Web Design Blog | Web Design Fan | Resources for Web Designers and Graphic Designers

As usual, we have been working hard to bring you an amazing selection of information, guides and tutorials to help you stay completely up to date in the world of web design lately. Now each week I will be coming on board to fill you in with not only the latest happenings at WebDesignFan, but also a bite-sized, handy roundup of current design trends, releases and updates from the rest of the design world.

Tis the Christmas season, and we have just thing for you, our readers!!

In this tutorial we will learn how to create an herbal frame in a simple and understandable way. Having studied the technique described here, you can fill with herbs objects of any shape. Herbal frame is an interesting and popular designing element. We will use it today to create a Christmas wreath! Let’s get started!

Happy Holidays!

This is a tutorial for a script that I find indispensable. Gradients are a necessary and simple tool of web design, providing the perfect transition from color to color. The problem that I often find is the limitations the use of images puts on dynamic templates. I am a huge fan of dynamic templates – allowing color customization to match user preference as opposed to designer preference. Green may be the designer’s favorite color, but blue is mine, and purple is a friend of mine’s. So why should we have to look at your overly green website?

Starting at the basics, this tutorial is going to show you how to create dynamic gradients for your templates. Not only will this save you time in gradient creation (since you won’t have open PhotoShop just to create a gradient anymore), but this will allow you to use a much greater variety of template choices for your users. Limiting template choice due to the cost, time, or effort of image creation is a thing of the past – at least when it comes to gradients.

You’ve got a great spot on your web page where you want the username and password fields to be. It’s absolutely perfect, except, it’s too small. No matter what you try, you cannot get the fields to fit along with the necessary labels. The fields fit just fine without the labels, but there’s just no room for the labels. You may have had a stroke of genius, thinking to yourself “I can use the fields themselves as lables.”

Now, as the superb interface designer that you are, you know that the label text that appears within those fields should readily disappear when a user focuses on each element. Well, this is fairly trivial for the username field, but it becomes a bit more complex for the password field.

In this tutorial I would like to show you how to design a stylish business card in Photoshop. This business card is  quite simple but looks clean and attractive. You will learn how to create vibrant background with popular light effects, also you will see how to create attractive button for your business or website name. Hope you will learn [...]

Hosting companies play one of the most important role in web community. For example to start a blog usually we need a domain, hosting and then blogging platform like WordPress. But today I’m not going to talk about which hosting to choose, which is better and which one fits your needs the best. Today I would like to show you some web design examples of hosting companies.

For those of you late to the party, I would recommend you read the first two ever-so-interesting parts of this tutorial: Minimizing File Size and Minimizing Server Calls. The first part, especially, will introduce you to the importance of web page optimization. This part of the tutorial is written under the impression that you have either read the first two parts or found this page via Google in an attempt to answer one question in particular, in which case you don’t need and probably aren’t reading the introduction.

That said, part 3 deals with minimizing your web page’s parse time – that is, the time it takes for the browser to convert your document from markup to visual elements. Thus concluding the sequential steps of web page creation: creating the files in a manner to reduce their size, retrieving the files in a manner to reduce server stress, and finally loading and displaying the files in a manner that occurs swiftly.

If you’re using WordPress just forself, then everything that comes with WordPress preconfigured is probably fine, but what about when you have setup a client site with WordPress, which your client will be using as a content management system? Well, assuming your clients are like everyone else’s clients, they’re probably not familiar with WordPress, which means that the simpler you can make the interface, the better their experience will be.

In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating to you how to customize several different sections of the WordPress admin area, including Dashboard widgets, left menu items, post/page meta boxes, and list columns. By the end of this, your WP admin area will be much better suited to inexperienced clients, making both your life and their’s easier.

We are pleased to announce that today is the grand opening of the Web Design Fan Store!

In our store, you can purchase a variety of jQuery addons and also our very own premium Wordpress theme: WDF Launch. The reception to this theme has been spectacular and now we are giving you access to use it on your own site.

Continue reading for coupon deals and even get a jQuery addon for free!

The spirit of Thanksgiving has taken us over and it got me thinking about all of the things I am thankful for online. There are a number of really incredible web design blogs out there that lend to us inspiration, information, and tools that make us better everyday. I want to acknowledge these resources here today and thank them all for what they do.

Happy Thanksgiving and be sure to add your favorite sites in our comments!