DMAD

Web Design


Talking WordPress Hosting & Performance – An Interview with WP Engine’s Austin Gunter

Posted on in Web Design

In 2011 I learned that a new managed hosting company – WP Engine – had just raised $1.2 Million from some very high profile investors including Eric Ries. At the time what really caught my attention was that one of the investors was Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. That piqued my curiosity and I 


Hosting Affiliate Programs: My Peculiar Experiences with WP Engine & HostGator

Posted on in Web Design

Over the past several years I’ve derived some of my income from testing out and recommending web hosting companies that I have ended up liking and using myself. And I’ve tried a ton of hosts: WP Engine, HostGator, A Small Orange, Pair, VPS.net, Zippy Kid, Bluehost, Dreamhost, Godaddy, Namecheap, etc. Each one of the above 


The Easy Way to Create a Vignette in Photoshop

Posted on in Web Design

I wanted to share a quick tip for you that discovered thanks to this post on Focus Faction, updated below for Photoshop CS6 (the menu is now in a different place). This is the fastest and easiest way to create a vignette for your photos in Photoshop in just a few seconds. It has saved me 


Free PSD Templates » Twitter, Facebook & Google+ Header Covers

Posted on in Web Design

Image sizes and free PSD (Photoshop) layered templates for: Twitter Header image, Google Plus Cover Photo, and Facebook Timeline template. Create your own graphics with these helper files.


All The Tools I Used to Rebuild the DMAD Website

Posted on in Web Design

I spent the last 10 days redesigning and redeveloping dmad.com and thought I’d share a lot of the tools that I used that were instrumental in rebuilding this site in case you find them helpful for your own web development efforts: WordPress Theme BootstrapWP I used Rachel Baker‘s as the core theme that I built 


Tools to Bootstrap Your Own Website

Posted on in Web Design

I’ve created dozens of websites over the years and I’ve always used the tools available to me to cut down on the time it takes to build a good looking website. Most of the time there really is no good reason to reinvent the wheel or to build a site from scratch (unless you’re a 


Free Design Elements – Arrows and Circle PSD

Posted on in Web Design

I was looking for this online a few times for various design projects and couldn’t find anything that I liked so I decided to create some myself and share it with you. I used a dry erase marker on a whiteboard, took a few photos of it, then isolated the background to create a layered 


The SEO Disease & My Trip Through the Land of (Internet Marketers)

Posted on in Web Design

In the mid-2000’s I spent an extraordinary amount of time reading and learning about SEO. I would spend 3 hours a day poring over what everyone was writing about (and doing very little actual testing myself). Unbeknown to myself, I was succumbing to a disease I call SEO-itis. It’s mostly a linguistic disease. Kind of like LAW-itis. 


Sitebait – a More Clever (2012 Version) of Linkbait?

Posted on in Web Design

I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon in the social media / web marketing space recently that I want to call your attention to. It’s actually quite clever. For a lack of a better word, I’ll call it “sitebait”. It’s a way for a company to create a viral website that’s very loosely (and almost imperceptibly) tied to their 


Get Your Face to Appear in Google Search: Author Markup for WordPress

Posted on in Web Design

Last year Google introduced something called Google Author rank in their search results. It shows the thumbnail of an author’s photo next to a search result. It’s normally for a blog post written by an author that Google can cross-verify from their Google+ profile (assuming the author has setup a Google+ profile). You’ve already probably 


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