10 Time Savers for Every Developer and Programmer

Perhaps one of the biggest things every developer shares is trying to find ways to speed up their production.  Because after all we would much rather be out in the sun at the beach rather than stuck in an office.  Below are 10 tips and tricks (in no particular order) I have found to help speed up production, workflow and even working with clients.

1. Find a good medium for support whenever you get stuck.  We all have those moments were we can’t figure out a bug or the client has some off the wall request that doesn’t even seem possible.  At first I must admit I was very weary of forums or support communities but, it’s grown on me.  My favorite is webmasterworld.com they have tremendous support with everything from seo tips, to zen-cart help.  Whenever I get really stuck I’ll just submit a question to webmasterworld and within a day or two usually get the answer.

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Phoenix Design Week - The world of design always keeps me on my toes

The world of design always keeps me on my toes. It is a constant learning process; one that provides a continuous challenge to stay on top of the latest news and innovations. While most designers agree that learning the newest trends and more efficient processes is necessary, they won’t take the time or effort to explore these opportunities as they are being developed. I recently ran into Stephanie Sullivan,  at Adobe Max in L.A. and upon her mentioning that she was heading to Phoenix Design Week, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity and learn some of the current happenings in Design.

In addition to design, I have always been interested in what other cities have to offer creatively. Surprisingly enough, not all design methods and trends are the same from one location to another. In order to be more versatile, you have to gain hands on experience in these locations in order to truly understand them. I decided to sign up for Phoenix Design Week to see what the latest developments have made their way to the Desert. Since I had never been to Phoenix, I figured it would be a great way to explore the city, get to know the local design community, and attend a couple of interesting sessions. Read the rest of this post »

Adobe MAX 2009 - Los Angeles, California

Adobe MAX 2009 was held in Los Angeles, California at the infamous Los Angeles Convention center (right next to the staples center were the Lakers play) The event was held from October 4th-7th.  Adobe MAX brings everything from entry level designers to the highest level Flex and AIR developers, no matter what your skill level your sure to enjoy the event.

I enjoy learning about any emerging technologies and am always trying to find ways to improve myself not only in the web development world, but the business side as well.  I attended Adobe MAX last year (in San Francisco) and was very excited to see all the new things adobe has been working on and really just learning as much as I can. Read the rest of this post »

Perl Fancy Captcha

Drag and Drop Captcha Demo

What is it:

Perl Fancy Captcha is a remake of PHP Ajax Fancy jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from spammers and bots. We are introducing you to a new, intuitive way of completing “verify humanity” tasks. In order to do that you are asked to drag and drop specified item into a circle.
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SQL and Chicks with Essential Dating Tricks

All of you who like databases, SQL and girls, but when you try to type SQL query you got an error, and when you try to talk to a girl you got slap in the face, read this carefully and enjoy.

If you’re tired of your buddies saying “Go home you’ve never seen a naked woman before” or “When will you lose your virginity already” this post is just right for you.

Tutorial “SQL stands 4 -> Sex Query Language” will help you to regain your confidence and SQL knowledge!

Many of you will say “Who needs girls when I have SQL” and offer strong argumentation like “Has your girl ever helped you join five tables, order them by date, and then insert into another table?” NO! But SQL did!

But then you should ask yourself “Has SQL ever made a breakfast for me and brought it to bed, or when has SQL surprised me, after a hard day, in sexy underwear?”

Don’t be modest, own  both a woman and an SQL and have best of both worlds.

My 5 favorite sexy queries:

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Free Fonts Download on CSSCreme.com

Just a quick post to make sure no one misses update on our favorite CSS gallery. From now on you can download great fonts from CSSCreme.com. New section was added for all font hungry designers who are looking for new ways to make their great designs even better. It’s starting off small but number of free fonts you can download from will steadily grow in future.

Adding fonts fits really well in our concept of making CSS Creme something more than just a good CSS gallery. New resources like various tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, inspirations and now fonts coupled with, in my opinion, better profiles and latest industry news should make CSSCreme.com even more useful to all those who are passionate about web design and who see themselves as part of that community.

Go check it out if you find time and let us know what you think.

On-Site SEO Factors

I’ll start this post with by saying that list of on-site SEO factors that is in front of you is meant to be a (short) recap of how certain factors can affect your rankings and how important they might be. To put things in perspective, on-site SEO has less impact on rankings compared to some other factors like trust and authority of domain and number and quality of external links. But here is something that you need to think about before dismissing on-site SEO as unimportant:

- Having good on-site SEO might not be enough reach top rankings by itself but having that aspect of SEO neglected will most definitely bring penalty and hamper your other efforts to achieve good rankings. To make extreme example, pages that have no title or try to rank for “Web Design” and page title is something like “Pet Food” really won’t do that well.

- While on-site SEO is relatively less important for broad and very competitive keywords, when it comes to long tails its importance raises dramatically. Having carefully chosen title for certain inner page that has good content and a lot of inbound links and you just might see page getting top rankings if overall domain trust is high.

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Free Twitter Backgrounds

With Twitter growing each day you can see more and more Twitter backgrounds out there. We at Web Design Beach decided to join the fun and make few ourselves. After all, Twitter theme you use is something people will notice, so having one that stands out can’t be a bad thing. We present you six brand new Twitter backgrounds for you to download and use if you like.

Every background is free, lightweight and optimized for mostly used 1024 resolution but we were thinking about all of you with big screens so have no fear our Twitter layouts are going to look the same on 1280px or wide screen.

• Web Design Beach Twitter background

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Web Design Companies Acquire CADwebsiteDesign.com

SAN DIEGO, CA Jun 9, 2009

Web Design Beach and Cofa Media are pleased to announce their acquisition of CAD Website Design. The purchase will allow these companies to work with more small business clients and achieve their online business development goals even with a limited budget.

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An Event Apart Seattle 2009

Going to a conference or some annual event you have never been at is always a good thing. If it’s good you’re sure to learn something, meet with people and discuss web and everything that goes with it. In case it’s not so good at least you’ll change usual routine a bit and visit a new place or try out a new restaurant, serves almost as mini-break of sort.

Joking aside, we decided to go to An Event Apart from May 4th till May 5th, 2009 in Bell Harbor Conference Center this year (Seattle - Washington State). I had pretty high expectations from it and I can safely say I wasn’t disappointed which isn’t really surprising considering that An Event Apart is organized by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. Read the rest of this post »