If you’ve got a blog, personal site or another web platform and find yourself wondering how you can get in on the no-plugin-needed streaming video in HTML5, Webmonkey has a handy guide to understanding and embedding HTML5 videos on your site.
Many of us spend hours floundering around looking for just the right colours while designing a website, presentation or pamphlet. Design blog Before & After put together a great booklet detailing a little beginner’s colour theory for complimenting your next effort.
Whether you’re putting together a portfolio website or just slapping together some slides, knowing how colours affect the minds of your audience makes your message more appealing. Smashing magazine offers a post that serves as Colour Psychology 101 for would-be designers.
Firefox and Safari partially support it, Google’s Wave and Chrome projects are banking on it, and most web developers are ecstatic about what it means. It’s HTML5, and if you’re not exactly sure what it is, here’s an explainer.
SharePoint Designer, a Microsoft tool for designing sites for use with its SharePoint “intranet solution” (yucky phrase, but what else to call it?), is now free. If you’re working in a Microsoft shop (or just sharpening your IIS and SharePoint skills to score a job), it’s a good chance to check out a ribbon-enabled, MS-friendly design tool without having to splash out $450 or so for the full version. SharePoint Designer [via Inside Office Online Blog]
Colors Palette Generator turns a picture with a pleasing look into a palette of equally pleasing colours for your web site or design project. You can upload any PNG, GIF or JPEG that is less than 1MB in size and Colours Palette Generator will extract colours from it. The application creates three basic palettes of the light, medium, and dark colours, as well as a grid of 49 shades from the image if you’re not satisfied with the palettes it has created. Once you’ve got the look you like, you can export it as either a Photoshop swatches file or as a CSS stylesheet. Free to use, no sign-up required.
Colors Palette Generator [via Download Squad]Web-based web site editor SynthaSite has relaunched itself with a brand new and radically more friendly user interface. Select your site’s colour scheme and template, and then modify it using a what you see is what you get, drag and drop editor. Drag everything from basic text and images to forms, maps, videos and photo galleries onto your pages. Publish the site you’ve created directly through SynthaSite, either at the http://yoursitename.sythasite.com address or set your current URL to redirect to your SynthaSite, or you can download the work you’ve done and host it on your own web server. If SynthaSite isn’t quite what you were looking for in a WYSIWYG editor, check out previously reviewed online editor Webon or if you’re looking for a meatier project to wile away your weekend you can roll your own professionally designed web site.
SynthaSite [via TechCrunch]Planning to spend some time during one of those mythical “free” weekends whipping your web site into shape? Open Web Design, a free and frequently-updated collection of site templates handed out without copyright, is a great place to start looking. We’ve posted similar collections before, but Open Web Design trumps our archives for up-to-date designs and breadth of material—images, CSS templates, and standard HTML are all available. The site is free to use, and registration lets you submit ideas and post to a forum. Open Web Design [via Web Worker Daily]
Need to give your blog or personal site a more modern look? AjaxBuddy, a free repository of Web 2.0-style site tools, is great for site owners who don’t have time to learn an entire programming language, or just need a starter block of code to get building. Grab free, easy-to-modify code for Flickr-like editing fields, quick-loading slideshows and tabbed galleries, instant graphs, date-choosing calendars, and dozens more examples. Many require replacing just a few values to get working, but even the more complex tools are great learning tools.
AjaxDaddy [via Online Tech Tips]
