Dainis Graveris
Role: Owner & Founder of Awesome 1WD
Dainis Graveris is 23 years old blogger and designer, founder of 1stWebDesigner, now more silently managing everything behind the scenes. He usually hangs out in Twitter tweeting design related links and chatting with people. If you have any questions or feedback that's the best place to start! Cheers!
90 New And High Quality Photoshop Web Layout Tutorials
I am continuing my research and this time I thought I’ve never done Photoshop layout tutorial roundup and wanted to become better in this matter. One of the reasons I didn’t make this kind of list, because I saw there are already many of similar articles.
But as always to stand out I invested two days in this article, collecting only really high quality tutorials and also ordering them all by date. Maybe such measure isn’t right – but I am sure you are tired of lists featuring old tutorials you have seen over and over again. I was searching only for Year 2009/2008 tutorials and was surprised myself, how many of them I found, which I really enjoyed and was high-quality ones.
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20 Free Keyword Research Tools – Comprehensive Insight
Before you write any good article or optimize website, you have to know how and why you have to select right keywords. SEO is very easy to overuse and do even worse, if you for example start to do keyword stuffing or repeating the same words over and over again without good thought. For regular content like blogs, people always like to argue about what you need to put in the first place – SEO or your readers. I am thinking you must do both – using simple but consistent and smart SEO and try to write as compelling article as possible to your readers.
If you haven’t already I strongly you suggest to read the first post -
How To Create Popular Blog With Keyword Research, Heatmaps And SEO? from series to get little starting overview.
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50 Really High Quality Photoshop Navigation Menu Tutorials
While waiting our SEO series to come out, I showcased for you pretty huge and comprehensive navigation, menu and button tutorial article. All of those tutorials are selected carefully just featuring here, the most high quality ones.
Navigation is very important aspect in every web-design, because it is usually the place where people will click the most as well as notice creative and usable buttons. Really all we need is to get visitor remember our site! To complete and sharpen you need to use Photoshop here, actually version doesn’t matter, I am sure everything can be completed in any of PS previous versions too!
Let’s get started and learn how to create shiny, clean, stylish, glossy or even 3D navigation menus! Hope you will enjoy this article!
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How To Create Popular Blog With Keyword Research, Heatmaps And SEO?
Keyword research really is the first thing you should do, when you are just planning to start a new website. In this case I am talking especially about blogs, since I am writing one by myself and still planning to evolve in future, get more topic ideas and continue to research my niche. One more thing which is especially important – you should know what people are searching, which keywords they are using to get good traffic from such research in advance.
I really think now and in future small business websites cannot exist without a successful blog presence. Blogs are well known for ranking high in search engines because of its frequently updated content and acting like social network in return getting many backlinks, which are very highly evaluated by search engines.
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50 Gorgeous Flash Websites You Definitely Should See
Oh well, it is time for yet another inspirational post, this time I am featuring really creative and inspiring flash websites. Such websites never stop to surprise, because really there are almost no limitations, you can do and create everything there with action-script, animation, include videos and also create really interactive designs or even games!
I got really amazed what can be done with Flash and how limitless possibilities are. You also may notice there are a lot of design, development and interactive agencies in this article, but that’s really self explaining – creative souls and agencies really offer the greatest creativity, because on their own designs they really have no limits. Enjoy and consider to visit also this fresh portfolio inspiration article from year 2012!
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16 Free Javascript Code Syntax Highlighters For Better Programming
If you are programmer or actually if you at least have some basic coding skills, you’ll find this article useful. For example just look at this page source – without highlighting that whole code is just a bunch of plain black text and it is really hard to find specific things if everything looks the same. Thankfully there are many highlighting scripts available, for example Notepad++ also supports and highlights different code snippets. These code syntax highlighters actually are doing mainly the same thing, but with more options, big coding language support, better integration – really in our days you just need to choose one – there are too many tools available anyway.
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New Things Happening At 1stwebdesigner Website
Hello there everybody! This will be kind of community post, where I will tell again my intentions with website and things like that to keep ball rolling.
Maybe (no, really!) you noticed 1stwebdesigner site has got completely new look! I was working for a while to that design, tried many different color schemes, did a lot of testing, talked with my friends about best solutions and finally came out with this version.
I promised new look some time ago actually, but it is really hard to keep up with regular and big posts, a lot of social networking and in meanwhile creating new design. I hope you noticed posts are becoming much more frequent and hopefully article quality is just becoming better and better!
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52 Really High Quality Free Fonts For Modern And Cool Design
I am big fan of typography myself and was surprised I haven’t done any good font collection yet! While doing research I was amazed how many really high quality fonts are available for free. And now with Sifr and similar tools you can use any font in your web-design actually, but if you are graphic designer you get even bigger enjoyment through such detailed and beautiful fonts. Balance between readability, elegance and use fonts with artistic approach to get best out of them, really that’s all you need to do. And by the way I am thinking about inspiring and effective typography article in soon future to show you very best examples – stay with us – get inspired and save your time because research has been done already for you!
Finally be sure to check license to these fonts, they may be free but some of them require reference or may not be used for commercial projects for free, although most of them are.
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32 Handy Gradient Tutorials Using Photoshop And Illustrator:Part 4
In my opinion gradient effects are very hard to master, all the beautiful vector icons, illustrations are made on basis of good gradient usage. Gradient mesh tool in Illustrator is the most powerful one, learn how to use it correctly and understand what can be done with it. I found many beautiful tutorials and ordered them from instructional to intermediate tutorials to lead you easier through learning process. I think you should get great starting point here and even if you’re experienced designer, you should find some new tips here definitely.
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15 Freelancer Design And Development Creative Job Boards
I believe many readers of my site are designers and developer themselves and freelancing is great way to earn extra income..or even better make it full time one with free conditions. This article is created to help you – find your potential clients or exactly opposite – to find who can do job for you. There are even job board directly related to help find programmer – designer and contrary. There are times when you can think, that you can do everything by yourself – but for me, I am better designer, and there is no way I will be very good PHP coder – I can get job done, but it takes a lot of precious time. Sometimes it’s better to hire somebody, so you can do what you do the best and not waste your time! Time is money remember!
This list features 15 best design related job boards in my opinion, hope you’ll find this article useful! In future I think to evolve this article and create other one just related to bloggers, because there are many services which offers affiliate programs, paid posts and things like that. I think it’s valuable at least to know such sites, can be good for article ideas too sometimes.
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