Some Wordpress plugins are pointless, others are fun, but these 10 are needed by any blogger. It can be impossible to find the right ones, so I’ve collected a list of, in my opinion, the top 10 Wordpress plugins, and responded to why they’re helpful.

I recently discovered this set of PHP tutorials, and was so impressed I thought I’d share them with my own readers. I’ve been studying PHP on my own for years, so most of this was pretty familiar to me. However, these tutorials are so detailed and well-made that I still learned new things at the beginner level.

Unfortunately, he’s going to only make 15 screencasts for this set, and plans to end the entire series there. (I did root for him to create an intermediate series in a comment once, though. We’ll see what happens.)

I’ve embedded the first video here, but you can view it on the home site along with links to all the others here.

Side Note:

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been busy with finishing up a term at school and getting up my portfolio. I have two weeks free now, however, so I should start updating more.

It looks like the sleek, Web 2.0 style website design was the most popular request on last week’s poll. This is not surprising since these types of designs are very popular right now, or in the very least, the core components of them are popular: simplicity, typography, whitespace, and a close attention to proximity.

Blogging ruts happen to the best of us. It’s not to say that you’re lazy or don’t finish things you’ve started. Most of the time, it’s just a lack of motivation.

Because everyone experiences a blogging rut, I hope this post will appeal to all of my readers. Here are 10 tips and ideas to get out of a rut, and to keep your posts coming.

In this tutorial we will be updating the cascading menu we created in jQuery Tutorial: Part II: Cascading Menu. We’ll be adding some CSS to make it look a bit nicer, so hopefully I’ll catch some more interest of the designers!

I’ll also be adding some neat effects that make the tutorial look more like Flash, with the use of parameters. This introduction to parameters will be both helpful with our cascading menu, and with most uses of jQuery.

If you haven’t yet, go read jQuery Tutorial: Part I and jQuery Tutorial: Part II: Cascading Menu.

There are a lot of things you can do with texture in web design, and it’s always an inspiring challenge to think of interesting ways of utilizing them. One of my favorite inspiration methods is nature, and what a better way to use nature in web design than to look at alternative views of nature through texture.

I’ve collected 40, relatively large textures created by nature under the categories of rock, leaves, water, ice, wood, animal skins/fur, feathers, grass, and sand. With the shapes, depth, and color nature can create on it’s own, using these textures to create art is only a small step away.

Alignment is one of the most important features in design in that it adds to the organization and usability of a web page. Even with all other elements in good condition, such as a great use of color, effective use of typography, and visually appealing balance, a bad use of alignment can make a website layout look cluttered.

While most designers understand this principle, many don’t see that they’re not achieving it effectively. I will go over the basics of alignment in this article, but also be sure to use specific examples and ideas for designers who have a grasp of alignment, to achieve an even better understanding.

I’ve decided I’ve done enough design posts lately, so I’m here again with a post concerning website traffic. Today I’m going to focus on how to build long-term website traffic, with the power of exponential growth.

I am going to be focusing this post particularly on blogs rather than plain websites. Can a regular website gain traffic with this same method? Of course, but blogs are natural attractions for search engines and visitor growth, and so I’m focusing on blogs because there is so much more you can do with them to help the process along.