Building a social network isn’t an easy task, let alone a successful one. As developers our job is to create, build, and bring to life the gears and functions of a social network. When it comes to marketing, well that’s a different department in most cases. We build then later deploy, and in order to develop a highly efficient and functional social network we’ll need to use a few tools.
Most developers are switching from building networks from scratch using PHP to highly-customizable social network platforms that give way to flexibility. Below we’re going to cover several of the most sought after open-source platforms that allow you create your very own social network and run it on a server of your choice. These networks will give you a hyphened control over the front/back end design along with a social networks most valuable asset; the database. Let us know if we’ve missed any and which ones appeal to you the most through the form of a comment!

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is the social network platform version of WordPress. As you can guess WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s available due to its quality, same goes for BuddyPress, this is one of the most widely used platforms. It’s absolutely free, allows you to fully customize your social network, and offer your users a unique experience through the use of features such as friend connections, extended profiles, discussion forums, private messaging, and powerful plugins.
On top of the social network platform, you also receive the option to integrate WordPress as your ultimate blogging solution for each of your users. Here you’ll find a massive collection of quality plugins.

Sites Running on BuddyPress

CUNY Academic Commons

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Recently icons are used widely in web and interface designs, icons convey the message in simple and effective manner,As a designer its always good to know how to design a icon on your own.

There are plenty of icon tutorials out there, here i have filtered and listed 30 of the best icon design tutorials, This article is a continuation of dzineblog’s 45+ Best icon design tutorials, hope you like this list of tutorials,

1.) Create a Golden, Vector Compass in Illustrator

2.) Design a Stylish Mail Icon

3.) Create a Van Icon in Photoshop

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No matter how much you may love your job as a web designer, there will come a day or two that gazing into your computer monitor is the last thing you want to be doing. But chances are you more than likely have a deadline or goal that needs to be met and therefore you feel forced to work, rather than wanting. When this happens you have to be careful as to what you use as motivation, this can sometimes make or break your ability to remain focused and properly motivated throughout your career. One thing they failed to teach most of us in design school, is that in the mist of dealing with clients and other aspects or our careers, there will be various times where you don’t want to design, and that could be deadly if you don’t know how to approach the situation.

This is why we’ve compiled five positively fresh ways to keep your motivation running at its peak. If you have any other ways in mind, please feel free to share with us in the form of comment! We’d love to hear your suggestions.

Reasons We Fail at Motivation

In order for you to become un-motivated, there had to have been a combination of one or more reasons why you ideally lacked that motivation. Within this section we’re going to focus on those reasons and why they occur sometimes in the life of designers.

Lack of Faith

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If you strive to be a great designer (like most), then you’re more than likely to know that a web application or websites success many times rely solely on how well designed the User Interface may be. As you scale the web and even read books, there can be an influx of misleading information pertaining to the way you should design your UI.

When in reality you should do what works best for you and your users. Below you will find a variety of excellent User Interface resources that will allow you to access, redefine, and create a well designed User Interface. You should use these resources first as inspiration, and second as somewhat of a guide as to what your users may need when they come face to face with your UI.

Interface Design Libraries

1.) MephoBox

MephoBox houses various interface patterns and designs that showcase the different trends within them. Their goal is mainly to inspire designers and hopefully allow them to conceive a greater design then they had first planned out to make. You’re even able to vote on designs and leave insightful comments. You can also search and sort results in an organized fashion allowing you to easily and quickly find just what you need. Read the rest of this entry »

Css3 have a capacity to revolutionize the way we design/develop website. css3 is intoducing loads of new and exciting features. Most of the browsers such as Firefox, Safari already support some of the CSS3 properties

It is essential today for a web designer to know about CSS3 and there are many tutorials and resources for the CSS3. Below i’ve listed 25 Useful CSS3 Techniques and Tutorials to get you started with CSS3, hope you find this collection useful

1.) Create a Dynamic Stack of Index Cards using CSS3

We will create a dynamic stack of index cards solely with HTML and CSS3 and use such CSS3 features as transform and transition (for the dynamic effects) and @font-face, box-shadow and border-radius (for the styling).

2.) CSS3 Analogue Clock

Analogue clock created using webkit transition and transform CSS. JavaScript is only used to pull in the current time

3.) Awesome Overlays with CSS3

The trick with these overlays is the gradient border, going form a lighter to darker orange as you go from top to bottom. To create that effect we used to the border-image property, which is a tricky little addition to CSS.
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When it comes to designing a website Photoshop is an excellent tool for it, No design Software gives you quite so much control as Adobe Photoshop in designing a website.

Most Designers share their Creative design stuffs to others for free. so that others can learn from their works, At sometimes these collection will become marvelous time saver. and a learning source for beginner web designers

Here I’ve listed 30+ Quality PSD web templates to Download, hope you like the download list, Also be aware about license terms and agreements before You put them in use.

1.) Shape

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