Contents:
Review of SEMRush.com
For those of you that do not know about SEMRush.com, you do not want to miss this review. SEMRush is just one of many SEO / SEM tools under the SEO Quake Team umbrella. The purpose of SEMRush is to, in their words, “satisfy your needs in advanced SEM and keywords research.” To find out about a site’s adwords competitors, keywords, volume and rankings. Also, you can see organic keyword results with volume, position and other great measurements.
As far as pricing, they offer a Free, Organic Only, Organic & Adwords as well as an Enterprise plan. If you sign up for a recurring monthly fee, you get a discount up to 30%. So why not start with the free version to show the power and time-saving ability of this solution today? What do you have to lose?
Photoshop 101 – Working with Slices
Working with slices in Photoshop can sometimes be a pain. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use the slice tool and show you some easy methods of slicing up your designs.
Download the example photoshop file we will be working with: Slices.psd.zip
Using the slice tool
First lets talk about the slice tool. The keyboard shortcut for this tool is ‘K’. Select the slice tool and draw a selection around the type in the middle of the header. When you draw a selection with the slice tool photoshop automatically creates slices around the slice that you draw.
You can select individual slices by using the slice select tool. Click and hold on the slice tool in the tools palette and a pop up menu should appear.
Right clicking on slices with the slice select tool gives you several options:
Slice options include renaming, linking and adding alt text. This is used when converting slices to a table based layout. Wich I dont recomend for a nything but e-newsletters.
Aother handy feature is the divide slice option. No more worrying about getting everything evenly spaced of lined up!
Now that we have learned about some of the options and how to use the slice tool I’m going to show you a super quick and easy way to create slices.
Creating Slices from Guides
Guides in Photoshop can be easily created by clicking in the ruler space to the top and left of the document and dragging a guide onto the document. If you don’t see the rulers go to view>rulers or Apple+R.
Drag your guides to the appropriate places. In this design we are going to slice the design into 6 pieces – so we drag guides to separate the text on the bottom and to separate the red area from the black area.
Next click on the slices tool in the tools pallet.
With the slide tool selected click on slices from guides.
Photoshop crates 6 slices based on the location of your guides. When saving the guides photoshop will number them accordingly with the number and file name.
Go to file>Save for web and save the document as a .gif file. (Not a jpeg like pictured… oops!)
Photoshop saves the images with their corresponding number into a folder in the directly you specified.
What do you think?
Leave a comment and let us know if you have any questions or if you have any subjects you would like to see covered in this Photoshop 101 series!
Tutorial written by Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog and Daily Design Bits. Follow Niki (@nikibrown) on twitter!
A Round-Up of Super Javascript and jQuery Plugins
jQuery has been flying the flag for Javascript for quite a while now, and rightly so, it is amazing. And, with its huge popularity, the volume of free plugins and tutorials has not only greatly increased, but also the quality and power of each plugin are continually pushing jQuery to its limits. Does it even have limits?
With the right combination of JavaScript plugins you can turn a simple website into a fantastic one. In this post from net.tutsplus.com, they have reviewed forty of the most popular javscript plugins that are freely available. The plugins are not limited to only jQuery, which is normally the case, but also offer plugins from the other major frameworks (well, MooTools anyway). You would be hard pressed to find a better all round selection.
40 Super-Neat JavaScript Plugins
In this post, the author has showcased 10 cool jQuery navigation techniques. Remember, not all nav systems need to be mixed with Javascript or jQuery, sometimes the simpler the better. But when jQuery is mixed with the proper ingredients the effect can be very impressive.
10 Incredible JQuery Navigation Menus
When talking about tables within web design we are, thankfully, not talking about an “ancient” layout system that should have died with the dinosaurs. We are, of course, talking about dynamic and sortable data tables. With the popularity of jQuery the volume of plugins available for displaying tabular data has greatly increased, and this post has a great round-up of the best.
15 Great jQuery Plugins For Better Table Manipulation
By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).
Apple Inspired Home Office Furniture
Are you a MAC or a PC? It doesn’t really matter, it is entirely up to you. We could argue about the differences between the two until we are blue in the face. There is one clear and defined difference between the two though, and I am sure that there will not be many that would disagree: MAC computers are sleek and stylish and look really, really cool.
The MAC style is a definition in itself, and has inspired designers for many years now. It has inspired a huge range of unique furniture designed to accentuate your MAC products.
In this post we have collected 9 of the best MAC Inspired Furniture for your Home Office, and best of all 9for PC users anyway, most of the furniture can be used for the PC as well.
Novanta, (translating as 90 due to its shape) is a workstation that has a completely unique style that sits perfectly with Apple designed products. Don’t be deceived by this minimal looking desk, it hides an awesome array of features. It has an inbuilt monitor stand, a really nice touch with the keyboard and mouse bay and an integrated iPod dock. The leather lined front drawers have been especially designed to accommodate a MAC laptop or A3 sized paper, or hide all the cabling that can accumulate from modern computer systems. Overall, this is an awesome workstation.
Novanta Workstation
The feature rich fashion statement that is the iGo desk is designed to fully integrate with your iMac and Mac mini with Cinema Display, so that you don’t have to compromise on the aesthetics of your environment. It is fully adjustable to allow it to be used comfortably in either a standing or seated position, it also comes with an iMac turntable so you can turn your monitor to exactly the right angle and if you but the sitting model it can be pushed around on it’s wheels. Overall, this one really cool workstation, the only thing I would worry about is could anyone sit at this desk all day, and be comfortable? Who cares, it looks good!
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