21 New Resources Covering Topics for For Designers, Social Media and Blogging

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Last week, was an interesting week for me. I finally got my domain and site migration completed. My new domain register and web host is great, but the company left not so much. Sometime I will do  review of the company, but not right now.  Because of these changes I did not make any changes to the site or post any new blog post for fear of loosing the new work.

Since I had some extra time, I decided to spend more time reading some of my favorite design, social media and blogging tips sites. Below you find a collection of links to some of my favorite articles that I read last week. As always, if you want to be featured on my list, comment on my blog and engage with me on Facebook and Twitter.

Design

Building a Website? Skip the Flash – Justin Germino (DragonBlogger) wrote a great article about why we shouldn’t build and design using flash. I agree with him on this one. Flash was cool in its day, but now its old and bit annoying. Whenever I see a site that loads with flash I hit the back button on my browser as fast I can.

50+ Amazing Free Abstract Photoshop Brushes –  Not much to say here. the author has compiled a list of abstract PhotoShop brushes for you to use in your design work.

15+Rules to Follow While Designing A Logo – A logo is the identity of a company. This logo will be what the world will recognize as your brand. This article list of rules you or designer should follow during the design process.

All There Is To Know About HTML5 and CSS3 – HTML5 and CSS3 is starting to take off, soon every browser will support both HTML5 and CSS3. As a designer I am always looking for information on latest and greatest trends out there, so during one of searches,  I came across this article about HTML5. Naturally I was interested. This article covers everything you need to know about getting starting with HTML5 and CSS3.

50 Helpful Typography Tools And Resources – Nothing much to say here. I love typography. I honestly believe that typography can make or break any project. So I am always looking for more resources to help me better my skills. Take a look at this list of some of the most helpful resources for typography.

18 Dos and Don’ts Of Usability On The Web – This article is for the web designer and website owner. If you build a site that doesn’t work for the visitor then you failed at keeping your readers happy. The article covers eighteen things you do and do not do to a keep your site usable.

Modern CSS Layouts, Part 2: The Essential Techniques – This a new article designed to help you understand and learn new techniques using CSS. The tutorial covers CSS3.

How to Setup local host with Latest Apache, PHP and MySQL Packages –  As a designer, I do a lot of WordPress modification for my site and my clients. So I find its a lot easier to test my changes offsite before I do it live. I hate it when my sites goes down, and my clients hate it even worse. So I havinga webserver in my studio/lab is absolutely essential. For better part of a year I had been testing my changes live, when my test server had hardware failure. The worse part of about this was making a change to WordPress and hoping that the update would not crash the site. After one of my personal sites went down and stayed down until I could do a restore through backups, my site was dead and I had no way of accessing the site to even put in maintenance mode. I came across this article on 1stwedesigner on how to build, configure and run a web server on using Windows 7 and not have to use WAMP or XAMPP. I have used both of these programs in the past but I found them to be limited in configurability.  Personally I would rather run a Linux web server and configure as close as I can to my web host but since I no longer have a Linux box, this will work until I have time build another server.

The Ultimate Roundup of WordPress Tutorials, Themes and Guides –  Another great article on 1stdesigner about everything you wanted to know about WordPress. This article is great resource for those using WordPress at any level.

Social Media

21 Tips for Using Twitter and Facebook for Business – Great article by Brian Solis. His tips will help you become a social media rock star.

How to Network Like a Web Warrior! – A guest post by Mars Dorian. The author gives tips to help us be better players in social media. The article is about Networking. As bloggers, that’s what we do.

Blogging, Writing, and Business Advice

39 Reasons Why You Suck – Robb Sutton explains why a blogger may not be successful. He is blunt about the why you suck. As a blogger, if you fall into any of these categories, get motivated and change it!

Do Not Make This #1 Fatal Blogging Mistake – Great  article about blogging and what the number one fatal blogging mistake is.

5 Ugly Truth About Make Money Online –  Lee Ka Hoong reveals to us the truth about making money online. Most are common sense, but take a look at these truths. You might be surprised at what he has to say.

5 Effective Ways To Create An Eye Catching Title – Having troubles writing killer titles for your blog? Check out this article and try out some of the author’s tips to creating a better title.

5 Reasons Why You Should Guest Posting – Here another article of why we should all be guest posting,.

10 Tips for Building Your Brand – Jimi talks about the basics of building your brand. If you are about to start a business or about to start a new site. Check out his article and take his advice. His advice will help grow your business.

13 Essential Social Media Lessons for B2B Marketers from the Masters – Great advice from great online marketers.

What We Can Learn From GM – Keith wrote an excellent article about what GM did to recover from debt they took on from the tax payers to help support their failing business. He goes into these changes and how we as business owners, can learn from GM to help better our companies.

Social Media Mondays: Episode 3 – Mike Stenger did a video post for Keith at Hot Blog Tips about sceheduled tweets and automated your social media. The bottom line is you shouldn’t automate it fully. Automating isn’t being social.

6 Useful WordPress Plugins for Businesses – Selena recently did a guess post for m about useful WordPress plugins for buisness. If you get the chance, check out her site, ESvienne. – Thanks for the great article. =)