With the theme of Valentine’s Day on our mind, we’re sharing tips on how to spice up your AdWords text ads, courtesy of the AdWords Help Center.Start by taking a moment to consider what you want to do with your ad. Then use the six guidelines below to create an ad that’s accurate, to-the-point, and engaging.

• Highlight what makes your business, product, or offer unique
• Include prices, promotions, and exclusives
• Tell your customers what they can do
• Include at least one of your keywords in your ad text
• Match your ad to your landing page
• Experiment

Here are some examples:Couples Cooking Classwww…

At one of my first jobs, my lunch constantly disappeared from the community refrigerator. There were no clues and, being New York, “nobody saw nuttin!”

I tried marking my lunch. I tried notes pleading with people to not take my lunch. I tried hiding my lunch behind cans, etc. Nothing worked. One day, after my lunch disappeared, I shut the refrigerator door and laughed maniacally. Someone asked me what was so funny…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed Interflora ‘Love Machine’ Facebook app.

Our very own Design, Development and Social Media teams built the Facebook app to coincide with the most romantic day of the year, giving visitors the chance to find out whether 2012 will be the most romantic year of their lives…

We have a fantastic freebie to download today from Pixeden, a one stop place for great tools for the modern design.

Released first and exclusively on WDD, it’s an infographic vector kit, with the most used elements that you may need for your infographic designs.

Included in this set is a world map, gender elements, as well as multiple pie and bar charts. You can easily combine and modify all the elements to create a distinctive infographic…

Every now and then, we release useful freebies for all of our highly valued readers. Today, it is our pleasure to present to you Cuberto‘s fantastic St. Valentine’s icon set  —  exclusively designed for Smashing Magazine and its loyal readers. The icons presented are available in transparent PNGs as well as Photoshop PSDs (128×128 px) and are perfect for any projects you have coming up for St…

It’s not uncommon for a designer in today’s world to pay little attention to how type is laid out, especially with the ever-so-convenient default settings of heading tags and web safe fonts found universally on the web.

If we as interactive designers we’re able to take a little more time when it came to typography, than the results would show a unique, well thought of design as oppose to a “run of the mill” creation…

We’re thrilled to see bring you another great giveaway of business cards from our friends at Uprinting.

This time around we’ll be giving away 5 prizes of 250 die cut business cards each!

What makes these cards different is their unique and attractive shapes. They are sure to get you noticed and will make your clients look twice!

Use them as appointment reminders, mini-resumes, service lists, calendars, portfolios and product samples, to name a few…

Creating an illustration of a sparkling disco ball might seem very complicated, and with good reason. In this new Adobe Illustrator tutorial we will try make it simple. We will be creating a really nice, shiny disco ball using only AI and our good taste in color selection. Overall, the coloring will be a real challenge. So get ready to create a vector that will have you dancing in your chair…

Previously I wrote two tutorials on how to style the image element with CSS3 inset box-shadow and border-radius. The trick is to wrap the image with a span tag and apply the image as background-image. However, I recently ran into a problem with that trick while designing the PhotoTouch theme. The issue is that the [...]

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We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month…

Like most well-designed things, the magic of an iPad app comes from a union of usefulness, usability and meaning. Games aside, the app must be useful by solving a problem that people actually have through the right set of functionality at the right time. It must be easy to use and, just as importantly, easy to get started using, without a lot of pesky setup and learning steps…

There are a whole bunch of CMSes out there ranging from lightweight micro-blogging platforms to huge enterprise packages.

I don’t want to mention any names here or tell you what to use.

Instead, I’m going give you some important points to consider, so that you can make an educated decision on your own.

And hopefully, not invest a huge amount of time and energy into a CMS you will have to abandon a year or two down the road…

There are a lot of advantages to freelancing. You will have more flexibility over the hours you work, you won’t have to commute to work any more and best of all, you are your own boss. It can be hard work landing a job. Not to mention making sure a project is completed successfully can mean working unsocial hours from time to time, however most people who leave their 9 to 5 jobs are happy with the freedom freelancing offers…

We do more reading on the screen today than we did even a year ago. If we are ever to have a golden age of reading on the screen, this might be the start of it.

Tablets, Nooks and Kindles make buying a book or magazine for the screen almost unavoidable. With smartphones, we carry our reading material with us and enjoy instant Web access, enabling the reading experience to flow smoothly from one device to another…

Firefox 10, due out January 31st (the same day Firefox 11 becomes an official Beta release), finally rounds out the browser’s growing collection of developer tools with Page and Style Inspectors.

In some ways, these tools are similar to Firebug, but they’re also uniquely Mozilla-ey.

Rather than try to reproduce Firebug or the WebKit developer tools, Mozilla has included only the most essential features, focusing instead on making the experience elegant…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Controlling who is able to view a post is a simple task once the system is established. Limiting access to certain users has several applications, such as enabling a design studio to distribute artwork to its various clients, or enabling a small school to arrange for homework to be posted online using a cheap and easy solution.

The easiest method to get this system working is to make the recipients of the information “subscribers” (since they need not be able to post) and the distributors of information “authors” (since they should only be able to edit their own posts)…

Managing a blog with a single author can be time-consuming enough, but adding in multiple authors can exponentially increase the amount of time and effort it takes to manage.

There’s editorial workflow, scheduling, and author management to consider, among other things.

Below are fifteen plugins that can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.

They include editorial workflow plugins, scheduling and calendar plugins, and plugins that will benefit your authors or make it easier to communicate with them…

CSS is a beautiful language but it can also be frustrating at times. Certain CSS solutions don’t work on certain browsers (cough Internet Explorer cough) and much of your time can be spent debugging code.

Thankfully there are lots of great CSS snippets available online that fix common problems and design issues. In this article we have listed 30 CSS snippets that we think you will find very useful…

(Originally posted on the Google+ Platform Blog, cross posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we’re adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites…

Has an improvement in how Google understands the layout of pages, and understands and classifies different elements found on page had an impact on the titles and snippets that we see in search results? Google may classify queries to decide what to show for those page titles and snippets in search results, but it’s [...]…

We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+…

UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let’s call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible…

Great websites always seem to combine great design with great code. Since building a website is a pretty simple task you find many people learn HTML and CSS and figure that if they can learn that then they can design any website they want. While technically they can you will often find that there are some key mistakes they make because they don’t wish to take the time to actually learn about design…

Using illustration in web design has become quite trendy these days. People love to see beautifully designed illustration based websites because they stand out from the rest. Not only because of the beautiful illustrative art work and carefully crafted web designs but also because of the perfect balance struck between these two important components.

Today, we want to dig into some creative ways you can work beautiful illustrations into your web design projects…

We often hear companies, including Web agencies, boast about how they provide exceptional client service. But how do they define exceptional?

Consider this scenario. You are hired to design and develop a new website for a retail client. The client loves the design, and the pages you develop use the latest in HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design, resulting in a website that works wonderfully across browsers and devices…

[Editor's note: This is a sponsored post for Template Monster]

TemplateMonster.com is among the most well known stock template and theme providers online.

They offer templates for a wide range of sites, agricultural sites to church sites, as well as general templates that can be used on almost any kind of site.

And all of their themes come with fantastic features that rival the top themes out there…

Web design is a craft that is constantly evolving and yet also sometimes sabotaged. The moment a design is released, a new version is born. In the beginning, like a baby, it seems vulnerable and weak, but in time it grows up and becomes self-sufficient. Redesigning a website for its own sake doesn’t prove anything; quite the contrary, it reveals a lack of effectiveness on the part of the designer…

In this article, I’m going to examine the science behind making successful UI icons before teaching you how to make your own embeddable icon font.

From designing the individual icons to converting them for @font-face embedding, and even licensing them for distribution, we shall be using only free software and online services. How about that? You will not need to rely on any of the esoteric knowledge required to make successful alphanumeric typefaces; just an eye for designing things that may appear very, very small…