Making the design to be responsive is very easy as shown in my Responsive Design in 3 Steps tutorial, but maintaining the elements to look aesthetically balanced on all breakpoint layouts is an art. Today I'm going to share 5 of my commonly used CSS tricks along with sample cases for coding responsive designs. They are simple CSS properties such as min-width, max-width, overflow, and relative value — but these properties play an important part in responsive design.

Responsive design is obviously a popular topic in the web design industry right now, and WordPress continues to grow as one of the most popular content management systems. Many bloggers and site owners who are using WordPress are interested in having a responsive website, and the result is a quickly-increasing number of responsive themes that are available for WordPress.

It can be a challenge convincing clients to add new strategies to their existing Web presence.

In a perfect world, a client would simply say, "You’re the expert. You know what’s best. Do whatever needs to be done to make it happen!" But, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that.

When you're ready to take your data into your own hands and run your own blog, own your own photos, and host your own apps, it's time to find a good web host that can put it all on the web for you, give you the tools, bandwidth, and storage you need, and support you when you need help. Thankfully, there are dozens of great companies looking for your business, and this week we're going to look at five of the best, based on your nominations.

Navigation menus are an important part of any web design for usability purposes, but they can also serve to improve the look and feel of the website. When designing navigation menus there are any number of different approaches that you can take, and in this post we’ll show 35 examples of sites with attractive menus. These examples sites can serve as an excellent source of inspiration for your own projects, as every website needs a good navigation menu.

CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very CSS little code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during :hover, and we also create keyframe-based animations by adding a className, but did you know you can animate elements using media queries as the trigger? Let's have a look!

In this article, we’ll be reviewing my top 10 online payment systems for accepting payments on the Web. While many of the companies on this list have been available to online merchants for years, many are also now getting into new areas of online payments such as social commerce and in-store online card reader systems.

Underscore.string is JavaScript library for comfortable manipulation with strings, extension for Underscore.js inspired by Prototype.js, Right.js, Underscore and beautiful Ruby language.

Underscore.string provides you several useful functions: capitalize, clean, includes, count, escapeHTML, unescapeHTML, insert, splice, startsWith, endsWith, titleize, trim, truncate and so on.

I basically rewrote this entire set so they are full vector buttons, meaning:

@font-face icons
custom font file for all social icons
icon font use private unicode spaces for accessibility
em sizing based on button font-size
support for about 67 different services
buttons and icons supported
no raster images (sweet)
works splendidly on any browser supporting @font-face
CSS3 degrades gracefully in IE8 and below etc.
also includes generic icon-less primary and secondary buttons

Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential workflow of a front-end dev. We measured our mettle based on our ability to wrangle IE6 into submission or achieve pixel perfection across browsers. Many members of the community – myself included – lacked traditional programming experience. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – usually in the form of jQuery – were self-taught skills.

Something has changed in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s the result of people starting to take front-end dev seriously, maybe it’s browser vendors mostly getting their shit together, or maybe it’s front-end devs – again, myself included – coming to see some well-established light about the process of software development.

JavaScript is an object oriented (OO) language, with its roots in the Self programming language, although it's (sadly) designed to look like Java. This makes the language's really powerful and sweet features stay covered by some pretty ugly and counter-intuitive work-arounds.

This graphic is an extract from Andrew Abela's book Advanced Presentations by Design. Please credit the book and author when using this diagram.

In recent years the possibilities for using a wide variety of fonts and typefaces in web design has come a long way. There are now several different options for approaches that you can take when you want to use a font other than the basic, standard web safe fonts. Google Web Fonts has quickly become one of the leading options

Any application of typography can be divided into two arenas: micro and macro. Understanding the difference between the two is especially useful when crafting a reading experience, because it allows the designer to know when to focus on legibility and when to focus on readability.

Whenever we start work designing a website one of the first things we always do is throw a bunch of colours and textures onto the canvas, but sometimes a design will benefit from the clean and crisp appearance of a pure white background. This showcase rounds up 20 minimal website designs that prove that sometimes less is more.

A better upload dialog for the web
Your content, where you want it. Upload files directly from Dropbox, Facebook, your computer, and more!

Developers: Connect your application to your user's content in seconds. Let us do the dirty work so that you can focus on building the best web application.

With so many designers and developers competing for jobs, finding work can be a challenging task. Fortunately, designers and developers can benefit from being in an industry that has a number of quality niche-focused job boards.

While major job sites can still be a source of job leads, smaller and more focused job boards are often a better use of your time. Many companies have found that industry-specific job boards typically produce higher-quality candidates, which has resulted in more job listings on these job boards.

In this post we’ll break down the leading job boards into a few different types or categories. First, we’ll show those that list mostly jobs for designers. Second, we’ll show those that list mostly development or programming jobs. Third, we’ll show those that have a good mixture of listings for both design and development.

WordPress custom taxonomies are a great way to organise your website’s content, but what are they exactly? How can they be implemented effectively? More importantly though, how can they benefit your website? Fear not, what you’re about to read in the following is the most comprehensive guide to WordPress custom taxonomies you’ll find on the internet today.

Building WordPress widgets is just like building a plugin but it is more simple and straightforward. All you need to do is have a single file in which all the PHP goes and it’s easier to code than a plugin which can have more than one file. There are three major functions of a widget which can be broken down into widget, update and form.

Today I’d like to show you how to easily add custom sidebars to use within your posts and pages. It could be useful to display different widgets according to your page or post’s topic.
We’ll see how to use WordPress meta boxes to store and retrieve a chosen sidebar for a specific post. Custom sidebars will be added in the theme options section.

The Truematter team was recently tasked with creating a fun, sexy web app that presents numerical data in an engaging way. After putting our heads together, we came up with a bar chart that responds interactively to user input without, heaven forbid, reloading any pages. We’re very pleased to be able to share that with the coding community. There are some CSS tricks involved, a dose of jQuery, and some graphic magic, but when we’re done with this tutorial, we’ll have a beautifully interactive chart that you can customize to your heart’s content.

There are a number of ways to profile and monitor the performance of PHP code in a development environment, but once it’s been let loose on a production server its extremely difficult to know what’s going on when your app is getting accessed by your users.
In March 2009, Facebook released XHProf, a function level profiler that allows you to identify bottlenecks in your application. And it runs on a production server with little overhead.

Although WordPress has made it very easy to create a custom WordPress theme, but it still takes time to learn and build it. So I've created a Base theme based on the free Basic theme from Themify. I've stripped out the framework and the extra functions that you might not need. It includes only the basic styling, responsive design, custom menus, and widgetized sidebar. This Base theme is intended to let you build your custom themes using it as a foundation. The main goal is to save your time and simplify the work flow. It is great for non-coders and quick client works.

Never resize a thumbnail again
Create thumbnails easily from high-res images, without any distortion, with one line of code.

You can even decide thumbnail dimensions directly from CSS.

Integrates prefectly with any media gallery, even more usefull in dynamic web application when you can face any shape or size.

If you want to add avatars to your application it's easier to use this plugin to let them fit any size you need then to develop a functionality that help your user to upload avatars of the right size/sizes.

In the first part, we touched on the basics of the WordPress HTTP API and how to make a simple GET request and read the response. In this tutorial, we’ll learn about the PayPal Express Checkout API and how to build a class that uses the HTTP API to process payments with PayPal. Preferably, you will have some knowledge of what PayPal is and also a Sandbox account (which is free and easy to get). We’ve done this as a plugin to show how the PayPal class works and ease making the HTTP requests.

retina.js is an open source script that makes it easy to serve
high-resolution images to devices with retina displays

Every year designers are pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do. 2012 is no different. In just a few short months we have seen a large increase in the number of premium WordPress themes being released, and the bar is certainly being raised with the new additions to the ranks.

Envision.js is a library for creating fast, dynamic and interactive HTML5 visualizations.

ResponsiveSlides.js is a tiny jQuery plugin that creates a responsive slideshow using images inside <ul>. It works with wide range of browsers including all IE versions from IE6 and up. It also adds css max-width support for IE6 and other browsers that don't natively support it. Only dependency is jQuery (1.4 and up supported) and that all the images are same size.

jPages is a client-side pagination plugin but it gives you a lot more features comparing to most of the other plugins for this purpose, such as auto page turn, key and scroll browse, showing items with delay, completely customizable navigation panel and also integration with Animate.css and Lazy Load.
Apart from all its features, the main diference for the other pagination plugins is that with jPages you can create as many navigation panels as you want and you can choose exactly where to place them.
The plugin is very unobtrusive and it won't apply any extra styles to the items you are paginating. It will only create and insert the links inside the element(s) you are applying the plugin to, in order to turn them into navigation panel(s).

Tooltip is a splendid invention. Small detail in web design that plays a big role when it comes to user experience. Usually, tooltips are used to present a tiny amount of hidden content (mainly explanatory, so-called tips), that pops up when user moves a cursor over or clicks (less common) on a special target.

Free jQuery OSX style scrollbars.
Lightweight, cross-browser, cross-platform.

Some of the most effective logos use text and typography as the primary design element. These types of logos, when done effectively, can be excellent for branding and building name recognition. In addition, type-based logos typically work very well when printed as opposed to being designed primarily for the screen.

In this post we’ll showcase 25 examples of type-based logos. To see more about the logo or to see more work from the designer please click on the links to be led to the source.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn about the WordPress HTTP API, and the different functions it offers to make HTTP requests and handle the response.

For marketers, effective email design is more than the fonts and images you choose. A good email template not only looks appealing, but also considers the special features and constraints of the email clients used to read the messages.

The Art & Design Inspiration Fix pulls together a collection of my favourite graphical images that I’ve come across over the past week to give you a fix of creative inspiration. This week we have designs from Like Minded Studio, Jordan Metcalf, Linza, Ricky Ruff and Florian Nicolle.

Being able to effectively and efficiently communicate with clients is one of the most important aspects of being a web designer. It can mean the difference between having happy clients and having frustrated clients.

Communication is a constant challenge when you are working with many different clients over a period of time. Sending out an email newsletter to your clients can help for a number of reasons. In this article we’ll take a look at 7 reasons why designs should send email newsletters to their clients.

Rhinoslider is the most flexible jQuery slideshow there is. Be welcome to try it yourself. Not only do we offer a variety of effects, we also allow you to add your own styles, effects and features to the slider.

We also give you a mighty tool: The generator. Even with very limited JavaScript and jQuery experience it should be no problem to implement Rhinoslider into your website. Just build your customized call by click-and-see and copy it into your .js-file.

If you have feature requests or found a bug in our jQuery slideshow, don't hesitate to write a ticket. If you want to get an answer to your ticket please register. We will get to it as soon as possible.

Feel free to contact us, if you have any questions.

One simple question can set the stage for your entire interview when you sit down with a hiring manager for the first time, face to face: "So what are you looking for in a new hire that will make them successful at this role?" Essentially, before you spend the whole interview talking up your skills and experiences that the interviewers may think is entirely unimportant or irrelevant to the position, find out up front what they're interested in, and shape your interactions to suit their response.

Webshims Lib is a modular capability-based polyfill-loading library, which focuses on accurate implementations of stable HTML5 features, so that developers can write modern, interoperable and robust code in all browsers. It is built on top of jQuery and Modernizr.

There seems to be a recent trend whereby creatives are aesthetically stripping down their online portfolios to their bare essentials. (UK-based web designer/web developer Kean Richmond recently discussed this trend in an article about "undesign", and the possible reasons why this trend is becoming widespread.)

In this showcase, you’ll get to see 30 great examples of minimalist portfolio sites for your inspiration.

Rainbow is a code syntax highlighting library written in Javascript.
It was designed to be lightweight (1.4kb), easy to use, and extendable.
It is completely themable via CSS.

Having knowledge on how to create an effective landing page can increase the number of site visitors that take the desired action of the web page. Lets discuss factors and considerations that can lead to a better landing page design.

A trackback is a notification of linking to a web document. In other words this system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between blogs. It helps keep track of who is linking or referring to a webpage (article) and therefore brings interested readers to the given site. Trackback is one of the three linkback methods, the other two being refback and pingback. Note that for applying a trackback it is not necessary to be physically linked with each other. Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks.

File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop support, progress bars and preview images for jQuery. Supports cross-domain, chunked and resumable file uploads and client-side image resizing. Works with any server-side platform (PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, Node.js, Go etc.) that supports standard HTML form file uploads

Given the popularity of vintage and retro styles among the web design community, we thought we would take an opportunity and shine a spotlight on some of those styles applied to websites. With so many flawless examples of vintage and retro web design floating around the internet it was a bit difficult to narrow down the search, but we think we found some inspired designs that have not already hit everyone’s radar, and maybe one or two that have.

So take a look below at the showcase we have prepared for you and see how some talented designers have brought the past to life on the web today.

A simple and lightweight framework for creating beautiful, interactive vector maps.

When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat.
My first goal for the WordPress Editorial Calendar was to make it do anything useful. I was new to JavaScript and PHP and didn’t really know what I could pull off. In a few days I had a proof of concept. In a few more I had a working version and was asking friends to install it. The calendar worked… sort of.

Twitter Bootstrap’s version 2.0 has added some fantastic new features to an already very strong front-end development framework. If you’re new to Twitter Bootstrap, you’ll want to check it out. And if you’ve been using Bootstrap, you may appreciate the chance to walk through some of its key features together. So let’s get started!
Today we’ll begin with the basics:
Downloading the files, including the new option to customize your download.
Setting up a template markup file.
Working with Bootstrap 2.0′s new 12-column grid.
Leveraging the new option to make your layout fully responsive – ready for multiple screen sizes.

Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.

Twitter Bootstrap is a beautiful "web design kit" for creating cross browser, consistent and good looking interfaces.

With a flexible and well-thought HTML/CSS/Javascript structure, it offers many of the popular UI components, a grid system and JavaScript plugins for common scenarios.

As we look around the web, we see so many examples of designers who have brilliantly used color in web design projects to make the page or various page elements really pop. Even in some cases when we see designers opting for more minimal designs, using bold splashes of color can really take the look to fantastic new heights in very simple ways. Using bright, bold colors can often be risky, as the colors can end up visually overwhelming or even downright uncomfortable. So it has to be done with care.

Magazine-style layouts are very popular for blogs and news sites that publish high volumes of content. This style of layout typically shows excerpts of headlines of articles from a variety of different categories or topics on the front page, allowing visitors to have easy access to more content compared to a typical blog-style layout.

In this post we’ll showcase 21 different magazine-style designs for your own inspiration.

The design of an e-commerce website can have a dramatic impact on the user experience throughout the process of purchasing a product. In this post we’ll take a look specifically at shopping cart pages, showing examples from 25 different e-commerce sites. The shopping cart page shows customers specifically which items are in their carts and allows them to change quantities (in most situations) or remove products.

Here are 25 examples of well-designed shopping cart pages.

WordPress ships with the ability to add users, either manually or via registration. This includes the ability to assign various roles and capabilities. But more often than not you don’t want users to be exposed to the WordPress backend. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a custom registration form on the front of your site as well as a custom profile form. Users will also receive custom emails with each step of the registration process. Please note, this tutorial won’t be covering membership payments.

Overview

Adipoli is a simple jQuery plugin used to bring stylish image hover effects.

Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons.
Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

wp-cli is a tool for controlling WordPress through a console window.
When the WordPress admin interface is so beautiful and easy to use, the natural question is: why would you ever use a command-line interface?

There already are many post rating system plugins out there. Surprisingly, no one fits my needs, they either are too complicated or with too many built-in options. So, in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build your own simple post rating functionality, directly within your theme files. There’s no need for plugin!

As we’ve mentioned numerous times here on WP Tuts (and as you’ve no doubt noticed), there has never been a better time to be a WordPress Developer. Be it client work or product development (with either themes or plugins), getting started in the WordPress ecosystem is almost more of a question of ‘where’ rather than ‘how.’

Nowdays most hosting plans offer an SSH/command-line facility so you should definitely consider the SSH method to download and install WordPress on your server. The big advantage you get is that you don’t need to visit different sites, don’t need to do any download/upload or open any control panels. You do that all via a single command-line interface. For this you will need an SSH client. If you are running on Windows go for PuTTY and if you are on Mac you can use Mac’s built-in Terminal or iTerm 2. Before we move ahead please make sure your host offers bash shell because our commands are configured for that.

Put simply, the script splits headlines into rows before resizing each row to fill the available horizontal space. The ideal number of characters to set on each row is calculated by dividing the available width by the CSS font-size – the script then uses this ideal character count to split the headline into word combinations that are displayed as separate rows of text. Many more examples can be viewed further down the page.

In this article/tutorial we’ll look at the basics of WordPress pagination, the default pagination setup and how it can be enhanced.

About two months ago Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) posted an update on the WordPress Developer’s blog, that plugin developers will now be able to add custom header images to their plugins’ pages. This initiative was appreciated a lot for providing plugin authors with more control over their plugins. Today, I will tell you how to add a custom header image to your WordPress plugin and what the advantages are of adding it.

In this tutorial you will learn how to generate custom sized images for you to use in your WordPress theme. Why use custom image sizes? So you won’t have to edit every image you upload to the Media Library. This way every image uploaded will get all the custom defined image sizes generated automatically. It can be inserted into the post or page using the Media Gallery or from the loop. Continue reading to find out how.

Welcome back to part two of this tutorial; in part one we looked at some of the model, collection and view basics for when working with Backbone and saw how to render individual contact views using a master view bound to a collection.
In this part of the tutorial, we’re going to look at how we can filter our view based on user input, and how we can add a router to give our basic application some URL functionality.
We’ll need the source files from part one as we’ll be building on the existing code for this part. I’d strongly recommend reading part one if you haven’t already.

Icon Fonts (or pictograms) are available for a very long time but the ones that are specifically designed for web apps are appearing lately.

They are so flexible and fun to use considering each icon can be resized, colored, rotated and styled very easily. No need to hack them in our image editing apps but just CSS is enough.

WordPress’ custom taxonomy features are fantastic, allowing you to organize your posts in various taxonomies, with all the hard work done for you. However, it can also be a bit constraining. When editing your posts, your taxonomy terms have their own metabox, and they appear either as a checkbox list (for hierarchal taxonomies) or as a tag cloud (for non-hierarchal taxonomies). Those are your two choices.

The jQuery framework has been around the web for a while now, but the jQuery base technology was basically designed for browser apps. jQuery Mobile is a framework based on jQuery that enables web designers to create web-apps that are optimized for use on a mobile device (Smartphone and tablets). The framework is touch optimized, uses responsive layout so that elements will automatically adapt on different device sizes, and supports a range of different platforms and devices.

We often assume the more detail we put into our website designs the better they will be, but great design doesn’t always have to include all the bells and whistles. This post showcases a variety of sites that are based on solid colour backgrounds. You won’t see a gradient, texture or pattern but all these sites boast great design.

This post rounds up a collection of 20 stylish sans-serif fonts, all of which can be downloaded and used freely to spice up your website design’s typography.

Our goal is to provide an ethical social sharing widget. We want your users to be able to share your web pages with their friends through social networking sites without having to give any information away to money-making third parties. An example of the shareNice button in action can be found on the top right hand corner of this page, and on http://mmt.me.uk/, www.garlik.com, and data.southampton.ac.uk.

Making good-looking graphs shouldn't be hard. Morris.js is a lightweight library that uses jQuery and Raphaël to make drawing time-series graphs easy.

Built on top of jQuery, these tools brings known interaction patterns for your website taking advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 features.

In addition to the explanations of how to get rid of the Admin Bar, you will also find on the Web no shortage of techniques and tips for customization, as well as a multitude of plugins that make working with the Admin Bar a little more enjoyable. While I am a huge fan of plugins, knowing where a feature comes from is important before deciding whether to customize it. In this article, we’ll look at the history of the Admin Bar, when (and from where) the bar is enabled, the particular functions that WordPress’ core developers have given us, and how to make the Admin Bar more personal and useful.

With so many free Photoshop brushes being shared around the web, it can always be a bit tricky to sort through the masses to grab those true quality packs that are available. So we have once again, sought to help out our readers by doing some of the work for you. With designers constantly on a quest to build up their arsenal of resources, we dove into the web and came up with a few choice treasures for you to check out.

In recent years the use of large background photos and illustrations has become increasingly common in web design. In some cases the background image is the most distinct feature of the design.

There are all kinds of different backgrounds that can be used, like nature photos, nature illustrations, and abstract designs. In this post we’ll showcase 25 websites with impressive backgrounds that really make the sites stand out. If you’re looking to make a website or a design memorable, a large background may be a good option.

Some of the most inviting website designs use elements inspired by nature. Whether it is a large photo background, an illustration of nature, or some other element, nature-inspired designs appeal to many visitors, and they are an ideal fit with certain industries and companies.

In this post we’ll showcase 25 nature-inspired websites for your own design inspiration.