10 Best Web Design Articles at MMO Social Network

August 24, 2010 - Last Modified: February 14, 2013 by Julius

Today we are going to do our weekly MMO round up.

This round up is all about web design articles that were submitted to MMO at one point.

If you sign up for MMO Social Network and bookmark site, start submitting articles to it, and you will have a change of being featured in one of our round ups.

Here we go!

Here is What I Have Found For You Today on MMO Social Network

Web Design Articles

The Benefits of Using Your Own Images in Website Design – I enjoyed the post because it talked about a different idea, i.e. using your own images instead of getting them from websites.
6+ New CSS Tutorials You May Not Have Read Yet – This is an extremely useful list of CSS tutorials especially for beginners.
How to Create an Enticing Blog Header Image – I liked this post because it showed me the opportunities of where you can find some free images and especially icons.
How To: Get Insights of Audiences on YouTube – This is a great post about a tool which reveals the demographics of Youtube, it’s really interesting.
Safe PC and Internet Data – A nice short post about how to guard your data more.
Awesome Floral Photoshop Brushes – A list post about floral brushes for Photoshop, useful for everyone using Photoshop or Gimp.
How to Show a Category Post in a Single Page in Thesis Theme – A nice tutorial about how you can add a certain number of posts from a category to a page. Definitely useful for everyone using Thesis.
Plugin to Display Banner Ad in Corner of Blog – A short post about a nice little plugin that helps you to display a banner ad on a WordPress blog.
How to Design Text Logo for Your Business Using Powerpoint 2010 – This is a short guide about how to easily create a logo in Powerpoint. Definitely useful for people who are not comfortable using professional image editing software.
How to Identify a Blog Theme – This is a great video for people who don’t know how to figure out what themes certain blogs are using.

Discussion: What Makes Up a Good Website Template?

I have been using lots and lots of templates (or themes) during my two years of blogging. There are so many good templates out there but there are few that I really want to use on my website. That’s because for me a good theme needs the following: good layout, good typography, highly visible navigation and most of all enough white space. I also think that many web designers do a nice job when designing a theme but they do a poor job when optimizing it for speed for example.

What do you think? What is important to you?

About Julius

Follow @friendsandcooks

Hi, I am Julius Kuhn-Regnier. I have been blogging for more than a year and a half now over at And Break! My blog is about helping other bloggers to achieve what they want. Also be sure to check out my guide about speeding up Wordpress.

{ 48 Responses }

Ahmad says:

Thank you for sharing useful information with us, I also making a site for the teaching ppl how to design.
Designer's Digest says:

Hi Julius, Thanks for featuring our post. :) awesome roundup. Designer's Digest
ZK says:

This will be good enough for my weekends reading. Thanks.
element321 says:

Great post Julius. A lot of good reading for the posted articles. Thanks for sharing my post.
Andreas says:

I think, while testing different things is ok for a certain period of time, I recommend staying with one blogging theme for a longer period of time, so that your visitors get familiar with the theme and you can kind of 'brand' your blog.
- Julius says:
  
  Yeah Andreas, I agree. I mean I sometimes want to change my theme too but it's important to simply stick with it. There are too many people switching their layouts around all the time. If you switch around all the time it will be hard to build up your brand. Thanks man.
Michael says:

I had not heard about MMO until just reading this post; guess I will have to go check it out myself. To answer your question on web design - I recently discovered two photo optimization tools that are so useful for making pictures as "condensed" as possible for WordPress posts. The first one is called "smush it" - that one is a plug in that "smushes" the picture down so it takes up less space w/out losing quality and the other is an Adobe Air App called Shrink-O-Matic and that makes resizing photos a breeze *and also allows you to easily save a GIF file into PNG or JPG to take up less space.
- Julius says:
  
  Thanks Michael for sharing these tools. I have personally used Smush.it and I really liked it. But ever since Yahoo took it over it got somewhat bad. But I will definitely check out the Adobe Air App.
Colleen says:

Curious on why you picked these articles over the other ones Julius.
- Julius says:
  
  :D Well first of all you need to know that there aren't too many articles to pick from. This is the MMO round up so I only include articles from MMO. The thing is that by deciding on a topic I narrow down my choice even further. That's why sometimes I have to take two categories. Then from the rest I try to pick the best ones and the newest ones. I hope this helps a bit Colleen. And by the way sorry that it took me so long to answer.
  - Colleen says:
    
    I see Julius. Was just curious about article selection. And the time you took to respond is ok. You are so faithful at responding to comments that I assumed you were busy. A testimony at how faithful you are at responding to your readers. :)
Daniel Sharkov says:

The article about CSS tutorials was pretty interesting and there definitely are some neat tips and tricks. Creating header images was also a nice read. Thanks for sharing the list.
- Julius says:
  
  Thanks Daniel. I'm glad you liked some of the articles. If you start submitting your links to MMO then you also have a chance of getting your articles listed here.
alamin says:

Thanks Julius for your nice post. Actually web design affect directly and indirectly on visitors
- Alex says:
  
  I agree web design can help to improve conversions. web design doesn't mean only create a good looking website. it means create a site that can help us to reach results we want
- Julius says:
  
  Yeah I totally agree with you. I believe web design is very important. That's why I don't understand why there are so many ugly websites out there.
Lennart Heleander says:

Hi Julius, Web Design is always interesting; to catch the client direct and get them to stay on the website. So thanks for the article list, nice reading.
- Julius says:
  
  Hi Lennart, I hope these articles helped you a bit ;) I have designed a few websites myself but I am not really good at it to be honest. I'd rather have someone create the sites for me ;)
Tinh says:

Thanks @Julius for listing them out, I love the article on banner ads plugin :-)
- Julius says:
  
  Thanks Tran. You mean the article about the Wordpress plugin that let's you display a banner ad in the top corner? How is your blog going by the way? Oh and what do you think makes up a good web design ;)
  - Tinh says:
    
    Exactly @Julius :-) It is so far so good, however, there are a lot of things to do
    - Hieu Martin says:
      
      Hi @Tinh can you tell me the plugin you use images slide show post in your home pages?
      - Tinh says:
        
        I guess it is Nivo that you can find it at hutruc.com as he has introduced this plugin and tutorials to work with it
        
        Hieu Martin says:
        
        Hi @tinh. Thanks for introduce with me Nivo plugin. I will try learn how to use it for my blog
Hieu Martin says:

Thanks Julius for listing Web Design Articles
- Julius says:
  
  I hope you found some article that were useful to you. Thanks buddy ;)
  - Hieu Martin says:
    
    Yes i found this post to helpful me "How to Show a Category Post in a Single Page in Thesis Theme" and "How to Identify a Blog Theme"
    - Julius says:
      
      Great :) I'm glad you found some nice articles.
      - ZK says:
        
        Julius you provided us great articles, and this is the time when you are going to get endless thanks.
Cindy says:

I'm attracted to blogs where they use plugins for a more attractive header... like sliding images and bold headings, but not such a fan of the Georgia font.
- Julius says:
  
  Alright but these are usually rather portfolio sites aren't they? Or do you mean sites with featured posts? Thanks Cindy.
  - Cindy says:
    
    It can be either, Julius... for designers, they rotate their best design work as the header while others have featured posts,
    - Julius says:
      
      Alright. Now I understand what you mean ;) Great blog by the way ;)
      - ZK says:
        
        Julius you should provide us few tips on these rotate things. Can we expect about this in coming posts ?
        
        Julius says:
        
        Sure I will do my best. I will definitely keep this in mind.
Hung says:

Thank you for listing.I just know about MMO site.
- Julius says:
  
  You only know about MMO social network?! Have you visited the other sites I mentioned above before? What do you think about web design? What's important to you? Thanks Hung.
  - Hung says:
    
    Thanks Julius, I have visited some sites you listed but the first time for MMO Network. web design is one of important thing that we need to consider when blogging.The good looking blog will make more comfortable for readers. Content and relationship with readers are most important thing to me.
    - Julius says:
      
      Yeah I understand what you mean. It's the same thing for me. I want to have a nice looking blog that will easily build relationships with my readers. Thanks Hung!
Brian says:

I just wrote an article highlighting some of the tweaks made in the Thesis 1.8 upgrade. It's really tough to beat the Thesis theme when it comes to ease of use and SEO benefits. I know some people complain that it costs $87 and that there are tons of free alternatives, but I don't think they really stand up well in a side by side comparison. Thesis just seems to be head and shoulders above many of the other options right out of the box. Thanks for the great list of blog posts.
- Julius says:
  
  So you are a Thesis theme fan?! To be honest I haven't used Thesis myself and I have heard many people talk about how great it is (including Hesham). So what are all the SEO benefits that you get with Thesis? Can't you just install All in one SEO plugin and get the same benefits? Thanks for the comment Brian.
  - Brian says:
    
    If you don't have the Thesis theme, All in One SEO would be my number one choice for a plugin to use. Thesis basically takes all the most important aspects of SEO and wraps them seamlessly together, while also allowing for extremely easy CSS access. If you have a good understanding of SEO and coding you could definitely outfit the normal Wordpress platform with the majority of the same benefits. It will simply take some time and won't be quite as user friendly. The fact that Thesis is so easy to understand and implement by people who are not necessarily "experts in the field" is why I chose it as the theme for all my clients' blogs.
Aaron says:

Thanks Julius.. The info on creating a great blog header will be very useful. I am always lacking in design so these resources can help me a lot.
- Julius says:
  
  Yeah I liked that article too. I am also not really good in web design yet I still do most of my things alone. I'm glad it's helpful Aaron :)
Julius says:

Thank you Tia. So you need a highly customizable Wordpress theme? I bet it's annoying having to code all week. I am using the Affiliate theme by UBD. I don't know whether that will be helpful to you. Have you had bad experience with Woo themes? I personally like Woothemes and all of the themes I bought were really professional.
- Tia Peterson says:
  
  Funny, it's just with one client. He's hosted on GoDaddy, so maybe it is their problem. But every time I turn around something is breaking with his theme. Recently I installed WooThemes The Morning After (I love!) on my personal dev site and there are some layout issues. I can't be bothered to correct them. I have a WooThemes developer license so I pay monthly and get all of the themes but I will stop shortly since I almost never use any of them. They are good themes, though. Very professional.
Tia Peterson says:

Hey Julius, I look for something that's easy to customize on the back end - and when I say easy, I mean easy! I work with code all week and it's too annoying to have to deal with it in a Wordpress theme. So anything that is 'push this button' or 'click this option' wins my vote. I really like Elegant Themes, SOME Woo Themes (the ones that work, lol) and of course Thesis.
- Julius says:
  
  Hey Tia for some reason I didn't directly reply to your comment. Still you should be able to see my old comment directly above yours ;)

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