Quick Tips to Improve Your Web Design Skills

Every web designer has a secret or two. Hard-won workflows, hidden hacks, and insider knowledge that are the mark of true experience and the stuff that separates great web design training from good.

Here, we've managed to persuade some of the web's busiest devs and designers to part with their most closely guarded tricks and tips. It's quite a collection.

Packed with professional know-how, you'll discover secret features of well known tools, the beta services that the design industry is buzzing about and CSS tricks that make page design for multiple platforms easy. So whether you're a beginner at online design or a web veteran, you're bound to uncover one or two tips here that will change the way you work.

Design in shades of gray, then add color

If your web designer creates wireframes prior to visual designs, then you know the value of starting with shades of gray.  Turn your wireframe into a grayscale visual design, add your photography, then carefully add color to design elements one at a time.  

This will prevent an “overdesigned” website and help to place prominence on just the items that need it.

Use Keynote (Mac) to create rapid page prototypes

You don’t need Photoshop to create rapid prototypes of web pages, landing pages, call to actions or other web interface elements.  There’s an entire underground movement around using Keynote (that’s Apple’s version of PowerPoint) to create mockups.

There’s even an online repository containing user interface design templates for wireframing, prototyping and testing mobile and web apps in Keynote.

Add web fonts to your corporate style guide

It’s 2015, and if your corporate style guide doesn’t include web fonts, then you need to look into adding those so your website has the same governance that corporate documents and collateral does.

If you haven’t looked into this yet, Google Fonts is a great place to start. Find a suitable web font and define usage in your corporate style guide so you use it consistently online

Remove sidebars

The sidebar has been an especially popular web design trend for the last ten years, especially on blogs. Many companies are finding that when they remove sidebars from their blogs, it encourages reader attention to the article and the call to action at the end.

Removing the sidebar on our company blog has increased the number of clicks on call to action graphics over 35%.

Get color inspiration from nature

Struggling to find the perfect color combination for your website or a call to action graphic? Get your inspiration from nature. You can either use your own camera to photograph natural wonders around you or find landscape photos on the web, the use a color picker to select a color. Nature’s color palette never fails.

Step away from the computer

Good design starts with great planning. Getting your ideas down on paper or on a whiteboard can help you iterate through a design, refining it and adding detail as you go along. Drawing on a whiteboard can also make the design process collaborative and allow other team members to give input.

It’s also easy to erase pencil from paper or marker from a whiteboard and make quick changes, and once you have something concrete to work with, snap a photo with your mobile phone and get to work on screen.

Use Pinterest to create mood boards

When you’re putting together inspiration and ideas for a new website, or you’re redesigning part of your website, you need a way to collect your inspiration in one place for future reference.

Did you know that you can use Pinterest to create a mood board of your favorite images, colors, layouts, patterns, sample websites and concept material? Another great advantage of using Pinterest is that other designers create and share mood boards too, and they’ve already curated a ton of resources that you can use.

Bury those social media icons

You did all that work to get people to your website, and yet you’re inviting them to leave? That’s what you’re doing when you place social media icons in a prominent location of your website, like in the header. Bury the icons in the footer.

If people are on your website, you want them to stay, learn and perhaps inquire about your services, not check out company picnic photos and bowling outings on Facebook. Social media should send people to your website, not vice versa.

Ditch the slideshow/carousel

When the homepage slideshow/image carousel came into fashion, it was a way to get lots of information on the first page of your website. The problem is that most people don’t stay on the page long enough to experience all of the tiles/messages.  

What’s more is that the messages and images usually aren’t relevant to your prospect’s first visit. What’s the one thing a visitor should take away from their website visit? Promote that one thing -- usually what your company does in layman’s terms -- and ditch the rest.

Simplify navigation

Reducing your visitors’ options might seem counter intuitive, but it can actually help guide people to your most productive content. Rather than overwhelming your website visitors with links to every page, simplify your navigation.

Eliminate dropdown menus and especially multi-tier dropdown navigation that only the most skilled mouse user can navigate, and go a step further by reducing the number of links in the header or sidebar of your website.

Increase your font size

Typography is incredibly important in web design. Text is hard enough to read on a computer screen, so you have to make the important things stand out.

One way to do this is to increase your font sizes, especially for headings and important blocks of text. Consider increasing the size of your normal font, too.

Use white space

It may be hard to believe that using whitespace is a hack, but I evaluate websites every day that could use more whitespace. Not every blank area of the screen needs to be filled.

Even though whitespace and simplicity are in style right now, too many companies try to cram everything into a small space, or worse yet, “above the fold.”  Give your design room to breathe, and your website visitors will be able to find things easier.

Use the squint test

Want a quick way to learn what’s most prominent on your website? Back away from your computer screen and squint.  Most everything will become blurry, and only the larger, colorful, more prominent features will be noticeable.

Read More..

How to Speed Up a Mac ?

Macs can perform slowly, too. If your Mac seems to be running slower than it should, the variety of tips here should help you identify and fix the problem. There are many reasons a Mac might be slow.Stay away from programs that promise to “optimize” your Mac and make it run faster. Some “cleaning” programs — like the Mac version of CCleaner — can remove temporary files and free up space, but they won’t make your Mac perform faster.

Manage Your Startup Items

It goes without saying that a clean startup helps speed up a slow Macbook. When your Mac launches faster, it takes less time to do anything. No waiting for Safari, Chrome, or Firefox to load — they open instantly. How do you get such speed? Well, when your Mac boots up, it runs a lot of unnecessary apps. It’s quite easy to take control of it again. Go to your System Preferences > Users & Groups and then click on your username. Now click on “Login Items,” select a program you don’t immediately need when your Mac starts up, and click the “-” button below.

Use Activity Monitor

If you want to see what apps are using up your system, open the Activity Monitor in the Utilitiesfolder.

Activity Monitor shows all the processes on your Mac (some of which you can’t or shouldn’t close) so click on View and Windowed Processes. Now click on the CPU button and the CPU column to list all programs by the amount of CPU they are using.

You can also use this to see what memory, disk and network processes are using up resources. A new feature in Mavericks is Energy that enables you to see which apps and processes are using up the most amount of energy from your battery.

Clean Up Your Hard Drive

If you want the most bang for your buck, cleaning your hard drive is by far the best and easiest way to speed up Macbook or iMac. Go through your hard drive and clean out everything that’s slowing it down. But how to clean up a Mac? What to look for? Caches, logs, apps, widgets, language packs, plugins, hidden trashes, and large files. Good news is, you can clean up Mac manually. But (there’s always a but) finding all of these things and removing them takes time, plus you have to know where to look. So there’s an easy solution to it,CleanMyMac 3 app has everything you need to finish the 3-hour task of hard drive cleanup in under 5 minutes. Even more, it will clean up the junk you didn’t even know about and give your Mac major a speedup.

Update Your Mac (OS and Hardware)

Typically, Macs take care of themselves. The latest software from Apple makes speeding your Mac up simple. Currently, the latest OS X is El Capitan. Compare it to the OS X version on your Mac by clicking on the apple icon in the top left corner of your screen. Then click About This Mac. Make sure you have the latest OS X installed (or the latest you can install, since not all Macs upgrade to El Capitan). As for the hardware upgrade, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s costly. But if your OS is the latest you can install on your Mac and you’ve cleaned up your hard drive, and you still have troubles with speed, this could be your option. Keep in mind that upgrading Mac hardware is not possible on certain Macs.

Must Read:How to Fix Common iPhone 6 Problems 

Manage your startup items

Obviously, a clean startup helps speed up a Macbook that’s running slowly. No wasted time waiting for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari to load. Instant access! Well, when your Mac boots up, it runs a lot of unnecessary apps that slow your Mac down.

Take control of your Mac again! Go to your System Preferences > Users & Groups and then click on your username. Now click on Login Items. Select a program you don’t immediately need when your Mac starts up, and then click the “–” button below.

Taking care of these startup programs is an easy way to help add speed to your Mac.

Turn off visual effects

Most Macs are now capable of running Mac OS X Mavericks without any trouble. But some people prefer to keep the dock static to prevent slowdown. Click System Preferences > Dock and uncheck the following check boxes:

• Magnification
• Animate opening applications
• Automatically hide and show the dock
• Turn off accessibility

Now click on Minimize windows using and change Genie Effect to Scale Effect.

Repair Disk Permissions

This might sound complicated, but it’s actually not that hard. In short, it means checking if your Mac goes to the right places to get info. It’s an alternative to the old “turn it off and on again” method. But it involves using Terminal (if you’re on El Capitan) and if you’re not familiar with it, we recommend simply “downloading CleanMyMac 3”, a Mac maintenance app that has a bunch of optimizing tools, including one-click disk permission repair. If Terminal doesn’t scare you much, you can open it and run commands. To open Terminal, either use Spotlight Search and type it in, or find it in the Apps/Utilities folder. 

Now, in the Terminal window, type in this:
sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs /This will verify permissions. If you see anything (or a lot of things) starting with “Permissions differ”, type in this:

sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --repair --standard-pkgs --volume /

Update your software (and set to auto update)

Make sure you perform a software update for Mac OS X and all the apps installed in Mac. Click on the Apple icon in the menu bar and choose Software Update (or open Software Update in the App Store).

If you have apps purchased outside of the App Store, they will need to be updated separately. You’ll usually find Check for Software Update from the program name in the menu bar.

AppFresh is an app that can help keep track of all your software and checks it constantly to see if updates are available. Some apps can also self-update by integrating with AppFresh.

You should also make sure that Mac OS X keeps itself up to date. Click on System Preferences > App Store and ensure that Automatically Check For Updates is ticked. You can also tick Install App Updates, which will automatically ensure that apps are updated.

Clear out your caches

If you regularly use your computer, odds are that it’s building up all sorts of cruft over time. That’s taking up space on your hard drive, and could also be slowing down applications. Web browsers, with their backlog of history and massive caches, are famous for this, which is why it’s a good idea to clear your cache from time to time. But they’re not the only programs that build up caches and other files over time, which is why we recommend you check out CCleaner for Mac.

Uninstall software you don’t use

Freeing up space on your boot drive can increase performance, particularly if your drive is nearly full. An easy way to save a bunch of space is to delete apps you don’t use anymore. So if you’re the kind of person who installs a bunch of apps and then forgets about them, it’s time for a journey. We need to head to your Applications folder and take out the trash. But don’t just drag your applications to the Trash icon -that will leave behind a bunch of stuff you don’t need. Instead, look into the free application AppCleaner.

Find and delete unnecessary files

Apps probably aren’t taking up most of the space on your drive — it’s files. But which ones? The free application Grand Perspective gives you a birds-eye view of your files, with the largest files taking the form of the biggest blocks. Explore this and see if there are any large files you want to delete or move to an external hard drive for long-term storage.

Clean up your desktop

Here’s a quick tip: if your desktop is a cluttered mess of icons, clean it up. Your desktop is a window like any other, so if it’s so overwhelming you can’t find files, it’s also probably slowing down your system. Even putting everything on your desktop into a folder can help, if you’re too overwhelmed to actually sort everything. We get it.

Read More..

Best Tech and Computer Magazines

Here is a list of top ten Computer and Technology magazines that will give you great edge on current Trends and happenings around the Tech field.Apart from news these magazines provides Gadget Reviews,How to Tips and solutions to common encountered problem in their Niche.

1. Wired

Most famous Tech Magazine which discuss about the Latest Gadgets and Articles related to Science and technology.The subscription charges are different for USA and other countries.

2. PCWorld

The one and only magazine you need if you are passionate about Gadgets,Every month It presents Gadgets Reviews,Computer How to Tips and Free Applications which comes in a DVD.

3. Linux Journal

The most popular Linux magazine,You can get to know the news around Linux and Opensource software’s.You can read Reviews about latest Opensource Software’s and Linux Distributions.Apart from that they are very popular for their Linux How To Articles.

4. Mac World

If you are a Mac user then you definitely need this magazine,It provides the Review about Latest Apple releases,both Hardware and software.You can also discover latest iPhone and iPad Apps.

5. PC Magazine

Provides Review of Latest Smart Phones,Laptops,Desktops and Digital Cameras.They also provide News,PC tips,Internet Tips and Software Downloads.

6.  .NET Magazine

If you are Web Developer or Software Developer you badly need this excellent Magazine,It provides lot of Tutorials.You can also read latest news in IT field and Interviews by famous Tech personalities.

7. Computer World

This magazine provides latest IT news and Gadget Reviews,Most attractive feature is “It is Free of Cost” yes You can Subscribe this magazine without spending a penny.

Read More..

Best Messaging Apps Available for You.

Text message is quickly becoming passe, particularly in light of the explosion of popular, easy-to-use messaging apps. WhatsApp, Telegram, Send, Line and other apps all offer free text messaging. And that's not even mentioning the options for voice, video and file-sharing to other users. Check out our favorite mobile messaging apps.

• Skype: This is a popular messaging app with quite a reputation. Both individuals and businesses make use of Skype calls and online messenger. Although there is a precedent of conversation leakage by Microsoft, it still remains a reliable and loved app.
• 
• Viber: Another app with millions of users on a daily basis, Viber has got some security features that cannot be ignored. It used to be basic messaging app, but now it has introduced end-to-end encryption.
• 

• Wickr Me: With encryption by default, this app is great and allows security enhancement. It is available on Apple Store and Google Play Store, helping out all mobile users to up their scale of communication online.

• WeChat: This is a free app that allows chat and calls. Even though there is no encryption, there is a huge percentage of global share following the app. It also helps you to send money and keep track of celebs, besides messaging features.

iMessage: If you are the proud owner of an iPhone or iPad, you can turn to iMessage for encryption and ease of use in communication. Facetime is a similar app. iMessage is about to launch the same app for Android devices, but it is not yet available.

Signal: It is available for iOS and Android OS. There is encryption with the same details that WhatsApp use. Yet, the software is open source and this is not the same as Signal. If you are not worried about speed, Signal is a great app.

• Line: Free voice calls and free text messages appeal to people, of course. This is why Line has become one of the most popular apps in messaging for the Asian market. Security layering has increased a great deal over the years, which is great.

• Snapchat: Snapchat is pretty cool as an app and it has some really great features. But, there is a drawback that you should be aware of. Messages can be kept forever, which makes privacy concerns quite valid.

• Slack: Without any end-to-end encryption, this is a powerful collaboration tool or in essence a reliable messaging app. It works well with Google Drive, Github and so on, while it is ideal for startups and software developers.

• Take a pick and enjoy chatting, sending and receiving messages! Communication needs to be convenient and practical, running smoothly and without any second guessing – so fire away!

Read More..

Best Secure Messaging Apps.

Encrypted messages can't be read by anyone but the intended 

Managing your email inbox is an important part of running a business, but email exchanges can be slow and fragmented. For quick and easy communication, instant messaging is more convenient than email, and more secure than SMS text messaging at least if you have the right app. A secure messaging application will let you safely exchange private information with employees, clients and co-workers, without worrying that your data could be compromised.

But what does it mean for messaging to be secure? Usually, it means that your messages are encrypted before they even leave your device. Encrypted messages can't be read by anyone other than the intended recipient, even if they're intercepted during the exchange. Some apps even offer self-destruct functionality, letting you send messages that are automatically deleted after they're read. No messaging app is totally foolproof, but business users with privacy concerns would be wise to check out these five secure messengers for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices.

Signal Private Messenger (Free) – Android, iOS

Secure, free and easy to use, Signal Private Messenger (available on iOS and Android) is our favorite secure texting app overall. The app features end-to-end encryption to keep all of your private correspondences secure. And while it’s simpler than some of the other options on this list, it has plenty of features that power users will appreciate. That includes the ability to set up encrypted groups for private conversations with your entire work team. And while most secure messaging apps require both parties to be using the same application for encryption to work, Signal Private Messenger sets itself apart by working with standard SMS text messages, as well as SMS picture messages. That means business users can use the app to add an extra layer of security to regular texting, even if the client or colleague you're messaging isn't on board.

BlackBerry Messenger (Free) – iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry

BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) has broader compatibility than most messaging apps; it's the obvious pick for BlackBerry users, and it's also available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices. Instead of connecting with others using phone numbers or email addresses, each user is identified by a unique personal identification number (PIN). That keeps the service private and gives you more control over who contacts you. All messages are encrypted during transmission, and pass through a firewall before they hit BlackBerry's servers, so they can only be decrypted by a private key on the intended receiver's device. Individual businesses can also obtain a unique encryption key for an extra layer of security.

Gliph (Free) – Android, iOS

Gliph is a secure messaging service that you can use on all of your computing devices. When you're on the go, use the iOS or Android app on your smartphone. When you're at the office, use the Gliph desktop app so you can send and receive messages using a mouse and keyboard. Another key feature is "Real Delete," which lets you permanently delete a message from both the sending and receiving device, as well as the Gliph server, whenever you choose. You can also attach a pseudonym to your main account at any time, so you can use a screen name for personal chatting and switch back to your real name for professional communications.

Wickr (Free) – Android, iOS

Wickr (available for Android and iOS) is a secure messaging app that lets you set an "expiration date" for every message you send; just select a date and time for your media to expire, and it will automatically be deleted at that time. That way, you don't have to worry about a third party inadvertently reading private communications that are left on a contact's smartphone. Meanwhile, the app features end-to-end encryption for all messages, and it lets you remove metadata from individual messages, such as the time it was sent, as well as geo-location data. Another handy feature gives you the ability to completely clear away message files that have been manually deleted but still reside on your smartphone's memory. Wickr also has standard messaging features, like the ability to chat with groups of up to 10 people at once.

Telegram – Android, iOS, Windows Phone

Telegram (available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone) is a messaging app that features end-to-end encryption so your messages can only be read by the intended recipients, with no data logged on Telegram's servers. Like Wickr, Telegram lets you program your messages to self-destruct from both devices at a particular time so there's no record of it. It's also a solid app for everyday messaging, letting you create group chats with up to 200 people so you can stay connected with everyone in your company at once. Regular messages are stored in the cloud so you can easily access them from any device running the Telegram app. Support for Windows Phone also helps this app stand out, making it one of the few good alternatives to BlackBerry Messenger on the platform.

Read More..