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Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions

A module tab is a design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content's corresponding tab control.

Module tabs are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs, they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content.

This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. We share with you some best practices to consider when using module tabs, a listing of real-world examples of websites the take advantage of module tabs, as well as tutorials and free downloadable scripts for building and deploying module tabs in your sites.

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8 Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs

The organization of content is probably one of the most important and influential aspects of any good web design. Organizing information into a well-built layout is the basis of a website, and should always come before styling concerns. Without a good layout, the website doesn't seem to flow correctly, and nothing connects the way it should.

In this article, we'll discuss 8 useful layout solutions and techniques that will help you create a clean and organized content layout. The 8 techniques include sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal windows, rollover elements, accordions and mega drop-down-menus.

You may also be interested in the following related posts:

• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers
• 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box
• Web Design Trends For 2009

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10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People

Which is more important,driving traffic to your website or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one and the same. Too often, we as website owners live and die by Web analytics applications. We fret about bounce rates, unique visitors and dwell time. However, when we focus so heavily on the performance of our website, we miss a fundamental point: we should aim to expose users to our content, not our website. The website is a tool to showcase our content, but it is not the only tool that does this.

The content matters, not the website. That is why each company provides numerous ways to access its content beyond the website. From Amazon's affiliate scheme to YouTube's embed feature, these companies can reach audiences that may never visit their websites.

While the points mentioned below will refine your strategy to deliver content to more people, they can not serve their purpose without an appropriate environment. In the age of social media and the rise of interactive web-applications such as Facebook, Twitter etc. building a community around your website is the most important way to drive traffic and keep the users coming back.

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The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials

CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements – particularly if you want to reduce your server load. And if you haven't heard of CSS sprites before, now is probably a good time to learn what they are, how they work and what tools can help you create and use the technique in your projects.

The term "sprite" (similar to "spirit," "goblin," or "elf") has its origins in computer graphics, in which it described a graphic object blended with a 2-D or 3-D scene through graphics hardware. Because the complexity of video games has continually increased, there was a need for smart techniques that could deal with detailed graphic objects while keeping game-play flowing. One of the techniques developed saw sprites being plugged into a master grid (see the image below), then later pulled out as needed by code that mapped the position of each individual graphic and selectively painted it on the screen.

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

• 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding
• 50 Extremely Useful and Powerful CSS Tools
• CSS Float Theory
• CSS Specificity

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50 Incredible Photography Techniques and Tutorials

Over the recent months we've been presenting various showcases of photography – while many readers hated the showcases, most readers found them inspirational and perfect for a lousy workday's morning. However, what we should have done in the inspirational posts is not just provide you with some inspiration for your work, but also present useful photographic techniques which can help you to achieve optimal pictures for your designs. And as requested by many of you, now it's time to correct our mistake.

In this post we present useful photographic techniques, tutorials and resources for various kinds of photography. You'll learn how to set up the perfect environment and what techniques, principles and rules of thumbs you should consider when shooting your next perfect photo. This round-up isn't supposed to be the ultimate one – please feel free to suggest more useful articles in the comments to this post.

Among other things, we cover high-speed photography, tilt-shift photography, black and white photography, motion blur, infrared, night, smoke photography, macro photography, HDR, panoramic photography, RAW processing and others. Hopefully, you'll find many of the listed tutorials and how-tos useful for your regular work.

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5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs

There's just no escaping light and shadow -- it's everywhere you look. Everything you see reflects light and casts some sort of shadow. Visually, light and shadow help us make sense of what we see and help us understand texture, dimension and perspective.

So, as we try to make our designs on the Web more natural, moving and intuitive, a good understanding of light and shadow is pretty important. Here are 5 ways to better use light and shadow to polish your page designs and make them stand out on the screen.

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[Ask SM] Transparent Background, Positioning Problem

This is our fifth installment of Ask SM, featuring reader questions about Web design, focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this post we’ll cover how you can style only the text inputs, refreshing a content-block automatically, how to avoid some positioning problems and create and use transparent div-backgrounds; we also discuss further CSS-related problems and deliver answers to a couple of quickfire questions.

If you have a question about CSS or JavaScript, feel free to reach me (Chris Coyier) via one of these methods: a) send an email to ask [at] smashingmagazine [dot] com with your question; b) Post your question in our forum or c) if you have a quick question, just tweet us @smashingmag or @chriscoyier with the hashtag #asksmcss.

Please note: I will do what I can to answer questions, but I will certainly not be able to answer all of them. However, I hope you use the forums to post questions because that gives you the best opportunity to get help from the community.

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10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software's appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress' power with hacks.

Today, let's do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, we won't just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you'll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves.

The problem. Because Twitter has become a social media revolution, many bloggers and Twitter users enjoy sharing blog posts they have found and liked on Twitter. However, manually creating a TinyURL before tweeting can get a little tedious. As you probably know, Twitter can bring a lot of traffic to your blog, so it is in your interest to consistently provide short URLs to your readers.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress
• 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks
• 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

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Handy Tweaks To Make GIMP Replace Photoshop

GIMP is the favorite graphics editing program of many designers and graphic artists. It is free and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (the two big reasons for its popularity). It has a wide array of features, as well as plug-ins, filters and brushes. Documentation is primarily available in online communities, as well as through extensive add-ons.

GIMP was never designed to replace Photoshop, yet with every release, it comes a little closer to being able to do so. It can be used to author graphics, create logos and edit photos, as well as make short animations (using GAP). Despite these features, the open-source app is a foreign world for many users switching from Photoshop. Familiar tools are missing, menus are laid out differently and tasks must be accomplished in unknown ways.

This article discusses eight tweaks to make GIMP a more serious Photoshop replacement option. Version 2.6 was used to test the following tweaks, but past versions of the app should work as well.

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10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques

Complex design techniques are often time-consuming and, well, complex. Some of these advanced effects can add plenty of depth to designs, but when used in the wrong place, they do little more than distract viewers from the project's intended focus. These effects may be precisely what a design needs to have the impact it requires, but even in these cases, they should be complemented by simpler effects.

Simple effects and techniques are the building blocks of today's designs. For example, what good is a stellar lighting technique if you can't decide which colors to use or which text-based effects to use in conjunction with the effect?

With a "less is more" mentality, we've selected 10 very simple and impressive design techniques that can drastically improve the performance and appearance of your designs.

For more techniques, you may want to look at our previous articles:

• 12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design
• Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques

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5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.

There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.

If your core demographic is women between the ages 35 and 65 who have an annual income of $60,000+, you would treat them different than the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. First and foremost in e-tail: forcing your visitor to think is a bad idea. When creativity stops being subjective and can be measured by a dollar amount, making sure you're designing for the customer is a no-brainer.

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12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design

Last week, we presented 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques, the first part of our review of useful design trends in modern Web applications. Among other things, we highlighted embedded video blocks, specialized controls and context-sensitive navigation. We also encouraged designers to disable pressed buttons, use shadows around modal windows and link to the sign-up page from the log-in page.

This post presents the second part of our review: 12 useful techniques for good user interface design in Web apps. We also discuss how to implement these techniques so that they are properly used. Please feel free to suggest further ideas, approaches and coding solutions in the comments below.

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

• Web Design Trends For 2009
• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
• 10 Principles Of Effective Design
• Five More Principle Of Effective Design

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45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience

JavaScipt libraries have made huge leaps and bounds in helping developers write code and develop products more quickly. jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with powerful tools that improve the user’s interaction with Web applications. jQuery has an additional advantage in that it allows developers to select elements on a page using CSS-like syntax.

To help you take it up a notch, we share below some methods that can help you give visitors to your website an amazing user experience. Here are over 45 impressive jQuery plug-ins and techniques that have been recently created and that could make the development of your next website an easier and more interesting experience than the last.

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

• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
• 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques
• 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding
• 60 More AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding

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Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3

There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design. These features include CSS styling rules that are being released with the upcoming CSS3 specification.

Realistically, you won't be able to use these on your everyday client projects for another few years, but for design blogs and websites aimed at the Web design community, these features can help you push the boundaries of modern Web design today, adding that extra spice to your design and helping the industry move forward. Here are five techniques snatched from the future that you can put into practice in your website designs today.

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10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here's my collection of 10 that I think you'll find useful in your work. They're not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects. Without further ado, let's get started.

Links (or anchors) are inline elements by default, which means that their clickable area spans only the height and width of the text. This clickable area, or the space where you can click to go to that link's destination, can be increased for greater usability. We can do this by adding padding and, in some cases, also converting the link into a block element.

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Online Advertising And Its Impact On Web Design

In recent years, advertising has become a major revenue source for many websites. Not too long ago, online ads were often met with disapproval from visitors, and advertisers were unsure about their value or effectiveness. Today, most visitors have come to expect ads on commercial websites, and advertisers have recognized the potential of various online ad opportunities. Ads have long been a part of print publications, such as magazines and newspapers, and now they essentially have the same role in online periodicals and publications.

Although advertising is a concern for website owners and those pushing products or services, it is also has an impact on Web designers, because they have to be able to design and develop websites that can produce ad revenue and still meet the needs of visitors. Clients with websites that depend on ad revenue need a design that provides the necessary screen space and a proper layout for selling ads, and advertisers need placement that will get them the exposure they seek.

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10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

RSS is one of those technologies that are extremely simple yet extremely powerful. Currently, RSS is the de facto standard for blog syndication, and it is used widely in both personal and corporate settings; for example, in blogs. And because a large percentage of these blogs run on WordPress, we'll cover in this post some (hopefully) relatively unknown but useful RSS-related tricks and hacks that will help you use RSS in a more effective way — and without unnecessary and chunky WordPress plug-ins.

Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing. Thus, you can make sure your WordPress theme remains under your control and is not bloated with some obscure source code.

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50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography

Tilt-shift photography is a creative and unique type of photography in which the camera is manipulated so that a life-sized location or subject looks like a miniature-scale model. Below, we present 50 beautiful examples of tilt-shift photography. All examples are linked to their sources. We strongly encourage you to explore other works of the photographers we’ve featured in this post.

To add good miniature effect to your photographs, shoot subjects from a high angle (especially from the air). It creates the illusion of looking down at a miniature model. A camera equipped with a tilt-shift lens, which simulates a shallow depth of field, is essentially all you need to start.

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

• Beautiful Examples Of High-Speed Photography
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures
• 45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos

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Image Caption Design: Simply Elegant or Boldly Graphic?

Image captions are an often-overlooked element of Web design. They’re often thought of more in terms of function than form. As long as they include the proper photo credits or identifying information about the image subject, not much more thought is given to them.

But image captions are a great place to add a bit more style to your website or to give some unique insight into the subject of the image. Whether the captions are for photos on a news website or design samples in a portfolio, they present an opportunity for reinforcing the overall look of the website. When done properly, they can even add more visual interest and become a distinguishing trademark of a particular brand or website.

There are two basic kinds of photo captions. There is the simple, minimalist, down-to-business style. These usually have a simple sans-serif font in white, black or shades of gray. They are usually positioned either to the side or below an image, though sometimes they overlay or are above it. This type is commonly found on news websites but is also seen in portfolios and other websites.

The other major style is more graphic. This often include effects, such as the caption only appearing on a mouse-over or a “Details” button displayed that leads to the full caption. While fonts are still generally sans-serif, much more color is used, and the captions are often overlaid on the actual image. These types of image captions are generally seen on portfolio websites of designers and ad agencies. Of course, there are websites that use a crossover-type image caption, displaying elements of both styles.

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40 Photoshop Tutorials On Rain Showers and Water Drops

With fall just around the corner, designers are looking for ways to complement their work with Fall imagery like water droplets, rain on leaves and fall rain showers. Including rain or water drops in a scene can be a nice effect because water is a very compelling element. As you’ll see in the tutorials below, water drops and rain can completely change the dynamic of a design or photo.

Adding the illusion of water and rain to photographs using Photoshop can be a bit tricky. Many times the effect feels forced and cheesy, as if you’re looking at a grainy picture instead of an authentic rain shower. The tutorials below will give any designer inspiration for incorporating water scenes in fall designs and showcase some amazing water work by excellent designers. You’ll learn how to create realistic photos.

Here are some other tutorials and Photoshop tutorials from Smashing Magazine:

• 50 Photoshop Tutorials for Sky and Space
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

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