10 Useful resources for web designers and developers

Today I want to present you a selection of some useful resources for web designers and developers. This list contains in particular some awesome fonts, a simple PHP Content Management System, a JavaScript Cart, a PHP application for job boards, a weekly calendar (Google Calendar like, made with jQuery), an open source knowledge base application and interesting links with jQuery and MooTools plugins.


1. 52 Really High Quality Free Fonts For Modern And Cool Design
This post contains a great collection of awesome fonts



2. Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs
In this collection Smashing Magazine presents high-quality fonts: Calluna, Andika Basic, Mentone, Sovereign Regular, Medio, Tiresias Infopoint and many other high-quality free fonts.

3. GetSimple CMS
GetSimple is a powerful and very simple CMS that has everything your client needs, and nothing a CMS doesn't.

4. SimpleCart(js)
No databases, no programming, no headaches. SimpleCart(js) is a simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. It's lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML.

5. jQuery Week Calendar
The jquery-week-calendar plugin provides a simple and flexible way of including a weekly calendar in your application. It is built on top of jquery and jquery ui and is inspired by other online weekly calendars such as google calendar.

6. JoobsBox
JoobsBox is the most flexible software for job boards, allowing community expand it to unlimited needs. Plugins and Themes allows you to extend JoobsBox to do almost anything with your job board.

7. jCryption
In short words jCryption is a javascript HTML-Form encryption plugin, which encrypts the POST/GET-Data that will be sent when you submit a form.

8. 68Kb Knowledge Base Software
68KB is an open source PHP MySQL driven knowledge base script. Built with you in mind to make it easy to configure and setup.

9. Moowheel
The purpose Moowheel is to provide a unique and elegant way to visualize data using Javascript and the <canvas> object. This type of visualization can be used to display connections between many different objects, be them people, places, things, or otherwise. The script is licensed under an MIT-style license.

10. SlideItMoo
SlideItMoo is a simple MooTools plugin to display thumbnail images of your gallery. It can slide either by mouse wheel scroll or by clicking the arrows on the left and/or right.

The Deming Cycle: an application to web design

In this post I want to illustrate an application of the Deming Cycle - also know as the PDCA Cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) - to web design. If you never heard of Deming Cycle, this model (made popular by Edwards Deming) describes an iterative process designed to drive continuous improvement typically used in business process reengineering and in quality management.
This process has four main steps:

- Plan: establish objectives and define methods to reach them;
- Do: implement what you planned;
- Check: measure and compare obtained results against expected result;
- Act: take action to improve what you implement.

In general, a popular way to represent the Deming Cycle is the following:

This circular approach can be very useful if applyed to web development expecially in order to:

- improve the quality of your work;
- organize your code in code snippets (or classes) to reuse in your projects in order to work faster and more efficiently;
- simplify and rationalize the workflow of activities during development process;


Plan: in this phase you have to establish what are your objectives and the expected output of development process. It's very important to have a clear idea about what you have to do to reach the final result. A plan of main activities can help you manage times during the implementation phase and have a to-do list to follow in order to monitor everyday your progress.

Do: in this phase you have to implement what you planned in the previous step executing the plan of activities identify in the first phase.

Check: in this phase you have to assess the output of development process against expected result in terms of general quality of the final product. You can image the quality as results/total effort. High effort and low results is index of low quality of your work (you spent a lot of energies to reach a bad final product). In general, what you have to do is to find a right compromise between results and effort.
A way to assess your results it is to define "indicators" that measure the differences between what you planned against what you implemented. A simple and very intuitive example of these indicators is the delay between a milestone and the effective date of completion of activities. For each delay, in this phase, you have to study why you fail to respect the plan defined in the first phase of the Deming Cycle. Too ambitious objectives? Bad planning? The study activity is very useful to find answers and avoid the same errors the next time you execute the same process, for example working to a new web project.

Act: in this phase you have to take action in order to improve what you implemented and, more in general, the entire process you followed to develop your output. For example you can organize some parts of code you often use in your web projects in classes or in ready to use code snippets , in order to save a lot of time when you implement them in a new web project.

For a deepening about the Deming Cycle take a look at the following links:

- PDCA Cycle
- Deming Cycle (PDSA)
- W. Edwards Deming

If you have some suggestion please leave a comment, thanks!

Related Posts

- Structured process you must know to develop a web application
- How to manage a small web project: a simple approach
- Simple process to estimate times and costs in a web project

Google hits back at Microsoft with its Go Google Campaign

Google launches its most vicious campaign against Microsoft till date. The war under the banner name of "Go Google" is one serious move taken against the collaborative offensive of MIcrosoft-Yahoo coterie.

"Go Google"is pitched basically against Microsoft's monopoly over business office application. Though Google Apps are in the scenario for quite some time now, it definitely could not be termed among the most successful ventures of Google. Though liked by many, some how it has still not been successful in its attempt to penetrate the hard core MS Office users heart. Google's not so impressive promotional campaign for this niche might be counted among one of the reasons behind it. But Google has decided to make up for the lost time with its newly worked out hostile ad campaign.

This campaign is also using social medias like twitter, facebook, orkut and others. And google has also gone to the extent of ditributing freebies to all its present users of Google Apps through out this August.