A collection of kick ass vintage and retro web designs inspired by the 1940’s era. Some of the design work on these websites is stunning.

http://www.targetscope.com

http://bigrigdesign.com

http://mediaboom.com

http://www.level2d.com

http://www.prahba.com

Continuing our top 5 series we are focusing on search engine optimisation (SEO) websites this month. All the websites below have a slightly different focus within the SEO community and offer valuable information, strategies and examples to help you become a better SEO.

SEOMoz

Rand Fishkin is something of a SEO hero of mine, if only for his charismatic performances on the now legendary ‘Whiteboard Fridays’. SEOmoz has a lot to offer SEOs of all levels and its premium membership offer a variety of useful keyword, rankings and linking tools. The recent Linkscape tool despite its recent controversy is particularly useful.

SEO Book

SEO Book.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search marketing arena. It offers marketing tips, search analysis and his SEO book is probably the best out there. Like SEOmoz Aaron also features a premium members subscription that has had some great feedback.

SEO Blackhat

Some insightful information about ‘Blackhat’ SEO, linkbait & link spamming. Some of these tactics are highly dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend using them on any serious projects however it is important to be aware of what the latest black hat techniques are.

SEO Roundtable

A vibrant search marketing community that features forums dedicated to Google, Yahoo and MSN optimisation as well as all the latest search marketing news and developments.

Search Engine War

Great blog from the team at Guava which offers some insightful comments on SEO and PPC best practise, optimisation techniques and social media strategies.

There are some outsanding themes available for Wordpress at the moment and combined with the power of Wordpress 2.6 there is no better time to switch to this oustanding open source CMS. Here is our list of favourite websites to download premium themes. more…

It goes without saying that CSS is now used for layout on a vast majority of websites however for anything but the smallest website keeping your CSS files organized can be tricky. I’ve complied a list of CSS organization tips that I’ve found to be invaluable for both saving time and avoiding bugs. These aren’t meant to be the definitive guide by any means but in the 5 years or so that I’ve been coding CSS they have proved very reliable. more…

I’ve always been fascinated by how artists create that authentic retro look and although its not quite the fad it once was it still has its place for certain brands. However designing a retro theme for a website is harder than it looks and its very easy to end up with a complete mish-mash of styles if you’re not careful. Luckily there is plenty of resources on the web to help you get started so I’ve compiled the following list of fonts, illustrations and website examples to help you get on the road to retro stardom.

more…

Creating a basic dynamic navigation is fairly straightforward in Wordpress and with a few tweaks or the installation of a custom plugin you should be good to go. However if your using Wordpress as a CMS for a larger content driven site then your going to find yourself running into problems with scaling the menu. more…

It takes something really special to drag me away from Wordpress development these days but Pligg, the open source content management system for social media/web 2.0 websites is my new passion. It’s got incredible functionality out of the box, is perfect for social media sites and has an active community developing mods. more…