Let’s dig into the 10 key elements to keep in mind as you polish your website.

georgiadaily:

How do you make decisions? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably answer that you pride yourself on weighing the pros and cons of a situation carefully and then make a decision based on logic. You know that other people have weak personalities and are easily swayed by their emotions, but this rarely happens to you.

Cross document messaging is addressed in a recent HTML5 Web Messaging Working draft from the redoubtable W3C. The proposed messaging system is said to “allow documents to communicate with each other regardless of their source domain, in a way designed to not enable cross-site scripting attacks.” For more on the w3C draft, go to its HTML5 Web Messaging page.

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at this impressive tumblr blog and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs.

When it comes to Facebook, if you’re uncertain where and when to place a “Like” button on your site and when to use “Share,” you’re not alone. Social sharing technologies have evolved significantly in the past several months, but it’s not as complicated as it may seem. Used in concert, “Like” and “Share” are some of the best tools around for driving referral traffic from social networks, opening new communication channels with customers and prospects, and building relationships with your best advocates. Here are three best practices for applying them together.

Last week I talked about 960 Grid System is Getting Old. Surprisingly a lot of comments have been made. It seems like people are using 960gs because of the “golden ratio” — all numbers are even. I’m a designer, not a grid scientist. Why restrict your layout so that it can fit into this 960gs? A grid is supposed to help you in design, not to limit your creativity. The 978 grid, that I mentioned before, is not just about increasing the page width, but to loosen the gutter space so users can read it more comfortably. Today, I would like to write a follow up post to further ellaborate on some of the points I brought up initially.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to develop a useful and attractive Audio Recorder application using Thibault Imbert‘s MicRecorder class. Read on to find out more!

During this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a dynamic scrollbar using ActionScript 3 and XML. Our scrollbar will include some cool effects such as blurring and easing. Let’s begin!

In the days of cold, hard newsprint, only people who could draw were successful comic strip authors. In some cases, this resulted in comic strips that had very nice pictures, but weren’t all that funny (cough, Blondie). Thankfully, the Internet has taught us not to accept an inferior form of comic artistry, but a more flexible one. Comic strip enthusiasts who want funny but don’t care about pretty drawing can have their strips, those who want artistry have theirs, and even those with very specific tastes can find something just right. The best part about these developments is that they allow you, regardless of any talent as an artist or comedian, to create your very own comic strip. Depending on what you’re going for, you can use one of these six sites to help you do it.

Adobe, a company known for their extensive portfolio of desktop based products for print and web design, is working hard to bring some of their software tools to the cloud. Buzzword, an online word processor that later transformed into Acrobat.com, was probably the first cloud-based product from Adobe. Then came Photoshop Express, an online image editor that you could use to quickly fix your photos in the browser itself. These products were useful with an innovative user interface, but nothing revolutionary. Services like Google Docs and Picnik had been there for a while and offered far more features than the corresponding Adobe tools. Project Rome, Adobe’s latest design tool for consumers, is however different.

Digital agency Invoke has a habit of creating products instead of purchasing them. HootSuite, a third-party client for accessing social networks like Facebook and Twitter, is the most successful of the in-house tools that the company has launched as products.

When Dario Meli, David Tedman, and Ryan Holmes launched the company in 2006, they weren’t necessarily planning on selling products. But as they developed the tools that they needed, they discovered other agencies needed them as well. Today more than 800,000 people use HootSuite.