In your day-to-day work, you might find that there are times when you need to provide a client with documentation that walks them through a process or teaches them how to do something they may be unfamiliar with. I’ve mentioned before that I view writing skills as vitally important for everyone, in every business, and this is a prime example of why being able …  Read More →

I’ve written several times about Typekit and how it’s dramatically changing the face of web typography by offering an increasingly large library of fonts which can be displayed on the web without using Flash or alternative images or any other jiggery-pokery. In the past, I’ve also written about different categories of type , so in this post I’m looking at some of the typefaces that are loosely labeled “Futuristic”. The ironic thing... 

It’s the end of the week, so let’s look at one of this more light-hearted stories from the past few days… Apparently, more than 10 billion tweets have been sent on Twitter since the micro-blogging service was launched in 2006. That’s a lot. The tabloid press will undoubtedly come up with metaphoric comparisons to show just how big 10 billion is. I’m going to beat them to it… If you could send a tweet every... 

The everyday in-the-trenches part of working for yourself can not only be all-encompassing and constant, but it’s also necessary. After all, it’s these small incremental actions you take everyday that provide the value to your customers and essentially pay the bills.  Plus, many of us find that it’s difficult to set aside time for any activities that don’t directly result in income. But despite the time challenge, there... 

Episode 52 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Kevin Yank ( @sentience ) and Patrick O’Keefe ( @iFroggy ) are joined by Derek Powazek ( @fraying ), co-creator of JPG Magazine and creator of Fray to discuss the care and feeding of web communities. Listen in your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below: A complete transcript of the interviews is provided below. Download... 

Stickybits is an app and website which lets you use your iphone or android phone to scan in a barcode containing any kind of digital file from text, images, video and PDFs. The barcode is created by you on the Stickybits web site. You print it out and stick it anywhere you want. The app is free to download, as is the barcode and you can buy stickers on the site.  Read More →

This installment of my business start-up series covers one very important part of business ownership – finances. As a business owner, or someone contemplating starting a business, having a solid process for creating, tracking and analyzing your budget is extremely important; it’s impossible to be profitable over the long-term if your business finances aren’t always on your mind. I’ve written quite a bit about business budgets... 

Well… we can teach you. Seriously. No strings attached. All you need is enough spare time to read approximately 4 million threads and you’ll be an expert. That is the power of the SitePoint Forums ! For those of you that don’t have that kind of time (or inclination), I’m going to make it easy for you. Each week I’m going to blog from the forums community…  Read More →

We’re coming close to the end of this series. Last week I posted about gray , with some examples of its use in web design. This week, we’re going darker and the focus is on black. Like gray, black provides a near-neutral background which allows other elements of the design to stand out. A lot of photography sites use a black background to allow the photographs take center stage. Black is a powerful color. It can be serious and sophisticated,... 

Microsoft have reported that sales of Windows 7 have reached 90 million copies just 6 months after the new OS was launched to the public on October 22 2009 . The sales figures are more than double those of Vista throughout a similar period. Perhaps that’s not surprising: Vista obtained a bad reputation from day one and never recovered. Windows 7 is not a huge technical leap beyond Vista and many have dubbed it little more than a service... 

Today we’re excited to present Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow , a tutorial by respected user experience professional Shane Morris. Shane starts off by touching on the history of prototyping tools, and the complex challenges that they once posed for designers who found themselves having to curtail creativity to cater to what the tools themselves were capable of. Fast forward a few years and the recent rise in demand for, and increased capability... 

It’s not something we’ve done before, so I thought it was worth sharing the news. For years we’ve offered a free sample for each of our books; a sizeable download comprising several chapters. jQuery: Novice to Ninja is no different, we’ve made 3 out of 9 chapters freely available — that’s over 150 pages of jQuery goodness up for grabs. What’s different with this book is for the first time we’…  Read More →

A few weeks ago, I shared some of my sources for writing inspiration . In a comment on that post, Mariano asked how I manage and organize my ideas. It was a great question, so I’m explaining my method in today’s post. Before it’s demise, I used Google Notebook to keep track of ideas and manage my writing. When it went away, I undertook a massive search for a replacement; I must have tested over 30 note-taking apps. One of the... 

Google announced last week that they had aquired the web-based photo-editing app Picnik . Picnik started in 2005 and was one of first online photo-editing sites. It’s a very busy site, with almost 40 million visitors each month. On the company blog , a clearly very excited staff member (and why wouldn’t they be?) said: What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before.... 

Opera has one of the most rapid browser release schedules and 10.5 is now available — just in time for Microsoft’s EU browser choice screen . You’ll need to download it from Opera.com , although automatic updates from previous versions will appear shortly. Opera 10.5 is a significant update — other browser vendors would have bumped up the major version number. Here’s what you can expect: excellent W3C standards...