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05 Sep 2010
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Quick Tip: Preventing Right-Click Context Menu with jQuery

One of my clients recently asked for an image slideshow on his blog to showcase his photography. When I asked him how he wanted it to be, he was insistent on using a Flash slideshow over JavaScript. It turns out that although the Flash gallery was far
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tags: tutorials
Sep 05 2010 11:06 AM
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10 Tools to Check Your Website’s SEO Status

As SEO becomes an increasingly important part of web development, it’s important to make sure your website conforms to the correct standards to help improve your search ranking. This is an area where you should be willing to spend some money, as
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tags: resources marketing search engines seo
Aug 31 2010 06:20 PM
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20 Free Fonts Every Web Designer Should Have

As a web designer I’m always on the lookout for great-looking free fonts to use in my projects. I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite fonts from 3 great sites: DaFont, 1001 Fonts and FontSpace. Check them out and leave a comment if you
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tags: design fonts freebies
Aug 24 2010 03:36 PM
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An Introduction to Mobile Web Development

Facebook, the second largest site on the internet, reports that over 30% of it’s active users access the site from their mobile devices, and that mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile users. As cell phones become more and more prevalent in
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tags: resources jqtouch jquery mobile
Aug 18 2010 10:14 AM
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Creating the Perfect CSS3 Buttons

The sweet looking buttons in this tutorial are created using only HTML and CSS3 – no JavaScript or images required! The buttons are easy to make and are pretty extensible but don’t take my word for it, check out the demo instead: Download The
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tags: tutorials buttons css css buttons
Aug 06 2010 09:50 AM
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Free Photoshop Invoice Template

I finally got around to redesigning my client invoice template and I’ve decided to share it with you guys. It’s in PSD format and you’re free to use it for whatever you’d like! Simply open the document in Photoshop, add new items,
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tags: freebies ballpark billing blinksale
Aug 03 2010 02:15 PM
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15 Awesome New WordPress Plugins

The real beauty of WordPress is the immense community of developers behind it. Several plugins are created and added to the official plugin directory every single day, which now catalogs nearly 10,500 in all! Here is a list of some of the best new
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tags: resources list plugins top-15
Jul 29 2010 12:26 PM
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The Complete Guide to Creating Your First Website

So one thing is clear: you want/need your own website. But how do you go about making one? Where do you even start? Whether it's for your business, personal blog or any obscure reason, understanding how the web works and establishing an online presence
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tags: tutorials beginners introduction programming
Jul 25 2010 06:28 PM
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How to Set Deadlines and Keep Them

The freelancer’s worst fear: underestimating the scale of a project, setting the deadline too soon and having to deal with angry clients. This is a scenario most of us have faced and many still continue to face as a result, but what can you do to
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tags: general deadlines productivity tips and tricks
Jul 21 2010 03:07 PM
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How to Create Realistic Buttons in Photoshop

This is the first of a series of tutorials aimed at teaching you how to create realistic interface elements that you can use on your websites or in mobile applications. The buttons created in this article are simple and easy to customize, changing the
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tags: tutorials adobe buttons photoshop
Jul 18 2010 03:40 PM
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Improving the BBC News Redesign

If you haven’t been to the BBC News page lately, check it out! They’ve completely revamped the site, changing the header, typography and element positioning among other things. While I like the changes overall, I would have done a few things
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tags: general
Jul 15 2010 04:37 PM
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Quick and Simple PHP Honey Pot Spam Prevention

A honey pot trap involves creating a form with an extra field that is hidden to human visitors but readable by robots. The robot fills out the invisible field and submits the form, leaving you to simply ignore their spammy submission or blacklist their
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tags: tutorials contact form honey pot php
Jul 11 2010 01:24 PM
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DevGrow 2.0 – New Design, New Features

If you’ve been to the site at all in the last day or two, you have probably noticed the fairly drastic design changes. I’ve spent the better part of 2 weeks redesigning the site and adding several new features, including a discussion forum
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tags: general devgrow discussions forum
Jul 08 2010 03:38 PM
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Quick SEO Tip 2: Submit Your Sitemap

A sitemap is an index of pages and content found on you website. If you don’t have a sitemap yet, make one now using free sitemap generators or plugins. If you do have one, submit it to the big search engines to make sure your website is correctly
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tags: tutorials quick seo tips seo seo tips
Jun 29 2010 08:16 PM
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Scalability for Web Designers

A scalable website is one that can handle growth with grace and dignity. Adobe refers to scalability as “a Web server’s ability to maintain a site’s availability, reliability, and performance as the amount of simultaneous Web traffic,
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tags: articles growth scalability social networks
Jun 21 2010 06:58 PM
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Top 5 Web-Based Screencasting Apps

While working on my latest project, a custom WordPress theme framework, I came across the need to record screencast tutorials that go over the features of my app. Using a web-based app means you don’t have to download bulky files (usually just a
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tags: resources apps productivity screencast
Jun 15 2010 09:18 PM
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Sharebar WordPress Plugin

My first ever WordPress plugin! Sharebar adds a dynamic and fully customizable vertical box to the left of a blog post that contains links/buttons to popular social networking sites. For wide blogs, a vertical bar with popular sharing icons appears on
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tags: freebies resources plugins sharebar
Jun 09 2010 11:34 PM
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All Plugins Moved to Github

In order to simply the process of updating my plugins and to give you guys the ability to fork them into your own works, I’ve moved all of my plugins to Github (thanks to Sam Sherlock for the suggestion). I’ll also be updating the download
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tags: articles devgrow github wywof
Jun 04 2010 06:56 PM
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Simple Threaded Comments with jCollapsible (new JQuery Plugin)

The jCollapisble plugin takes any nested list (OL or UL that have children) and coverts it into collapsible threads. This is especially useful to create simple threaded comments on a blog or nested posts in a forum without having to modify the backend
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tags: resources tutorials collapsible jquery
May 30 2010 11:55 PM
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Slick Animated Menus Using Only CSS3

I’m always looking for ways to create neat looking effects with minimal code, so today we’ll take a look at a couple of slick animated menus made with CSS3 goodness. I was inspired by the menu system on Mashable for the first example, while
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tags: tutorials animations css3 transitions
May 26 2010 09:27 PM
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Super Simple CSS Buttons

While playing around with a few button designs for my latest project, I came up with a simple CSS-only button system that is both lightweight and compatible with nearly all major browsers. Check it out and let me know what you think! Examples
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tags: tutorials buttons css html
May 22 2010 02:38 AM
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SliderNav: Apple-Style Contact Lists Using JQuery and CSS

This effect is actually from Techi.com, a new blog launched by the guys at WebDesignerDepot, where they use it to display their popular tags in the sidebar. I wanted to see how easy (or hard) it was to recreate using JQuery and CSS, and it turns out that
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tags: articles tutorials jquery jquery plugin
May 18 2010 03:01 AM
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From Zero to Blogger in 3 Months: A Look Back

In the spirit of transparency and openness that many websites have embraced over the last few years, I’ve decided to share my stats and experiences blogging on DevGrow over the last three months. Overall, the results have been pretty interesting
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tags: articles devgrow reflections site
May 14 2010 03:23 AM
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Tools to Help You Visualize Your Thoughts

When brainstorming ideas for a new website, product or tool, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement or rush of creativity that comes with creating something new. It’s important to use this rush to motivate yourself and actually create
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tags: resources mind maps planning web development
May 11 2010 02:57 AM
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Griddy: Simple Grid Overlay Plugin for JQuery

Often when I’m designing layouts, I know I want to create x number of columns that are spaced y pixels apart. Usually I do the math in my head or if I’m feeling super lazy, I pull out my calculator. While playing with grid overlays earlier
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tags: resources tutorials css grid
May 06 2010 08:59 PM
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Don’t Just Build a Brand, Build a Community

Over the past few years, several new web startups have launched and quickly gained momentum, and there’s one thing they have in common: they don’t just build a brand, they build a community. Brand vs Community In simple terms, a brand is any
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tags: articles branding community marketing
May 04 2010 06:55 PM
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Web Designers: Not Everyone Uses A Mac

There’s a new trend in web design that I’m already getting sick of. Designers, listen up! I know you love your Apple products and it’s great that you’ve found so much inspiration from their designs but please, for the sake of
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tags: articles fonts opinions rants
May 01 2010 12:28 AM
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Quick SEO Tip: Set Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools

There are a few quick fixes you can apply to your site that can help boost your search rankings. If you haven’t already done these, take a break from what you’re doing and do this first – the results will be well worth the 10 minutes it
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tags: tutorials apache google lighttpd
Apr 29 2010 04:57 PM
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25+ Useful Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers and Developers

Firefox is a free, open-source web browser that is easily extensible with add-ons. With over 12,000 of them, however, discovering new add-ons can be a chore. We’ve compiled a list of more than 25 of the most useful Firefox add-ons for web designers
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tags: resources add-ons extensions firefox
Apr 28 2010 07:59 PM
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Using Google Analytics to Refine Your Website

Google Analytics is a free service that lets you monitor website traffic and more importantly, understand your visitors and what they are seeking. The data provided by analytics can be immensely useful for creating a targeted website that thoroughly
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tags: tutorials analytics google marketing
Apr 24 2010 02:35 AM
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20 Web-based Tools to Help Run Your Freelancing Business

As a freelance web designer, I make use of a lot of web-based tools and applications to help manage all aspects of my business. Using these tools has increased my organization, professionalism and timeliness, which in turn has increased profits. The best
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tags: resources business freelancing productivity
Apr 21 2010 01:56 AM
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The Key to Internet Success: Create Value

It’s easy to get lost in the details, finances or prospects of an online project and overlook the time-tested trick to building a successful business: creating value for the end user. This post is to serve as a reminder (for myself more than anyone
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tags: articles business philosophy success
Apr 18 2010 07:20 PM
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Site News: From Apache2 to nginx

If you’ve been to the site today then you’ve probably noticed that it was down intermittently throughout the evening. One of our articles was featured on Smashing Magazine’s Twitter stream (sweet!) and I’m sad to say the site
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tags: articles apache2 nginx wordpress
Apr 16 2010 07:03 AM
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How to Migrate Your WordPress Blog Between Hosting Providers

I found this article suggestion on Skribit and realized that after doing this numerous times for multiple sites, I have a pretty solid technique down for migrating WordPress blogs between hosts. While a large part of it depends on the hosts themselves,
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tags: resources tutorials backup how-to
Apr 14 2010 08:10 PM
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Interview with Jon Yongfook Cockle, Creator of Peashoot and Seashell

I first came across Jon's work a few years ago, when he made a big splash in the design community with the release of SweetCron, an open source life-streaming platform. Since then, he's successfully sold his first startup and is now working on two new
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tags: articles
Apr 10 2010 03:58 AM
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Interview with Jon Yongfook Cockle, Creator of Peashoot and Seashell

This is the first interview for a new series here at DevGrow aimed at learning from multi-talented developers, designers and entrepreneurs who are on their way to leaving a big mark. I first came across Jon’s work a few years ago, when he made a
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tags: articles
Apr 09 2010 10:48 PM
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Mastering CSS Floats

Last month, I had the pleasure of teaching a friend basic HTML and CSS for a job that required him to know the bare essentials of building a website. Instead of learning how to use Dreamweaver, he wanted to understand the way modern websites work,
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tags: articles tutorials css tips
Apr 07 2010 07:10 PM
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Starting a New Business in a Crowded Market

Right now, I’m working on a new business idea for an over-saturated market that has multiple industry leaders sitting on (nearly) untouchable thrones. That’s right, I’m building my own premium themes shop, a one-stop site to buy
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tags: articles business research
Apr 02 2010 11:08 PM
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Design Etiquette 101

If web design is art and art is interpretive, can there be such a thing as design etiquette? While it’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are certain standards and conventions to follow when dealing with design, otherwise you
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tags: articles art design standards
Mar 30 2010 07:18 AM
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iPhone Style Radio and Checkbox Switches using JQuery and CSS

For my latest project, I created a great interface for an administration panel, complete with great looking forms and buttons. The one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb, however, were the ugly radio buttons and checkboxes I had to use repeatedly
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tags: freebies tutorials css forms
Mar 26 2010 09:59 PM