Mash Up #15

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Hi guys, it’s time once again for our weekly Mash Up series. This series is a list of great articles I have read over the last week or so and I share them here. Generally these lists have articles for everyone. You can usually find a great listing of design related articles. But I also share articles about SEO, blogging, making money online, social media, new media, photography, and inspiration articles. All of which I hope can help you with your websites and businesses.

This week’s list is has some great articles. The list has topics in design, email marketing and social media. I found some great design articles, that should help those who are new to design or those creating their own themes for their sites. I would recommend checking out “The Principles of Design” article and “20 Reasons Why Your Website Designs Sucks Part 2.” Both articles have great advice on design that can help you with your design projects.

Design

A Graphic Design Primer, Part 2: The Principles of Design
“In the last part, we covered the elements that make up most designs. In this part, we’ll cover the principles you can apply to those elements to create a design. All of these principles can be applied to any project, and have a direct impact on the success of that design.”

Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3
“As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today?”

20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks Part 2
“In 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks part 1, I’ve started with a short introduction about why clients should be just clients, and why some self-proclaimed web designers shouldn’t be “designing” at all. We then explored important concepts which you need to know before you start designing and planning a website. A thorough knowledge of concepts like balance, white-space, and overflow make the difference between a good and a bad design.

Like the previous article, we’re focusing on another 10 mistakes that can transform your website design into an unpleasant place to be. However, this time I won’t show you extremely bad layouts that make you laugh, we are now on the next level and will focus on bigger mistakes that good designers make.”

Design/Email Marketing

10 Tips to Boost Your HTML Forms Performance

“Sometimes we get so used to doing things one way that we forget a little and important thing: to improve. We get so involved with all this CTA stuff that we forget other important things, like the contact form that comes after the pretty button.

Our task today is to improve our form, to get better conversion rates, and maybe learn something from it.

We will be talking about conversion, code, and design, in an easy and practical way.”

Social Media

3 Steps to More Traffic With The Digg Digg Plugin
“Wondering how to make it easy for people to share your great content? Keep reading…

You’ve done the hard part, which is creating compelling content that will keep your readers coming back to your blog again and again. Now that you have these amazing posts, the next obstacle is to get people to share your content.

I found this great WordPress plugin called Digg Digg, an all-in-one social sharing tool. It’s easy to configure and offers lots of choices.”

12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros
“Are you struggling to make social media work for your business? Sometimes a few well-chosen tools are all you need to get your social media marketing working for you.

In our recent Social Media Success Summit, there were presentations that covered all the key topics you need to make your social media marketing easy. In this article, I’ll share 12 of those tools that were recommended by the pros.”