Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

CSS3 is the technology behind most of the eye-catching visuals on the Web today, but the official documentation can be dry and hard to follow. Luckily, The Book of CSS3 distills the heady technical language of the CSS3 specification into plain English, so you can get started on your next project right away.

With real-world examples and a focus on results, The Book of CSS3 shows you how to transform ordinary text into stunning, richly detailed web pages fit for any browser. You’ll master the latest cutting-edge CSS features, like multi-column layouts, borders and box effects, and new color and opacity settings. You’ll also learn how to:

• Stylize text with fully customizable outlines, drop shadows, and other effects
• Create, position, and resize unlimited background images on the fly
• Spice up static web pages with event-driven transitions and animations
• Apply 2D and 3D transformations to text and images
• Use linear and radial gradients to create smooth color transitions
• Tailor a website’s appearance to smartphones and other devices

From the simplest blog layout to the most feature-rich web portal, The Book of CSS3 puts the whole wide world of web design at your fingertips. The future of web design is now—what will you create with it? Download Now »

Book Description

Whether you’re just starting out in web development or you’d like to update your existing skills, this book gets you off to a fast start! In fact, in just the first 6 chapters, you’ll learn more about web development than you can from most full books. By the end of this crash course, you’ll be developing web pages the professional way, with HTML or XHTML for the content and CSS for the formatting and page layout. That includes sophisticated page layouts that require the use of the box model, floating, and positioning.In section 2, you’ll learn all the other skills that you need for developing web pages. Those skills include how to develop forms that are submitted to web servers, how to add audio or video to a page, how to use a style sheet for printing, how to develop pages for mobile devices…everything you need for modern web pages. You’ll also learn how to take your web pages to the next level by using tested JavaScript code for effects like image rollovers and slide shows.

In the last section, now that you know how to develop web pages, you’ll learn how to design an entire web site using today’s best practices. You’ll also learn how to deploy your web site, and how to get it into the major search engines and directories. When you’re done, you’ll have all the perspective and skills you need to develop professional web pages.

About the Author
Anne Boehm has over 30 years of experience as an enterprise programmer. She got started with Visual Basic in the days of VB5, and has been programming on .NET since its inception. Download Now »

Book Description

If you want to design intuitive and engaging web sites, apps, print materials or products, then you need to know the psychology that underlies people’s behavior. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People explores both the foundational and the latest research in the psychology of the conscious mind and applies it to design. What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen? What is more important, peripheral vision or central vision? How much information is too much at one time? How do you motivate people to continue on to the next step? What line length should you use if you want people to read text on or offline? What about color? Imagery? Does font type really matter? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers.

This book is not just a set of guidelines, but a deep dive into what makes people tick. Dr. Weinschenk shares the psychology research and shows lots of examples so that you can design intuitive and engaging print, web, applications and products that match the way people think, work, and play.

About the Author
Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and a 30-year career in applying psychology to the design of technology. She has written several books on user-centered design. Her 2008 book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?, published by New Riders, applies the research on neuroscience to the design of web sites. A popular speaker and presenter, her nickname is “The Brain Lady”. She is Chief of User Experience Strategy, Americas, at Human Factors International, and runs a popular blog: Whatmakesthemclick.net. Download Now »

Book Description

It’s been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens.

In this how-to companion to Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out an approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don’t Make Me Think, “It’s not rocket surgery”.)

In this new book, Steve explains how to:

• Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning web site or application
• Keep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all)
• Fix the problems that you find, using his “The least you can do” approach

By paring the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials (A morning a month, that’s all we ask ), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it’s still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don’t Make Me Think so popular.

Download Now »

Book Description

Templates in OpenCart provide a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want either using a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain templates, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and customize templates to meet your needs perfectly.

Get to grips with the basics of template design for OpenCart such as changing the logo and altering color schemes for your templates. Understand OpenCart concepts such as module chrome and template positions. Create custom error templates for your website. Style OpenCart’s search results and customize OpenCart’s breadcrumb trail. Customize the look and feel of your OpenCart website’s administration panel to match either your business or client identity. Use the jQuery JavaScript library to enhance your OpenCart template. Make use of a wide range of miscellaneous tips, tricks, and tasks to help get your OpenCart website one step closer to perfection. Create custom menus using multiple approaches and techniques.

First we will install OpenCart. Then we will get familiar with the ways to modify the store configuration. After that we will start styling our OpenCart store by resetting all the browser settings. We will create a banner image step by step. We will control the positioning of our OpenCart modules. We will see how we can use different jQuery plugins to display our products effectively. We will also cover several modern footer creation recipes in this book. Towards the end of the book we will use different eye-catching menus for our store so it really starts to take shape. Finally we will learn how to create an error page and a sitemap page for our store. Download Now »

Book Description

Mastering Photoshop for Web Design is the third book in our eBook series, and it’s definitely the best eBook we’ve published so far. It was written from scratch by our regular writer Thomas Giannattasio, exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. We are very proud of the result, in particular because of the high quality of tips, ideas and techniques that Thomas—who is a deep expert in Adobe Photoshop—presents in his book.
All chapters have undergone a careful technical review by well-known designer, illustrator and speaker Elliot Jay Stocks. The book was proofread by our regular proofreader Andrew Lobo, and it has an attractive layout. The PDF can be printed and read on all devices.

The book contains eight chapters:

• Color Management: Colors can appear lighter or darker, more or less saturated, cooler or warmer, or just plain wrong depending on the user’s environment. This can be quite a problem, especially with a client’s brand-specific colors. As Web designers, our responsibility is to ensure that the experiences we craft are as true to the original as possible.
• Paths: While Illustrator’s vector tools are much more powerful, Photoshop’s benefit lies in its ability to blend vector and raster data together seamlessly. Because Photoshop documents are based on a pixel grid, the path tools in Photoshop make them superior to Illustrator for designing on-screen media. Download Now »