There are different ways of preventing your WordPress blog from becoming the target of spam and abuse. Which method you use will depend on a number of factors. I have used Akismet succesfully for example on a number of blogs, however I came up against a problem with a press release website.

I had developed this site using WordPress and with the addition of Plugins it was designed to be a Press Release Center allowing PR Professionals and marketing experts to submit their news releases for online publication. I developed the site and tested it, everything seemed to work fine. We tested it in-house and then decided to go for a soft launch. We checked http://jkhanok.com and for the first few hours nothing. Where were all the submissions that we had been promised? That is right, the Akismet Plugin had grabbed them as spam.

This was going to be a problem, I certainly did not want the submissions to be a free for all for every idiot online, but I did not want every other press release trashed because it looked ‘spammy’ to Akismet. So I had to take a look at what other options were out there.
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There is plenty of ‘free’ stuff available for web designers online, and it is great for building personal web sites, and really handy for increasing your skill-set however most of the stuff that is available comes with a proviso. The proviso is “For Non Commercial Use”.

So you can find everything you could possibly desire from Photoshop Brushes and Vectors to icon sets, graphics, images and backgrounds. However after hours of searching for that perfect resource you find that it is for “Personal Use Only”. This can be extremely frustrating, however there are plenty of artists, designers and creatives who make their stuff completely and freely available for commercial use.

So if your looking to complete a project on a very tight budget then you should take a look at some of these resources. The sites listed offer more than a single freebie for webmasters so they will be useful for future projects too, so well worth bookmarking.
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As a web designer you probably know of peope that have either suggested or actually gone ahead and searched Google images for sites to use in their designs. There are a fair few sites out there that offer free images for commercial use. Unfortunately you can spend hours browsing sites, searching and looking, registering at sites only to find there is only a very limited number of images available for you to use or worse still they are all too poor quality to be of any use to a professional.

It must be one of the most common questions asked of me by young designers and developers that I mentor. So I thought I would write a short blog piece introducing you to some of my favorite resources. There is a couple of pretty definitive lists online so that is not what I am attempting to offer here. This is a collection of the best Royalty Free Stock Image libraries.

Colectively it represents hundreds of thousands of images so if you want to complete a project on the cheap it is likely you will find an image for the job within these links.

Stock.XCHNG
In the first instance there is Stock.XCHNG the leading FREE stock photo site
Huge gallery containing over 350,000 quality stock photos by more than 30,000 photographers.

http://www.sxc.hu

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Whilst there are many web designers out there today who never ever put a pen to paper, you will find that the very best still start by sketching out their designs. These initial sketches can help a designer formulate his or her ideas. An increasing trend for web designers is to incorporate some of these sketches within their finished design, or even create hand drawn sketches specifically for the job.

They can make quite a change to all the slick edges, smooth bevelled finishes and sharp garish colours of most of the current Web2.0 style sites you see today. Web sites that incorporate hand drawn elements have a unique feel to the, they convey personality in a way only hand written comments and drawings can offering a truly creative outlet for the web designer.

The way in which designers incorporate hand drawn elements varies. Many utilise hand drawn icons, notes or messages, backgrounds and section breaks. They all help to lend a human touch to your website design. The amusing thing is many of these designs tend to be created on a tablet PC so a pen or pencil is in fact never used.
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I have been surprised to learn that there are still a great number of web site designers who are not aware of what a CMS is or to give it its full name Content Management System/Software is. Essentially a system that will alow your clients to maintain the content on the web site you develop with your intervention or requirement to know HTML.

So is it a fancy term for software that allows users without HTML knowledge to update their own website? well there is a little more to it than that. Essentially it seperates the design of the website from the content. The content will usually be stored in a database (although there are some basic systems that use a flatfile system)

You may say that design and content is already sepearate as you make proper use of CSS stylesheets and that your clients can use just the most basic of web editors to create content. A CMS system will go a step further. So if you want to add a new element to a website or a whole new section of content you will not need to amend dozens of pages to make room for this.
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You know the saying “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” ? Well, your website design IS your cover – and people DO judge you by it. Your website is your lifeline to making a good first impression online and without a kick ass website design, you’re losing out on many potential viewers/clients/readers. So what qualifies as a good website design? This is a list of 50 killer web designs we feel embody the great web designs = great websites philosophy.

Click the images below to view each website and make sure to let us know in the comments which sites you like best and why. We’ve done a mixture of styles, so there’s something here for everybody

Gozz

Bulls, Boars & Barra

84 Colors

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Web Design is a highly required service lately, as more people and companies got the taste of web advertising and traffic. But along with that, a strong competition has grown among the web design service providers, to make a difference, you need to leave a quality trace all around your work.

Get your contract right

Personally, I do not even want to imagine commercial web projects being done without a contract between both parties. There are quite some nice contract samples out on the web which you can either inspire from or fully use, but along the way, I can tell you a few things a contract needs, so I’d suggest it specifies a few, if not all of the followings:

• after a chosen solution, the client has to offer all the data the web pages have to contain and should do so within a limited period of time, to have the project built faster and strategically

• client’s agreement on being responsible for all the given data

• possibility to pay in more rates

• page validation on HTML and CSS

• pages will be SEO ready

• periodic visual display of the project as it’s being worked

• guarantee fully working links

• guarantee bug and update fixes in a limited period of time

• copyright goes to client, but allow the client to agree whether you are allowed to post the website designer (i.e. you) and have the website presented on your gallery or any other presentational promos for your company, out of appreciation, they should accept

• get an advance!

It’s hard to get a good contract right from the start, you’ll find yourself modifying it along the way.

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Already built a website or a community, but wondering why its traffic is either not increasing or worse, decreasing? Then you may want to consider a few things and most are related to the website’s maintenance. Maintaining a larger website is rather difficult and time-consuming and it should definitely not be a single person’s job.

Redesign

There are to main impacts you want to have on your visitors, design and content. I’ll have to be a bit specific here when it comes to content since there is a bit of confusion out there where people understand text as content. When I or mostly everyone mentions ‘content’, we’re actually referring to text/media/files resources and everything else that a website displays available.

If you have good content, do you have it under an old and hardly retouched design?

Visitors enjoy seeing the place they revisit well taken care of, otherwise they feel they are in a forgotten place.

Go ahead and start simple, try with a small redesign by just changing some colors here and there, like a different theme. See how your visitors react, you should then know how further you should go. Post a poll about it, have your visitors involved in your website’s look & feel. It would satisfy your visitors, knowing they are enjoying a design they have partially participated at.

Content

Always keep it fresh, no matter how good your content is, new content can only do wonders. Put up a News and Announcements section, let your visitors know of all your updates, consider adding the possibility to post comments on each announcement.

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CSS is not a very complicated language, but it is used on a global scale and it is most likely one of the most used WEB languages. In this article I will try to briefly introduce you to the best CSS practices.

Just to make sure we are all on the same page here, I’m going to explain how you can implement CSS into your HTML pages, namely, in 3 ways:

1. Embedded CSS – this would be a fast way to add CSS to your HTML documents, by adding your styles directly into your HTML tags. (i.e. <h1 style=”color: green;”>Welcome!</h1> )

But I do not recommend it much, it should be used just when it’s necessary, otherwise, you’d be using CSS without much control, and you’ll see for yourself why once you’ll find out the other 2 ways of adding CSS.

1. Internal CSS – this is a bit more practical way to add CSS and it’s done in the <head> section of your page(s). And this is done as shown below:

<head>

<style type=”text/css”>

CSS goes here

</style>

</head>

1. External CSS – I find this one to be the most practical and powerful way to add CSS into your documents and I’ll explain soon why. To add an external CSS stylesheet, you’ll have to create a file with a .css extension (i.e. styles.css) and then you’ll have to load it into your HTML documents by adding a META tag in the <head> section.

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css” type=”text/css”>

In this example, the CSS file is located in the same place as the HTML document, if it’s placed somewhere else, you need to type the full location starting with your HTML’s document location as the base. For example, if you will put the CSS file in a folder named css, then you’ll have to use href=”css/style.css”

Now that we cleared the CSS integration section, let’s dig in some best CSS practices I’ve learned along the way, to have a professionally maintained code.

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Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have already or will have plans to enter the twitterverse. If you are using WordPress then there is good news as there are plenty of tools to help you promote your twitter profile, manage your tweets and generally promote your tweetdom in a bid to gain more followers.

In fact if you search the WordPress Plugin archive you will find there are over 200 plugins listed that are Twitter related. It would take you several days to review them all. I know because I have done it, thereby saving you the time and effort.

This article is a round-up of the best of the best Twitter Plugins and Widgets for WordPress. Anyone with a WordPress blog and a Twitter account will want to use at least one of these applications to enhance your Twitter profile on your blog. I have tested all these widgets and know them to work with the current version of WordPress.

Twitter friendly Posts

The plugin creates a shorter link for every blog post, so instead of having:
http://webdesignlessons.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/ you can use http://webdesignlessons.com/554
This will not replace your original URL’s but will provide you aditional new URL’s that you can use. When you publish a post you will be presented with a new option in the Edit Post page in your WordPress backend. That is “Tweet this Post” This abbreviates your headline and appends your short URL and allows it to post it as a tweet.
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