Cheap Website Design Blog

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The wallpapers calendar series will not be discontinued. Next month is the last month in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. In February, you’ll have one last chance to showcase your work by designing a desktop wallpaper calendar for Smashing Magazine. But don’t worry, we have a number of new contests coming up, so it will be worth staying in touch!

Wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use one wallpaper for a long time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration from it. That’s why we decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers to cover 12 months. And to make them a little more distinctive than the usual fare, we decided to embed calendars for each month. If you need to look up a date, isn’t it better to show off nice wallpaper with a nice calendar, instead of launching your default time application?

This post features 70 (!) free desktop wallpapers for February 2009, created by designers across the globe. Every wallpaper can be downloaded for free and comes in two versions: one with a calendar and one without.

Please note:

• All images are linked to a preview of the wallpaper.
• You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to feature on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

This month, we’ve been literally smashed by the explosion of your desktop wallpaper calendars. So look out, February 2009, we’re coming!

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The design of 404 error pages is often overlooked and underestimated. However, designed carefully, these pages can make a random visitor stay on your website, take a look around and eventually find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. Effective 404 error pages communicate why a particular page couldn’t be displayed and what users can do next. A search box and list of useful resources (possibly related to the missing page) could be helpful in this case.

We’ve already covered the design of 404 error pages in previous posts. In them, we also covered some interesting and useful ideas for designing 404 pages. Now, it’s time for a fresh dose of 404-error inspiration. This article presents 50 more examples of beautiful and original 404 error designs. Some of them are beautiful but not user-friendly, others are user-friendly but not really beautiful. Please use these examples as a source of inspiration; hopefully, this showcase has something for everybody.

Also note that some examples used in this post were suggested by our Twitter followers: please follow us on Twitter to vote on which article gets published next, discuss new ideas, get fresh updates and suggest great ideas for our next posts. Thank you.

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Color is a major consideration in any Web design. Whether for an individual, small company, or major corporation, color scheme is one of the most significant factors in the overall look and appearance of a website. In some cases, the designer may have the sole discretion in making color choices, but many times a color scheme has already been established and needs to be followed. In situations where a company already has a strong brand, color usage for the website can either build or take away from this.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the impact that website color schemes have on the overall branding of a company, and we’ll also look at plenty of examples. We won’t be going into the subjects of color choices for branding or the psychology of colors, but rather we’ll look at established companies to see if the colors in their website branding are consistent with the rest of their marketing.

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In this post we release 2 free high-quality WordPress magazine-themes. The themes include full PSD-templates and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. The themes were commissioned by Smashing Magazine exclusively for our readers and designed by Wendell Fernandes. As you may know, since the beginning of the year, each release on Smashing Magazine has been dedicated to a specific theme or topic that could be useful in your next project. This release focuses on the vintage-look and on the magazine-style.

With Vintage WordPress Theme we wanted to release a WordPress theme that would reflect the vintage, old-style look and thus look attractive, unusual and memorable. We discussed retro and vintage designs already, but we wanted the theme to literally stand out – not through its style, but also through its structure. Therefore we were more than happy when the designers suggested a design with a magazine-look.

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Typography is elegant when it is attractive and communicates the designer’s ideas. When chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective in supporting the overall design. Designers are always exploring different techniques with type: some use images or sIFR to produce very beautiful typography, while others prefer CSS alone to get the typography just right.

Today, we will look at 50 most useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly. These tools are great for experimenting with different font types for your website.

Below we cover typographic tools, useful typographic references, font browsers, typographic CSS- and JavaScript-techniques, hyphenation techniques, sIFR tools and resources, grids and related tools, free and commercial fonts, a guide to Web typography, examples of great Web typography.

Please feel free to suggest further tools and resources in the comments to this post. And if you like this post please feel free to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter.

You may want to take a look at the following related articles:

• 50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools
• 50 Extremely Useful CSS Tools

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The administration area of a Web application is a favorite target of hackers and thus particularly well protected. The same goes for WordPress: when creating a blog, the system creates an administrative user with a perfectly secure password and blocks public access to the settings area with a log-in page. This is the cornerstone of its protection. Let’s dig deeper!

This article focuses on defending the administration area of WordPress, meaning all those pages in the wp-admin folder (or http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/) that are displayed after a user a verified. We highlighted the phrase “after a user is verified” deliberately: it should be explicitly understood that only a simple query stands in the way of an evil hacker and the powerful admin area of your whole blog. The latter is only as strong as the passwords that are generated.

To make an attack more difficult, you should perform the following actions manually. These solutions do not guarantee 100% security, but you can create effective stumbling blocks on a hacker’s way to the administration area.

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For website owners who are evaluating e-commerce solutions, there are several good options for powering websites and shopping carts. Regardless of which option you chose, deciding on a design brings with it even more decisions to make. Of course, a custom design is always an option, but for those who want to keep costs down, templates are a popular choice. Premium e-commerce themes are easy to find, but they can be expensive. Free e-commerce templates are difficult to find, and quality free templates are even harder to find.

We’ve done the research for you, and in this post we present 35 of the highest-quality free e-commerce templates available. There are templates specifically for WordPress, Prestashop, osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart, CubeCart, and CRE Loaded, as well as a number of general e-commerce templates. Please notice that these templates aren’t intended to be used 1:1, but should rather be used as a skeleton for your own shop and hence saves a lot of work, because otherwise you would have to start from scratch.

Few products have generated the kind of hype that the iPhone has. Its beautiful design and large multi-touch screen are irresistible. Although its interface is beautifully designed, some of us want to put a little something extra in it to suit our style, personality and profession and …

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.
And to make them …

by Vailancio Rodrigues and the Smashing Editorial Team

Dual displays come in handy when you are working on several projects at the same time. They allow you to separate everything, organize and work efficiently. Dual displays are highly suitable for Web designers, Web developers and graphic designers and they are …