At the beginning many people were tempted to dismiss Twitter as one of the million monthly internet upstarts with an expiry date.   However, Twitter has gone on to defy many odds and not only remain in market but increase in customer base and geographical scope.  It seemed overnight that everyone was on Twitter as it is a great way to share opinions, keep personal contacts and add new ones.

As a web designer, you can harness several resources that Twitter avails for the betterment of your design and development skills. Used correctly, Twitter can be a conduit to personal and financial success. Some of the things that a designer or developer can do are:

1: Follow and be followed

Twitter can be a great way to market you as a web designer or developer.  This can be done by twitting about web development and design and following web designers and developers. Soon if your twits are informative and well put you will not only become a celebrity on Twitter but also a household name for great web designers and developers.  Follow established designers and developers too as you will gain a wealth of information and network of people who think along your lines.
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Creative Inspiration is the first step to success. No one has to be born a genius to get great ideas; all it takes is a little thought and a lot of passion. Try the following to get your mind to start thinking out of the box and come up with ideas that inspire.

1. Meditate

Meditation helps you focus your energies and thoughts on to one thing. It helps you free your mind of worries and stress, and makes you feel relaxed. The silence helps you contemplate things better and gives you clarity of thought.

Meditation is not as easy at it sounds; it takes time to be able to relax your mind and let go of things worrying you. But don’t lose heart, soon enough you will be able to reap the benefits of meditation and direct your thoughts better.

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jQuery is an excellent JavaScript library with which you can create wonderful effects on your website and that too with a few lines of code. It simplifies HTML document traversing, processes of event handling, animating, and most of the Ajax interactions for rapid web development. There are many features in jQuery which can be used to improve your website.

This article will brief you on five ways by which you may improve your site using jQuery.

1) Building better web forms by highlighting the context using jQuery:

Through jQuery, you can easily improve your web application forms by highlighting the current context. Due to the complexity of the forms and having too many controls on them, this feature allows the user to focus on a current context. You may highlight the current row as shown in the snapshot below:

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Two out of three times when I’m approached by a client to build them a website, I ask for prototype images to give me an idea of what they want. This is always met by baffled and suspicious looks of my true intentions as they assume a website is built off the top of the developers head. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

For that top-notch, breath-taking website you have in mind with 3-D like effects, drop shadows on starry background, round corners and flickering flash images, you need to put that into still images called prototypes. These are high-resolution pictures, usually JPEG for its fantastic pixels that capture screenshots of the proposed website. They are used to quickly communicate visual ideas between a web designer/client and the developer about the proposed website’s layout and design before coding. The devil is in replicating the images details painstakingly in HTML code.

Illustrator is probably the best graphic design software I’ve encountered so far. Other major contenders for this coveted position are FireBuilder , Balsamiq, MindNode, and OmniGaffle which use a combination of wireframing and rapid prototyping to generate the layout and designing of a website.

Coming back to illustrator, drawing web concepts is so practically simplified that, save for the creativity aspect, one would credit it for the picturesque art it facilitates a designer to create! Below are some cunning, behind-the-scenes tricks I use to make web design a lesser nightmare than coding:

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