Everyone that needs to be creative goes through it. It’s called writer’s block, designer’s block, musician’s block, artist’s block, the list can go on and on. Sometimes the best way to get over a block is to simply look at fresh material that other people have already thought of. That doesn’t mean you should copy another person’s work, but you get new concepts and experiment by adding to or twisting it to make it your own. Writers will free write and read books covering unique topics. Musicians will listen to different genres and improvise. Web designers should look at other web designs to gather different tastes and ideas to really be inspired to make something just as jaw-dropping and fresh. Below are some of the top CSS web galleries I’ve picked out. These are not in any order because I really can’t rate any as the best or the worst.

With the recent addition of the parameter section in Google Webmasters, Google prefers that you use their feature instead of blocking them in your robots.txt file. Last week I wrote an article on how to write a robots.txt file and mentioned in the end that you should only disallow parameters for the MSNbots. I’ll explain it further here.

There are thousands and thousands of Wordpress plugins out there trying to get your attention. But do you really need that many? To be honest, an average blog only needs a few plugins to get it really running. If you have too many plugins, you’ll end up having a blog that’s slow to load and will end up having too many complications with newer Wordpress updates. So knowing that you should only have enough plugins to make your blog functional (and visitors happy), take a look at the top 10 most useful Wordpress plugins.

What’s the purpose of a robots.txt file?

First off, lets clear the reason why everyone should use a robots.txt file. When the search engine crawlers (Googlebot, MSNbot, Yahoo! Web Crawler) arrive at your website, they first check if a robots.txt file exists on the root of your domain (eg. www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt). If it does, they use that as a guideline for crawling and indexing your website and its pages. If it doesn’t, they just try their best to crawl your website. But that’s where the problem begins. When a crawler reaches a page that doesn’t have any links, it will stop crawling there. For instance, if you link to a small pop-up page that contains nothing but text, crawlers will goto that page and stop the crawl there because it can’t find its way back. The solution to this is to block the page from being crawled in the robots.txt file.

A simple navigation menu may suffice for many, but those that want to go the extra mile and be “that” site users will remember often times utilize a really unique and cool navigation menu.

1. Fixed Fade-Out Menu (CSS + jQuery)

A pretty cool fade-out menu tutorial by Mary Lou at Codrops that gives the users an option to fade the menu in/out by hovering the mouse.

Now, everyone might be quick to jump on the bandwagon and vote for Wordpress. But there has to be a reason why so many people still use Google’s Blogger platform. Here we will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of both services. Use this guide to figure out for yourself which blogging service is right for you.

With Wordpress as popular as it is, the amount of crappy themes out there literally “litter” the internet. If you type in “Wordpress themes” in Google, you’ll get #1 – the official Wordpress theme directory that offers not-so-pretty themes. Then #2 and on, you’ll get websites made for profit, websites that offer hacked themes that secretly include a link to their website, or both.

Use this gathered list of my personal favorite websites that offer links and downloads for free, reliable and high-quality Wordpress themes to save yourself the hassle of digging through the junk.

Choosing the right keywords before beginning your SEO efforts can save you a lot of time in the future. Use this list of helpful tips to keep you in check while doing your research.

It can be especially frustrating for the independent webmasters that are looking to create a new niche-targeted website but find themselves stuck on picking the right market. In this post, I’ll give you a few guidelines and tips to help you find the right and successful niche for your new website.