MakeUseOf » web design

3 Gamification Plugins To Take Your WordPress Blog To The Next Level

James Bruce — Sun, 19 May 2013 18:31:58 +0000

Points, badges and leaderboards – the staple of gamification is found in so many places nowadays that the act of avoiding a numerical designation of your worth or status is nigh impossible. Regardless of your personal feelings toward the concept though, there’s no doubt that rewarding users for specific actions on your website, such as sharing [...]

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Find The Perfect Color Scheme Every Time With Adobe Kuler

Tim Brookes — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:30:30 +0000

Whether you're building a website, designing a brochure or painting your spare room; finding the perfect combination of colors can be a daunting task. It often takes more than just personal taste to marry shades perfectly, and that's where an advanced color picker can really help you out. The best tool for the job has been freely available on the web since 2006. This tool is called Kuler, and it's probably the best free product Adobe has ever released.

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Facebook Ads vs Google Adwords: Which One Got Me The Most Clicks?

Ryan Dube — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:30:03 +0000

I honestly never thought that I'd be paying for any sort of advertising for my blog, at least not until it entered into the "big time", with many hundreds of thousands of pageviews per day. I never really believed that the cost of advertising on a small scale could really be worth the results. If you only invest less than $10 a day into an advertising campaign, can it really have any impact at all? Don't most advertising campaigns require hundreds of dollars a month or more? This is the question that I set out to answer at the beginning of this year

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Making Your Own Website: Your Career Will Thank You Later

Aaron Couch — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:30:10 +0000

A personal website is probably one of the biggest aspects of your online presence. Sure other areas such as social networks and blogs are important, but your website is like a home base – a hub that everything branches off from. Let's now explore some reasons how just such a website will benefit you tremendously.

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You Are Missing Out By Not Creating A Personal Website: Disproving The 6 Myths

Aaron Couch — Sat, 11 May 2013 03:30:27 +0000

Have you ever considered having a personal website? You know – a place where people can go to read about who you are, what you do, your goals and aspirations, and of course to contact you. This is the first article of a two-part series where we will explore the benefits of creating a personal website. Today, we'll cover the common misconceptions that are keeping you from creating an awesome personal website.

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3 Desktop Color Picker Applications To Help You Pick The Perfect Shade

Craig Snyder — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 02:31:53 +0000

"Creative" is a word I'll never use to describe myself! Not visually, at least. I'm proud of much of what I can do on the Internet, but when it comes to graphics and image editing, you won't see me throwing out my two cents. However, I am very picky and a bit of a perfectionist. For years, I've been designing small websites and learning the basics of web design using CSS.

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Figure Out Website Problems With Chrome Developer Tools Or Firebug

James Bruce — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:01:51 +0000

If you've been following my jQuery tutorials so far, you may have already run into some code problems and not known how to fix them. When faced with a non-functional bit of code, it's very difficult to actually pinpoint the offending line of code - and that's where debugging and developer tools come in. So before continuing with some more complex jQuery code, I thought we'd examine the tools available in the world's most popular browser - Chrome.

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Create A Slick Newsletter In Minutes With Sendicate

Nancy Messieh — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 03:00:20 +0000

Finding an easy-to-use newsletter service certainly has its challenges. With Sendicate launching a free service, you may be able to stop looking. The recently launched service gives users a WYSISWYG interface, so you can put together a professional looking newsletter, filled with images, videos and links, in a matter of minutes.

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What Is a Website Wireframe & How Can It Help You Develop Your Website?

Erez Zukerman — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:01:31 +0000

On a technical level, a modern website isn’t just one thing. It’s a complex soup of interacting technologies, such as HTML (the markup you see on the page), JavaScript (the language running in your browser, affecting interactions), CSS (the language for setting the page’s appearance), and more. But on a more basic level, a website is an idea. If it’s your website, you probably know what you want it to do, or what you want users to get out of it.

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How To Manage Your Website From Your Mobile Or Tablet

Christian Cawley — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:30:18 +0000

Around ten years ago I got hold of my first mobile device, a HP Pocket PC that enabled me – wireless networks provided – to get online and browse the web in a very basic version of Internet Explorer. It wasn’t long before I was more interested in accessing the backend of websites rather than [...]

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Take Pixel Perfect Measurements With The Ruul Onscreen Ruler [Chrome]

Saikat Basu — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:01:04 +0000

Onscreen rulers are important online tools. Web designers use it to keep everything pixel perfect and lay out things symmetrically on a webpage. Ruul is neat little online ruler that’s available for Chrome. It is listed as a developer tool on the Chrome Web Store, but I think you can spot a few more uses for it because it comes with some little touches wrapped in a simple package. Let’s look into some of its features.

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4 Websites That Offer Simplistic Portfolio-Ready Tumblr Themes

Joshua Lockhart — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 01:30:03 +0000

The sites here offer several black and white, simple Tumblr themes for you to display your work. Also, most of the themes are free! Granted, there are a few paid selections, but the free ones are every bit as good as the paid versions. They are clean, simple Tumblr themes that aren't distracting and are, for the most part, black and white. With that said, you'll have a lot of options to play around with them, and if you choose to modify them a little, there's a bit more of a free reign. Let's look through them.

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5 Typography Resources To Help With Your Designs

Joshua Lockhart — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 01:31:49 +0000

We all know that fonts are important, right? I mean, when there's a website bashing Comic Sans exclusively, we know it's obviously important enough for someone to care about font usage. However, what makes a good font? What goes into properly using a font? These are the questions that bother me when I'm trying to work on something that involves any element of design. Fortunately, I've found a few websites to consult when preparing to use fonts.

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W3C Standards Group Launches Web Standards Page [Updates]

Matt Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:30:05 +0000

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has launched a new documentation website called at WebPlatform.org. Its mission is to help web developers make sense of the wide variety of technologies that they must deal with while trying to make apps compatible with today’s five major browsers.

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5 Interesting Ways To Create Your Own Forum Without Having To Run A Website

Simon Slangen — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:00:13 +0000

If you're looking for a private, or more specialized discussion board—you can always create your own forum. One possible approach would be to pay for server space, and install the necessary forum software yourself. However, in some situations it's possible to avoid these costs entirely, and cut down on maintenance by creating a forum without first purchasing server space. We'll show you how.

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