Even if many designers don’t like this part, a website is built on tons of code sequences and managing these is a pretty tough job. Until few years ago, the construction of a website was mostly based on HTML and CSS but nowadays we have many other items to add into a website, such as PhP elements, the information must be manipulated via MySQL help , the images are sliding within a jQuery plugin etc. Under these circumstances there is no wonder that a code editor is mandatory in the arsenal of a designer; the programmers were aware about it and came with fabulous offers. At the same time, the multitude of solutions confuses the designers & coders and they can hardly make a decision.

One of the best code editor is Codelobster PHP Edition. By using this precious tool, the coding is simplified and a lot of time is saved. Here is only a small part of the features that should impress any coder:

1. Highlight tags

It’s very important to have highlighted the tags from the rest of the website texts. It’s incomparably easier to see if you add correctly the respective commands. The code editor allows distinguishing the HTML tags but also PhP and Javascript items, depending on each one’s preference and needs.

2. Context help & pair highlighter

The art/science (depending on each one’s perspective) of making websites evolved and even the greatest coders have sometimes small problems and aren’t sure about the role of some tags. It is enough to press F1 and, by the same speed as a F1 car, a complete explanation appears in your browser. We all know that the huge majority of HTML tags are pairs and it’s a great feature to have a pair highlighter by your side. Obviously, Codelobster PHP Editor has this facility.

3. Powerful auto completion

Yep, sometimes it is boring to write all CSS attributes and a powerful auto completion is another saving time point. Try yourself the Codelobster PHP Editor to see the auto completion feature in action.

4. PHP debugger

PhP isn’t the easiest language and anyone may make mistakes, but using a powerful debugger, it’s far better to correct any wrong interpretation.

5. Project manager

It’s a very important feature. Very few people need just few line codes. Everyone wants a full website and in this case a project manager is a gold mine. By using the project manager, everything is created into a united building; for example, the links will work no matter where the website’s files will be transferred.

6. It is free

I purposely let it at the final, to amaze you. All the above advantages are free! This code editor is free and anyone may download it from here. The good news aren’t yet ending. The list of features isn’t finished and only by visiting the official website you may find these interesting and useful “surprises”. It isn’t important what Windows version you use because the code editor works anyway. Therefore don’t waste your time and try Codelobster PHP Edition.

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users.

Facebook Timeline is a section of a Facebook user’s account that replaces the profile with wall pages, and merges them together. This is usually a complete overhaul of the profile page with the ability to view your status updates in a list sorted by time. This allows all the famous companies to organize their company details as required by them. Here we picked certain Facebook timelines of famous companies for your inspiration. Check them!

1. Microsoft

2. Red bull

3. oracle

4. HBO

5. Intel

6. Yahoo

7. Nike

8. Nokia

9. MTV

10. IPL

11. Ferrari

12. Discovery Channel

13. Disney

14. ESPN

15. Fed Ex

16. Cisco

17. Accenture

18. WalMart

19. Dream Works Animation

20. Star Bucks

21. Deloitte

22. Virgin America

23. BMW

24. American Express

25. EA Sports

26. Pepsico

27. Coca-Cola

28. YouTube

29. Samsung Mobile

30. Mc Donald’s

31. Volkswagen

32. Sony

33. Amazon

34. Linked in

35. Novartis

36. Blue Sky Studios

37. Pandora

38. XBox

39. Disney Pixar

40. Nat Geo

41. The Rolling Stones

42. Harley Davidson

43. Porsche

44. Oreo

45. Bing

46. Fox News

47. Infosys

48. Mozilla Fire Fox

49. Google

50. Adobe Systems

Hope this post invokes your creativity to change your Facebook timeline as needed!

Building a fun, interesting or useful product is challenging enough – but once it’s built, it needs to be presented in just the right way. Landing pages need to be designed in such a way as to show the product in a great light, sell the benefits of the product (not just the features) and make it quick & easy to understand what it does at a glance. Aesthetics are important too – potential customers can be easily put off by distracting or poor design, so it’s important to make sure that the landing page is pleasing on the eye. We’ve brought together a collection of beautifully designed landing pages that describe & sell the product perfectly.

TinyLetter

TinyLetter is an email newsletter service that allows people to easily send out newsletters via email to a whole range of subscribers. The entire service is built with design in mind, and this really comes through on the clean, minimalist landing page. The landing page features a video front and centre to help highlight the product, and includes a big, brightly coloured “Sign Up” button in the top navigation that remains visible when you scroll down the page.

Paper

Paper by FiftyThree is a drawing app for iPad that includes allows for sketching, colouring & notes. It’s an app that’s focused on style & design, so it was clearly important for them to get the design of the landing page right. The huge header image shows off the app, while the remainder of the page focuses on the different tools within the app, and talks about benefits rather than features.

Path

Path, a social networking app that’s designed for your closest friends, has an interesting & creative user interface, and this is one of (if not the) most talked about feature of the app. Path have decided to make this UI obvious on their landing page, by making the background a huge video of the interface in action.

Flight Card

Flight Card is an iPhone app that helps to show you the status of your flight and helps to show you which terminal and gate you need to be at, what time it’s departing and updates live to let you know if there are any delays or diversions. The design of the app itself is the highlight, as it’s so hard to find flight information displayed clearly and elegantly, and so the landing page is extremely visual to show this off. Huge images of the app in action are shown, along with several, easy-to-spot “Download on the App Store” buttons.

Stripe

Stripe, which provides a service for developers to allow them to easily accept customer credit card details, has an amazing landing page which serves it’s purpose beautifully. The main heading makes it clear what the service does, and provides a very easy-to-spot “Get started with Stripe” button. Underneath, they list several benefits to using the service – and each benefit has enough surrounding white-space to give it room to breathe.

Ness

Ness is an iPhone app which describes itself as a “personal search engine based on your unique tastes”. The landing page is hugely visual, with a huge background image & image of the app in use on an iPad. Clicking the “next” icon reveals more details around the app, and each page includes a large “Available on the App Store” button.

Mint

Mint is an online budget planning tool that helps people manage their money better. The app has quite a lot of features and can handle some pretty complicated things, but to avoid overloading you the landing page focuses on a few key benefits and thoughtfully highlights those. The landing page also does a few other things really well – they make it clear that the service is free and, because it involves your personal money, they also highlight how security-conscious the product is, by mentioning that it has “bank level security”, and by using HTTPS.

Nest

Nest is a thermostat that’s been built with design in mind (it was built by one of the original iPod designers). The best way to show off the device is through their video, so the landing page makes sure to include a huge header that shows the product and encourages visitors to watch their demo video with button that heavily stands out against the background.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management app built by 37signals. The big, bold headline on the landing page helps to show how versatile the app is. Basecamp is used by a large number of varied customers, and many people use the app in different ways. To help make the landing page suitable for everyone, it asks you questions about how you currently work (e.g. are most of your meetings over the phone, or face-to-face?), and helps to display the perfect landing page for you based on your answers.

Statusboard

Statusboard is a large, visual display that integrates with Basecamp and shows you how your projects are progressing. The landing page has been kept nice & simple, with a huge image of the main product, along with a really clear and obvious call to action – the huge “Join the open beta!” button below. Scrolling down reveals some more details for those who are interested – along with a testimonial to help encourage people to try the service out.

Square

Square is an app that allows businesses & individuals to accept credit card payments through their iPhone or iPad. The app is beautifully designed and the landing page helps to demonstrate this. It’s beautifully designed from a conversion point of view too, as it encourages people to sign up with compelling taglines such as “Start accepting all major credit cards, anytime, anywhere” along with a relatively large “Sign up for Square” button which, like many of the examples we’ve used, stands out from the background by using a different contrast.

Camera+

Camera+, a camera app for the iPhone that aims to improve on the camera that comes bundled with iOS, uses the landing page to demonstrate the app in action. The video on the iPhone loops through examples of the app being used – running through a photo being taken, to effects being added and customised. The app has picked up some very strong recommendations from sites like Macworld, Time and Lifehacker, and so these testimonials are shown very clearly on the landing page too.

Foursquare

Foursquare, the well known “check-in” app, includes a very clean & thoughtful design on their landing page and focuses on the benefits of using the service, from keeping up with friends, finding new things nearby and saving money by unlocking rewards.

Streak

Streak advertises itself as CRM for your inbox, and demonstrates the many ways it can be used by constantly adjusting the tagline on the landing page. The heading changes once every couple of seconds and cycles through taglines like “Manage customers inside Gmail”, “Track bugs and issues inside Gmail” and “Manage email support inside Gmail” amongst others. It also includes a number of videos to help you get up to speed on the service, and it includes 3 easy steps to get started.

Zendesk Lotus

Lotus is the codename for an interface update to Zendesk, the popular help desk software. The new interface is best shown through video, so the landing page for Lotus reflects that. The large play icon is used and placed front and centre to help encourage visitors to check the video out, but other details include a better explanation of what the interface change is all about, screenshots of the new screens and even testimonials taken from Twitter.

Are there any landing pages that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

Author - Alex writes for printing experts Print Express, who specialise in business cards, flyers &custom designed postcards. In his spare time he studies graphic & web design and learns to code in Ruby.

The general opinion in the design community is that you must know coding. I disagree. While most designers today have a pretty good grip on HTML, designers who are focused heavily on visual design such as graphic design, identity or brand development usually only have the fundamentals down. There are also creatives around the world without the finances or availability to pursue training in additional skills such as JavaScript or HTML5 who deserve a fair shot at a successful and competitive business.

If you love design and have a talent for color, layout and functionality, you can succeed as a professional web designer. Where things become difficult is when clients begin asking for things that are beyond your knowledge level. You also need to consider the ever-changing landscape of web technologies. If you’re not able to produce websites in HTML5 or CSS3 to accommodate mobile users and adapt to new standards, you may lose any competitive edge you may have had.

So what are your options?

You can:

• Enroll in classes to learn HTML or JavaScript
• Read a few books and try learning on your own
• Hire someone else to do the work
• Only offer design services and leave it up to the client to find a developer

These are all viable solutions, but they all have drawbacks. You may not be able to dedicate time or money to learning new skills while trying to build a startup or freelance career. Books, while certainly resourceful, won’t contain the most updated information and leave a lot up to experimentation. Hiring someone else cuts into your profits and can be risky or frustrating. Limiting your professional services limits your audience and will also limit your ability to compete.

If you find yourself in this position, an efficient strategy is to build your business around a set of solid tools and resources that enable you to produce high quality work from your designs all the way to your hosting offering and support. This way, you won’t need to hire anyone else or spend unnecessary funds on advertising.

The Toolset

You may already have access to graphic editing tools such as Photoshop or Gimp, and the web is a phenomenal source of stock art, elements, fonts and tutorials so I won’t get into the design process here. Instead, let’s focus on how to create highly functional websites using interactive technologies such as Flash, jQuery and HTML5 visually.

Your shining star is the Wix website builder. Wix provides a set of cloud applications for creating completely custom websites, Facebook pages and mobile mini-sites using Flash or HTML5 featuring a drag and drop UI with all the features you need for styling and laying out each element. They offer a vast library of templates, effects, fonts, animations and widgets, or allow you to start from scratch. Essential elements such as galleries, image slideshows, video players and forms are easily inserted, and you can use any of the integrated services for enhanced functionality or build your own HTML widgets. The builder has a huge library of stock graphics, photos and background textures and provides ample space to upload and store your own. But Wix is not just about design. It includes support for Google Analytics, SEO, adaptive layouts and localization. They really have just about everything covered.

Being able to create professional looking, interactive and bespoke websites using the graphic design capabilities you already possess will empower you to build up a business with a better chance of attracting the kind of clients you want, and Wix even helps you get there. The Wix Pro directory helps you promote your services to the world and all existing Wix members, and designers are featured daily, giving your designs the exposure they need to drive traffic to your portfolio.

How to Get Started

Step 1 – Create a Portfolio

Even if you have an existing website or blog, create your own website with the application to experiment with the various features and capabilities and show off your creativity. Be sure to add a page about yourself and a light description of your services. Don’t worry about pricing lists – simply add a custom quote form using the Wufoo widget or similar service.

Step 2 – Challenge Yourself

Create a few websites with a few pages each to explore various techniques and styles or to appeal to the kind of clients you want to attract. They don’t have to be complex or based on client work. Make up your own brands or re-imagine an existing website to show how you could make it better. Put these designs into your Wix portfolio.

Step 3 – Connect Your Social Networks

Create a matching Facebook page and mobile site, or use a fluid layout on your original design so it works in both a desktop browser and a Facebook iFrame app. If you have a blog, integrate it or add an RSS feed and cross-link everything for better continuity.

Step 4 – Promote Yourself

Sign up for the Wix Pro directory and submit your portfolio. Advertise yourself on social networks and actively participate in the design community. Get involved with your target audience and consider contributing to design repositories, stock websites or design magazines to increase your name recognition and skill visibility. If the budget allows its nice to hire a freelancer or profession company to SEO and promote your website. Keep in mind that it should be white hat SEO, if not you’ll be screwed up by search engines. Here you go if you’re looking for full service internet marketing in Chicago

Step 5 – Keep Creating

Now that you don’t have to worry about spending a ton of time struggling with something that may be difficult, uninteresting or expensive to learn, you can spend that time finding inspiration and creating designs, both for yourself and your clients. Surplus designs such as graphics, backgrounds and illustrations can be sold for passive income on design marketplaces, turning your downtime into profit.

You still need a basic understanding of HTML websites so you can insert widgets where needed, but building websites in this tool is based on your creative ingenuity and willingness to succeed. It is also 99% profit. Wix is a completely free application, right down to its hosting service and amazing support. Premium services such as custom domains and additional space are extremely affordable compared to similar services. If rolled into to your package costs, you stand to make 99% profit. Compared to the thousands of dollars in licensing fees for other software, web hosting and training, this is a huge benefit for designers who are just starting out.

Conclusion

There is a measure of business savvy, self-discipline and social networking that goes into making a design business a success, but in one weekend you can be well on your way.

If you like to have a look and try Wix HTML5. Here are resources for  Wix HTML5 Review and if you decide to purchase save some bucks using Wix HTML5 Coupon Code

Pardon me for my words but I am very much fed of what all I have been reading about CSS frameworks. Some call CSS frameworks as piece of art that helps web designers, while others call CSS frameworks as reason behind the stalled growth of a web designer. I noticed that each such “expert” critic was missing the basic fact. They did not consider the mind-set of a web designer and why a CSS framework might just be a boon for his business.

What is CSS Framework?

For those (especially web designers) living under a rock, a CSS framework is a set of HTML and CSS files that can be used as the base for any new website design. As a web designer, you will clearly understand that at some point of time you will have to use IDs and classes to add flare to your web designs. Once a web designer is loaded with work then he understands the pain behind re-doing the basic work over and over again. Would you want to re-write the basic structure of any website before you actually start coding down your real idea? Of course no! This is when a CSS framework (pre-built basic structure that you require) comes as a saviour.

Stop calling CSS Frameworks a crutch!

Isn’t “crutch” the word that has been used multiple times by most of the writers when they talk about CSS frameworks? Well, to an extent CSS frameworks end up making life easy for a web designer, but you cannot compare CSS frameworks with a support system that oldies use. I mean, man, c’mon! A crutch is a support system used by a lame person in order to support his/her body.

A CSS framework is the pre-written piece of code that can be used by an expert web designer to save time and a not-so-expert web designer to create a website in order to earn some quick bucks. What is so wrong in both the situations? People are using CSS frameworks for their benefits and everyone is happy. Can’t the critics look for another topic? Please?

CSS Frameworks aren’t overly bloated!

I have heard critics call (and rightly so in few cases) CSS frameworks as bloated with lot of unused code. Well, they might be true to some extent. Third party CSS frameworks are loaded with huge amount of code that can be used as and when necessary. An average web designer ends up using only a quarter of the CSS framework’s code while the rest sticks with the overall website for no use.

One might argue that such code ends up slowing down the website but I really don’t think so. Are we still stuck in the age of dial ups? Almost everyone out there is using an Internet connection which is faster than 22 Kbps and I guess few KBs of your extra CSS code won’t kill the experience. Lastly, if it is really doing so then you have two options.

• Compress (or minify as they call it) the CSS code.
• Use an online tool to optimize your CSS. One such tool that is already installed in your laptop is the Chrome browser. What? You haven’t started to use Chrome yet? Are you nuts? Go, get it! Once you have Google’s Chrome web browser installed then follow the instructions given below.

How to use Google’s Chrome to compress CSS?

Follow the below steps to understand the usage of CSS in your website using Google’s Chrome:

• Right click on your website once it is loaded completely and then from the menu chose for “Inspect Elements.”
• From the horizontal menu in the footer that opens below click on Audit.

• Now, click on Run button and see the results. You should be greeted with all the data that you have been looking for.

Wrapping it up..

Well, at the end of the day it’s you who makes the decision. You can be the die-hard web designer who would want to chisel his way through by cutting a rock or you could be the short-cut lover who would want to use a broken home to furnish it back. It solely depends on the purpose and the end results. Weigh the requirements before you make your move.