A website’s “visual appeal” is one of the most important factors when it comes to first impressions. Visitors make nearly instantaneous judgments that influence their decision on whether to stay and the site or bounce out of it right away.

When it comes to creating aesthetically appealing websites, you might be interested in taking a look at Wix. If you haven’t heard of Wix.com yet, let me introduce you: it’s a powerful Flash website builder that enables you to create and publish your own stunning custom Flash websites, mini-sites and other Flash content for free. More and more bloggers have also come to understand the importance of a well designed site. Many are now using Wix to add more dynamic designs into their blogs and also, to create their own custom standalone websites into which they add their RSS feeds. The connection between Wix and Bloggers couldn’t be more natural.

Similar to the WordPress platform, Wix offers a powerful free web design solution. Read More

I am always looking for new and unique free icons to use in my WordPress theme design and web development work. Although there are a lot of free icons sets available on the Internet, but my favorites are those sets which have icons for almost every aspect of theme design, e.g., categories, tags, comments, RSS feed, e-mail etc.

To save you from the hassle of hunting around on the Internet for icons (free and usable) to use in your projects, I have made a list of my all-time favorite icon sets freely available for download.

LED Icons

• Number of Icons :- 500
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download LED Icon Set
  

Developpers Icons

• Number of Icons :- 105
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
• Download Developpers Icon Set

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My apologies for not updating the blog for so many days . To make it worth your wait, I am launching a brand new free WordPress theme called “Bookish”. This is a small sized (80Kb) theme that comes in four color variations – Blue, Red, Green and Black. The theme comes with admin options that allow you to switch the color theme, change post text alignment (left/right), Twitter ID, change the featured post category and finally an option that lets you set excerpts or full posts on your home page.

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.
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Today, while browsing the WordPress website, I noticed that WordPress 2.8 Beta was available for testing. So, I decided to download it and give it a test run. Here is a list of major changes that make this release a bit different from the earlier versions.

Manage your Tags

A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called “Post Tags” that contains all the tags that have been used so far in your blog. Just like categories, you can change the Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags.

Manage Themes Better

When managing your themes earlier, you had to click on a particular theme’s screenshot and then activate or discard it from the enlarged theme preview screen. This has been changed to something efficient now. You just have to click on the “activate” link and the desired theme gets applied directly without showing you a preview (the preview sometimes used to get stuck in case a theme was broken or if a required plugin wasn’t installed). This feature can indeed save a lot of precious time. Additionally, you can also delete any unwanted themes from the same screen by clicking on the “delete” link.
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What is Adobe AIR?

If you haven’t heard of Adobe AIR yet, let me introduce you to this technology provided by Adobe. Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-platform environment that enables you to have your favorite web applications with you all the time. Since applications built for Adobe AIR run on your desktop computer without a web browser, they provide all the convenience of a desktop application. AIR allows existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct traditional desktop-like programs.

In order to run these applications, you need to first install the Adobe AIR environment in your computer (Just like you install Flash player or JAVA runtimes). You can download the latest version freely here :- Get Adobe AIR

My 10 Favorite Adobe AIR Applications

As I use many of these AIR applications almost everyday, I have made a list of my favorite ones. These are quite handy and I am sure that you will find them useful too. I have made a folder on my desktop where I keep all the shortcuts to my AIR applications. So, here they are :-

• Font Picker :- If you have too many fonts installed on your computer, it can get very hard when you have to choose the right font type for your projects. This AIR tool shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project.

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