Best of the web for Design and Web Development August 2024

• August 29th, 2024
• News

The end of the month approaches in our usual fashion. We’re rounding up a month jam-packed with excellent design tutorials, ranging from Photoshop to Illustrator—a diverse mix of instructional content. The second half of the post features valuable web articles covering topics from SEO to WordPress. It’s a stellar roundup this month, filled with engaging posts to explore.

Design tutorials

Design How to Make a Striped Ribbon in Illustrator

Ribbons and stripes are a good combination to create eye-catching elements for your designs to be used as backgrounds, figures, or even as small touches in a composition.

How to use the Brush Tool in Affinity Designer

Learn to choose Affinity Designer brushes, control the pressure and opacity, and create stunning effects to transform your creations.

How to Make a Refracted Effect in Photoshop

Distortion effects, whether on graphics or text, are a good way to grab the user’s attention, especially on backgrounds or main titles. This kind of effect adds depth and dimension, transforming any text or graphic into an eye-catching one.

How to Create a Photoshop Composite

In this tutorial, you’ll learn all about Photoshop compositing by creating a realistic image using multiple photo sources from Envato.

Web and design tutorials

On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO: What Is It + How It Impacts SERP Visibility (2024 Guide)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical strategy for online businesses and websites, as it helps drive organic traffic to the website by improving visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Core concepts to understand in WordPress theme development

WordPress themes play a crucial role in shaping the appearance and functionality of your website. They define how your content is displayed and offer various design options to create a unique site. Over the years, WordPress themes have evolved significantly, starting with what we now call “classic themes.”

How to Harden WordPress: An 18-Step Guide with Essential Tools

WordPress websites can become vulnerable if they’re not well-maintained. A few skipped updates or a bad plugin, and your site is at risk. Attackers can also get in through the login page if it’s not properly secured or bring your site to a halt with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

CSSWG Minutes Telecon 

I was just going over the latest CSSWG minutes (you can subscribe to them at W3C.org) and came across a few interesting nuggets I wanted to jot down for another time. The group discussed the CSS Values, CSS Easing, and Selectors modules, but what really caught my eye was adding triggered delays to CSS for things like hover, long taps, and focus states.

Pricing Projects As A Freelancer Or Agency Owner

Discover effective pricing strategies for digital projects. Learn how to balance fixed pricing, time and materials, and value-based approaches while managing client expectations and scope creep.

Delicious Brain Bytes: New Ways to Learn WordPress

In this issue of Delicious Brain Bytes, we look at the recently launched WordPress Learning Pathways, WP-CLI’s new release, WordPress Accessibility Day, and much more!

Exclusive accordions using the HTML details element

The name attribute of the <details> element is soon to be supported across all major browsers. Firefox 130 should also have support, enabling most engines to handle common UI accordion patterns using only <details> elements. This is good news for developers who have been writing custom handling for these cases from scratch. Let’s explore what the attribute allows you to do with some quick examples.