1. The Typographer’s Glossary

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2. Meet Your Type

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3. Type Classification

4. Typeface Anatomy

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5. The Vignelli Canon

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6. Webfonts

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7. A Practical Guide to Web Typography

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8. Styles,Weights,Widths

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9. Helvetica – Complements and Alternatives

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10. Typography and Readability

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It all started in 1996, when itList conceptualized social bookmarking for both, public and private use. Ever since then, bookmarking has evolved and become more products centric. However, social bookmarking is not only about promoting a website or product. It is indeed a useful tool to increase the number of users visiting the site, nevertheless, it is not considered to be a good practice to make use of social bookmarking for this sole purpose.

Ideal Social Bookmarking

Ideally, social bookmarking started off as a way to let people share some interesting websites or blogs, with their regular site visitors. It is possible to restrict the viewing of these bookmarks to only a set of people as well, in order to imbibe some privacy. But gradually, things changed and today we rarely see private social bookmarking. People have stopped ‘sharing’ links and have started to simply paste their own links on their webpages. So, the noble cause of sharing information has twisted well enough to give rise to another social marketing tool.

Excessive Bookmarking-Ouch! That Hurts

A very general question that pops up in many social marketers’ minds is ‘If social bookmarking is a powerful way to boost your sales and reputation, why not make good use of it?’ Well, it is not a ‘good use’ if you actually exploit it; even bookmarking can come back to pinch you, if you try to misuse it.

If a user clicks on a captive link and gets redirected to a product promotion page or a page with less content and more hype, he/she will obviously not want to click on anymore bookmarked sites. Moreover, when your regular site visitors see the excessive bookmarking of your own sites, they will start to dislike your pages altogether, which can result in substantial loss of your original clientele. Hence, over usage of social bookmarking can bring down and affect your business! That definitely hurts!

To use or not to use Social Bookmarking?

If you come across a particular site or blog, which you are very impressed with, you can share the link on your page. If you stumble upon an important piece of information, which can help others as well, you can bookmark it. If you think that the article you wrote is good and informative, you can share it with others by bookmarking it on your site. When you do all these, you will be indeed attracting people towards your unique site. If they like your work, they will even start to follow it. Thus, an optimum use of social bookmarking poses no harm and can be absolutely used.

Describe the Bookmark

When you describe a bookmark, even before the user can actually enter the site, you are giving the user an idea on what to expect from the resource. Therefore, if a user feels the urge to read it, he/she will go ahead, or else they will not take the pains to download it and then discard it immediately. You may even add comments, supporting or opposing the resource, but only if you really think you know clearly understand what the resource is talking about.

In our economy many workers are taking their profession into their own hands. Becoming a freelance or self-employed designer may have been your dream from the beginning. However, unlike working in an office or a cubicle, freelance working can be quite difficult to keep on track. With so many distractions, lack of inspiration, or just all around procrastination, you may find yourself lacking the results you are expected to provide. Therefore, here are some tips on how to increase productivity.

Set Your Goals:

Without a boss breathing down your neck, you might find it hard to keep yourself on pace. Setting goals is an important part of any project. As a designer, your clients expect your designs to be completed in the time-frame you quoted. Therefore, setting step by step goals will help you achieve this. Don’t just write a deadline on the calendar; try setting small goals that will lead up to the final outcome.

Avoid Interruptions:

One of the dangers of working outside of an office is the possibility of constant interruptions. Between people coming to the door, the phone ringing, and the distractions of things around the house, you may find it hard to work uninterrupted. The best solution is to use discipline and treat your project as a job.

Stay Inspired:

When you work from home and look at the same 4 walls everyday it is sometimes hard to stay inspired. With many projects seeming monotonous, you will need to find ways to keep your creative juices flowing. Visit your favorite sites to pull inspiration from, take a break and take a drive, or walk around the neighborhood. Do whatever makes you feel inspired to create.

Exercise:

Many work at home jobs, including freelance design, requires hours of sitting and constant use of your computer. This can take its toll on your energy levels. Be sure to plan a workout during the day in order to keep your energy up and stay productive, the sluggish feeling will only deter you from completing your projects on time.

Get Dressed:

One of the advantages of working at home is wearing what you want. This includes working in pajamas. However, your comfortable clothing may be stopping your productivity. If you find you are too comfortable and don’t feel like working, get up in the morning, take a shower, get dressed and take your short commute to your home office. This will give you more of a professional feel to your at home office and you will find you are more productive.

Don’t Stress:

If you have deadlines quickly approaching and you are falling behind, don’t stress. Thinking clearly will help you complete your project much easier than making mistakes as your stress and rush. Take a deep breath and collect your thoughts. Organize what is left and give yourself a tight but possible timeline. If you have to skip watching your favorite TV show, then so be it, that extra hour of calm productivity is better than the rushed haste of stressing out while working.

There are a lot of benefits of being a freelance web designer and working at home. No commuting, flexible scheduling and no bosses can prove to be appealing. However, if you are not treating it like a job, find it stressful, or are lacking motivation, make the small changes to be more productive and meet your deadlines.

1. Chalkmark

 2. ClickHeat

Another in the usability tools that track where users click, ClickHeat provides an interesting display method of results via heatmaps.  But unlike other usability tools, ClickHeat is a free OpenSource tool that can be deployed on your web server.  This provides a major advantage, which is actual users will be providing the data that drives the click maps.

3. Usabilla

Usabilla is a free (beta) unmoderated remote usability tool that enables researchers to collect feedback about a web page or image from users.  In addition, Usabilla tracks where users click, which enables both click-tracking information to be captured, as well as qualitative data.Not only is click information provided, but researches can enable notes so that users can share information about their opinions such as why they clicked on a certain button, or what they expect to find next.

4. IntuitionHQ

IntuitionHQ is a simple, powerful online usability tool. It’s designed to help you see which parts of your design are working for users, and which parts aren’t. By running tests on your design work with real users as it’s in progress, you get instant feedback on where they’re succeeding and where they’re failing – information you can use to guide the next stage of design.

5. Ethnio

Ethnio is not a data usability testing tool, instead it’s a tool usability folks can use to find and recruit real web site users for a live remote test.Ethnio works by adding some JavaScript code to the page you wish to do the recruiting on.  It displays a survey which they call a screener to your web site visitors, asking them to participate in a brief usability test.

6. Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback was and is designed as a way to gather input and feedback from experts about new designs for marketing or advertising purposes.  However, this tool can be used by web site designers and usability researchers to gather information about potential new web site designs, or interfaces.

7. GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting allows you to host an online meeting with up to 15 people – so you can do more and travel less. Using our web conferencing tool, you can share any application on your computer in real time. Attendees join meetings in seconds.

8. Loop 11

Loop11 is a unique usability testing tool in that it allows unmoderated remote usability testing using actual users.  A researcher provides a simple task to a user, for example, finding a particular type of gift book for a relative on a book site, then tracking user interaction.  The data is presented via reports of task completion rate, time on task, common fail pages, paths and a nice detailed path analysis for each users

9. WhatUsersDo

WhatUsersDo is a powerful new way to quickly and efficiently test, research, enhance and improve any aspect of your website, application or internet marketing.

10. ClickTale

ClickTale is a paid hosted service that tracks user keystrokes, mouse clicks and moves and the time it takes for users to move around a web page.

11. CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is a popular click tracking usability tool which has the ability to display a large number of interesting data based on clicks.  These data displays include heatmaps of the more popular locations of clicks on a page, lists and overlays.

12. Morae

Morae is a complete suite of usability testing tools for the Windows OS (a Mac version of Morae is not available), including a Recorder module which captures all user interaction (including voice, video, keystrokes, mouse movements, screen action, etc.), an Observer module for displaying sessions to remove observers, and the Manager module which is used to analyze, edit and package the resulting usability test.

13. Navflow

Navflow helps you improve your conversion rates by analysing how people navigate around your websites and applications.

 14. Silverback

Silverback is a Mac-based software tool that enables the recording, analysis, editing and playback of usability testing sessions.

15. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an easy to use, free, and very handy usability testing tool that provides a comprehensive set of web site data tracking and analysis tools.  Usability researchers seeking to understand usage information for a web site can use the reports to identify behavior, trends, and any red-flag issues.  Data includes user sessions, visits, page views and much more.

16. Website Grader

Website Grader is a free and handy SEO usability tool that can help researchers identify issues in a web site that might need to be addressed.  Website Grader analyzes 22 key indicators of SEO success, including on-page and off-page factors.

17. Five Second Test

Five Second Test is a tool that enables researchers to upload images and have people provide feedback about the image – but the people seeing the image are only provide 5 seconds to take in the image.

18. Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free A/B and Multivariate testing tool that enables usability testing of various “what if” scenarios.

1. Xtranormal

Xtranormal lets you create fun movies that you can upload to Youtube and embed in your site.

2. ToonDoo

ToonDoo is a fun tool for making cartoons for your website or blog.

3. Dipity

Dipity is a fun tool for making timelines. You can set the up yourself and then invite people to contribute to them. As well as having a standard timeline like the one below you can create flipbooks, lists and maps.

4. Kwout

You can use Kwout for quoting websites. Just install the addon and then you can grab areas of websites and embed them in your blog. What makes Kwout so useful is that it creates an image map of the area you have taken the screengrab from.

5. Wallwisher

This is very interesting tool to create a web wall for your blog. It’s very easy to create and embed in your blog or website.

6. PhotoPeach

PhotoPeach is a useful tool for making slideshows. You can easily embed captions in them, and add quizzes. Below is one of the popular slideshows made on PhotoPeach.

Portwiture

Portwiture is definitely one of the more unique visual Twitter apps that you’ll find. Rather than tag clouds or graphs, Portwiture allows you to visualize your tweets in photographs.

Bit.ly

Next social mediasoftware product allows you to receive information about your “bit.ly” shortened links, number of clicks, top referrers and location data. Also you can trace all comments concerning your tweet and further shares on other social networks.

MentionMap

MentionMap is a cool network exploring tool.  The interactive nature of this tool is very neat, although sometimes awkward to navigate.  Test it out for yourself with the embed below.

Tweetstats

Tweetstats creates informative graphic reports about twitter activity which may contain aggregates of your daily and hourly tweets, monthly statistics report with interactive data visualization, information about your interface usage, number of replies and mentions of your account.

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme analytics monitors retweet data, tweet locations, referring domains, influential users, user stats and many more. With this tool you’ll increase your ROI and will enhance your social craftsmanship.

Trendistic

Trendistic  is a Twitter trend grapher. They provide the option to either embed Twitter charts as a static image, or a dynamic and constantly updating graph like the Facebook graph below.

TweetReach

Tweetreach helps businesses measure the impact of social media conversations. It builds for you two pie charts concerning tweet types and quantity of impressions. So you will know how many people your tweets have reached which help you coordinate your twitter marketing strategy in a right direction.

5K Twitter Browser

5K Twitter Browser is a very cool way to explore the followers of your followers.  The only downside to this app is that there are no links to the profiles, you need to enter the usernames into Twitter directly to check people out, and longer usernames cannot be entirely seen.

Twistori

Twistori is an elegant way to view a scrolling stream of tweet containing the emotive words: I love, I hate, I think, I believe, I feel, and I wish.  This is a pretty interesting way to get a feel for the pulse of Twitter.

Tweetmetrics

Tweetmetrics is another interesting measuring tool for all Twitter maniacs. This software will give several various reports concerning your account including “account by numbers”, Twitgraph, Network overlap and few others.

TwitterMap

Twittermap is a simple but cool Twitter Tool that will show you who is tweeting any keyword by pinpointing them on a Google Map.

Angry Birds (Chrome Only)

Agent 008 Ball (Pool)

Canvas Rider

Sketchout (Bouncer)

VII

BoredBoredBored

Pirates love Daisies (Tower Defense)

Sand Trap

Canvas Defense (Tower Defense)

FreeCiv

Entanglement (Puzzle)

Contrasaurus (Platform Shooter)

 Torus

Onslaught! Arena (Hack’n Slash Action)

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

2. Alexa

Alexa is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Search Alexa to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use our analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research, or business development. Use Alexa’s Pro tools to optimize your company’s presence on the web.

3. Woopra

Woopra enables you to track a visitor while they’re moving through your web site and then initiate a live chat with them. You can also compare how visitors interact with individual pages on your site or blog, and even get alerts when certain actions (like visitors landing on a particular page) take place on your site.

4. Compete

Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers.

5. Footprint Live Analytics

Footprint has positioned itself as a simple alternative to tools like Google Analytics. By simple, the folks behind Footprint mean giving you the information that you need. Nothing more, nothing less. And all wrapped in a package that doesn’t require you to have advanced training in statistics to understand. Footprint literally tracks visitors as they move through your site or blog. As you follow them, you can pull up information — like where on your site they clicked, where they came from, and even when their first and last visits to your site were. On top of that, you can integrate Footprint with Google Analytics to get an even deeper view of the traffic on your site or blog.

6. Crazy Egg

CrazyEgg also has a powerful analytics component. Called Confetti, this feature takes a closer look at the clicks not just on your site or blog but which led people to your site or blog. It also pinpoints search terms that visitors used to get to you, the time of day they hit your site or blog, and ever the country and browser and operating system they used.

7. StatCounter

If you’re looking for a live analytics tool that you can quickly get up and running with — matter what kind of web site or blog or content management system you’re using — then look no further than StatCounter. While it has the features that most other live analytics tools pack, StatCounter does have some nifty functions.

8. Fire Stats

FireStats is a web statistics system.It protect the privacy of your users, unlike services like Google analytics.

9. Clicky

Clicky claims to be the easiest live analytics tool out there. It’s hard to dispute that claim. Sure, you get the usual dashboards and graphs. But Clicky’s are easier to read and are broken down a lot better than most. And Clicky doesn’t just do analytics for your web site or blog.

10.Yahoo Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. By storing data in raw, non-aggregated form, Yahoo! Web Analytics is more than simply a reporting tool. It is a powerful, and highly flexible, data analysis tool. Both near real-time and historical data can be segmented instantly and visualized with advanced graphs to help marketers and site designers answer specific business questions and find new insights to improve their business.

11. Who’s.amung.us

who’s.amung.us not only has a clever name, it sits in a sweet spot between some of the more advanced and some of the more basic live analytics tools available on the web. You get the standard dashboard containing the same information that other analytics solutions track, but who’s.amung.us offers a bit more. That bit more comes in the form of maps. There are four of them, which show where visitors are from. Not impressed? Those maps also show which visitors are online right now, where a majority of them come from, where they’re concentrated geographically, and whether they’re accessing your site or blog during the day or at night.

1. Strawberryj.am – Friend based trends as your newsreader

trawberryj.am pulls in all your past tweets and orders them by most mentioned. This means it will filter out all the clutterand present you with only the most relevant news. Another great feature is that you can opt in to receive email updates with the top news from your stream.

2. Coolendar – A calendar that turns into a to do list

Coolendar ties in very neatly with Gmail so you can set up a bot that notifies you for events via Google Talk.

3. Buffer – Tweet without creating noise

Have you ever come across 3 or 4 great articles that you felt like Tweeting? Doing so in a short space of time can often overwhelm our followers. By Buffering your tweets instead, they will be spaced out over the whole day. You can Buffer tweets from any website with one of the browser extensions (Chrome, Safari or Firefox) and never again worry about flooding your followers.

4. Let’s Crate – File sharing at its simplest

Although Apps like Dropbox make filesharing very simple, Let’s Crate takes it again to a new level. All you do is arrive at the website and drop a file you wish to share into the box. By doing so the App will generate a link for you containing the file and you can conveniently share it across your Social Networks. The beautiful design makes doing this easy on the eyes too.

5. Rapportive – Get to know your email contacts better

Rapportive has been around for a little while and is super helpful in order to interact on a more in-depth level with your email contacts. If you install the App inside Gmail, you will receive detailed information about a person if you receive an email from them. This includes data about their Facebook, Twitter and other social network accounts.

6. Mockflow – Beautiful Wireframes in seconds

Although Mockflow is not the first software to allow you to build wireframes, the functionality of it is very powerful. You can design user interface mockups and website within a very short space of time. As a plus it also works offline. You are offered many different drawings and concepts to create your mockup, which makes putting a concrete idea across very easy.

7. WooRank – How well is your website doing?

Woorank is something like a Klout score for your website. By dropping in any URL you will receive interesting insights about how well your site is performing. You can see various measures on in-site and off-site SEO as well as traffic analytics from Alexa and Compete in one spot. After all analytics taken you will be presented with a score that you can compare with other sites.

8. Simplenote – Take notes from anywhere you go

The need to jot down notes is one of these things that happen at the most inconvenient times I found. This is where SimpleNote comes in and helps you out. With the Apps browser extension you can easily take notes of things that pop up. The App offers you to publish these notes and collaborate on them with others. I also suggest you try the tagging feature to find your notes quickly again.

9. Bounce -  Analyze websites in a fun and new way

Bounce offers you a fun and useful solution to optimize your websites. The tool takes a screenshot of any URL you put in. You can then go ahead and comment on various parts of the website and save these comments. I found that this helped me great deal to give and receive feedback on my design in a hassle-free and quick way.

10. SocialMention – Where and what do people talk about you?

Another fantastic tool I have started to use is one called SocialMention. You can type in any keyword, brand name or username and search for it from across the web. It then displays different mentions alongside some great statistics. You can track sentiment, number of authors, related keywords and of course the content itself.

1. TwitPic

This plugin displays your latest pictures from TwitPic in the sidebar of your blog.

2. Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary use of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

3. TwitterCounter

Using this plugin, you can integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog that show the number of followers you have on Twitter.

4. Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a useful WordPress plugins with several functions. If you have a Twitter account, these plugins tools directly twits the content to the relevant account. Twitter Tools is uniquely different from other Twitter plugins for WordPress. It uses a certain application to cut the URL’s short, add a hash tags and to post a regular and weekly updates of what other twits on your blogs and contents.

5. Twitter Feed for WordPress

The WordPress Twitter Feed Plugin lets you simply output any user’s tweets into your WordPress page, template or sidebar. You can customize the username, number of tweets, and style of output.

6. TwitterLink Comments

This plugin will add an extra field to your comment form so a user can add their Twitter username. A user configured ‘follow me’ link is then displayed along with their details on all their comments.

7. WP to Twitter

The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using your selected URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

8. Tweetable

9. Tweet Blender

Provides several Twitter widgets: show your own tweets, show tweets relevant to post’s tags, show tweets for Twitter lists, show tweets for hashtags and more.

10. Simple Twitter Connect

Simple Twitter Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Twitter functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.

11. HL Twitter

HL Twitter lets you display your tweets as a widget in your sidebar or even browse your entire Twitter history right on your blog. But it also does a whole lot more. You can track multiple Twitter accounts and store all of the tweets on your blog indefinitely (currently Twitter only keep your 3,200 most recent tweets) as well as pulling in any tweets that you reply to for future reference

12. Topsy Retweet Button

Provides a Twitter retweet button for your posts that shows all tweets, enables retweeting, and adds tweets as comments.

13. Twitter Goodies

Official Tweet Button + Twitter Goodies Profile & Search Widget. Plugin shows your tweets on Page/Post/Widget area.

14. Twitter Fans

Twitter Fans lets you display your twitter followers in the sidebar as a widget just like Facebook’s fan widget in appearance.

15. Twitter Blackbird Pie

Add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts just by adding simple shortcodes.

16. TweetMeme Button

Easily allows your blog post or page to be retweeted. It provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been retweeted throughout Twitter.