Devlounge just posted a great Friday Focus, based on girly illustrations.

We have unmistakably girly illustrations here on this week’s Friday Focus! Girl power, baby!

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of our primary goals as designers is to constantly improve the usability of our websites and blogs. Content, while very important, doesn’t help readers if they can’t easily get to it. In this post, Tutorial9 would like to outline several ways to quickly improve a blogs usability.

1. Work Above the Fold
2. Track Your Blog’s Statistics
3. Apply Those Statistics – Pareto’s Principle
4. Make Your RSS Feed Very Visible
5. Make your Search Work Better (Wordpress Users)
6. Put Your Pixel Real Estate to Good Use
7. Show Related Content on Individual Posts
8. Your Links Should Make Sense
9. Test. Test Again. Repeat as Needed

Popularity: 1% [?]

In this tutorial, Tutorial9 will show you how you can easily add thumbnails, lead image, and other extras to individual posts in Wordpress. These images can be shown on the front page, archives, search pages, etc – but appear outside of the content, giving you full control of their placement and style.

Popularity: 1% [?]

This tutorial will explain how you can override the default alert box of your browser, without modifying your existing code and by adding 2 lines of javascript code.

YUI’s fantastic loader utility will be used, which will allow the load of specific YUI components and their dependencies into our page via script from their servers.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Joel Falconer at Freelanceswitch wrote an article on how work-life balance is a problem for many people. Not just freelancers, either—anyone who works in a job that involves some kind of thinking is tempted to take work home with them. Maintaining a good balance is one of the benefits to menial shift work.

But freelancers have it worst. Without an employer, the income is more dependent on performance than any corporate employee’s income. And for the vast majority of freelancers, there’s no real distinction between home life and work life, because the work life happens at home.

Here’s the thing that we lose sight of: becoming a workaholic does not improve your bottom-line or productivity.

When you work every day, all day, with no time set aside for living life, you just get more stressed. You lose sight of reality. You get out of touch with creativity, which is just as important for producing quality work as it is for innovating in business. You take much longer to do things and you get so exhausted that you sit there looking at the screen for hours.

There are no benefits to living a workaholic lifestyle.

Popularity: 4% [?]

In the past 5 years we’ve seen an increasing trend of designers using a hand drawn style on their websites. As designers have gotten better and better at designing and developing websites we expect more out of them — we expect them to look cleaner, we expect them to function better, and we expect them to look more artistic. Including these hand drawn elements is an easy way for web designers to make their interface more artistic and less technical. Whoever is viewing the site doesn’t want to see the source code behind it or think about the unending lines of 1’s and 0’s that their computer is translating to create the image on the screen; they want an aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate web experience and the use of hand drawn text and illustration is one popular way of accomplishing this.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As bloggers, designers and consistent Internet surfers, we constantly visit a lot of websites and blogs on daily basis. Aside from reading the content, we get all curious too. These ponders are often figures and data the website/blog generates, for example – the pageviews, feedreader counts, rankings, web host, how much money a site makes, etc.

If you are constanly checking out these figures of any websites you go to, don’t worry because that’s a good sign. These information allows you to understand websites you visits better, it also keeps you closer to your competitions. If you often checkout Google PageRank, Alexa of your website and others, hongkiat wants to show you more. Here’s 9 Interesting Facts To Know About a Site. Full list after jump.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Aqueous

Three column, blue and white theme with a fluid later, designed for higher resolutions.

Talian Reloaded

Talian is a 3 colomn premium theme with several new features (Post styling options, mini social bookmakers) and option pages e.g. custom sitemap, custom archives and custom link pages

WP Foto

Wp Foto theme is single layout theme designed for photo blogger. It uses custom fields for displaying thumbnail in home page, archive page, category and tag page.

Mediterranean

Mediterranean is a two column, widget ready WordPress theme, with right-hand sidebar, from an original XHTML template by DemusDesign.

Popularity: 4% [?]