Giving Your Older Web Designs a Refresh

Every once in a while it doesn’t hurt to give your website design a refresh. It helps to remove older blocks of code which were slowing load times and costing you pageviews. It can also help to re-evaluate what you’re trying to do with your site and how your audience should interact with each page element.

I’ll be going over a few tricks to ease the process of a website refresh. The redesign process isn’t something that should be happening weekly, but it is a powerful process that should be applied to your site every so often. If you’re starting to feel lackadaisical about your site’s design that may be a clue you could use a refresher.

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25 Pink Web Designs to Inspire You

October is the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and since pink is the color for breast cancer awareness, we decided to gather this selection to inspire you and also to show our respect for something so important: the 25th birthday of Breast Cancer Awareness, Education and Empowerment. Pink is a really beautiful color, so here you will see some inspiring examples of how to use it in web design. From vibrant pink backgrounds to light pink elements and typography, you will certainly get inspired. (more…)

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How to Identify a Font

What is the font used for the title of Friends? How about the typeface of that old copy of Moby Dick you picked up at that garage sale? The back of your Starbucks pastry bag? And please tell me, how can you find the font on a worn out birthday card that your client wants you to replicate?

Graphic designers are consistently asked to use a client’s nameless favorite font. Thanks to the typeface renaissance spurred by increasingly fantastic font tools and talented foundries, the font identification game is getting harder by the minute. Unless you happen to be a first-class typeface aficionado, you probably aren’t going to be able to call the latestGothicsans serif, such as Avenir, Geogrotesque, or any of the approximately 100,000 other fonts available today, by name. (more…)

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10 Excellent WordPress Themes for Portfolios and Galleries

Themes can extend WordPress into much more than just a blogging platform, and it’s common for theme developers to create themes with a focus on specific niches. For example, a few weeks ago we posted a collection of business WordPress themes that were aimed at giving business owners an easy way to get a great looking site online. So for this post, the focus is on portfolios and galleries. We’ve rounded up 10 themes that are ideal for designers and photographers who don’t have web design skills to build their own portfolio site. The themes we selected for this post are well designed and do an excellent job of presenting the content in a professional manner. (more…)

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WDL Premium: Signal 8 WordPress Theme

Today we’re releasing a premium WordPress theme for our WDL Premium Members. Signal 8 from Mojo Themes delivers a sleek & fun feel, but is still packed with tons of features. It offers a premium magazine/news formatted homepage. Featured articles or posts display on the homepage slider. Included in this theme are 3 different color options and Google Analytics integration, among many more amazing options. (more…)

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Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness with Confident Copy

Want to increase your website’s effectiveness? To have a higher conversion rate: more of your website’s visitors become subscribers, customers, members? You can increase the likelihood of that happening by having your message be more clear and confident. In other words: increase your website’s effectiveness with confident copy.

It might seem like forehead-slapping common sense, but a lot of web designers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs get caught up in design tweaks, form designs, and other details that don’t matter nearly as much as simply being more confident with their message. By simply having more confident copy, you can increase the likelihood of that next visitor converting into a new subscriber, customer, or member. (more…)

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40 Fresh Examples of Minimal Web Design

There is nothing more inspiring than a clean and minimal website. A design with few elements representing something. The saying “less is more”, even though somewhat cliche, couldn’t be more true. We already published here a A Showcase of Clean White Web Designs and a list with 60 Minimal and Super Clean Web Designs to Inspire You. Since minimal sites are always around and they are actually pretty trendy right now, we decided to gather a new list. Enjoy. (more…)

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30 Fresh and Inspiring Logo Designs

Inspiration plays a key role in the growth of a designer. If you live in a vacuum without seeing what other designers are doing, it’s very difficult to improve and grow your skills. That’s why we think it’s important to find excellent examples of design and share them with you. As you know, every Monday we showcase inspiring web designs, but we also mix in other types of design. For this post we are focusing on logos. So here are 30 Fresh and Inspiring Logo Designs. Enjoy! (more…)

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BundleHunt 2 Giveaway

Update: The contest has ended and the winners have been picked. Congratulations to the following three people, and thanks to all who participated!

Erica S.
Craig Paterson
Michelle Bowman

If you were one of the winners, someone from BundleHunt will contact you with instructions on how to get your bundle.

The team at BundleHunt is releasing their second bundle and wants to give WDL readers a chance to grab a bundle for free. They’ve given us 3 bundles to giveaway to 3 of you. For a chance to win one, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. The three winners will be randomly selected on October 9, 2010. (more…)

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WDL Premium: Seamless Patterns Vector Pack

Today we’re releasing a set of seamless vector patterns for our WDL Premium Members. This set from Designious has 9 vector seamless patterns that can be scaled to any size. These amazing seamless vector patterns have vintage royal motifs, come in 2 colors, but you can easily add gradients and turn them into your personal piece of history. (more…)

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