By Mike Takahashi

Recently, there have been a lot of creative ideas and uses of online ads that have been pushing the traditional medium. Takeover ads, where ads takeover the entire site design have become more common. Apple has taken banner ads into a new dimension by creating ads that appear to interact within the design of a site. While others have been able to leverage platforms such as YouTube and Twitter to create an interactive experience…

This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in the past few months so I thought I’d spend some time explaing what it is, what to watch out for, and how it could be problematic for you.

Lets start at the beginning with sponsored themes. A sponsored theme is where you have a designer create a wordpress theme for you and give it away to others to use for free with the provision they leave the link intact in the footer…

To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd. This post showcases a gallery of appealing iPhone app sites and common design trends that I see. (more…)

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We are giving away 14 Web design-related books to the Noupe Community. The winners will be selected randomly among all commenters to this post. The winners will be announced this Friday, 23rd of October 2009 in this post.

To participate, just pick the number of the book you are interested in and answer the question “What do you want to read in future posts here at Noupe?” in the comments to this post…

Today, we’ve added 285 new languages to Google Translator Toolkit, bringing the total number of languages supported by this product to 345 — and making it possible to translate between 10,664 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on Google Translate and makes translation faster and easier.In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface available in 35 languages, so that more people can access the service in their own language…

We’re always delighted to introduce new design flair to our user experience, especially through the personal expression of iGoogle themes. As a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach Google users around the world, we’ve shared more than 125 iGoogle Artist themes since May 2008. Today, I’m excited to announce ten new artist themes, all from talented up-and-coming fashion designers you may not have already heard of…

We care about a clean energy future and that’s a commitment that starts at home. In honor of Blog Action Day 2009 and this year’s climate change theme, we wanted to walk you through some of the green features of our global headquarters here in sunny Mountain View, California.

• Getting to work: We’ve got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day…

By Juul Coolen

Everyone and their grandfather (and dog) seems to have a website these days. The Web is getting more crowded by the day, with literally dozens of websites being added as you read this article. It is becoming harder and harder to get noticed among the masses.

“Fortunately” for us designers, not everyone seems to understand what makes or breaks a Web design…

Finally, I’ve joined Twitter (follow me @nickla). At the moment, I don’t really have any tweets yet. The main reason I’ve started Twitter because I’m redesigning N.Design Studio and I want to be able to post updates and in-progress images for readers. Also, if you have a moment, please let me know what kind of tweets best interest you.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll…

by György Fekete

Comment forms are an essential part of our blogs, social networks and websites. Comment forms are our websites’ communication channel. Through these forms we get feedback on our content; therefore, it’s necessary to design them in such a way that they are easy to understand by our user base.

A good comment form should align with our website’s main design, but at the same time it should be interesting enough to encourage easy commenting…

In his famous 1908 essay, ‘Ornament and Crime,’ modern architect Adolf Loos wrote: “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” This pronouncement banished many of the frilly, decorative fonts of centuries past from the realm of High Design. Fast forward to the present day: Web 3.0 is awash in enough sleek sans serif and classic roman typefaces to make designers long for the typographic indulgences of yesteryear…

I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview.

“8) Buy a spot in a link roundup, whether it’s a list of resources, bloggers, blog posts etc. There are as many ways to do this as there are list posts!

9) Buy a text link in a ‘How Not To Do ABC’ post. These are popular in the web design community, such as the famous Web Pages That Suck…

Feeding off the momentum of improvements we’ve made over the past year in AdWords, we recently released beta versions of the updated Keyword and Placement Tools.We’ve maintained the core functionality of these tools, but have added some new features that we hope will make them more useful for you. If you use English as your AdWords interface language you may have noticed that you already have access to these tools, and availability to all English advertisers as well as other languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks…

We’ve posted before about how testing your website landing page can increase your conversions from AdWords. Back in July we held a webinar on the “7 deadly sins of landing page design” and next week we’ll hold the second webinar in that series: “Planning and running your first experiment in Google Website Optimizer.”The webinar will cover how to plan and set up your first experiment for testing your website landing page, while also providing tips and best practices that will benefit even those of you who are already pros at testing and optimizing your landing pages…

Are you tired of your typical columned and boxed layout? It is time to learn how to break out of the box and do something creative. In this post, I’ve collected some of the best examples that are designed out of the box. I’ve also provided some quick CSS tips with demo files on how to break out of the box by creatively using background images and the CSS position property…

Search marketing consists of two channels: PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization). Both channels have advantages and disadavatages you need to consider before committing resources to either approach.

Advantages Of Google AdWords Over SEO

Minimal Impact – Most sites won’t need to make design or layout changes in order to use PPC. SEO often requires site design changes, and these changes can be significant…

Templates and Themes

Scriptorium Fonts, Art and Design

Landing Page Directory

Carrington – The CMS Theme Framework for WordPress

Opt-in Page

6 FREE Wordpress Themes You Need Today.

40 Options for Converting PSD to HTML

WordPress Theme: ClockWorkSimple

Landing Pages R Us | Make simple landing pages in seconds

PSD TO HTML – Portfolio

HTML Portfolio: CSS Coding, HTML Coding, PSD Slicing, Markup Services

PSD to Wordpress Theme – Theme Slice » PSD to Wordpress

PSD to WordPress | Hand Coded | Professional Solution – PSDtoWordpress

Premium WordPress Templates For Thesis — WordPress Bandit

Free Landing Page Templates

Usability

Usability Testing Community – UsabilityTest…

True “interaction” happens when request and response of pages happen in sub-second speed.  So just because people have cable and dsl connections doesn’t mean you should fill your pages with bloated code and heavy images.

In fact, the natural advantage of fast loading pages is one reason Google patented the sparse design of their home page.  They know that simplicity, speed and relevance rule the web experience, and that every millisecond counts…

Creating beautiful, unique websites seems to get harder every day. There are so many amazing website designs out there that coming up with something fresh and different is getting close to impossible. And even if you’re not looking for something entirely unique, creating beautiful designs that don’t look dated is a constant challenge.

Below are twenty excellent techniques and design elements you can incorporate into your designs to create a beautiful, polished website…

photo credit: photoaf

By design, in-house and advertising agency clients can successfully take over day to day account basics after working with us to pilot, heal or massively improve missing, average or terribly broken PPC. Agencies & businesses just need reliable support (and intensive training) to fix existing accounts themselves. We’ve witnessed success in as little as 4 intensive weeks…

Today we held the last in the series of new interface webinars. Each week we get lots of great questions from attendees about the new interface. Today on New Interface Thursdays we’re going to highlight some of the top questions and answer them.How do I delete keywords?To delete a keyword, select the checkbox next to it and then click on the Change status menu at the top of the table. There, you’ll find the option to delete…

Most business cards tend to be forgotten, which is why they are not effective. Business cards can become great interactive elements with the added ability to have custom shapes, different materials and matte finishing along with a great design idea.

In today’s article, we would like to present a collection of 60+ Creative Business Cards ideas that say a lot about a person.

itomi

lush

by www…

What’s in your Cart?

Finding the right theme can be a long and arduous process – a process that becomes more important when we’re talking about Shopping Cart or eCommerce themes. There are two big differences between picking a theme for your Dallas-Cowboys-bashing blog and the theme for your custom furniture shop.

• Credibility: Your blog has the luxury of being superficial – looking good is important to attract readers…

Creating display ads that look truly professional is hard work. Last year, we launched Display Ad Builder to help you easily design display ad campaigns. Since then, we’ve provided advertisers in over 40 countries with more than 90 templates to streamline the design process. Today, we have introduced a new set of “Elegant” ad templates in the “General” category of Display Ad Builder that make it even easier to create high quality display ads…

The more intuitive layout structure is designed, the better users can understand the content. Whatever content you have to present, you can present them in a more interactive & more responsive ways.

Today we would like to focus on sliding effects and how i can change the structure of a page in a truly unique and creative way. There are many transition effects that can be used to slide different contents, such as fading, horizontal sliding, vertical sliding, the list goes on…

Do you like commerical photography? If you do, this post is for you. I’ve collected 30 awesome Flash-based photography sites. Not only do they have stunning photos, but their Flash design is also amazing. Most of them are designed in full screen mode. So, get your coffee or tea ready and enjoy these beautiful high resolution photos.
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(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome blog)When I was originally designing the Google Chrome icon, I went through many iterations to figure out how to best represent our brand new web browser. The design needed to stand out on the desktop, look stable yet dynamic, and use color to show some Google branding. Through the design process, another quality that became important to the team was to make the icon feel like a real, tangible object so that clicking on it would be like pressing a real button…

Since our last major update of Google Chrome in May, we’ve been hard at work improving some of its most used and loved features. Today, we’re releasing a new beta for you to try. Not only is it speedier than ever, but we’ve also given the browser a little bit of design whimsy that we hope will bring some color and delight to your day.This new beta is fitted with a customizable New Tab page, an improved Omnibox and a few basic themes that allow you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns and images…

For the last two months, we’ve been hosting weekly webinars about the new AdWords interface. In each webinar, members of the AdWords team walk through the changes in the new interface, show how you can use the new features to manage your advertising campaigns, and answer your questions.Over the weeks, many advertisers have joined us to learn more about the new interface. Here’s what a couple of them had to say about the webinars:I’d like to thank you for today’s webinar…

Have you ever wondered how many impressions or clicks you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid? Until now, finding the right bid has typically involved a lot of trial and error.The bid simulator, launched today, is a feature of the new AdWords interface that shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids…