Thought to update people within the circle of web design and web development. Most of them are on twitter anyway and if you are not following please follow websitedesignuk and get updates. You might find it more amusing if you follow those being followed by websitedesignuk for example Smashing Magazine, Abduzeedo and many more.

There are couple of businesses, I know of, that have used twitter as a business tool and I mean successfully used it and not just to post updates about their websites. Well everyone is saying that twitter is useful for business but no one can precisely tell what it can do and how to use it to get most out of it. A session being held at Regus Manchester by Speaker Dirk Singer will be focusing on aspects of how people got twitter wrong and what we need to learn from them. Its good to know that people are interested in learning these kind of things. Now look at the cost of this session £75 + VAT (considering VAT is going to be 20% from 2011). This is ridiculous and I don’t think anyone who wants to use twitter as marketing tool or perhaps expansion will be looking to spend this much for couple of hours talk. If you compare this with Flash Camp Manchester which is basically more oriented to Flash Platform, Flex and Adobe Air is FREE for anyone interested. Its from 12Pm to 8PM which makes sense for students and for those working full time. This is being held on 8th July and I think more beneficial as compared to enterprise twitter. For more events like these and those please visit Crains Manchester Business Website

Changing my topic to FIFA 2010 where most of the buzz and likes from Facebook are going. Look at fifa.com match list links and buzz traffic. Its massive and from my experience you can really follow whole match pass by pass on Google wave. With the power of social networking most of this can be achieved very quickly. Who will tame this beast. Any ideas?

Welcome Qadir as he has recently joined our team of designers. Visit http://qadir.webricate.com for his complete portfolio and commercial projects. If you need any design work done at fair price where everyone is happy then do get in touch with Website Design UK and keep smiling.

Most of new web designers and web developers think they can simply open up Dreamweaver and start coding CSS and HTML. The moment you start coding without planning, basically you are making sure that your design looks unprofessional. You should know how to use these tools and yes you should be quick in using shortcuts and any other enhanced features to get yourself organised and get your design or website rolling in less time however success depends on a lot more factors. Most important of those factors is planning. Planning is most of the time more than 80 percent of work.

Planning:

I have included a couple of videos emphasising on importance of planning here. These are not kind of moral lectures but they show you how to create a wireframe and how it can boost your design skills. Ok lets roll it out.

Well Here’s another one showing exactly how its done.

So now you know how its done all you have to do is wait for your next project or design. Do practice it on small projects. The misconception that if your client is small you don’t plan and just do something that is quick and dirty solution. This ruins reputation which is hard earned if you know what I mean.

Do we need anything else than planning. Maybe you can have a look at some tools for making wireframes.

If you plan and do it properly it will have high probability of success. I am keeping this post short just so people can get the idea of what I am talking about.

This was shared by some friends and thought to put it on my blog in case I am not able to find direct link to it. We are still on mercy of Youtube to watch it and of course on mercy of uploading user. Anyway some real things that are going to change the real world.

Have a look at some of the comments on Youtube and people are more concerned about who is going to take over the world however I think more or less the harmful thing for any country is its people in power. From past its clear that whoever has gained power is scared of losing it at some stage and none of the presidents are happy to become prime ministers while every governor has a dream of being president. This race is similar to watching 100 meter run where everybody is cheating and pushing each other, you wont be watching them running but fighting close to starting line.

Watch this…A talented…web administrator working while doomed office users try to “get help out of” (simply annoy) him with “The website is down”

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One of the great videos found while looking for IT blunders on web servers. Be cautious of the game play and some strong language including desktop icon arrangements. This is more of a listen-to-me-and-comprehend video so adjust your volume and turn other noise down. Also get your brain ready to state-of-audio-conversion-to-normal-voice if you want to understand most of the funny parts. This one is really from one hell of a web server admin guy who can control server with his joystick.

While I am working on setting up my office desk and networks I thought to make a quick wallpaper for next month. Thout sharing it would be a great idea. So here is your 1024x768 resolution wallpaper. Click on Thumbnail to view image and set it as background.

Current supported resolution 1024 x 768 but it will work for slightly different resolutions and widescreen monitors. If you need PSD file and used fonts, these will be available after the launch of webricate.com which is not far in future. More wallpapers and design work will be made available as we progress through our library for webricate.com.

Was getting into one of the competition to create custom brush and generate a 640x480 image to use it with any font from online. Did this all in 7 minutes and won a wrist watch. Sale stamp is a custom brush and leaves lookalike are also a custom brush generated from a custom shape and motion blur filter. Will upload brushes for free later.

Matt Cutts from Google Webmaster Tools giving his traditional mixed answer to this question.

Watch this!