be prompted to enter a budget, but with different options than the budget for web design services, and so on.

In the past our contact form has included a field to allow visitors to select a budget, but that was based on the assumption that they were contacting us regarding web design services. Since the budget field isn’t applicable for someone who is filling out the contact form just to say hi, this “advanced” form will only show what is relevant based on user input.