Nowadays, we always use internet as our main resource to acquire knowledge and improve our skills. Everything is there. Just one click, you can get whatever information that you need. However, please do not forget our traditional source of knowledge which is by reading a book.

There are a lot of books that you can get about design, usability, typography, CSS, software and many other related topics. Below are some of book would give benefits for you. Hopefully all of these books can make you a better designer and business owner. Here are some short reviews.

The Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide to Themes, Trends and Styles in Website Design

Author: Patrick McNeil
Price: RM 103.80
Store available: MPHonline, Amazon.com

This book compiled more than 7000 websites which are the best and arranged thematically. You will easily review them by colors, design style, type, theme, element and structure. At the end, you will expand your design vocabulary and train you to break down your favorite sources of design inspiration into bite-sized chunks that you can use in your own work. Plus, you will get inspiration for your next projects.

Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design

Author: Kristen Cullen
Price: RM 87.50
Store available: MPHonline, Amazon.com

Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. More than a collection of great examples of layout, this book is an invaluable resource for students, designers, and creative professionals who seek design understanding and inspiration.

The author, Cullen approaches layout with a series of step-by-step fundamental chapters (a “how-to” of layout) addressing topics such as The Function of Design, Inspiration, The Design Process, Intuition, Structure and Organization, The Interaction of Visual Elements, Typography, and Design Analysis. The book offers inspirational quotations and a unique, progressive design that truly reflects its content.

The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design

Author: Craig Grannell
Price: RM 116.37
Store available: Kinokuniya, Amazon.com

The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design is a special book—it will tell you all you need to know to design fantastic web sites that are standards compliant, usable, and look fantastic, but not overwhelm you with waffle, theory, and obscure details. It is designed to be invaluable to you, whatever stage you are at in your career, with a mixture of practical tutorials and reference material—beginners will quickly pick up the basics.

The Elements of Typographic Style

Author: Robert Bringhurst
Price: RM 165.80
Store available: MPHonline,  Amazon.com

It’s a book packed with design wisdom. Bringhurst has produced what is essentially a first principles of typography—a grammar of good taste based on the relationship between form and content of printed matter. It’s also a very beautiful book in its own right. You will not fail to discover visual pleasures on almost every page, and the text is illustrated with such an astonishing variety of beautiful fonts, that this almost doubles as a catalogue of type designs.

Typography Now: The Next Wave

Author: Rick Poynor / Edward Booth-Clibborn
Price: RM 165.80
Store available: MPHonline, Amazon.com

This book is worth having for a few reasons. One, there are some interesting pieces that stand out from the rest and will spark ideas. Two, the designs serve to remind us that just because you CAN make a piece of text jagged, cluttered, and obscure doesn’t mean you should. Three, it will get you thinking about the place of the designer/typographer/graphic artist.

Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain

Author: Stefan Mumaw / Wendy Lee Oldfield
Price: RM 70.50
Store available: MPHonline,  Amazon.com

It’s great to do an exercise each morning to get your day started, or even just when you’re feeling you need a little inspiration. There have all types of exercise such as design, photography, idea kindling, play, problem solving and writing also.

How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer

Author: Collis Ta’eed / Cyan Ta’eed
Price: $ 29
Store available: Amazon.com

This book is suitable for those people who want to start his or her career as a freelancer. The book provides information about how to figure your hourly rates, increase your rates over time, getting leads, managing clients, marketing, and subcontracting. If you have not yet decided on what you want to be, How to Be a Rock star Freelancer can help you by providing an accurate illustration about the field of works and the lifestyle of a freelancer. This can help you decide whether being a freelancer is suitable for you or not.

How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer

Author: Collis Ta’eed / Cyan Ta’eed
Price: $ 29
Store available: E-junkie.com

The book is aimed at anyone with a solid understanding of HTML/CSS. You don’t need to know PHP, you don’t need to have ever even touched WordPress before. The examples begin from scratch and build on each other, while basic PHP principles that are used are explained in an easy to understand manner.

Happy reading to all of you!

In business you have to know the strategies which make the work flow going smoothly. Here are the collections of tools that you will thanks to them later. It is suitable for both, those have own company and also for the freelancer.  Check them out. I’ll hope it will help you. All the best!

PDF to Excel

Use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly-editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in other files.

Checkvist

Create hierarchical task lists share them with your team, print out or publish online. For more info, click here.

Lovely chart

With Lovely Charts’ extremely simple and intuitive drag and drop drawing mechanism, you’ll be able to focus on what really matters. Register here just for free.

CurdBee

Easy, fast and secure online billing experience. CurdBee is all your billing in one convenient location. Estimate, invoice, and get paid – it’s that simple. That’s all business needs.

Show Document

This is online meeting that everyone can share and works on the same document during the live meeting. Go here for further information.

Host your business tools, with our hosting products. Kindly click here for more information.

One of the best ways to drive the engagement and traffic to your product is running a contest via social media channel. Plus, launching the online contest will be very inexpensive. Here are the strategies that you can follow to launch and manage a social media contest.

1. Define marketing goals

What you want from contest. How many people interested into your product? Do you want to learn more about the market? Do you want to drive awareness of a new product or service?

2. Simple and fun

Don’t get stuck with big idea and make it complicated. It doesn’t meant cannot make a video contest, but it will require many thing like skill, equipment, time and more. Find something small but it can be fun to participate and watch. Taking picture it can be okay.

3. Offer the great prize!

It will make more crowds. Sometimes they will ask common question. Should I have this? What if I’m not winning after spending much time? If the answer no, the contest cannot going well. The prize doesn’t necessarily to be a physical or service, but it can be something pleased your contestant. Such as public honors.

4. Don’t drag too long

For simple contest, don’t take time until a month. It would be more complex.

5. Monitor entries and contest

This is the toughest part to manage all the entries.  If you have a platform that can simplify that for you (e.g. one of the contest experts’ services), it will significantly cut down on contest management man hours.

6. Make judging transparent

Disclose how you are going to determine the winner. Are you going have the judges? Who they are? Or are going to let audience decide the winner?

7. Announce winner quickly!

When the contest is over, the interest is highest. It is the best time to announce the winner. People will be more willing and excited to join the contest in the future.

Good Luck!

Nowadays, most of companies were realize that they have to invest some of their marketing funds into social media.  However, some of them do really no idea why they need strategy marketing. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flicker, WordPress and Blogger – that are the list they already registered. But, what next? Why?

They just have need to do is embrace the benefits of social media and wisely thinking the objective. Different objective require different strategies. Here are the reason why companies need to plan and launching a social media.

GIVE CHANCE TO BUILD, INTRODUCE AND PROMOTE YOUR BRAND

The goals are creating awareness about the product or services, including introduce new company, existing company with new product or enhancing the product itself. Once they keep talking about your products, it might means they had been shared with friends, family and co-workers. Sometimes, they post on their blog and shared on Facebook’s wall. Spread your business entire world.

FEEDBACK IN UNIQUE WAY.

Another good reason is can get feedback from target audience. Using social media as a feedback channel is all about actively soliciting input, ideas and even complaints about products or services. This strategy have to take serious attention because every products need feedback.

Use blog as a medium to create relationship between author and readers, run ideas and share thoughts would be great.  Then, take their advice as marketing strategy absolutely open the amazing door of opportunity. Wisely use other social media channel like Facebook and Twitter. It can be asked simple question to larger audience will let find a way to deliver it carries a lot of value.

DEMONSTRATE PERSONALITY

Companies are faceless, people are not. Using social media to tie your business brand to a personality can go a long way toward making even the largest company feel small and approachable. Whether it’s answering questions on Twitter or sharing anecdotes or stories on your blog, letting some of your personality shine through goes a long way toward helping consumers feel connected to your brand.

These days, a lack of natural writing ability won’t keep your personality from shining through. Whether it’s shooting video, recording a podcast or simply sharing unique finds and quick insight on Twitter, social media has opened up a ton of ways (other than writing) for people to communicate.

Setting up e-Book is just one piece of the internet marketing puzzle that you will need to have in place in order to build a profitable online business. The objective is making money with easier way.

Recent release of new eBook by Kevin Zahri was a roaring success, achieved RM 1000 daily sales and has appeared in local newspaper Harian Metro. By using all tips given here he managed to market his ebook successfully and set the benchmark for others to follow. You may see how he market his ebook here and his facebook page, which he effectively combines both to market his ebook to broader audience.

Here are some tips that have been used by Kevin to market his ebook through EmbunWeb hosting services and social media integration:

Purchase  domain name

Do not get wrong perspective that purchasing domain name was really expensive. It not at all. You can view our reasonable price here, as what Kevin choose for his website. Plus, it wills much easier if you have your own domain name is related with your own product or by your name itself. Example:  www.yourname.com .  This way could be easier to advertise and customer will remember rather than free web space URL you will get. Example: yourname.somecompany.com.

Setup hosting account

Nearly all hosting companies offer different types of hosting plans, including shared hosting and dedicated hosting. In addition, some hosts also offer a “virtual private server” hosting option for users that requires more resources then shared hosting plans. In Kevinzahri.com case, he use EmbunWeb’s shared hosting plan which is affordable and comes with 40+ web applications that can be easily installed from build-in control panel.

Social Media

This is the most important value in online marketing strategies. From here, you can create attention for your target user. Today, so much type of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5 and much more. To get better communication and share thoughts for your audience by blogging, such as WordPress, Blogger and etc. Kevin Zahri integrates his Facebook fan page comments within his website so that he can draw lots more audience into his website, and he also can updates his Facebook fan page automatically with his latest post from his website, thus creating dynamic interactivity from both places. With share and like buttons, his fans also can helps in promoting his ebooks to much broader crowds.

Email Marketing

This is popular with companies because it likes communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. With EmbunWeb’s Embuzz Email Marketing services, Kevin can send out periodical personalized newsletter and updates to his fans with ease and can monitor each email delivery with build in real time reporting and statistics.

In The Nutshell

With effective usage of hosting plans, correct domain name selection, social media and email marketing strategy, EmbunWeb.com can helps online entrepreneurs like Kevin Zahri to reach out more into larger market share. Feel free to browse our product offerings at embunweb.com, and you are more than welcome to speak to us on how we can help your online business too.

Lecturers: What is good design?
Student A: Viewers or users can understand what the designers want to deliver through his art or design
Student B: Creative and good for clients.
Student C: ….

…

Here are the some of great quote that I would like to share about “Good Design”.

Good design is good business.
Tom Watson, Jr., President, IBM (1952–1971)

For a definition of good design, I go back to Vitruvius, who suggested
that good design was “solidity, commodity and delight.”
Hugh Dubberly, Co-founder, Dubberly Design Office.

Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism).
William Drenttel, partner, Jessica Helfand/William Drenttel design firm.

Design is the term we use to describe both the process and the result of giving tangible form to human ideas. Design doesn’t just contribute to the quality of life; design, in many ways, now constitutes the quality of life.
Peter Lawrence, Founder, Corporate Design Foundation

Scientists spend their time trying to discover what’s already there.
Designers spend their time inventing what doesn’t yet exist.
Peter Lissaman, aerospace engineer and professor, University of Southern California.

Good design is design that surprises, something that is unexpected but immediately comprehensible and pleasing.
Norman Klein, Cultural critic and professor, California Institute of the Arts

Hi all, i just found the good article to share . This article taken from wpbeginner

1. Merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.org

For those of you who do not know what WordPress MU is, you do not need to worry at all. WordPress MU is a similar platform to WordPress except it allows users to run multiple sites under one installation. WordPress.com is running on WordPress MU code base. Matt Mullenweg announced the merge news during WordCamp San Francisco 2009. After a year of hard work, Automattic staff and WordPress core developers finally did it.

What does this mean for you?

You can now have multiple sites in one installation. For example we can have showcase.wpbeginner.com with one WordPress installation if we want. What are the possible outcomes? If you have one site now, and you do not want to add more sites later that is perfectly OK. Nothing will change for you. If you are running on WordPress MU, after the upgrade your sites will remain the same. Nothing will change for you.

The bottom line is that nothing will change if you don’t want it to change. This feature is just an add-on that will help users who want to have multiple sites. It will also help WordPress MU users because this will allow them to use all WordPress.org plugins without hacking them.

Domain Mapping – If you are a WordPress MU user, or if you have used WordPress.com in the past, you know that there is a way to have top level domains for your network sites. WordPress.com allows users to upgrade their subdomains to a custom domain. This feature will NOT be included in the core. You can still use the plugin to make it work.

Cross Network Search – If you do decide to have numerous sites under one install, cross network search is not a built-in feature. It may become a core feature in the future, but in WordPress 3.0 this will not be possible. Although you can still use the plugin to make it work.

Click for preview

2. Better Navigation Menus

Custom Woo Navigation will be included to the core in this release in order to allow for better menu management. This menu system has the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen, it could combine Pages, Categories, and Links. It also allows the ability of re-ordering, along with submenus, and hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether.

Click for preview

3. Custom Post Types

There was a big hype about this feature when WordPress 2.9 was being released. Due to some technical difficulties, this feature did not make it in. Well the wait is over because it will be included in WordPress 3.0. Combining Post Types and Taxonomies will make WordPress a much more robust CMS option. This feature will allow you to have different type of posts for example Portfolio listings, Products, and then Normal posts.

Note: This feature is not to replace the use of categories. You should still use categories. This feature will allow a different way of sorting/display and enable other CMS options in WordPress.

Click for preview

4. New Default Theme 2010

Bye Bye Kubrick Theme. Welcome 2010. WordPress 3.0 will come with a new default theme known as 2010. From this year on, the goal is to have a new theme for every year. Wondering what the new 2010 theme would look like?

Click for preview

5. Custom Background Support

Support for custom background can be called by adding this line in your functions.php:

add_custom_background();

Once you add that code, you will see a screen in your admin panel that will let you upload a custom background image which will replace the default grey background. It will only work in this theme and other themes that support this feature.

6. Author Specific Templates

We know that in WordPress 2.9 there was an option added which allowed designers to create category templates using the slug fore example category-slug.php. In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.

In WordPress 3.0, you would be able to name files like author-syed.php.

7. Ability to Choose Username When Installing WordPress

As of now, WordPress automatically assigns the first user with the username “admin”. If you have read our 13 vital tips to protect WordPress Admin Area, or sat through any of Syed’s Security Presentations, you would know the importance of this feature. Now the hackers cannot guess your username because it will no longer be “admin”. Before those who did not change their default username were helping the hackers by giving them half the answer.

8. Welcome Guide in Every Installation

In the past, WordPress always lacked something which was very crucial. A welcome guide which would help users get familiar with using WordPress. Many users complained regarding this issue, so in WordPress 3.0 there will be a Welcome Guide to guide new users.

9. Canonical Plugins

Have you used a plugin that you loved, and the author discontinued providing support. No bug fixes, no upgrades, and the plugin initially breaks in newer versions. This is a common issue therefore with WordPress 3.0 there is a mission that Jane Wells is carrying which is to unite the plugin authors and come up with canonical plugins. Canonical plugins are developed by a community instead of one developer, so if one person steps down, the plugin does not die.

Lets hope this idea works because it will be great for the community.

What is Tweetmeme?

Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on Twitter every 5 minutes.

It aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular by analysing links that people have “tweeted”, organising and categorising them – delivering streams of the most popular.

Step 1: Click the green tweet button (in red box)

Step 2: This pop up window will pop up and click blue tweet button.  Your title post will appear automatically on your  twitter account

It’s an interesting sneak peek into popular culture and what people are talking about and you can use it to add your content to the mix.

See that little green and white button at the top right of this post?

That’s a Tweetmeme button. If you have a Twitter account you can click on this button and descriptive text with a link back to the page will appear in your Twitter update box.

You can add the button (for free) to your website content so that visitors can simply and easily share your content – widening your distribution and driving more visitors to your website.

Interesting ?? It’s incredibly easy to setup and there’s also a downloadable plugin for wordpress. So get your tweetmeme and lets twitting

Embunweb is twitting .  Follow us @ http://twitter.com/embunweb

HTML5 and CSS3 are here, and most of modern web browsers are starting to support it in big way. Originally designed as a simple language to format the webpage layout, it has evolve to a full fledged complex programming language. Coupled with Javascript and some of AJAX magics, an ordinary webpage can be transformed into a great compliment (or perhaps surpass) for desktop applications, as demonstrated by Google Docs service. With the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3, now web designer can easily create visual effects and web application which previously only possible by using browser’s plug-ins such as Adobe Flash Player. Some of major websites are already started to deploy these technology in big way, such as Youtube, which are starting to use the new HTML5′s video tag to serve their video without using Flash video player.

What does this mean for you as EmbunWeb’s client? More saving on webserver’s disk space as all these technology consume much less space by using only lines of codes instead of have to deploy additional external flash files or java applets, which also translate into faster delivery of webpages to your visitor’s web browser. Below are some of online resources on HTML5 / CSS3 examples and tutorials on the web:

1. 22 Handy HTML5 & CSS3 Tools, Resources And Guides

2. Designing for the Future with HTML5+CSS3 : Tutorials and Best Practices

3. CSS3.Info

We are excited with what these new technology can bring into your web development and design process, and looking forward to see some of these great new technology to appear on your website. Drop us your URL here to showcase your HTML5 and CSS3 website.

Have a great day!

Maybe some of you have a question, How i can get my EPP Code? Below is some info about EPP Code. Hope this can help you to get the picture on it.

The EPP key (Authorization code) is one of the safeguards against unauthorized transfers of domain name registrations and it protects your rights as a domain owner. The EPP key is required when transferring .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .us domain names. It is not possible to initiate a domain name transfer for these domains without an EPP code.

Please note that EPP codes are case sensitive.

If you are having issues with your host/registrar and you cannot obtain your EPP key, you may not be able to manage your domain and transfer it elsewhere. In such cases it may be best to use a new domain name for your website.

source : kbsiteground