According to a poll I conducted, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really surprised me is about 24% don’t even know what SEO is! If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article. This is an SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. I’ll explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers. Then I’ll provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines. (more…)

In this tutorial, you will learn how to make a Flash parallax scrolling gallery from scratch. Parallax scrolling is frequently used in most 2D animation and games, where the background images and foreground images scroll at different rate of speed. This will create an illusion of depth as the background images are moving slower than the foreground images.

View Demo Gallery

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Previously we did a free TxEff giveaway contest and the feedbacks were very well received. Jumpeye Components would like to hear more feedbacks from you guys. This time they are giving out the MCTE component. To enter the contest, just write your feedback in the comment form for this post and everyone will get a free copy of MCTE V3 (value $50). In addition, we will draw three random numbers from the comment list to giveaway the MCTE Collection Plus (value $200). (more…)

Viget Labs, a web development firm based outside of Washington, have been in the industry since 1999. With a team of 30 people, Viget Labs sure has a lot to blog about. Instead of writing everything on one massive blog, they separate their blogs into four divisions: Advance, Inspire, Extend, and Engage. Each blog has unique topics and design theme that are nicely wrapped together. I like them so much that I featured all their blogs on Best Web Gallery. In this article, Viget Labs is going to share their internal design process of the blog series with us. Don’t miss the insider tips! (more…)

If you are serious about your web career, don’t miss out on this upcoming festival in Toronto - FITC 2008. It will take place between April 19^th - 22^th. For those who don’t know about the festival, "FITC is now entering its 7th amazing year, and is the only festival of its kind; combining cutting edge technical and creative speakers from around the world". The speaker list is endless, so I’m just going to list my favorite ones: Si Scott, Joshua Davis, Rob Chiu, Scott Hansen, and Julian Dolce (see full Speaker List).

Discount Coupon

This year Web Designer Wall is one of their media supporters and we are giving out 10% discount coupon code: WDW03122 for anyone who is interested in purchasing the tickets (see festival and workshop pricing). (more…)

Linn Olofsdotter - Mixed media artist

Location: Portland
Website: www.olofsdotter.com

Growing up in Sweden, Linn was exposed to art and design from an early age, but it wasn’t until she was in her early twenties that she decided to become an artist. After a few years of flirting with both motion graphics and advertising she realized it was illustration she had passion for and left everything else to pursue that as a career.

Her colorful illustrations are often described as emotional, surreal and a little naughty. These are qualities that have brought her clients such as Samsung, Green Peace, Oilily, La Perla and Levi’s amongst many others

While Linn has lived in several different places, she finds endless inspiration in traveling to imaginary magical worlds. Rich forests and reflective oceanic pools are themes she often references as sources of creativity. (more…)

This article contains 10 visual tutorials intended for web designers and newbies on how to apply Javascript effects with jQuery. In case you don’t know about jQuery, it is a "write less, do more" Javascript library. It has many Ajax and Javascript features that allow you to enhance user experience and semantic coding. Since these tutorials are focused on jQuery, I’m not going to get into the details of the CSS.

Note: the version used in this article is jQuery 1.2.3

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If you are looking for inspiration for grid and column design, here is a nice collection of 32 column-based websites. These sites show how grid layout can be applied on various type of sites — whether a massive content editorial site or just a personal blog. Check out how the layout can be divided into 3 columns, 4 columns, a mixture of narrow and wide columns. (more…)

XHTML Challenge is a freshly launched project by Valentin Agachi, which enables you to create challenges between two websites. The script will analyze the sites’ XHTML markups and return a report for the visitors to vote. The signup process and overall workflow is very simple. Within a minute, I created a challenge between Best Web Gallery and CSS Remix (see the challenge).

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Have you been working hard? Well, it is time to take a break and be inspired. Carsonified is hosting a party (actually, it is an event called Future of Web Apps) at South Beach, Miami. The event will take place between Feb 28^th — Mar 1^st. There will be workshops, conference, and beach party (yes, beer and volleyball on the beach!). Some of my favorite speakers include: Kevin Rose from Digg, Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch, and Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress. For more details, visit their website FutureOfWebApps.com (designed by Elliot Jay Stocks).