You’re a terrible client

It’s not just me; I’ve asked around: You will probably be your own very worst client. Ever.

Every trade has a similar story to the point where it’s almost cliché: the carpenter’s house is falling apart, the mechanic’s car is a rattling jalopy, and the barber is a balding chatty guy who’s always forcing loved ones into drawn-out awkward small-talk. It only makes sense then that the web designer’s site would be mired in all sorts of miserable problems.

Working on your own site is incredibly hard! You’ve just worked all day on other people’s websites, now you’re going to do yours, on your own time

Turning a WordPress error into an opportunity with a custom 404 page

Unfortunately, the vast majority of website designers and operators view the 404 error, which occurs when a page is not found, as a dead end.

This page is often given a simple message that just states merely, “Sorry! There’s nothing here.” With WordPress, however, there absolutely can be something there when a user navigates to a page that is no longer there, has moved, or has been deleted.

The unique setup of pages and templates within the Dashboard allows this page to be as dynamic as any other page within the WordPress ecosystem.

Don’t let a drab and unhelpful 404 page be the end of a user’s journey through your website. Instead, turn it into an opportunity for further reading, redirection to the content a user may have been looking for, or a suggestion of where to go when the website’s navigation offers no obvious answers.

It’s time to create a 404 error page using the WordPress Dashboard

Installing a WordPress theme can be a hodgepodge effort, where some pages are included and others were left out of the template for reasons of expedience or other considerations. The 404 error page seems to be one which is not consistently included in every WordPress theme, and some custom design authors even leave it out of their own, self-designed website interfaces. That means that a good number of users will have to create their own 404 error page before they can add content and redirect users to a site’s best features.

Creating a 404 error page is generally done using FTP to create the initial PHP file that will contain basic theme code. It can then be edited using built-in tools contained within the WordPress Dashboard itself. To create a 404 error page for a theme that simply does not have one at all, open up an FTP client and navigate to the theme’s main directory. This can typically be found by navigating through the following site path:

/public_html/wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME

Foxy Complete advanced autocomplete search with images

Today I am going to share a trendy functionality which I have been implementing in my projects for a while now.

I call it “FoxyComplete” and what is does is fetch clickable search results along with images either automatically scraped from the result’s content or a specified file. It’s easy to implement and once done, easy to tweak.

The application of this functionality is purely dependent on the designer and developer preference but its impact on the user experience makes it a top choice to add in modern design and development projects.

Business units where I have personally used this functionality are e-commerce, corporate designs, photography, entertainment and future projects that demand a comprehensive search feature.

I am pretty sure that you all have visited the IMDb and Apple websites and tried their search features. If not

Free download Ultimate Social Icon Set

Today’s freebie is a social icon set which contains all the latest icons needed for you social needs! It includes a total of 75 icons, provided in three sizes: 16×16, 32×32 and 64×64.

The file is free for personal and commercial use. Redistribution is not allowed, so if you’d like to share this one with your friends, kindly direct them to this page so that they can download their own copy from here.

The set was designed by Chris Kirkman, a designer from San Diego that focuses on UI and UX design. You can follow him on Twitter and you can also check out his free digital business card app, uME

See the full preview and download after the jump!

Comics of the week

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

The wrong type of consistency

Our favorite tweets of the week May 21 – May 27, 2012

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us

CSS3 Best Practices for designers

If you’re primarily a designer and have recently started learning CSS, you’ve probably started to incorporate some of the new CSS features that have been added to the language in CSS3.

But if you don’t have a lot of experience with CSS, then you’re probably trying to figure out what is the best way to handle some of the challenges that arise from using multiple vendor prefixes, dealing with older versions of Internet Explorer, and other CSS3-specific dilemmas.

In this article, I’ll try to cover some of the important things to remember when dealing with these issues. Keep in mind that nothing here is set in stone but these should just be guidelines to help you write more effective, easier to maintain, and future-proof code.

Know your support charts

You probably won’t have to memorize which features work in which browsers. In most cases, CSS3 features will not work in all in-use browsers. And in some instances, even the most recent versions of browsers don’t have full support.

So the first thing you should do is understand where support is lacking. The primary resource you should use is the When can I use… site, which includes charts for CSS3, HTML5, and tons more. You can even do side-by-side comparisons with different browsers, as shown in the screenshot below that compares CSS3 support in Firefox 3.6 vs. IE9:

Convince your boss about telecommuting

When I was a kid, I remember driving with my father during the gas crisis of the early 1970s. We drove past lines of cars that went on for about half a mile or more.

We would stop at a local gas station where he knew the owner. The owner of the station closed his business and sold gas by the tank full only to good customers, by appointment only. God forbid you drove far away from home and needed gas elsewhere and had to wait on line for a couple of hours for the maximum half tank stations would sell while customers shot each other over the precious juice. It was just like The Road Warrior only people were more civil in that movie and the gas they killed each other for cost nothing.

It was a bad time but it forced people and society to change. When gas was outrageously priced at a dollar a gallon, consumers opted to buy smaller cars and dump their gas-guzzlers that were the size of Rhode Island.

There were articles and news stories spotlighting the practice of mixing errands so one could save gas and the government preached trying the four-day work-week.

The proposal was simple and brilliant. Businesses would extend the 9-5 workday by two hours, four days a week and be closed on Fridays. The 40-hour week would still remain but by cutting the need for commuting and the energy used by an office full of people, there would be substantial savings and lessen the dependence on foreign oil. With every office closed on the same day, there would be no loss of business inertia.

How to make a WordPress site

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management software solution, with more than 60 million users around the world. With a community that large, it’s only logical that the development community is appropriately robust itself.

As adoption of WordPress continues to increase worldwide, more and more theme developers are bringing their private skills to the public marketplace.

They do this by offering custom WordPress themes either for free or for a small price, and they demonstrate each theme’s appearance using a demo site.

This is far different from simply displaying an image of the theme in action. Instead, a theme demo site actually lets users peruse an entire, complete WordPress installation with the theme in action. This actually helps to sell users on a theme, as enabling them to use the theme itself proves its usefulness and high quality.

This can be done by any user of WordPress 3.0 (or higher) more than a single extra plugin. All it requires is enabling one of the new WordPress “sleeper” features that goes unnoticed, and unused, by all but the most advance WordPress customers. Here’s how it’s done.

WordPress networks: the key to a theme demo site with WordPress 3.x

Previous versions of WordPress before the 3.x line of releases were big on using plugins to make a theme demo site. And this process wasn’t simplified by simply installing one plugin; instead, the vast array of features a user required often meant that they’d have to enable two, three, or even four plugins and widgets to get the job done. With WordPress Networks, this is essentially a deprecated way of creating a theme demo site.

Enabling WordPress Networks will require a bit of PHP knowledge, as well as some basic coding of server files like .htaccess. It will use the Dashboard to perform most of the setup, and then the user will simply modify a few files to complete the process. After that, new sites can be created to display the content of WordPress themes within one website.