Cairns Web Design

For the majority of non-profit organizations, online fund-raising has become one of the most important sources of income, especially the last 10 years. Designing an inspiring and appealing donation page can certainly make a big difference in converting large numbers of visitors into donors. But, unfortunately many non-profit organizations simply overlook this much more mundane aspect of online appeal while paying loads of attention and time in developing innovative and inspirational online content. In this round-up, we are showcasing some exceptionally designed donation pages for your inspiration.

1. Save the Children

This website has a very sleek design with beautifully designated avenues intended for assistance. There are plenty of courses of action for users that could have made it a cluttered mess, but the design keeps it all very well-organized.

2. Keep a Child Alive

This sleek design makes use of large buttons with a variety of ways to contribute to the mission. A slight grungy effect is used in order to highlight areas of the page. Overall the design is simple and impressive.

3. Manna FoodBank

In this website, you can see the use of a natural color scheme that fits with their mission. The call to action button with the slightest change in color definitely stands apart.

4. Red Nose Day

The Red Nose Day site makes use of a simple two-tone color scheme that symbolizes the passion for the mission. The red colors spreading through the donation page drive people to take action.

5. Oxfam

Here the design of the donation page focuses the entire attention on the obligatory mission and calls to the readers.

6. Habitat For Humanity

The design of this website’s donation page is simple and clutter free; and focuses only on the mission.

7. Witness

The Witness donation page is mainly covered with the text and relevant information with a nicely designed call to action button that is placed right at the upper right corner.

8. Make-A-Wish

In this web design, although it is constructed well, there is a lack of distinction for its calls. The blue turns out to be rather awe-inspiring with the amount of information it contains.

9. American Heart Association

This stylish donation page mainly draws the attention of their users towards the calls. They picked their color scheme quite smartly and the subtle uses of white with the blue definitely look great.

10. Giving to Johns

Giving to Johns Hopkins pushes their cause with a very stylish and appealing donation page that stands out mainly because of its alluring contrast in colors on the header and call to action button.

11. Doctors without Borders

This design of a donation page stands out in our collection as it utilized tabbed windows in order to separate the different paths that users can take to dig in.

12. ASPCA

Here is another example of a subtle donation page. ASPCA uses purple for their calls that truly stands out from the overall orange design colors. With such a soft coloring, ASPCA imparts a sense of comfort that in turn eases the readers into the cause and taking action.

13. Susan G. Komen for the Cure

Susan G. Komen for the Cure website uses a brilliant color scheme that symbolizes their true passion for the mission.

14. Natural Resources Defense Council

The Natural Resources Defense Council uses a very simple approach. They bring overly large and bold call to action buttons into play that make their donation page stands out from the rest. This no frills approach puts pure focus on the mission.

15. Invisible Children

The Invisible Children donation page is as inspiring and touching as their mission is. In order to connect with their mission effectively, they utilize large images of the children the world tends to overlook.

16. Donate Life California

This is a somewhat unusual design for a donation page but this one really stands out from the rest of the site because of its pink calls to action buttons.

17. Charity: Water‘s

With the help of this understated design, Charity: Water‘s keeps their donation page extremely simple and focuses only on the mission.

18. Humane Society‘s

Large images and bold buttons are used to draw the users’ attention towards the main cause and convince them to take action.

19. Action for Children

This website has an attention-grabbing, large and appealing call to action area. This call to action area offsets the donation area satisfactorily and efficiently pulls the reader to it.

20. MJFF

MJFF brings warm and inviting colors into play in order to engage their readers. The color scheme works well and the gradient on the actual donate button makes it stand out.

21. The Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy uses a quite unusual approach for their donation page. They placed two subtle calls under the header where users are likely to expect the navigation to be.

22. Kiva

Kiva has a very simple, sleek donation page that focuses on several routes to help users. The boldly colored call to action buttons are truly attention grabbing.

23. Operation Warm

Here you will notice a nice, friendly color scheme that varies throughout the page. Though the main calls to action mix together with a majority of the site because they are the same color while the secondary calls are a bit more obvious because they break from the blue.

24. Mozilla

Mozilla features a delicate donation page design with an innovative header that accompanies their website. Their fans and users can donate to keep their mission active.

25. Network for Good

Network for Good has got a fantastic design that possesses three courses of action that their readers may pursue. Each of them holds a large, attention-grabbing call to action button.

26. Virgin Money Giving

Here is a unique donation page that is divided into categories in order for users to find the kind of charitable organization they are seeking to support.

27. Planned Parenthood‘s

Here a form is used for the main appeal with more subtle calls placed in the upper right corner. Overall the design is simple and effective leading the reader into the ‘action center’.

28. World Food Programme

World Food Programme uses a very subtle design for their website with an online form to help their users donate for their cause to keep it alive.

29. Red

In this web design, you will see minimalism in a new style as this donation page features overly large typographical elements that truly work well to draw the users’ attention to the action areas.

30. Amnesty International

Amnesty International design of the donation page focuses the entire attention on the obligatory mission and calls to the readers.

31. Dalit Freedom Network

Dalit Freedom Network uses a very natural and earthy color scheme that works well with their mission along with eye catching and appealing call to action buttons.

32. Take The Walk

The boldly colored call to action buttons in this design truly stand out from the other donation page designs. The color scheme is also very appealing.

33. Practical Family Living

Another excellent example of a subtle donation page design that works very well for the mission. All the design elements are in perfect balance making this design stand out.

34. Housing Works

What makes this design stand out is its excellent color contrast as well as call to action button. Housing Works pushes their cause with an extremely trendy and tempting donation page.

35. Children’s Rights

Children’s Rights donation page is designed by keeping the overall design simple and clutter free. The call to action button is moderately sized and positioned at the center of the page.

37. Project Rescue Foundation

In this web design, you will see a unique approach for designing donation pages. An online form is also there to help you donate to their cause.

38. Custodial Abuse

Here they use a large image to connect with their cause in a simple but effective way as they are working for a very sensitive cause.

38. Memphis Zoo

This rather remarkable design for a donation page truly stands out from the rest of the site due to its excellent and vividly colored calls to action button.

Have you ever thought that the reason behind you not getting any design jobs is not the amount of skills you have, but the résumé you send to companies? Think that when companies post job openings hundreds of applications come in day by day and the HR manager needs to sort the bad ones out first. What if your résumé, even if you are a great designer, fails to make the second round?

The goal of the companies is to determine if you really are the person on your résumé, and they do this by first looking at your basic skills. Most of the hiring staff only want to contact applicants on the phone, because this is easier for them and more effective, so they will try to get you on the phone soon after your CV passes the initial basic requirements.

They also look at how dynamic a person is and try and determine a bit about their personality – previously working in groups is an advantage, as graphic and web designers have to do this every day at their jobs. If your personality and the basic skills get the OK, then the HR manager will probably ask technical employees more about your coding skills. Although it is a very quick process, it all starts with your résumé and if the one you submit is not good enough, you will never get a phone or direct interview.

1. Tell them where to find you

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I do not mean your home address – this is something you should have in your CV anyway. I’m talking about your portfolio. If I want to hire somebody, I definitely do not want to spend time searching for him on Google. I am not hired to do this, if you are not smart enough to provide it yourself, your CV goes to the shredder. List your web page in the header of your résumé, so it is the first thing the hiring staff notices.

Keep in mind you also need to show your work. If you say you are good in HTML5, the company needs to be able to be convinced before you will be called for an interview.

2. Follow people to stay in touch

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An important asset of a job candidate in the design field is to be in touch. It is important to use websites for inspiration, to follow other fellow designers on Twitter and exchange opinions with developers. Many companies ask during the interview who you follow in the design industry, either on Twitter, Dribble, Facebook or other media. I am not saying you should prepare an answer only for the sake of it, I am saying you should actually follow people in the industry.

Another question you might get asked is what did you do in the last year to become a better designer. This is a key one because it will show your potential employer you are really interested in what you do and are passionate about it. Moreover, it will show you continuously work to improve yourself and this is something managers like to hear. You can take different courses on the internet or pay for subscriptions on Lynda.com. Code School and A Book Apart are some other great resources you can use.

Image by Lifetracks volunteer group.

Your résumé should show that you are interested and look to grow as a designer or developer. You should be able to adapt to new techniques and show that you always have a hand on what is new in the industry.

3. Notice the job description

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When applying for a graphic designer job, knowing ASP.net doesn’t help too much. It is an advantage, but it is not what you will be evaluated on. It is a good idea to write a personalized cover letter for each job you apply for; make sure it is unique and reflects why you wish to work for that company in that specific opening. Although you think they will not, I assure you HR managers notice when people send mass e-mails, so as said before, avoid doing it. You can create a good, strong impression if you write a unique e-mail to each job posting – as a matter of fact, as all of them are different, it would be stupid to send the same application to all of them.

4. No signs of experience

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How do you expect to get a job if you have no experience in the field you apply for? I am sure there are job openings for inexperienced people, but they do not mean newbies. If the work you did before is not something you are entirely proud of, you can always create your own project. Use your skills to create a template and sell it on ThemeForest or any other similar website. Do you have a lot of client work that doesn’t show your creativity? It’s never impossible to make something on your own – a hiring manager will appreciate the fact that you design in your free time as well. If you think your portfolio can be improved, do it before sending out your résumé.

Image by Susanne13.

5. Show you are a designer

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When you send out a CV for an engineer job, it can be a basic word format with no template. But when you apply for a design job, why not put your creativity skills to work and make a great template for your résumé? If you are able to design a stunning template for your CVs, this will scream creativity, care and attention to details and will move you to the top of the list right away. If you don’t have time for this, use a digital tool such as Zerply. The templates they offer look great and the portfolios uploaded there are very easy to maintain. Another tip is to send PDFs instead of Word documents and sending out your whole website (if it works as a classic résumé) can be effective as well.

Conclusion

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These were only a few basic tips to improve your CV. Remember that while there is no direct contact between you and the company, the résumé is the only piece of work that will bind the two of you. It is always worth spending two hours on building a stunning CV than using two hours for sending out default templated résumé.

Keep in mind you need to show creativity and willingness to improve and your résumé will pass into the second round. Now if you are a good designer and have the necessary skills, you will pass through the third round and will be able to meet the hiring manager in person. But tips for a face-to-face interview another time…

Until next time, let’s stir up a discussion here. Do you have some other tips to give all of us for improving our CV?

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

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Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

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  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

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  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

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  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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You don’t like working for others and wish others worked for you? Are you also attracted to the idea of working with lots of people and multiple personalities? Then going for your own design company is something you might want to look into.

Starting a web design business might seem something anybody can do, but is definitely a difficult task. Note that this discussion is purely theoretical, if you wish to read a real opinion, then find someone who owns such a company and ask him how it was in the beginning.

The difficult part about starting your own company is that you need to be patient – the good stuff comes to those who wait. It is a long-term commitment and results might not come right away. Actually, it might be a bumpy ride up until the results come; or worse, they might not come at all and you will fail miserably.

Image by kristja.

In the beginning it sounds nice. You are your own boss, make lots of money and do pretty much nothing besides sign papers. This might be the life of huge company owners (although I would like the right to disagree), but it will not be yours. You might have to work even more than your own employees, you will not really make that much money and yes, you will be your own boss, but the clients you work with will still decide whether or not to hire you – they have the money, right?

Statistics say 80% of new businesses disappear within their first year. It takes a lot of determination and it is not the path to take for people without drive and stamina. If you’re still reading and think you have a fairly good chance of being one of the 20%, then continue reading, this is for you.

Owning a company

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Great, are you ready to embark on this journey? Then you need to know things will change for you. Your career will not be a 9-5 job and won’t even be similar to the bits of freelancing you experienced before. Expect to get a feeling of accomplishment when things happen as you wish them to – expect to put your head down and be disappointed when things don’t turn out the way you want. Now you are on the other side of a business. You control what is happening and you give jobs, order people around and decide on wages. Landing a big project will mean much more for you now than if you were working in an agency, where you just get assignments and, when you deliver them, you get new ones. Your life has changed!

Now you can also employ people and let them do your work, while you spend time with your family or doing whatever else you wish to. However, most designers or developers who start their own businesses have no, or a limited, amount of money in the beginning and choose to do some of the work themselves, to save up until they have a bigger budget. You will most definitely have to do this in the beginning, unless you find a partner who is willing to contribute to the finances.

Advantages of owning your business are many. You are able to schedule your own time and have more freedom to experiment; even more freedom to hang out with your friends. You get total control, price up jobs as you think and have a different feeling knowing this time everything you do is for your own purpose. You are in charge of everything. But challenges arise at any minute too…

Get ready for problems

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The first part of the article was about the nice stuff. Now it comes the ugly. Just because you are a great web designer doesn’t mean you are a great entrepreneur. There is a whole new path for you to learn and there is not much free time for you after you throw yourself out there. As in freelancing, you need to be able to motivate yourself and the ones you work with and be the boss, not just a friend or co-worker.

Unlike in a company, there is no one who takes care of other things for you. Unless you hire people for it, you will need to do the bookkeeping, taxes, client meetings, project presentations, project management and so on. This doesn’t allow too much time for hanging out with your friends.

Image by iprole.

Working on your time and whenever you want is an advantage – like in freelancing. But in both careers you need to be able to motivate yourself and start working right away instead of doing laundry or walking your dog. Also, you need to be good at following a schedule. If you slack off a day, the second day you will find yourself in a lot of trouble. Distractions are also something difficult to deal with, from social media to e-mails and, if you work from home, to kids and family members.

Maybe the most time-consuming task is email. This time you need to create them yourself; from scratch! There are no short answers to your project manager anymore. Now you are also in charge of communicating with the client and there is a reason why every company hires specialized people to do this – because it requires special skills. Now go and ask yourself, will you spend the necessary time to learn them or will you hire someone to handle the external communication? If you prefer to do it alone, get ready for some difficult challenges. Not every client is a joy to work with and you need to learn how to get the best out of them. Your job will be even more stressful if most of the clients are difficult to work with – and you probably already know most of them are difficult to work with.

Some good tips I can give you for when you decide to start your own design company is getting an accountant and focus on smaller tasks. Having an expert to keep control of all the stuff you have no idea about will pay off because it will allow you more time for the things you know how to do. It is not really possible to keep track of everything and doing both administrative and technical tasks will only give you sleepless nights.

If you are out there always looking for clients and you do it well, keep doing it and hire somebody at the office to actually turn the ideas into projects. Chasing clients and doing the work is quite impossible to do at the same time. It is possible for freelancers, as they have more free time than you do, but don’t forget – there is no real free time for you in the following months or even years. On the other hand, if you’re really good at completing the design briefs, then do that and hire someone else on commission to land projects. All big companies have several departments for a reason: keep sales, finance, design and technology apart from each other.

What’s in for you later?

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Now we talk about the future. What are your opportunities in the future? Well, there are actually only two: success and failure, but we all know failure is never an option. Forcing yourself to be successful is the only way to actually reach your goals. If in the beginning you only run a business, in the future you have the opportunity to own it and hire people to run it – this is the dream, I would say. It is as far as it will go for you.

Image by cobrasoft.

You will pick up business skills along the road that might help you get back in with another agency. If at some point in time you wish to start working again, nobody will reject you – with the experience of leading a small project to running a company everybody will be delighted to have you around.

If you fail, however, the only thing you can do is go back to an agency or freelance. You can still have the company on your CV, but is it really worth? How likely are you to get a job if you state your small business failed? If you disagree with this, you are more than welcome to share your opinion with us; I would love to hear them.

Bottom line

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Well, now you’ve heard it all. You know what is good about owning your own business and you know what challenges to expect. I would be glad to hear that some of you still want to pursue your dream or maybe start or continue on this path. I can’t wait to hear about your results.

Until next time, let’s hear your opinions on the topic…

Time to Ruby dooby do! It can take a lot of time, and be quite boring, to learn a new programming language. A .Net developer will jump up and say why should I even learn it? I am a professional .Net developer and my day job doesn’t give me time (and scope) to learn a new programming language. But, it isn’t like that. You learn a lot with new programming languages especially when they are a refined version of other optimized ones. Ruby is that sort of language. I agree that the transition from being a noob developer (in a particular programming language) to a pro is arduous but you will appreciate the experience. As of now all that I can do is let you guys know that if you stick around with Ruby then you won’t be at a loss. Just be positive.

Note: Consider this article to be a very basic discussion on Ruby (the programming language) and Rails (an application framework). My basic goal is to introduce you to Ruby and give you that initial push which is required when learning a programming language.

What is Ruby?

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Ruby, as I said before, is a refined combination of various programming approaches. Ruby is the perfect mixture of python’s easy to understand flow, Smalltalk’s elegance and Perl’s easy to learn syntax style. Ruby is a high level object-oriented programming language (as is the case with most of the programming languages these days) which came into existence in mid 1990s in Japan. With time Ruby has started to become more dominant in the U.S. and Europe too.

Ruby is famous for its dynamic type system and automatic memory management. By dynamic type I mean that most of the type checking in a Ruby program is done during run time which means you don’t have to worry about integer and string types. Ruby will do that for you. We will see more about this in a short example later.

The basic purpose of launching Ruby was to make it easy for humans to interact with machines and understand codes. Yukihiro Matsumoto, the father of Ruby, insists that Ruby was designed for programmer productivity and not for machine optimization.

Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves. – Yukihiro Matsumoto

What is Rails?

Rails is an extremely productive application framework written in Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson. It is said that developing a web application on Rails is ten times faster when compared to that of a Java based web application framework. Rails is open source (of course!) Ruby based framework that can be used for easy (and fast) database integration.

Rails is famous for over-the-top ideas which resulted in shunning conventions and picking up dynamic programming structure. The basic application code and the updated database will always contain everything that Rails will require to execute a program from start to finish.

A Basic Ruby Program

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See how interesting (and easy) things will get after this:

Code:
personal = “I don’t love my girlfriend”
puts personal

Output:
I don’t love my girlfriend

Yep! That will actually be it to print an output in console. No initialization, semicolons and main methods.

Now, let us see a quick difference in programming between PHP and Ruby when we have to reverse a string:

PHP:
strrev(“string”);

Ruby:
“string”.reverse

Voila! Your string will be reversed in no time. See the difference in effort in both the programming languages. A Ruby based programming language will make it easy for you to write a program. It is more like writing in English than in coded language. It is the future of programming languages.

Advantages of sticking with Ruby (and Rails)

I know the world of Ruby is big and I haven’t scratched the surface of it but a blog post will prove to be overly small to dive into the world of Ruby. Henceforth, let us directly go through the advantages of Ruby:

• Elegant - As I have pointed out before, this happens to be the strength of Ruby. As a programming language Ruby is super elegant and almost like English. It is this similarity to English that makes it easy for noobs to take on Ruby without being afraid of it.
• Concise and Powerful - Our example above itself explains how concise a Ruby code can be. As short as it can get. Also, Ruby is as powerful as any other language as it is Object Oriented High Level Programming Language just like other trendy programming languages.
• Never Reinvents the Cycle - Rails (based on Ruby) is one programming interface that will never let you reinvent the cycle. It generates codes that can be reused over and over.
• Built in Testing - Rails is famous for its harness and fixtures which act as supporting codes that will make it easier for programmers to write their test cases. Also, Rails creates simple test stubs that can be extended by programmers.
• Dev, Test and Prod Environments - Rails smartly starts your project in three different environments namely Dev, Test and Prod. All three environments behave a little differently from each other and each complement the original software development life cycle.

The Showcase

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Now, let us go through some of the websites (really famous ones) that are using the overall strengths of Ruby. You will see how designers are taking their websites places with the help of Ruby.

43Things

A List Apart

Basecamp

CrunchBase

Github

Groupon

Hulu

Scribd

Slideshare

Yellow Pages

Conclusion

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You are not done yet. You really aren’t. Hang around with Ruby and keep riding the journey on Rails. Someday you will call yourself a Ruby Pro and who knows, your article might just come in handy for me. Ruby has its disadvantages and the most obvious of them all is the that it is very new to this game. It is still evolving and has a lot to prove. Still, we know that it is going to go places. Now, it is in our hands. Either we can wait and let it grow or else jump in and evolve as an expert when their is high demand for Ruby professionals.

Did you know that every second delay on page loading results in a 7% reduction of conversion rate?

Actually you lose 7% (maybe even more!) of sales without even noticing… Sounds bad, huh?

I mean, you work carefully to put things in the right place, good call-to-actions, nice design, spend a few bucks with ads.. And then you lose 7% of sales just because you forgot to minify your CSS. We’ll, this is not going to happen again.

We’ll put every future project that you work on a diet. And this one, won’t wait for next monday, or next january

Here we’ll see amazing tips to reduce your files size and increase your site performance without affecting important things like image quality or a files readability for future edits.

Grab your meter and let’s rock!

Every Second Counts

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Before the practical stuff, I would like to share with you a few numbers about page loading X users satisfaction.

I saw this infographic several months ago, but it’s still amazing. Click on it to see all the data, here’s what I liked most:

• If you hit 4 seconds of page loading you have 25% abandonment increase
• About 80% of users expect mobile pages to take almost the same amount of time as the desktop version

Credits: Kissmetrics

Image Optimizing – File formats & Tools

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So, the best way to optimize images starts with using the right file format. Basically we have 3 common formats for web (no, I won’t talk about .bmp, .svg, .tiff or anything else):

• JPEG – Really good for photos and bigger images
• GIF – Good for icons and images with fewer colors
• PNG – Good for small images with a lot of colors or when alpha channel is needed

This is really just the basics, there is a lot of particularities for each image type that we won’t be talking about (right now). But you should be good with this, when you are exporting a psd to code a layout you should use .jpg for photos or bigger backgrounds, use .gif for smaller elements or elements with a restricted color palette (like simple icons or replacements for common inputs) and png where you can’t lose any data or small colorful images.

I know many people say that png are bad and too big, but actually if you know how to use them they can give you a better effect (exactly what you designed) AND smaller or similar file size as gif or jpg.

Let’s see some tips for each image type:

JPG Minimizing

JPG does “lossy compression”. That means that its algorithm stores data using much less disk space but will also save less info about your original file. Once compressed it’s impossible to decompress .jpg files. Your best choice in this case is to always keep the original file safe and just save copies.

Ideal quality for jpg is pretty tricky, but most times you’ll be good with 60-80.

When you take photos your camera stores metadata about the photo that you may not use in future. Also image size is often bigger than your entire screen. So get rid of useless data and reduce your image to what you really need.

Irfranview is a small tool that can do this for you even as batch conversion for lots of files.

Recently I heard about an amazing tool, called JPEGmini. They have an amazing compression algorithm that works pretty much like our eyes do, so it makes what gets our attention higher quality and what doesn’t, lower. You should give it a try!

GIF Minimizing

GIF files have a really small color table, ranging between 2 and 256. 256 may sound a good figure, but when you realize that jpg has up to 16 million colors, 256 isn’t that good, huh?

What you can do to cut files size is to reduce their color palette. Above is an example where reducing a file from 128 to 64 colors we saved almost 30% of file size.

PNG Minimizing

PNG compression is similar to gif compression. You reduce the color palette and gain a few kbytes. In above example, png-24  instead of png-8, would be a huge file since it’s completely lossless, so you would have a perfect image, but pretty big.

The best part of png-24 is full alpha channel, but we can handle that. Image Alpha gives us full alpha channel over PNG-8, so we have much smaller files but pretty good-looking for overlays and advanced effects.

Code Compressors – HTML, CSS, JS

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Actually I’m not too much a code-compresser type. But images aren’t the only thing we should care about in our websites, HTML, CSS, JS files should be compressed too since they can eat precious bytes from your diet.

Let’s take a look at a few options:

minify – PHP solution

HTML Compressor

YUI compressor

HTML Minifier

Server caching

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Another good way to improve site loading is server-side caching. If you don’t use cache your page needs to be processed by the server every time it’s accessed, even if you don’t change your site for ages.

So, here are the best WordPress Caching plugins:

WP Super Cache

W3 Total Cache

DB Cache Reloaded Fix

GZip, a.k.a. Compression Like a Boss

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I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about zip files. Or maybe .rar files or .7z files. Well, GZip is an implementation of GNU Zip, which does pretty much the same thing as ZIP files, but gives you a really good compression rate.

The crazy idea here is to drastically reduce download time by sending users compressed files, instead of the uncompressed original ones, and their browser will handle the decompressing in much less time than if it had to download original files.

Your hard work here is to paste this code into you .htaccess file:

#Gzip
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>
#End Gzip

Then you’re done! Well, hope it doesn’t take you more than 5 minutes

Sometimes, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by how much there is to learn in this industry. If jQuery happens to be on your personal “need to learn soon” list, then I’m happy to announce my new course: “Learn jQuery in 30 Days”. If you’ll give me fifteen minutes a day for the next month, I’ll help you become a jQuery pro – and it’s free!

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How Does it Work?

Sporadically, your skills will be put to the test, when you take the interactive quizzes!

Once you enroll (free) via email, each day, you’ll receive a 10-15 minute video lesson. As you might expect, every episode will build upon the one it proceeds, and, sporadically, your skills will be put to the test, when you take the interactive quizzes!

Along the way, you’ll learn the essentials (querying and manipulating the DOM), while incrementally working your way up to more advanced topics, such as jQuery’s AJAX methods and plugin development.

I worked particularly hard to make the process of picking up this new skill as easy as possible for everyone – even if you have very, very little JavaScript experience. So…do you want to join me?

It appears that the world has just gotten better with the introduction of Content Management Systems like WordPress and their customizable themes, but in order to create a fully functioning WordPress theme you’ll need to be knowledgeable in both programming and design, right? Many people don’t have all the required knowledge and skills to build a custom theme from scratch, and that includes yours truly. There are many designers out there with great concepts for themes, but their works only remain as JPEGs or PSD files. Good thing there is Divine Elemente that can semi-automatize the conversion of your PSD to a functioning WordPress theme.

Don’t forget to read through, there’s a CONTEST waiting for you here. Winners will receive a  License key! We will be choosing 3 winners! Brought to you by Divine-Project.com.

Note: To begin with, you will be seeing a lot of product and service reviews from now on. I would just like to point out that we take this seriously and we review them absolutely for free when we deem the product to be very useful and innovative. If you are a developer or know someone who is, that has an awesome product/service then contact us!

Divine’s Elemente is a new program that is still under careful development and is definitely a one of a kind program that many designers have been dreaming of since WordPress became mainstream. Open Google and search “PSD to Theme” and you’ll end up seeing Divine-Project.com as the top result, followed by services like CodeMyConcept that you have to pay for.

Previously, the main go-to guy for designers are coders or services like CodeMyConcept. I have to admit that when I first heard about Elemente and what it does, I was skeptical. I mean, people once thought it would be quite impossible to use drag-and-drop software to create a website, right?

The first thing you need to have is the creativity to design, then you need to have Adobe Photoshop. Currently Elemente only supports Adobe Photoshop. When you already have your design in place, the only thing you need to do now is to convert it.

What I Like About Elemente

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1. It’s cool design. Black and aqua (pardon my ignorance, I can’t specifically name the colors). This is more of a personal opinion. I’ve grown tired of software interfaces having only black and white. Elemente’s design is refreshing, and sometimes even soothing.

2. Spoon feeding. No coding required. Literally everything you might write in a CSS or PHP file is already in here. Including adjusting the size of the template, size of the content area, header, and sidebar.

3. Solid documentation and an active online community.

4. You can literally create a WordPress theme in less than 5 minutes if you already have the design.

I have no problems with Elemente, aside from the pricing which I cannot afford, but that is just me. It only works on Windows, but there are talks that they’re working on making it available for Mac. Pricing starts from $139 for a personal license and $199 for Theme Developers, having unlimited website accounts and a 90% commission on the Themes Marketplace.

Wait, they have a Themes Marketplace? Yes. You can actually make a living just creating themes and selling them in the marketplace. You can even sell your themes on other marketplaces like ThemeForest, although I believe you’ll have to do some customizing to be in line with their guidelines.

Elemente is not hard to learn, all of the things you need to know are laid out in front of you, all you have to do is read first before trying anything or risk the chance of getting lost.

How it works

Below I will briefly walk you through the software.

On the screenshot below you will see that after clicking on “Create a Blog Layout”  I was welcomed by a built-in guide.

Step 1: Create a basic layout 

Choosing option 1 will lead to a default layout that is filled with elements you can find in most themes. There you can add and remove the elements that you won’t be needing. This part is pretty much full of clicking and tweaking, manipulating the layers. Do not be disheartened when you try it yourself, since you will only be looking at black and white text and cells. Remember that this part is where the skeleton of the theme is made.

Above you will see the main layout that you are free to edit. You can remove elements that you will not use on the theme. Sadly, I was confused at first so I will mention it now, that this is not the part where you move the elements around. Just leave them where they are.

Adjusting the Grid

This is where you adjust the size of the header, footer, post, sidebar, and content. I had fun playing with the sizes because it’s so easy!

Above the Grid blocks you will see “Create PSD”, this is what you’ll be clicking once you are satisfied with the adjustments you’ve made on both the grids and the elements of the design.

Adjusting the Elements

This part is where you adjust the elements shown on your layout. By checking and unchecking the items, you are adding and removing certain elements that you won’t be needing.

Step 2: Put graphics to groups

After laying out the skeleton of your theme, it is now time to place graphics. It’s pretty much a dress-up game where you apply the graphics to their designated places. Yes, that is all.

Above you will see how it works. The first image is the un-adjusted and the most basic layout which you can see on Step 1 under the name Billboard. The second image is the finished one, added with graphics. It’s just like tracing an image and making things fit.

Step 3: Adjust properties & publish

This is the part where you add the links, SEO stuff, ALT, CSS, meta information of your page, Google Analytics ID, change the background color if you fancy, margins, and a bunch of other stuff that can affect the entirety of your theme.

After publishing, your theme is now ready to go.

Free Themes created using Divine Elemente

2 muchwires

Download It Here

iPhone

Download It Here

But don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Elemente has a 30–day trial that you can use instantly, just download and install. Don’t forget to tell your friends about it, I’m pretty sure many will find it very useful!

Contest

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I know many of you have been waiting for this, and that many of that many actually just skipped through the whole thing above (I assure you, there’s a very vital piece of information in there that will make or break your chance to win a license key!).

How to join:

1. Register using our form below. Why? So that we’ll have an idea how many people will join and so that we can contact you for future design contests! Isn’t that cool?
2. Design your template using Adobe Photoshop
3. Download and install Elemente trial version
4. Run Elemente and convert your PSD to a working WordPress theme!
5. Submit your entry on or before February 18, 2012

• submit a zip file containing everything to rean [at] 1stwebdesigner dot com
• write your full name in the body of the email
• don’t forget to include your portfolio website (wow!)

Rules:

1. The design should be yours.
2. Only one entry per person.
3. Trolls will be banned from future contests.

How to Win:

After gathering enough submissions, we will be posting them here. The 3 submissions with the most votes will win a license key from Divine Project! So, how do you gather more votes? 1stwebdesigner.com receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, if you’re lucky, many people will see your design and vote for it. But it does not stop there, you can call on your friends to vote for you, provided they have Van Gogh’s eye for art!

Remember, this is the first contest of our explosive 2012!

Most freelancers out there work as a freelancer either because they are in need of a job or they want to increase their skills and improve their portfolio. But have you ever thought about the fact that all of us do it for money too? Now some of you might disagree with me and I fully encourage you to do it. Then I also encourage you to go out there and work for free, while marketing yourself as a volunteer designer. After three months come back to me and I am sure you will agree that you freelance for money. If we wouldn’t need money to survive, we would probably not work at all.

Now I am not saying all freelancers are focused on the money. Some of them are not even full-time freelancers, but do this as a hobby after their normal 9-5  job; but even they charge money.

Image by caltiva.

So you might ask yourself now and then, how much should I charge the client? Should I charge him by the hour or maybe a flat rate per project and should I ask for milestone payments or not? At some point you will find answer to all these questions and then the supreme one will come: how can I charge my clients more than I do now?

This is a difficult question to answer because the internet is a relative new domain thus unknown to many. Sometimes it is difficult to even convince the client that the sum you ask for is actually quite decent – how will you manage to convince them to pay even more?

Now I know many freelancers prefer to work for a lower fee to get the project, than ask for an outrageous sum and not get anything. I totally get it. I’ve found myself in this situation many times. Sometimes I still do. I probably always will, but if you are able to land your dream project, money shouldn’t stop you. However, we’re not talking about dream projects, but about the normal, weekly design or development assignments you can get.

The main question

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The question you will always have to answer is how much is the client willing to pay. Think of the importance of your job, which is also the criteria used in any other business to determine the salary of an employee. You also need to think about how much demand there is for the kind of work you do, and how many other people can do it. While you can be a genius at comic book design, there might not be anyone interested in them anymore, as they are not profitable. Moreover, there are so many designers out there who can do the same job and there is always someone out there who can outclass you, that landing a huge project is highly unlikely for the average freelancer.

Image by immrchris.

How much to charge

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The first step is knowing how much you are worth. You need to determine how much you can charge and the way you do it (per hour or by project). Think of costs versus profits, your experience and skill level and the demand we talked about earlier. Then try to research the market for and see how much a designer in the same situation as you would charge. There is no shame in asking other fellow freelancers how much they charge and set your price accordingly.

If, for example, the demand is very high, which means more people are in need of your service than you can provide, you can ask a higher price and you will get it. But consider that unless you do something really special, this is not the case, as the market is saturated with professional designers and developers with years of experience. And talking about experience… consider it when setting your prices as well, because it matters, regardless of what many nut jobs in the field think. Would you like to be operated on by a surgeon on their first day, or a surgeon with more than 30 years experience?

Consider who you work with

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It is also rather smart to know the client you work with. This is not easy to do all the time, as many clients you land are new to you, but just think of it for a while. If you ask $1,000 for an integrated blog, to an individual it might seem too much for him, but you might get away with $3,000 from FedEx or Coca Cola for the exact same product.

Most freelancers start low, with small companies and individuals, build their portfolio and then thanks to this, and their experience, are able to land higher clients who will pay more. This is the normal path. Hoping to charge hundreds of thousands dollars per year in the beginning is unlikely to happen – there are designers with more than 20 years experience out there who don’t earn that much.

Market yourself and your products

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Selling you and your products is crucial. The way you do this will affect your final price. But knowing how to sell yourself and your skills will definitely help you get away with a bigger paycheck. You are in charge of developing products and also in charge of marketing yourself and landing clients. This is not easy to do because you need skills in two areas of the web, but knowing how to properly use these skills will give you an advantage over the others.

Many freelancers out there undersell themselves because they want to get hired. As said earlier, they would rather work for a small fee than not work at all – which is a normal way of thinking. But for how long are you willing to work for lower wages than the others?

Image by Cognition Coach.

It is very easy to spot in a supermarket two products from different companies (with the same ingredients and same weight) that are priced differently, only because individuals place more value on one than the other. To give you a more familiar example, consider an Apple computer and a PC. Or to go even more in-depth, consider a Sony Vaio laptop and an Asus. They do the same thing, both of them have the same warranty, the Asus might even have better specifications – but the Vaio will always be more expensive.

Underselling yourself is strongly linked with this principle of undervaluing yourself to the client. If you don’t undersell yourself, the client will not think less of you., always be confident about what you can deliver.

There is no shame in negotiating your prices down – everybody does it. But try to stand by your standards as much as possible and always have a clear minimum that you don’t go under. You might lose some clients now and then if you negotiate strongly, but don’t be afraid of doing it. The clients who will accept your demands will respect you more and we all know this can lead to further collaborations.

Show you are a good guy

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This is much easier than you think. It has something to do with knowing how to sell your products and knowing something about selling in general. Just ask salespeople how often they use the “and there’s even more” technique. The main idea is to make the client think he gets a good deal. Little does he know you would have charged the same amount regardless, but at least you look like a good guy. Let me explain:

Let’s say your price for developing a customized CMS plus customized graphic design is $750. Now you go to the client and tell him you will develop a customized CMS for him for $750. And there’s even more; you tell him that for an additional $250, you will also throw in the design for his web page. The bottom line is that now you get $250 more for the same products, and all you did was pull a simple sales trick. Tell him that if he is interested, you will do both for only $750, as you are really excited about working with him.

Image by jnobles100.

What did just happen there? You still get $750, your original asking price, and you still have to develop exactly the same products, but now you seem like a good guy and the client thinks he got a deal out of you. Not only did you get the client, but he will also recommend you to others and we all know how much viral and word of mouth marketing means.

Explain everything in detail

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Laying out every detail to the client is important, especially when working with clients who don’t know too much about the web. They might search Google to see what a development process entails and realize it would be much easier to hire an expert than try to do it themselves. They just don’t get it and don’t care about it, it is not their business.

Therefore you might want to explain to your clients what your products mean. Explain to them why you charge so much, put everything on paper, from domain and hosting costs to each hour you spend on developing the website. If you show them in detail why you charge as much as you do, it is an increased possibility that you will land the project.

Image by Winter Bicycles.

Keep in mind you don’t do this because you are desperate to land the job, you do it to help the client. You will earn more gratitude by treating them with respect and they will appreciate you even more after this, because not everybody takes the time to explain the process and what the client is actually paying for.

Bottom line

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If you expected me to tell you precisely how much to charge during the course of this article, you were obviously wrong. I can’t tell you how much to charge because it depends on many internal and external factors and there is no way for me to discuss this with each of you individually.

The conclusion is that very few clients will pay less than the market dictates. You can try whatever you want, you will not fool many. Don’t ask for outrageous prices and always remain within the market price range. Selling yourself properly is what will help you charge closer to the higher end. Always make the customer feel like he gets a great deal and that you do something for him by developing these products, not him for you by paying. Don’t forget to treat every single client with respect, this is what will bring you more referrals from him in the future, and keep you in their minds when they have any projects in the future.

How do you try to set your prices and when do you think is the right time to start charging more? Are you pleased with what you get or you would like to charge more, but the market does not allow you?

Web development is an industry that’s in a state of constant flux with technologies and jargon changing and mutating in an endless cycle. Not to mention the sheer deluge of information one has to process everyday.

In this series, published monthly, we’ll seek to rectify this by bringing you all the important news, announcements, releases and interesting discussions within the web development industry in a concise package. Join me after the jump for an extra dose of community content this month!

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News and Releases

All of the important news in a single place: releases, announcements, companies bickering, security issues and all related hoopla.

‘HTML5 Please’ Helps Devs Make Informed Decisions

HTML5 is a beast of a spec with no one truly knowing everything there is to know. This shiny new site gives you all the information you need to use HTML5 features on your site, right now.

The site provides you with recommendations as to whether you should be using that specific facet of HTML5 right now and provides you with helpful links to polyfills, when necessary. Time saver!

Read more

HP Open Sources Enyo

Enyo is the engine that powers webOS. But what exactly is Enyo, you ask? Well, it’s a spiffy JavaScript framework that helps you build better performing, easier to maintain application.

I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times before so why don’t you check out the link below to find out for yourself?

Read more

Tech Giants Protest SOPA

Last month saw a figurative deluge of protests against SOPA. If you have no idea what SOPA is, hit the link below to find out.

While many services merely blackened out their logo, many others, including Wikipedia and Reddit, went the extra length and completely blacked out their sites. The proposed bill has been shelved but I predict that we’ll see another in a different skin soon…

Read more

Vim on a Tablet? Yes, Please!

I understand not everyone uses a tablet but the number is growing, quite rapidly. Wouldn’t it be great to SSH into your server to fix that pesky bug? Get a proper laptop, you say? I’m going to ask you to shush for now and go with the flow.

This month saw the release of Vim for the iOS platform. And no, it’s not a gimped version. From a quick run through, it seems that all the nice bits are still in there. If you’re in the intersection between developers and iPad users, let us know in the comments below as to whether it fits your needs.

Read more

Cut the Rope Ported to the Browser

I’m sure a lot of you have played this ridiculously cute ‘aww’ inducing game. What brings the game to our list is the fact that it has been ported to the browser by the newly cool Internet Explorer team.

And true to their current vision, they’ve ported it using JavaScript and the magic of HTML5. The link below leads you to a write up about the game development instead of the game itself to protect your productivity.

Read more

The Rails Tutorial, Version Two, Inches Towards Completion

‘The’ Rails tutorial? Indeed it is! Michael Hartl’s free has helped many learn the voodoo that is Rails and Michael is slowly updating his ebook for Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2

Thus far, six chapters are out with a chapter expected every week in the future. Make sure to check the site out!

Read more

Sublime Text 2 Piles on More Features with New Beta

Sublime Text 2 is a grand piece of work and every build only reaffirms this. This new build introduces a ton of features including auto complete, performance improvements, a new UI theme and a ton more.

Read more

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New Kids on the Block

As web developers, the sheer amount of resources we can tap into increases exponentially with time. Here is just a quick look at some recently created resources that deserve your attention — everything from new books to scripts and frameworks.

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wrap.js

My wrap.js plugin handles the nested require based on a config, and takes it to the next level by generating an actual AMD module for you during the build. So now you don’t have to write wrappers around scripts that you wish were modules, wrap.js does that for you.

Github Repo

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Resumable.js

Resumables is a JavaScript library providing multiple simultaneous, stable and resumable uploads via the HTML5 File API.
The library is designed to introduce fault-tolerance into the upload of large files through HTTP. This is done by splitting each files into small chunks; whenever the upload of a chunk fails, uploading is retried until the procedure completes.

Github Repo

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IcedCoffeeScript

IcedCoffeeScript is a fork of CoffeeScript. It is superset of the CoffeeScript language. The iced interpreter is a drop-in replacement for the standard coffee interpreter since it will interpret all existing CoffeeScript programs. IcedCoffeeScript (ICS) adds two new keywords: await and defer. These additions simply and powerfully streamline asynchronous control flow, both on the server and on the browser.

Github Repo

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Banking.js

Banking.JS retrieves all of your bank transactions similiar to how quickbooks does it. There is no need to depend on or pay for third party services. The bank statement results are in JSON or Valid XML and supports all financial institutions.

Github Repo

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Roy

Roy is a small functional language that compiles to JavaScript. The main features include whitespace significant syntax, compile-time meta-programming, structural typing and monad syntax

Github Repo

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jsgif

jsgif an animated GIF player bookmarklet with support for pausing, going frame-by-frame, playing in reverse, and other features that one might expect from a video player.

Github Repo

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zip.js

zip.js offers a low-level API for writing and reading large zip files (up to 4GB) with a stable RAM use. It also offers a Filesystem API in order to manipulate zip file structure.

Github Repo

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Seriously.js

Seriously.js is a real-time, node-based video compositor for the web. Inspired by professional software such as After Effects and Nuke, Seriously.js renders high-quality video effects, but allows them to be dynamic and interactive.

Github Repo

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Best of the Internet

Often, you’re not really looking for a tutorial as much as you’re looking for a rant, an opinion or the musings of a tired developer or just something cool with absolutely zero real world use. This sections contains links to precisely those — interesting and cool stuff from the developer community.

The Five Stages of Hosting

Five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of ‘cloudiness’.

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JavaScript Needs Blocks

Yehuda Katz talks about why he wants to see block lambdas in JavaScript. It’s a bit technical but well worth a read.

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How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

A Non-Developer explains how… I think you know already. Just click the darn link and move on.

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Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Is it the developer’s fault? Is it a management issue? Bad methodology, or lack thereof? Or is it ingrained in the nature of the process?

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Explanation for the ‘Wat’ Talk – CodeMash 2012

This StackOverflow question, along with the well written answers below, explore the code that was demonstrated in the talk mentioned in the title. Provides a quick look at the quirkier portions of JavaScript.

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Why are column oriented databases so much faster than row oriented databases?

A quick little read that explains why, and how, different databases perform differently. There isn’t much jargon there and gets the point quite clearly.

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PHP Mind Love

The link below points to some PHP code. Figure out what the output is and you get a cookie!

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Testing Socket.IO With Mocha, Should.js and Socket.IO Client

A clean writeup that details how the author got all the named technologies working together.

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What is the difference between semicolons in JavaScript and in Python?

Ever had to think about the question above? How exactly do they each handle semicolons and newlines? Read up below.

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The Programming Djinn

The Least Boring Programming Book teaches Ruby programming to beginners in an unconventional way.

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Non-Canvas Wizardry

I don’t really have much context to go on here so just give the link below a click. Pretty smooth stuff for something that’s not canvas or Flash based.

Read more

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Wrapping Up

Well, that’s about all the major changes that happened in our industry lately.

Do you want us to cover more standard news? A focus on upcoming scripts maybe? Or just more interesting posts and discussions from the community? Let us know in the comments and thank you so much for reading!