So last week I’ve started sharing a lot more of what I read on a day to day basis on Twitter, and I decided I had to share these links here on yoast.com as well. Below is a quite extensive list of links that I found interesting, ordered by topic. I’ll try to do these on a weekly basis from now on.

WordPress

• Code Snippets and Examples
  • The only proper way of adding a Facebook “Like” button to your WordPress blog
  • An article I wrote recently for Smashing Magazine: Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plug-In
  • Gravity Forms PayPal integration
  • 16 Vital Checks Before Releasing a WordPress Theme
  • How to Display Human Readable Post Dates in WordPress
  • Control WordPress Content via Userrights or Time
  • A good Beginner’s Guide to the Thematic Framework
• Plugins
  • BuddyPress Courseware beta; a very cool plugin for schools & other educational institutions…

By János Rácz

In the age of the Web, with personal computers and tablets, we tend to forget that art has been around for a really, really long time and that this digital field is just one of the many media in which art and design have a form. Fortunately, there are many artists out there who still turn to more traditional methods of creative self-expression…

Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be…

We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.

From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.

Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?

Ikea for example, starts with price and then work backwards…

The Internet is bursting with knowledge. Whatever you want is available at your fingertips, and learning new techniques is so easy with the load of useful tutorials that guide you step by step. Adobe Illustrator is powerful indeed, but when used right, it can perform feats that humans will marvel at! So today, we present a collection of some fresh and useful tutorials for Adobe Illustrator…

There are well-known proverbs that imply (or state outright) that beauty is superficial and limited in what it can accomplish. “It’s what’s inside that counts” and “Beauty is only skin deep” are a few simple examples. Because the Web design industry is now flooded with what is evidently a lot of raw talent, and because virtually anyone can create a “beautiful” website, recognizing a truly beautiful website experience is becoming increasingly difficult…

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…

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a beautiful Modernist WordPress theme, designed by Rodrigo Galindez and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video…

I love it when a good story is broken down so that even the simplest of minds can understand. I’m not the smartest, fastest or most creative person in the world, so I don’t like using a lot of big words or fancy jargon to try and impress you — but I’m learning every day, and that is what pushes me on. Let me cut the small talk and dive right in.

The Current State

When I look out on the hillside of design, all I see are copies of what great designers have done before us…

When creating a website, so many things need to be planned and considered before even beginning the design — content, audience, goals, usability, color schemes, and so much more.

The design of a microsite, on the other hand, would seem to be an easier task to execute. But this isn’t always the case.

A microsite will sometimes have more sensitive issues to deal with, and could see just as many design iterations — possibly due to branding issues, or a host of other factors that arise due to company politics…

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes may be updated now…

Today we’re giving away a wonderful set of social media icons designed exclusively for WDD by Orman Clark, a web designer from the UK.

The icon set is called “Buddycons” and includes 126 vector social media icons. Included in the set are PNG versions of all 126 icons in both circular and rounded variations as well as a vector source file for easy resizing.

The icons are free to use for personal and commercial usage, however, redistribution is not allowed, so if you’d like to share these icons with your friends, please direct them to this page so that they can download their own copy from here…

Come on. Is it really possible to build a company website in only an hour?

Not if you want a custom design, custom programming, and a custom marketing plan, no. You’ll spend weeks, maybe even months, designing your website, and unless you’re doing it yourself, it’ll cost you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

But sometimes all you care about is getting something up in a hurry…

At one time or another, we are all newbies. That’s right: you can deny it all you want, but not one of us got into this game with a full deck stacked in our favor. We entered as newbies, born fresh after the start screen loaded. However, unlike in a game, we are not immediately launched into a tutorial level to learn the ropes in this new world — what to avoid, how to progress, etc…

As designers, we need to be creative in order to be successful at our jobs.

Coming up with ideas and creative solutions to problems is what we do on a daily basis. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do so.

Sometimes we get blocked creatively, and it seems like no matter how hard we try, we just can’t come up with a creative solution to anything.

The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do that can help you overcome a block in your creativity…

Since the beginning of July I have been writing about Google’s test to radically change the display of local search results on the main search results page. Miriam Ellis of Solas Design decided she really wanted my opinion not just my screen shots:

I’d like to ask the million dollar question, though: what do YOU think of this? In your mind, would this represent an improvement for users/business owners, a step backwards, something else? I know you like to report all this fascinating news with the measured voice of reason, but I wouldn’t mind some editorial opinion on this subject from you…

Today we are glad to release Color Stream, a free iPhone App, created by Sahil Lavingia (@slavingia on Twitter) and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Color stream lets you create and store color palettes that are either created from scratch or generated from a photo, or even generated automatically using a built-in color schemer. The color schemer supports analogous, monochromatic, triadic and further color schemes…

If you use My Client Center (MCC), over the last few weeks you might have noticed that we’ve added some new features to your MCC interface. We’ve introduced search across accounts, labels, and simplified dashboard buttons.Search across accountsWith this feature, you can search across all of the accounts linked to your MCC. When you search, your results will include accounts, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, and placements that match your search term…

In a recession, companies go one of two ways: either they become the cautious cat, adopting a wait-and-see attitude, spending carefully on their marketing and less overall, cutting back, or they become the ferocious lion, bold, taking advantage of their competitors’ caution to seize opportunities in the tough market.

Whatever your approach, remember that Web marketing is a great investment during a recession…

In the past, we featured creative business cards on WDD that show incredible creativity in order to promote a business, however, business cards seem to pale in comparison to some of the card designs you’re going to see next.

As you’ll see below, weddings invitations have been overflowing with creativity, with couples wanting the guests to start experiencing their special day from the moment they receive the invitation, way before the big event…

By Cameron Chapman

Web design is often an appealing career choice for artistic and creative people. It’s seen as a potentially lucrative opportunity to be creative on a daily basis. But there are drawbacks that many people don’t realize going into the field.

While most of these wouldn’t deter people who really want to be designers and who know what design is really about, they might deter people who are only looking for a job that allows them to be artistic or creative…

This one’s easy: take a shot, send us the image and win a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS digital SLR camera. Typography and icons are everywhere: they surround us, guide us, help us find the right path every day. As Web designers and graphic artists, we can learn from observing the type and public signage around us. How do designers of those graphics combine type, visual design and pictograms? How do they guide us through our day? More importantly, how do they design their graphics to meaningfully serve their purpose in particular settings?

That’s what we want to find out with this photo contest…

Flickr is probably the most famous of all photo communities on the web.

It’s a place where photographers from all over the world come together, share their work and admire the work of others.

Flickr however, like any other social network, has its own economy and social conventions.

There are professionals, celebrities, enthusiasts, beginners, networkers, the list goes on…

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…

With the huge number of design-related conferences and events around the world, the Web gives those of us who cannot attend them a great opportunity to listen and benefit from their great and talented speakers. To aid in this, here we present some of the best videos, interviews and presentations about design and related topics.

Using Design to Make Ideas New

Speaker: Milton Glaser Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca…

Web layouts are crucial for every web design. Whether it is a simple design or an advanced one, Photoshop can often come handy in creating such layouts. We have collected some really creative and helpful recent tutorials that display the process behind creating web layouts in Photoshop.

Photoshop Web Design Layouts

How to Create a Trendy Colorful WordPress Layout in PhotoshopIn this tutorial author will create a trendy and colorful wordpress layout in Photoshop…

My name is Russell McGovern and I use Fireworks to design websites. There, I said it. I could be wrong, but it feels like I’m in a small minority; among web designers, the application of choice seems to be Photoshop.

Agencies send me PSD files at work and ask for them in return; design blogs are full of Photoshop tips, tutorials and templates; other designers request the Photoshop files that they assume I must have used to build elements…

You may probably notice that I haven’t been updating Web Designer Wall for a while. I’ve been working very hard on a new project called Themify, a premium WordPress theme shop. It is a collaboration with Darcy Clarke, who is an amazing developer. Each theme is packed a framework and bunch of custom widgets. With the framework, you can apply theme settings, style everything, apply skins, and import/export the setting data…

A few weeks ago Matt Mullenweg of WordPress threatened to take Thesis Developer Chris Pearson to court over his not supporting the GPL Licence. Fortunately they where able to works things out a lawsuit was averted and everything got back to normal … except that Matt Mullenweg might have started to use the commercial resources of Automatic (the parent company of WordPress.com) to convert users away from Thesis, and he’s pulled Chris Pearson’s free thesis theme cutline from the wordpress archives …

Up until a few days ago several high profile blogs like LaughingSquid…

Brett Tabke n the gang at Pubcon just added me to a panel entitled, Post Click Marketing: Landing Page Optimization. Here’s what I plan to speak on, per my application:

SEO experts regularly say that pages need more content to rank. While this is often true, it sometimes leads to silly design decisions, such as having a paragraph of text above rows of merchandise on an ecommerce site…