Posted by vitaly on Nov 8, 2009 in
Design & Graphics |
View Original Article 
Knowing your resources is important in all aspects of design. You could be near the completion of a project and realize you are missing one thing, texture. Textures are not always beautiful by themselves and many can appear quite boring, but when you add texture to your design, it gives that little bit of depth you might be looking for to make the image pop. With a digital camera or intermediate to advanced skills in Photoshop, textures are easy to make. One thing we may run out of is time. Time to make or even the countless hours surfing the Web for the perfect texture.
This post presents an extensive collection of resources with textures from which you can choose the perfect background image for your next design. Please visit the linked sites to download the textures of your choice.
40+ Beautiful Patterns and Textures for Ornate Backgrounds
The use of ornate patterns in web design has been popular for several years now. Not only does it add a lot of intricate detail, but it’s also a great way to add a level of sophistication to a design. Here are some of the most beautiful ornate patterns and textures
50 Outstanding Free Design Textures
A few good textures can take a boring design and turn into something stunning. As a designer, you should seek to build a library of all kinds of textures to complement a range of styles. Here are 50 completely free and ready to download textures to get you started.
100 Beautiful Free Textures
Use of texture in Web design is extremely common. Part of the reason textures are so useful to designers is the relative ease of the integrating one into a design if a high-quality textured image already exists, not to mention the endless possibilities. Fortunately, plenty of photographers and designers are willing to share their work with the rest of us so that we can use them in a number of different ways.
270+ Sets Free And Beautiful Watercolor Textures
Both grunge and watercolor effects are really cool and hot in web design industrial. There are a lot of website backgrounds using watercolor effect. Some people may think watercolor and grunge effects are “dirty”, but if you are able to mix the design with these effects, then you will have a beautiful layout which able to give visitors an impressive appearance.
23 Water Color Textures I
23 High-Res Water Color Backgrounds are now available for free personal and commercial use. Each individual file can be found and downloaded for free at SadMonkey’s DeviantArt Page. Please feel free to use, redistribute or modify the files any way you see fit
25 Free High Res Watercolor Textures
These awesome watercolor textures are brought to you by Daniel Davidson. Daniel is a freelance graphic designer, you can check out his portfolio at SadMonkey Design
>Grungy Watercolor Textures and Layered PSD
Today’s webtreat is a layered PSD of our Grungy Watercolor backgounds on BackgroundsETC along with a selection of several of our favorites.
10 beautiful Free Wood Textures for Your Designs
Used as background images, wood textures are quite popular on the web theses days. In this article, I’ll show you 10 beautiful wood textures that you can freely use to enhance your designs.
12 Free High Resolution Wood/Rock Textures
Textures design are very popular among designers to add to their design work. Today we are offering 12 free high Res textures of wood and rock. You can download/preview the texture by clicking on the images which will take you to the Flickr Photos.
9 Free Hi-Res Wood Panels Textures
It’s time for another high resolution texture set. This time it’s all about wood panels. Wood textures pop up in more and more websites as background images. It’s a trend which sure won’t disappear in the near future. With a bit of tweaking these wood panels textures can be transformed into tile-able background images for your web projects and at the stunning size of 3264×2448 pixels they’re great for your print projects too.
10 Super High-Res Wood Textures
This texture set is courtesy of Franz Jeitz, who you may remember we interviewed recently. Franz runs the design blog FudgeGraphics, and was kind enough to offer this texture set to our visitors. This texture set is huge! Images are 3264X2448px in size – perfect for large scale designs.
30 Wood Textures Sets
If you create nature design work, you maybe will need Wood textures. Wood textures can add more natural feeling to your artworks. Wood textures you can use as backgrounds or apply them to some objects. In this set you will find 31 large-scale, high resolution (1950 * 1310) suitable wood textures. On Psdeluxe you can download this set for free.
200+ Excellent Free High Quality Tree Bark Textures
Tree Bark Texture is a kind of texture taken from the bark of a tree. Some passionate photographers and designers took these textures and contribute it for the design community. This could be useful for any graphics design artwork and normally used for background purpose.
42+ Free Photoshop Textures
Beautiful collection of background textures for Photoshop. A lot of texture backgrounds are used in modern web designing, textures add quality and beautify designs.
50+ High Resolution Textures, Tutorials and Resources
Hundreds of thousands of incredible Textures are all over the web. Due to this phenomenally vast amount of textures available, you can now add dirt, rust, floral effect, swirls, mold, oil stains in your artworks and photos to give them an aged, damaged, dreamy or any look you want
11 High Resolution Free Fabric Textures
Today I have a good set of high resolution of fabric texture. I found some fabric around my house which inspired me to take up my camera and shot some good high res texture. Fabric texture has always been on of my best favorites. Hope you can use high fabric textures for better use in your design.
45+ Absolutely Useful Free Fabric Textures
Today we will showcase a collection of textures where you can use and apply on your future web page design project or just for graphics use. These type of textures is more on different kind of fabrics.
50 Free Rusted Metal Texture
Textured backgrounds are a great way to add an extra dimension to any graphic design project. Magazines and printed media can resort to textured paper for added impact however, this is impossible to do on the web, and the closest we can do is adding texture to simulate this effect.
Large Textures from India
Five large and colorful textures from India.
12 Large Textures
12 beautiful textures for your designs and inspiration.
17 Paper Papyrus Textures
17 Lovely paper textures.
24 High Res Grunge Textures
This pack contains some really nice grunge-style textures.
10 Catalyst Textures
10 beautiful textures with vibrant colors.
Five Grunge Textures
This is a second set of interesting grunge textures designed by Cloaks
12 Free and High-Res Grungy Wall Textures
In this freebie, we share with you 12 free grungy wall textures that you can use on your future design projects in an innumerable amount of ways.
50 Grunge Icon Textures
For those times when you need to fill a small area, here are 50 colorful grunge icon textures..
60+ Free Textures from SXC.hu
In addition to using brushes, you can get great results and save considerable amounts of time by taking advantage of textures that are freely available. One excellent resources of textures (and other types of stock images) is Stock.xchng. Below you’ll find more than 60 textures from their site. Each image links to the page on sxc.hu where the image can be downloaded.
40 Free Concrete Textures
Concrete textures are excellent for use in web and graphic design. You can quickly take your own, since concrete is so easy to find, or you can take advantage of those that are already freely available. In this post we’ll feature 40 different concrete textures from a variety of sources.
Cool Textures in Bricks and Stones
We find ourselves going through photographs and wonder why in the world we even wasted the battery on that shot, not thinking of course they can be used for textures, patterns or even Photoshop brushes at a later time. We have collected several photographs of bricks and stones which could make some pretty cool texture effects in your designs.
Rust Texture Pack
This is a pack of 10 rust textures. You can get any of them from Flickr, or download the full pack in a zip file at the end of the post. Most of them have a resolution of 2560 x 1920..
101 Free Stone and Rock Textures
Most designers are always interested in quality textures to use in their own work. Recently I was looking for some good stone textures, so I decided to put together this collection that will hopefully be a helpful resource for others. There are textures from a variety of different sources.
New York Concrete: 10 Free Hi-Res Textures
The latest texture pack contains 10 high resolution concrete textures taken during my last trip to New York City. I took over 300 photos, mostly of the regular tourist attractions.
40 High Res Textures
If there is one thing that is ubiquitous among almost all grunge web designs, it’s having a good quality grunge texture or dirty background image
30 Most Incredible Textures for Vintage Style Design
One of the most important aspects of a good vintage style design is the use of authentic looking textures. Since most of you probably don’t have time to browse the local antique shop, and your grandmother’s attic is miles away.
Cloud Textures
Weird colors – 27 cloud textures, made from photos. Please credit the artist if you use these textures. Resolution is 1600×1200 pixels.
11 Free Hi-Res Old Grunge Paper Textures
It’s time for another high resolution texture set. This time it’s all about grunge paper textures taken from old books. As a bonus there’s even a nice book cover texture for you to download. Due to the enormous size (about 7MB each) of the textures I will not offer a single zip file containing all the images. Instead you have to individually download each texture by clicking on the preview. I hope you don’t mind. The files are perfect for both web and print jobs to your designs a more organic or vintage feel
60+ Extremely Useful Free Concrete Texture Backgrounds
You may notice the last few days I made some list of free texture resources. And as a continuation of gathering some High Quality Textures on the Web, here are another textures which can be very useful when it comes to grunge designs.
25 Great Free Photoshop Texture Packs
Photoshop textures are very widely used in modern web design, and hopefully you don’t have to create all your textures by yourself since a great choice is available freely on the web. In the following collection we have selected some of the best free Photoshop texture packs.
25 Useful Digital Textures Tiles
25 tileable textures for your multimedia, web, 3d, game or print designs. Bricks, stones, furs, metals and other materials. These tiles were created digitally, so you won’t get the dirt and impurities normally found on scanned images.
30 Free Cardboard Textures
Having the right textures can make a huge difference for designers. Today we’re going to feature 30 of the best free cardboard textures from a variety of different sources.
15 Textures of Italy
Here is the first of several, Italy Texture Packs. This one includes 15 textures from all over Italy. (The name of the city the photo was taken in is in the file name.
25 Free High Quality Brick Textures
I recently used some brick textures for a design project. I got a good collection and thought of sharing it. In this post, you would find some of the best high quality brick textures which can be used in different ways.
25 Great Free Photoshop Texture Packs
Photoshop textures are very widely used in modern web design, and hopefully you don’t have to create all your textures by yourself since a great choice is available freely on the web. In the following collection we have selected some of the best free Photoshop texture packs just for you.
60 Unique and Free Paper Textures
One of the most commonly used texture resources is the paper texture effect, many designers including like this texture and use it in many projects and digital painting works in Photoshop.
25 More Free Photoshop Texture Packs
22 Textures from The Grand Canyon
A couple of nice textures from a trip to the Grand Canyon. There are also a few textures from Vegas.
Free Texture Tuesday Rust 2
The venerable rust texture. Rust can be one of the most useful textures when trying to add a hint (or a lot) of grunge to your designs or photos, very handy.
31 Hi-Res Grunge Remodeling Textures
Free high resolution grunge remodelin textures. Overall 31 textures are included in the pack.
10 Free Original Hi-Res Fully Stained Paper Textures
These were created by soaking A4 pieces of paper in a tray filled with food colouring and then left to dry in the sun. The edges are most concentrated while the middle of the paper has a sort of tie-dye effect.
10 Free Hi-Res Photoshop Brushes for Acrylic Textures
These brushes are perfect for textures, overlays, and even poster making, letting you achieve a great organic feel. This set has a total of 9 Acrylic Texture Brushes all hovering at exactly 2500px.
Gallery of Textures
Textur.es is a community ran texture gallery for designers, photographers, and creatives alike.
Tags: design, Freebie, Textures
Posted by Robert Hartland on Nov 8, 2009 in
Design & Graphics |
View Original Article 
The need to update websites faster to keep content fresh has been ever growing. Ever since the first business owner wanted their Web designer to update their website faster, content management systems have played an important role on the Web. Why does this matter to you? How do you know if your company is ready?
In this article, we will look at how to tell if your organization needs a content management system. We will also give you information on the abilities of content management systems to help you better understand what they can do. While content management systems may seem complex, their entire purpose is to streamline your workflow and make your life easier.
A content management system allows you to create, manage, store and edit massive amounts of content without any HTML programming skill. Because you are able to edit your content from any computer with an Internet connection, you no longer have to rely on third-party developers or companies to keep your website up to date. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Every company would like to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Also consider our previous articles:
1. What Is A Content Management System?
If you have never heard the term before, a content management system (CMS) is a Web-based solution that makes it easy for a company to manage website updates internally. For many companies, updating a website is not something to look forward to because it can be a lengthy and, over time, expensive process. Most companies search for easier means of accomplishing their goals. The solution that many large and small companies have found is a CMS. The easy-to-use application allows your company to control its online identity with little to no knowledge of Web design.
Do I Need a Content Management System?
While you know your business better than anyone else, if you answer Yes to any of the following questions, your company would likely benefit from using a CMS-based website.
- Does your company update its website content frequently?
- Does your website contain over 10 pages?
- Do you constantly outsource simple website updates to third parties?
Although building your website with a CMS may not save you money up front, if you need to be able to manage your own content in a timely manner, you will certainly be cutting costs in future. You will increase your organization’s speed while reducing its effort. With a CMS accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, you will speed up the process of approving, publishing, and updating.
Some CMS’ have in-page buttons to speed up the process of editing content, while preventing users from accessing the admin interface.
Because a CMS has built-in organizational features, content is easier to find and nearly impossible to lose (unless you delete it by accident). You no longer have to spend a lot of time on simple tasks or duplicating your efforts. All of your content is created, managed, published and edited from a single location with very simple, easy-to-use tools. Because using these tools requires very little training, you can start managing your content almost immediately.
If you have identified your business goals and recognized that your website will play a role in them, you should begin the process of implementing your own CMS. There is no set list of requirements for a content management system because each organization has unique needs. Keep your requirements to a minimum, but be sure to allow for the future growth and demands of your company. Enlisting the help of a Web design and development company to assess your needs is a good idea.
2. Essentials Of A CMS
Three key elements that every CMS has, one way or another, are templates, content and meta data. Understanding how these three elements interact with the other CMS features is important: the template is the graphic wrapper of your website; without the actual content, you would have no need for a website; and the often over-looked meta data helps with search engine optimization.
An example of a CMS theme that has the same look and feel on every page.
Templates control how your content looks on the page and are extremely helpful when you have to produce a lot of pages (10+). The template is a graphic wrapper that usually looks the same on every page of the website, regardless of the content. It makes your website’s look and feel consistent. When you want to change the template (say, the color or an image), you have to make the change only once and it will be reflected on every page of your website. Popular CMS’ such as WordPress and ExpressionEngine have many free or premium templates available online that can reduce the cost of and help you customize your system.
This is the typical layout of a WYSIWYG editor, which has features that are standard in word processors today, such as bolding, italicizing and justifying paragraphs.
Content is created, managed and edited independent of all other CMS elements. Content could be anything from the text on your “About” page to the photo on your company press release. All content is normally managed through a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) that has integrated photo uploading tools. This helps you create new pages on your website, manage and edit existing pages and assign pages to multiple areas without having to copy them.
Facebook does an excellent job of pulling an external page’s title and description meta data when you post a link to it on a fan page or wall.
Meta data plays a key part in search engine optimization (SEO). The great thing about a CMS is that it makes it nearly impossible for you to forget to add this information, thus helping your website’s search and index ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Meta data contains such information as category, author, publishing date, title, brief description and keywords.
One great use of meta data is for automatically adding a title and description to links posted on social media websites such as Facebook. This not only saves you from having to retype this information but keeps your content relevant as well. This information can also be pulled by search engines and any other website where your website is listed, so make sure to put some thought into writing it.
3. CMS Features And Functions
Content management systems come with many standard features to help you create, manage and edit your content. In addition to standard features, additional features can be added to the flexible system framework. These additional features are often referred to as add-on modules or plug-ins. Because a CMS is very flexible, you can use it for a simple website with little content or expand the features to support a complex website with a lot of content. Here is a nice list of high-profile companies that use a CMS for their websites, which will give you a good idea of how far you can expand these systems.
Standard Features
These features are what make your content management system so extensive and highly flexible. They allow you to publish, edit and organize content and manage members, and they contain a variety of built-in security features.
With these straightforward tools, you can see how easy creating and managing your content is.
Publishing is made easy with the in-depth features of a CMS. Without any knowledge of HTML programming, users can create, manage and schedule content with ease. These powerful tools help free up time within an organization by streamlining the whole process. A user can create content, set the category (i.e. the section in which it will be published) and then set it as a draft for later review.
Once the content is reviewed, it can be scheduled to be published, say, seven days from then. Once you have reached that step, the rest of the process is automated. You can write and complete a week’s worth of articles ahead of time and take a vacation without having to worry about publishing new content, because it will publish itself (if you have done your part).
Typography often causes headaches for writers, especially if the writers are not HTML savvy, but the task is made easier with built-in text editors. With most CMS’, your text can be automatically formatted to produce XHTML-valid typography. This saves you the hassle of hand-coding every piece of content and leaves the “fun” bits to the system itself. If you paste disallowed characters, such as curly quotes, bullets or accents, from text editors like Microsoft Word, they will automatically be converted into an HTML-valid equivalent.
Another great feature that many CMS’ include is automatic linking. This feature saves you from having to manually link URLs that you add to your content. All of these features are useful because they make your workflow more efficient when you create a lot of content. And if you prefer to enter your own HTML code every time because you don’t trust the automated process, you have that option as well.
Organization is a key part of maintaining a website. With a CMS, all of the content is stored in one place, only once, and is accessible from any location with an Internet connection. Content can be saved in a number of states, such as draft, published and archived. So you can keep unfinished and finished content in separate places, with different attributes. This is especially handy if you like to write content ahead of time and want to be able to easily find it when it comes time to publish.
- Draft: this is work in progress and is not visible to the public.
- Published: content that is visible to the public.
- Archived: previously published content that is tucked away in a safe place, away from the main navigation. Typically used with blogs.
Member management helps you control all aspects of your website’s users. As an administrator, you have full control over how many people can access your website and how much control they have themselves. This can be extremely useful for a large company, where many people (author, editor, publisher, etc.) are responsible for creating and maintaining content. You control how many hands are in the cookie jar at each stage of the creation process.
- Administrator: has complete control over all users and access to all of the website’s administration features.
- Editor: can publish and mange their own content as well as other people’s content, etc.
- Author: can publish and manage their own content.
- Contributor: can write and manage their own content but cannot publish it.
- Subscriber: can read content, view and write comments, receive newsletters and so on, without being able to edit anything.
Build-in security measures give you one less thing to worry about. You no longer have to worry about session management, robots trying multiple passwords to hack your account or losing data when processing forms. Almost every CMS has different session management configurations, so you can set the preferences that fit your security needs.
With the built-in “multiple password denial” feature, you can make sure that multiple users cannot access your system simultaneously with the same log-in credentials. In addition, you can automatically lock out users after several incorrect password attempts and allow forms to be submitted only once. This helps prevent loss of data and attempts to hack your system via password.
Additional Features
You can integrate add-on modules, or plug-ins, into your CMS to add value, improve accessibility and increase functionality. With the right combination of features, you can create a website that fits your business plan and helps your company achieve its goals. While the number of additional features that you can add is endless, we will focus on the major ones here.
GoMediazine is a great example of blog integration.
Company blog functionality helps keep your website fresh and can be a very useful marketing tool. While CMS’ have evolved into complete website solutions, they were originally intended to manage blogs. Most blogs were used as personal diaries or breaking news outlets. Adapted to business use, they can be very useful for letting customers and clients know about what’s new and exciting with your company. If you sell products, you can announce new items or sales. Some businesses, such as GoMedia, use their blog purely as a community-building tool to publish educational information.
The Electrorack website is a great example of seamless e-commerce integration.
E-commerce integration makes the user experience on your website a very comfortable one. Being able to sell products and services from within your website would be ideal for any business. Some companies, including Electrorack, have seamlessly integrated their e-commerce solution into their CMS. The user doesn’t even notice that they are jumping from one platform to another because the look and feel are so consistent.
The DesignByHumans website has a great integrated user-based community.
Discussion forums are a complete community-building solution that helps your website’s visitors exchange ideas. Users can create topics, offer feedback on existing topics and interact with other users. How you use a discussion forum depends entirely on your needs. Design by Humans uses its forum to post company news and to let their artists and customers interact for free.
This website has a photo gallery set up on its system for album postings.
Photo galleries are used by millions of people around the world. Online photo sharing is becoming this era’s scrapbooking. With the increase in social media use, people can easily send everyone they know a link to their latest photo gallery. The Memory Museum can display photos easily through the customized gallery on its photography blog. Businesses can use this feature to showcase recent events or feature products. By organizing and displaying photos from within your CMS, you can have all of your content in one location.
National Geographic has an intuitive integrated video management system to help users view their video content through the Web.
Video management helps you organize, edit and distribute video content. You no longer have to upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo and then manage them separately. You can manage your video content just as you manage your website’s pages. You can upload almost any kind of video and then share your albums and videos on your website and on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Digg.
CMS’ vary in the video management features they offer. But most let you upload multiple files at once (in batch) and automatically create thumbnails. Once videos are in the system, you can track viewer behavior as well as feature content based on popularity. National Geographic integrates videos into its articles and offers them separately for others to embed on their own websites.
Apple offers extensive multi-language support and uses multiple URL extensions to differentiate content.
Multi-language support lets you offer content in multiple countries within a single CMS, allowing visitors to choose their preferred language. While most small companies do not need this feature, it can be helpful. The support features may not actually translate content (and if they do, they won’t do an accurate job), but they do let you feature content in multiple languages, which is extremely useful for corporate websites that operate globally. Because Apple operates in many countries, it offers its website in many languages.
RSS feeds typically show excerpts of content and images (if any), as shown above.
RSS feeds are a really simple way to syndicate the content on your website. With the explosion of RSS readers, which constantly check a user’s favorite websites for new content, RSS feeds have become essential. It does not matter whether you update your website daily or monthly, your readers will be sure never to miss an update. Millions of websites publish RSS feeds on a regular basis, and yours should not be an exception. With people’s attention spans shrinking along with their free time, letting users choose the content they want to read through an RSS feed is helpful.
A newsletter can be a great way to reach out to users who are interested in your content, especially if yours is designed as well as TV Guide Daily Scoop’s.
Newsletters/mailing lists are an extremely helpful feature, especially if you have a lot of users or want to expand your base. Many mainstream users still do not use an RSS reader, and some of them may prefer to receive your content in their inbox rather than by visiting your website every few days. You can integrate newsletters into your system and set the feature’s functionality. Usually, you will be able to manage subscriptions, create a template, compose the newsletter in a WYSIWYG editor, manage your archive and track open/click results.
Google Analytics shows detailed information on your website’s visitors, at no charge.
Statistics/tracking is an essential feature for any website. To effectively run and market a website, you need to know as much as possible about your visitors. Analyzing whatever data is available prepares you to achieve company goals, focuses your marketing initiatives and converts visitors into regular users. You will have information on how many people visit your website, where they live, what content they view and much more. Google Analytics is one of the most widely adopted analytics programs that are available for CMS’. Its popularity is partly due to the immense amount of information it provides about your visitors for free.
Where Can I Find A Content Management System?
You know the size of your organization and how much you can spend on a CMS. These factors are good indicators of where to start your search. Actually finding one can be a daunting task, but if you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, you can quickly weed out the options that don’t fit your needs. Finding a solution that helps your business achieve its goals is important. Many businesses, large and small, use all kinds of different CMS’ to manage their content. Start your journey by using the resources listed below.
Further Resources
Check out the following related articles and resources:
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© Robert Hartland for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: CMS
Tags: CMS, How-To
