Must Design

Gary Marshall shares 50 of the best free web tools to help build your site, from well known tools as WordPress and Drupal through to some you may have never considered

Check out these 21 free and easy-to-use visual content creation tools.

We've had a HUGE Day over on GPlus today. I wrote a post about why G+ is magical thinking (https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/F5fXyrkTPCr ) and my post got picked up by my friend Mark Traphagen (@MarkTraphagen) and it BLEW up into an amazing conversation.

Given the MONSTER day we've had I thought it would be a great idea to share some of the most successful G+ Brand pages. GPlus is a massive Blue Ocean for most.  Blue Oceans are where your content gets MORE traction with less work. Red Oceans are where your content requires more investment to generate LESS return.

GPlus is really a set of TOOLS. Incorporating Hangouts, maps, communities and other widget-like tools. The first website or agency to figure out how to combine those powerful tools in unique combinations is going to WIN big. Some of these examples approach the top of the mountain, but G+ has more power than even anyone here captures.

Future Tools
This is a great web design post. Don't worry if you don't know or understand only about half of it. Importance is in the tools suggested to test, design and pivot toward a future of more flexible web design.

But there's a problem.

I created my first highly static website in 1999. Not static in the sense we didn't update it since we updated it all the time. Static in the servers and code we used. Today and especially true tomorrow your websites will need to fly around the web curating information from the 4 corners of the web.

The more "flying around" your website does the greater the stress on your backend serving architecture and the more the need for the cool web design tools outlined in this Smashing Magzine post.  

Adding Haiku Decks To WordPress

I love  Haiku Deck tool and figured out a way to add our decks to our blog:

http://www.curagami.com/marketing-haiku-decks/

I've been prodding  Adam Traitt, one of Haiku's founders, for a user profile (done) and more control over display (Haiku Deck team is working on it). In the mean time I decided to add my decks to Curagmai's  blog. Here's how we did it. 

*How To Add Haiku Deck To Your WP Blog*

1. Create a new Haiku Deck category on your blog. 

2. Create posts for every Haiku Deck to be added. You may want to use a date from last year or the year before to fool WordPress into moving your new Haiku Deck posts to the back of your stack. 

3.Create a grid we used WP Ultimate Post Grid and we upgraded to premium for the ability to filter by category. 

4. Redirect your WP posts to your Haiku Deck (we cheated and used the Twitter links, better to grab the nasty URL you can find in the embed area since we will drive up our Twitter share numbers artificially) we used Redirection plugin by John Godley. 

We wrote copy into this page mostly for   reasons. You can see a grid without copy here; http://www.curagami.com/magazines-2/ ;

We also use embedded  feeds behind the "Magazines" link. Each "Magazine" is firing from our Scoop.it feeds. This is how we see "websites" changing. Instead of a place where you creating everything tomorrow's sites will share your creations from all over and encourage visitors to collaborate and share too. If that sounds like we suggest you create online community you win a cookie (and I'm writing this from  so just tell me what kind you want :). Marty 

Haiku Deck Zuru uses the power of artificial intelligence to transform your ideas into polished presentations. Become a charter member to get 6 months free.

Marty Note
Haiku Deck is one of my favorite visual marketing tools. Our 41 "decks" have generated more than 100,000 views. We got the idea about slides being a new marketing channel by working with this magic wand of a tool.

Now they've got something new up their sleeve and the entry fee is a whopping $30 bucks (lol). Let's see, 100K views for $30 bucks, we signed up today and suggest you do the same. Whenever their new tool comes out of beta we know it will be worth many multiples of $30 bucks :). M

Designing G+ In
Crazy to suggest using G+ as a tool to power your online marketing right? Maybe not. Greatest return always comes from the least understood ideas. GooglePlus is a "least understood" idea these days.

Their leader left and TechCrunch said G+ the social net is dead. They may be right, but that is beside the point. G+ has always been more than a social net. G+ is a suite of tools marketers can use to find blue oceans.

Blue oceans are the as yet unspoiled places where marketers can still swim without fear of a herd of sharks. Oceans where sharks eat themselves are "red oceans" such as Facebook.

We suggest designing G+ into your marketing and site. Hold weekly hangouts, you don't need a G+ profile to use hangouts now, and created a branded community if only so you rule your name in #seo. Finally we suggest curating the great comments you will receive on G+ as a source of future content.

We've never been able to figure out how to use circles in a unique way, but they too beckon with possibility. By creating weekly content based on Hangouts and Community you get lots of GoogleJuice, the least expensive #videomarketing we know about and great community development tools that cost you NOTHING.

The linked post discusses Mark Traphagen's call to use G+ as a hub of your marketing. That's a great call since the price is RIGHT (free though you may spend some making G+ play the way you want it in your design). Designing G+ tools INTO your community creates the cheapest, biggest and best online win we can think of.

So the death of G+ is greatly exaggerated and, if you are smart, you will find a way to design the tool's many possibilities into your marketing.

Every web designer has a secret or two. Hard-won workflows, hidden hacks, and insider knowledge that are the mark of true experience and the stuff that separates great web design training from good. Here, we've managed to persuade some of the web's busiest devs and designers to part with their most closely guarded tricks and tips.