TemplateMo.com is a website providing 100+ free CSS templates that you can download, modify and use on your websites (both free & commercial) with no restrictions.
All templates are XHTML/CSS compliant & will work flawless on all major browsers.
To see more, check these free CSS templates.
Inside the "Let’s make the web faster" website, Google is sharing the tips & tutorials for better performing webpages.
Besides the articles, It is possible to reach videos of speeches by several organizations on website performance.
Also, links to various tools for the issue provided & a large community discusses the subject continiously.
pForm is a web-based & free HTML form builder application for creating good looking forms easily.
It offers various color schemes to get started & enables you to design your form with an Ajaxed interface.
Any type of form objects (text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, file upload fields, etc.) can be added & every field can be customized (field label, type, size..).
Once the form design is completed, it can be previewed & ready-to-use HTML/CSS files can be downloaded as a .zip file.
To get amazing features like saving entries to database, input validation & much more, you can check the commercial product of the service: MachForm.
When working on projects as a group of designers & developers, it sometimes requires an effort to keep all files within the project synchronized.
Jake is a free & open source software which keeps everything synchronized in a group of any number of users & does not require a central server.
Jake uses Jabber and open source chat server engines for the communication & users can login even with their Google username/passwords or any Jabber server.
The software is available for Windows, Mac & Linux.
Wix is a free web-based service for creating simple to advanced Flash websites.
It offers 100s of ready-to-use and well-categorized free Flash templates (like e-flyers, photographers, business & more) or everything can be created from scratch with a blank one.
Wix is very easy to use with its drag’n drop editor that enables anyone to add:
to their websites.
If you want to sell stuff, the application has a solution for that too. It offers PayPal buttons to be added & configured with ease.
Although Wix looks like a perfect fit for anyone who is not into or new to web design (considering it does not require any programming skills), it is also a solution for experienced users to create impressive websites very quickly.
Websites created by this free web design service are search engine friendly & hosted free. For anyone looking into getting more with Wix, check the premium upgrades.
P.S. This post is a sponsored review.
ProtoFish is an advanced dropdown menu script which supports multilevel navigations & built with Prototype.
The script is lightweight (1.3kb minimized), unobtrusive & cross-browser.
The hover class used & delay effect of the menus can be customized with ease.
It is accessible via keyboard using the TAB key & multiple instances of ProtoFish menus can be used on the same webpage.
For demos with various number of of levels & delay effects, click here.
Web Developer Plus, a blog providing web design/development tips & tutorials, is sharing a slick featured content slider that is built with jQuery & jQuery UI.
It is a tutorial which describes each step (HTML, CSS, JS) & comes with the source files.
The slider auto-changes the displayed content in every x seconds defined & can switch to the clicked item instantly.
In proportion with the size of the "main image", the slider can present a limited number of items (4 in the example).
It is also a proof of "how jQuery UI can help creating beautiful stuff with a very little JavaScript".
For every web designer & developer, refreshing the browsers to see the updates we make is a very common action.
XRefresh is a solution, specifically built for easing this process, which automatically refreshes browsers once an update to a file in our project folder is done.
It comes with 2 parts: a browser plugin (both for Firefox & IE) and an application (for Windows & Mac) which watches the changes made in the folders we mentioned.
Although it is handy for systems with one monitor, the best environment will probably be two monitors where the IDE & the browsers runs on each.
P.S. For Firefox, it requires Firebug to be installed.
LESS is a Ruby gem which compiles the LESS code to CSS & extends css by adding variables, mixins, operations and nested rules.
It uses the existing CSS syntax. So, it is very easy to convert current CSS files to LESS files & there is almost no learning curve.
@brand_color: #4D926F;
#header {
color: @brand_color;
}
h2 {
color: @brand_color;
}
LESS is well-documented & source can be found here.
Opera, with version 10, is announcing a new feature named Opera Unite which converts any device running this browser into a web server.
It is an open platform where, using its API, developers can create new services/products (with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and AJAX) which will be served from user’s computers.
It already comes with various ready-to-use services like:
To read more & download Opera Unite, click here.
