3D Website Display">3D Website Display

Show off your web­site on busi­ness cards, post­cards, etc. with this easy cus­tomiz­able PSD file.

Source | Down­load

Tri-Fold Brochure

This Tri-Fold Brochure PSD is per­fect for your next mock-up in web, print, or other media.

Source | Down­load

Free Black Designer Business Card

Source | Down­load

How To Design a Print Ready Die-Cut Business Card

How To Design a Print Ready Die-Cut Busi­ness Card

Need a new set of busi­ness cards? Fol­low this step by step tuto­r­ial to cre­ate a cool busi­ness card design in Adobe Illus­tra­tor. We’ll begin cre­at­ing the vibrant pat­tern effect, then we’ll lay out the con­tact infor­ma­tion and set up the final print ready file ready for us to print right here on our web­site using our online designer. Tuto­r­ial By Chris Spooner Read more

CMS">WordPress As A CMS

As defined by Wikipedia: A con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) is a sys­tem pro­vid­ing a col­lec­tion of pro­ce­dures used to man­age work flow in a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment. These pro­ce­dures can be man­ual or computer-based.

Word­Press is the per­fect plat­form for mul­ti­ple users to con­tribute towards the con­tent (both for blog posts and pages).

To take advan­tage of your man­ual labor cre­ate roles:

Admin­is­tra­tor – has com­plete con­trol over the site; can change themes, add new users, write and pub­lish blog posts or pages.
Edi­tor – can write and pub­lish their own posts or those of other users.
Author – can only write and pub­lish their own posts.
Con­trib­u­tor – can write their own posts but not pub­lish.
Sub­scriber – can man­age their own pro­file but can only read posts.
Plu­g­ins: Always beware of too many plu­g­ins or using a theme that doesn’t have enough built in options; how­ever, why not enjoy the labors of some very smart peo­ple and enhance the func­tion­al­ity of your Word­Press blog|site with plu­g­ins? A few of my favorites are Sexy­Book­marks, WP Data­base Backup and NextGen-Gallery.

Set the perma­link struc­ture – don’t leave it at default, you want to cus­tomize your URL’s. This takes 10 sec­onds and is great for SEO. (Dash­board -> Set­tings -> Perma­links -> Cus­tom Struc­ture, type in %postname%)

Take advan­tage of the SEO capa­bil­i­ties: easy sitemap gen­er­a­tors (plu­gin), add meta titles & descrip­tions, H1 tags. Many well built themes (Small­Biz) have SEO options built right into the theme, if you have cho­sen a theme that doesn’t have this, down­load All in One SEO. If you have cho­sen a Word­Press theme that doesn’t allow any plu­g­ins, you need a new theme.

Cus­tom Menu – drag and drop your pages into a hier­ar­chy of par­ent and child pages. If you have ever tried writ­ing the code for a drop down menu you will bow down and pay homage to who­ever imple­mented this func­tion. A really cool use of the cus­tom menus is to cre­ate sec­ondary menus for cat­e­gories or child pages which you may use in wid­gets and footers.

By Eileen Lonergan

Steve Jobs

HTML">Adobe Muse: Create Sites Without HTML

Adobe Muse

Pub­lish­ing giant and design soft­ware leader Adobe has made avail­able a new appli­ca­tion called Adobe Muse for cre­at­ing sites with­out touch­ing any HTML. Code­named Adobe Muse and run­ning on Adobe AIR, the full release won’t arrive until early 2012 but users can already start road test­ing the inno­v­a­tive fea­tures today by vis­it­ing here. The soft­ware can effec­tively be described as a light­weight com­bi­na­tion of the Dreamweaver design view IDE, Fire­works and cer­tainly InDe­sign for the way layouts/templates are rapidly pro­duced using intu­itive drag and drop-based objects. This is desk­top pub­lish­ing for HTML in other words and offers another insight into how Adobe are look­ing to plug those gaps in the pub­lish­ing spec­trum left vacant by end user abil­ity. With the rise of online-based ser­vices that unashamedly ‘dumb down’ the web design process but still deliver pro­fes­sional results, there clearly is a user base that will respond well to solu­tions such as this. With Apple set to phase out sup­port for a tool like iWeb, per­haps this sim­i­lar pack­age will prove sim­i­larly pop­u­lar with hob­by­ists and those design­ers who remain stub­born to the idea of mas­ter­ing HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the like. Read more

Facebook Rolls Out New Left Hand Navigation

Face­book has begun rolling out a restruc­tured left-hand nav­i­ga­tion that includes revamped book­marks and noti­fi­ca­tions for Pages, Groups and Apps.

The changes, orig­i­nally announced last week, are part of the company’s efforts to make Face­book Apps more engaging.

The new ver­sion of the nav­i­ga­tion is divided into four groups: Favorites, Pages, Groups and Apps. Favorites includes direct links to pop­u­lar Face­book fea­tures such as News Feed or Events. The Pages and Groups sec­tions each list the two most pop­u­lar Pages and Groups you use, along with a noti­fi­ca­tions num­ber to the right-hand side. Game Requests and App Requests look almost iden­ti­cal to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the nav­i­ga­tion menu.

The “More” menu item has also moved. Orig­i­nally you could see a full list of your Groups by click­ing the “More” but­ton at the bot­tom of each menu set. The new ver­sion hides the “More” but­ton until you hover over the left-hand nav­i­ga­tion. Click­ing it takes you to a new page where you can add dif­fer­ent Pages and Groups to your “Favorites” sec­tion for quick and easy access.

The pre­vi­ous nav­i­ga­tion design was imple­mented dur­ing a major Face­book redesign in Feb­ru­ary 2010. Game and App requests got an addi­tional over­haul a few months later.

What do you think of the restruc­tured Face­book nav­i­ga­tion menu? Let us know in the comments.

Arti­cle Writ­ten By: Ben Parr

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

The dis­tinc­tion between WordPress.com and WordPress.org can cause some con­fu­sion for peo­ple. Let’s clear it up.  WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who work on Word­Press, the Open Source blog­ging soft­ware.  WordPress.com uti­lizes the same Word­Press soft­ware which you can down­load at WordPress.org.  With WordPress.com the host­ing and man­ag­ing of the soft­ware is taken care of by the team here at Automat­tic.  With WordPress.org you need to install the soft­ware on your own server or with a 3^rd party provider. Read more

A Few Of The Best Church Web Designs

We’ve rounded up a few of the best church web designs because some­times church web­sites can really be lame. I have seen church web designs that look absolutely hor­ri­ble and not to men­tion hard to nav­i­gate when look­ing to find infor­ma­tion such as ser­vice times, direc­tions, or even the doc­tri­nal statement.

Things are get­ting bet­ter thanks to God using Word­Press and other con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems. even the small­est churches can afford a new web site design for as low as the cost of a tem­plate a vol­un­teer with web design skills or hir­ing us to han­dle every­thing at a lower than aver­age price. Take a look but be sure to click the images for the actual site: Read more