Monty Tuts - Your Ultimate Web Design Resource

5 Amazing Wordpress Themes

Monty — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:14:50 +0000

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article I present 5 premium WordPress themes. All themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Hope you find this section useful and find a theme to your taste.

Unique Light Edition

This theme is best suitable for the freelancers, personal blogs, business portfolios and suitable for many more other categories.

Priminence – Wordpress Theme

All, a new update has been approved which adds the contact page sidebar styling, as well as archives styling (left out of the upload I submitted originally, my apologies), as well as a couple basic bug fixes.

Concept - Wordpress Template

This theme is a complete Wordpress Theme, designed from the ground up to function as a comprehensive Wordpress theme that can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout.

Blue Glow Wordpress Theme

This theme is a complete Wordpress Theme, designed from the ground up to function as a comprehensive Wordpress theme that can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout.

MagStar WordPress Theme

MagStar is a stylish Wordpress theme designed for blogs, magazine sites and portfolios.

oaker-wood-website-proposal

10 Amazing Joomla Templates

Monty — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:38:59 +0000

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

In this article I present 10 amazing Joomla themes. All themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme. Each template has been carefully crafted by top professionals.

Hope you find this section useful and find a theme to your taste.

mpONE, astonishing Joomla template

This template proudly doesn’t support IE6 . Internet Explorer 6 is too old, it’s deprecated. Leave it and install Internet Explorer 8 for God’s sake. Not all features of the template could be seen in the live preview, so make sure that you’ve looked at all the screenshots as well.

JoomBiz Joomla CMS Template

This is a nice and modern Joomla template wich can be used both for magazines/blogs and businesses.

Royal Joomla Theme

Royal Joomla is a sleek, fixed-width,1,2 or 3 column, wiki/article site styled joomla 1.5 native template. The beauty of the template comes in its simplicity and accessibility.

In To Blue

In To Blue is a bright and clean 2-Coloumn Joomla template.

Hallmark

We’ve pushed Joomla to it’s limits and beyond with this stunning Joomla theme. Complete with its own custom skinned comments system (optional) You can use this theme to run your own website, or even a blog.

NewsPressed Mobile

This is the mobile (iPhone) version of the NewsPressed Template. It automatically integrates into the existing NewsPressed template. There is no need for a seperate site (mobile.example.com) or template.

Hope Joomla Theme

Hope is a wonderful template designed for portfolios and blogs. It has a simple design with left, top, and footer module positions only. It includes seamless suckerfish dropdown menus and a text size changer. Works in Firefox, Safari, and IE7.

Personal Touch for Joomla

This is the Joomla version of the static Personal Touch template. Module positions and the content area collapse appropriately.

Joomla Mobile Dark Theme

This Joomla 1.5 template will help get your site optimized formobile users! Includes detailed instructions, a logo PSD , and great mobile styling.

Business 2.0

Business 2.0 – a clean, fixed-width, 3 column, corporate business joomla 1.5 native template.

5 Ways to Advertise without a Budget

Monty — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:36:24 +0000

You’ve decided to go into business for yourself as a freelancer. You have your business idea, your preferred niche, and some contacts and potential clients. How do you get new clients without paying a lot for advertising?

Here are five tips for advertising without a budget:

1. Create your own website.
There are some low- or no-cost options available for developing a website. Some platforms like Wordpress and Weebly have templates where you can have multiple static pages in addition to a blog page. Use your name as your sign-in. Unless you pay a fee to have the site open in a domain, it will be a subdomain of the platform you use, such as http://[yourname]/wordpress.com.

2. Join social networking sites.
Sites like Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., help freelancers in building relationships with potential clients. People like to work with someone they “know.” Having an account on any of these sites and interacting (rather than always trying to sell) will build relationships, establish your reputation, and develop reliable contacts quicker and more effectively than traditional advertising.

3. Design your own brochures and business cards.
Depending on what area you freelance in, developing brochures and business cards can serve a dual purpose: Advertising materials and samples of your work. This does have some cost associated with it as you would need to invest in some business card stock and brochure paper, along with your printer’s ink.

4. Attend community networking events.
There are a wide variety of networking opportunities available for freelancers. Always have at least your business cards with you. Consider keeping a handful of brochures in your car as well. Take these with you particularly when you attend a networking event, perhaps as sponsored by your local Chamber of Commerce.

5. Include your freelance information in the signature area of any/all e-mails you send.
Word gets around about what you do. If you have your freelance information in your signature file, it will go out to everyone, spreading the word about you and your freelance business. Include this information even when you e-mail your brother who lives across town. Services such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc., also have areas where you can insert a signature file.

Freelancers who have just hung out their shingle don’t have to go without advertising. With a little creativity, you can advertise without a budget almost as effectively as if you had money earmarked for that, sometimes more.

Bluehost hosting voted The Best Business Web Hosting

Monty — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:13:32 +0000

Bluehost hosting had been voted the best business web hosting provider, and leading the professional web hosting categories. Bluehost hosting plan with cpanel and come with excellent technical support with live chat support and phone call support. Highly reliable web hosting servers and with good server uptime and network uptime, complete with high performance server specification, creates the best professional web hosting plan at just $6.95 per month.

More than 10 best web hosting companies had been nominated and evaluated and tested throughout the year of 2008, and the best web hosting company had been selected based on their winning categories. Not all hosting plan are the same, and bluehost hosting is leading the business web hosting category.

If you are looking to host a company website or ecommerce website with professional quality in mind, bluehost $6.95 hosting plan will be the right choice that you can count on. Good server + good support services = the best business web hosting plan.

Bluehost $6.95/month = Unlimited storage + unlimited domain hosting + cpanel control panel

Fantastic AJAX Newsletter Module

Monty — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:23:16 +0000

This free app should be great for any newsletter management needs. Copy this one file onto your site, and you’re ready to send and archive all newsletters, manage e-mail addresses and categories, and configure a template for your e-mails. If needed, the source code is well documented!

Downlaod here.

Build a Login and Registration System with XML

Monty — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:16:10 +0000

Building an entire membership system can be a tedious, and time-consuming task. Tim Cooper is going to show us how to build the ENTIRE thing in roughly thirty minutes. Rather than using MYSQL as our database, Tim will instead demonstrate an alternate approach: using an XML file. We’ll be reviewing PHP, .htaccess files, sessions, and more!

Click here for full video tutorial.

84 Useful CSS Tips & Resources

Monty — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:17:03 +0000

Web Standards are so so important, and i appreciate the beauty and power of CSS, in fact my shropshire based web design studio - Project Thirteen Design is built on the aim of producing beautiful, accessible websites. The love and respect for web standards is continually growing in the online community and the push to create more and more unique web designs and layouts means the use and functionality of CSS is more keenly discussed.

Here we have 84, yes 84 amazing css tips, resources and tutorials. They should keep you occupied for some time.

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

20 Useful CSS Tips For Beginners

5 Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

Using CSS to Do Anything: 50+ Creative Examples & Tutorials

101 CSS Tips, Tutorials and Examples

CSS Code Snippets : 15 Wicked Tricks

15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned

8 CSS tips for better linking

8 Premium One Line CSS Tips

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

30+ CSS Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Guides

10 Principles of the CSS Masters

10 Excellent CSS Tips and Tutorials

50+ Nice Clean CSS Tab-Based Navigation Scripts

CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Tips, Demos & Best Practices

120 Excellent Examples of CSS Horizontal Menus

60+ Wacky CSS Tutorials, Layouts, Optimizers & More

12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean

Quick & Easy CSS Development with Firebug

25+ CSS Tools to reduce your work load

20 Useful Resources for Learning about CSS3

16 Usable CSS Graph and Bar Chart Tutorials & Techniques

Top 10 Swish And Stylish CSS Tricks

12 Most used CSS tricks

Five web 2.0 CSS menu tutorials

12 CSS Tools and Tutorials for Beautiful Web Typography

30 Excellent CSS Based Navigation and Buttons Tutorial

Creating CSS Layouts: Best Tutorials on Converting PSD to XHTML

20 Ultimate CSS Tutorials That Will Help You Master CSS

19 CSS Menu Tutorials to Spice Up Your Web Designs

Create a Progress Bar With Javascript

Monty — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:30:35 +0000

Here’s another fantatic tutorial from Net Tuts….

The Progress Bar is one of the latest components to be added to the excellent library of UI widgets and interaction helpers built on top of jQuery. It was introduced in the latest version of the library, which at the time of writing is 1.7.

Click here for the full tutorial.

How to Become a Freelance Web Developer

Monty — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:02:22 +0000

Found this fantistic article, and thought you might find it useful.

Have you ever wanted to be a freelance web developer? Whether you’re working for the man or developing as a hobby, there are some tried and tested tips you can use to ease yourself into the life of a freelance web developer - even if you only do it part-time.

By working with many and varied clients, your web dev and business skills will grow at a rapid pace. If everything goes right, you should be able to make a good living doing something you love.

So today we’re going to go over how to actually become a freelance web developer, and all that goes with it.

Click here for the full article.

Project Thirteen Design Goes Live

Monty — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:54:13 +0000

I am very pleased to announce Project Thirteen Design (www.project13design.com) has gone live. Project Thirteen in its own words is a web design agency based in Ludlow, Shropshire, focused on delivering websites that really work for our clients. At Project Thirteen Design we use our experience in delivering solutions to help businesses and individuals improve themselves by using internet technologies intelligently.

From planning to testing Project Thirteen has been a long time in the making. So it’s great to finally see the fruits of my labour online.

If anyone has a Project we can help you with don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We offer web design, graphic design, SEO and online marketing such as Google Adwords.

Thank you for your time.