Anybody who has ever put together a killer piece of linkbait has thought about it: how could I get this kind of attention to my landing pages?  It's an obvious dilemma. You get a ton of traffic, a ton of links, all of the ranking boost that follows, how could you not want that juice directed toward your conversion-centric pages?  Well, there are reasons why the two tend to be mutually exclusive, and that's what Rand explores in this week's Whiteboard Friday. Fear not! There are ways a good piece of linkbait can and will benefit your conversions and we'll explore several of them in this video. Let it be known that not all methods discussed are of the fairest shades of habberdashery, but that DOES NOT mean we advocate the dark side. Some of this stuff can get you in serious trouble. We discuss it only to educate and warn our readers of tactics they may see and be tempted to try despite the very negative ramifications that may result. [source]

Important: Some resources are not free for commercial use. Make sure you check the licensing before using them. Oriental Photoshop Brushes Dragons & Animals Here is a GIMP version of the Chinese Dragon brushes below. Chinese, Japanese & Arabic Text Brushes Other Vector Oriental Images People Dragons Other [source]

Grunge [ Demo ] NotePad [ Demo ] ModernOak Ragteka [ Demo ] Secondary [ Demo ] Starlite Diva [ Demo ] TravelGrunge [ Demo ] Ikarus [ Demo ] Notepad [ Demo ] Small Studio [ Demo ] [source]

Step 1 The first thing you will have to do is create the 3D text. To do that you can use Illustrator. It has a very nice 3D filter and it will work just fine. Type the text you want and go to Effect>3D>Extrude & Bevel. Change the Position to Off-Axix Bottom. Then you just rotate the X,Y, and X Axis until you get the result you want. Follow the image below for reference. Tip: It's very important that you select Draw Hidden Faces. Otherwise Illustrator will not create some faces that will be very important for the end result. Step 2 Now you will have to expand the 3D effect in order to select and change the color of the faces you want. Go to Obejct>Expand Appearance. First select the top faces, and move them away. Then select just the outer faces and fill them with black. Step 3 - Photoshop Create a new document in Photoshop and fill the background with Black. Copy the 3D text without the top faces and paste it in Phothoshop. Position it in the middle of the document and reduce its size. Step 4 With the Magic Wand Tool (W) select the black faces and delete them. Step 5 Go to Images>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation, change ...

This Text Effect Quickie will show you a real simple way to create a vibrant, poppy type in just a few minutes. It’s a great effect to use on promotional materials, posters, or even in website graphics! Before getting started, you may want to grab a Pop-styled font to work with. Really, anything with a bold look will probably look great, but for that extra pop feel, you may be interested in trying out a font like: Club Font (Free Trial Version, or $5 for the commercial version) Snow Dream Advert Pop Magic Step 1 - Background The background is a key element to this effect. If the background doesn’t give off a poppy, groovy sort of feel, the text alone may not be enough to compensate for the loss. Start out with a base color of your choosing (I chose an especially bright Lime Green: #b7f22b), and fill the entire background layer of your document. Create a new layer. Now, using a white foreground color, and a soft (0% hardness), large (300px-ish) brush, make a few dabs in your new layer. Set this layers blending mode to Overlay. Repeat this process of adding new layers, painting a few dabs on each, and setting them to overlay to build up ...

Most theme don’t use all the possibilies of wordpress and smoothgallery. In some of them (like massive news) you must hardcode the links to the post in the control panel. That’s why i decided to do this tutorial. this is what it will look likeyou can see working example on the main page of this site What do we need ? The first thing we need to do is to download SmoothGallery 2.0 First Step : Put the files where they have to go Unzip your smoothgallery archive copy the css directory to wp-content/themes/your_theme_name copy the scripts directory to wp-content/themes/your_theme_name Second Step : Add the reference to the files in your Header Add these lines in your header file (wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/header.php) <!--Css SmoothGallery--> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/css/jd.gallery.css" type="text/css" media="screen"/> <!--JS Mootools--> <script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/mootools.v1.11.js"></script> <!--JS SmoothGallery--> <script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/jd.gallery.js"></script> Once this step is done, SmoothGallery is ready for use in your theme Third Step : Create the file gallery.php (in your theme directory), this file will generate the html code to show your gallery. before starting this step, bear in mind the structure of a smoothgallery element <div class="imageElement"> <h3>Item Title</h3> <p>Item Description</p> <a href="Link to Item " title="open image" class="open"></a> <img src="Image of item" class="full" alt="Item Title" /> <img src="Thumbmail of item" class="thumbnail" alt="thumbnail of Item Title" /> </div> In the gallery.php file ...

You can click on each image to view at Flickr, or download all in a zip at the bottom. Download » <!-- google_ad_client = "pub-3209828212158502"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 15; google_ad_format = "468x15_0ads_al"; google_ad_channel = ""; google_color_border = "FFFFFF"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "E1771E"; google_color_text = "4C4C4C"; google_color_url = "808080"; //--> [source]

[special thanks to Just Creative Design for his hard work on this compilation]

We know we can always count on the Internet for free quality icons, but that being said, free icons sometimes might have it’s limitation too. Here’s few we can quickly think of: Copyright. Most free icons restricts usage on non-commercial product/website only. Size. Don’t you just hate it when you found your favorite icon but it’s only a 32×32 and you wish they have a bigger version? Colors. You found the exact icon you want, but the color is just not right. Transparency. Some author did not distribute their free icon in .PNG or original source. That makes it hard to implement their icons on our design. Creating your own icon not only overcome above mentioned problem, at the same time you gain and brush up your Photoshop skills. Nothing beats the satisfaction of creating things on your own. We’ve crawled the net, searching from sites to sites and here’s a 40+ hand-picked Photoshop tutorials that guide you through icon designing. Have fun. [continue]

Unfortunately, You The Designer hasn't annoyed round 3 of their contest despite the fact that a lot of us are eagerly awaiting. Instead, they would like to tease you with a slightly smaller competition. Your mission if you chose to accept: design a poster using only fonts provided by FontShop.com and textures provided by iStockphoto.com. Round 3 will be coming soon, so in the meantime we would love to see what you can do with the banners we will use for round 3! Prize 1 Copy of FontBook from FontShop.com valued at $99! Banner Specifications Size: 640 x 300, 72 DPI and RGB Color Mode and Size: 398 x 514, 72 DPI and RGB Color Mode Text That MUST be Included UPrinting.com International Poster Design Competition Sponsored by: UPrinting.com, iStockphoto.com, PSDTuts.com and FontShop.com Hosted by YouTheDesigner.com Round 3 - Typography Wine a 16GB iPhone & Many Other Prizes Finalists Will Compete for a Full Page Ad in PRINT Magazine! Rules Both banners MUST match in style such as color, fonts used etc. Only text, colors and textures may be used in the banners No photographs or vector artwork Any fonts can be used as long as copyright permits 1 submission per person Submissions and comments are moderated before accepted! You must be able to email us the PSD file for both banners ...