Editor’s note: Product tours are immensely helpful for user retention and minimizing bounce rates – often improving sales conversions 20-100% – but they can also be frustrating and eat up valuable time.

Evan Chen is a software developer who experienced this problem and did something about it, developing a terrific app for taking the pain out of creating and managing product tours. In this post he shares with us what he has learned as well as a code to get a free beta invite to his new app, Taurus.

I was recently working on a personal project where I wanted to implement some cool “checkmark” icons like you see at left to spice up my unordered lists. I could’ve done it quite easily with the list-style-image property, but I was trying to keep my images and http requests to a minimum, so I wanted to figure out another way to do it (plus, the challenge sounded kind of fun).

I had just seen Nicolas Gallagher’s awesome pure css social media icons, though, and I thought, “If he can do that, than I could certainly create a simple check icon with just css3″. I did figure it out with some experimenting and testing, and today I’m going to show you how to achieve the same effect.

The PHP language includes lots of helpful functions for easily filtering, cleaning and manipulating content, all of which are excellent tools in the hands of a skilled developer. A solid knowledge of these filtering tools will help you achieve enhanced security and functionality in your projects.

Today, I’m going to give you a crash course on PHP’s basic filtering functions so that by the end of the tutorial you’ll be able to easily escape data, strip tags, remove words and more.

There are plenty of great, useful jQuery plugins out there. It’s great to have those kinds of plugins and know where to find them, and the community has done an excellent job of giving those plugins the attention they deserve.

There’s a whole other class of plugins, however – brilliant masterpieces that make your jaw drop as you go, “Whoa!! How did they do that?!” You don’t find them every day, but they’re definitely out there. Today we’re going to dig through the development community and unearth 6 of those amazing under-publicized animation plugins that are guaranteed to impress every developer-at-heart. Let’s get started!

It’s been a while since we had a good development tutorial, so let’s reawaken the tradition again and have some coding fun today! I’m going to show you how to use jQuery and PHP to build a content editing system that will allow you or your client to easily edit .html pages visually.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, read on. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

CSS3 is developing fast, and the most exciting part is seeing all of the intriguing and attractive effects that are being invented to solve real design problems. With the combined creativity of the design community, CSS3 has quickly traveled through the zone of interesting speculation and into the territory of time/resource saving practical everyday use.

Today, we’re going to look at 7 impressive, concrete, real-life effects and techniques that you can implement in your next design. This isn’t going to be the usual overview of features – these are all specific techniques that will help your design work to be more advanced and effective. Let’s dig in!

Knowledge of CSS3 is fast becoming a crucial element of any web designer/developer’s skillset, which means that it’s an excellent time to start learning, if you haven’t already! A solid knowledge of CSS3 has a large market value and will take you a long way towards success, giving you an image of competence and authority.

Thankfully, there’s a huge amount of terrific tutorials and resources available – if you can find them. Here you’ll find an amazing ‘ultimate’ toolbox of over 350 of the best tuts and tips out there. Get ready to be amazed!

If you’re ready to learn more about WordPress plugin development and continue your journey, you can be glad that there’s a lot more great resources out there.

In this final post of the series, we’ll take a look at a few carefully selected high-quality resources for learning more and then explore some of the best plugins from the repository.