Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta Download

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Gary Simon

As a user of Photoshop since version 3, it’s always exciting to see the changes and additions made by upcoming versions of Photoshop.  Photoshop CS6 is the latest and there’s a free beta download which you can find here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/photoshopcs6.html

I’ve downloaded it and played around with it a little bit.  There are some decent changes and additions made which I will tackle very soon in an upcoming photoshop cs6 tutorials page here as well as on designcourse.com.

I will be covering several tutorials which outline features and changes made in Photoshop CS6, and I will also be covering website design and a few photoshop cs6 logo design tutorials.

Check back soon for those free tutorials!

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Launch of CouponsCourse.com

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Gary Simon

I recently launched a new website that my wife and I have been working on for quite awhile.  How to Coupon | CouponsCourse.com

My wife became quite interested and involved in the couponing community a couple years ago. She definitely wasn’t one of those insane “extreme couponers”, but it surprised me when she was able to save so much money.  The idea for the site came when I was with her at the grocery store and a woman behind her in the shopping line said, “Wow, I wish I could do that.  How do you find all those coupons?”

The same types of questions occurred at other shopping trips, and it only made sense to me that we build a service aimed at educating people on how they can save a lot of money with coupons.

So check out the site, and the video on the home page which I created (that’s my voiceover as well, haha).

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Yahoo Site Explorer is Gone.

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Gary Simon

For years, many webmasters have used yahoo site explorer to check the backlink account of their own site and competitors. Unfortunately, due to the yahoo and bing merger, they are removing the site explorer. Commonly you could use operators like “linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com” or “linksite:” to retrieve a comprehensive list of every backlink pointing to domains and URL’s. It was also free.

You can search through backlinks in Google, but it only shows a mere fraction of the backlinks that yahoo has shown, making it ineffective to gain a solid idea of the amount and type of backlinks that a URL has.

Alternative Backlink Services

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Google PageRank (PR) is 0 for everyone.

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Gary Simon

It appears as though Google has either intentionally or unintentionally reset every website’s pagerank (pr) to 0. If intentionally, this will be a huge impact on the industry of SEO and how it operates. Many webmasters sell links primarily based on their PR, and if PR is now removed, we can effecitvely say “Goodbye” to a standard SEO metric.

This page will be updated as more details follow.

Update (10/6/11 10:55 AM ET)

You can relax, Google Pagerank has not been removed. Google has changed their URL in which applications / toolbars use to query for the Pagerank data. Here is a fix.

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Free Google Plus Icons

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Gary Simon

I was fortunate enough to snag up GooglePlusIcons.com after the Google+ social network was announced. Facebook icons are a commonly searched for keyword amongst designers, so it made sense to get in on the search traffic early while the competition is minimal.

So I quickly put up a site which features free downloadable Google Plus Icons <-Link there! Enjoy!

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Google Plus Design / Templates?

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Gary Simon

Google just launched (in an invitation only format) their response to Facebook; their very own social network. I’ve been fortunate enough to become one of the few invited to try it out. They do a great job of addressing the primary concerns of facebook (privacy) and then some (with group video chat and some interesting user interfaces with circles).

But one thing I was particularly interested in was whether or not they offered any level of profile customization in terms of layout/graphics. At this early stage, it doesn’t appear so. I understand that MySpace allowed for way too much customization which made it ridiculous with silly teenagers cluttering their profile, but I was hoping for at least *some* customization; which would have allowed me to launch one of the first google plus design/template services!

Oh well, perhaps in the near future they’ll rule out something similar to twitter in terms of graphical customizations; which would be great imo.

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*FREE* Vector Facebook Like Button

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Gary Simon

I decided to re-design the facebook like button in vector format. Sometimes it’s necessary to implement a larger version of the facebook like button. With this free vector facebook like button, you can integrate it into your designs and scale it to any size without losing quality.

To download the project files:

  1. Visit my Facebook Fanpage and click “Like” at the top (or beneath these steps)
  2. Click on the “Facebook GFX” tab on the left menu.
  3. Right click and hit “Save file as” on the download project files link. That’s it!

Included in the package are also 2 common facebook button designs (dark blue and gray) with editable button captions. The font used is Tahoma bold, which most people have by default.

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My new site: UpcomingGames.com

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Gary Simon

I’ve worked quite a bit the past several months on building and launching a new site: Upcoming Games. Last year I purchased the domain from a company for relatively cheap, and decided to build it out at the beginning of 2011.

The site features the latest upcoming games based around every platform imaginable. Each game has its own forums (which I coded from scratch), video page via youtube api, release date page and more. I’ve ran game fan sites in the past but always wanted to run something that could cover everything.

Right now I’m simply focusing on building traffic and a member base via search engines and social media. I’m also focusing on putting out videos that have to do with upcoming games.

Follow UpcomingGames on:
Youtube UpcomingGames,  Upcoming Games on Twitter, Upcoming Games on Facebook

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HTML Custom Dropdown List and HTML Compression

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Gary Simon

I wrote two new tutorials that showcase HTML custom dropdown lists and HTML compression.

Custom Dropdown List
HTML Compression Tutorial

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CSS3 Font Face Tutorial

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Gary Simon

I wrote a quick example/tutorial on the CSS3 font face property. It allows you to use custom fonts that will render in HTML via the browser. Here’s the tutorial:

CSS3 Font Face Tutorial

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