Today your task in the 31 Day challenge to Build a Better Blog is to do some learning from successful bloggers.

To do this I’ve asked nine bloggers that I know and respect to nominate a few posts from their own blogs archives that they believe would be most helpful for bloggers wanting to improve their blogs.

Today is Day 8 in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge. Congratulations on making it this far!

Today I’m presenting you with a task that is perhaps a little less involved than some of the days so far. I wanted to give you something that would both help improve your blog but that wouldn’t take too long to either learn or implement (although it is something that you could dedicate a lot of time to if you have time on your hands).

Last week we already presented our first selection of beautiful, clever and creative logo designs. This post presents the second part of our selection, featuring even more beautiful and creative logos that will hopefully inspire you or at least give you the idea of what the current logo design trends look like.

Just as last time, we focused on logos that use creative methods to represent the brand through color, shapes, and typography. Every design presented below tells you something about the company that it is supposed to represent. Also note the brilliant color palletes and unique patterns used in many of these. Finally, pay attention to the typography, especially font selection and coloring…

Photoshop plugins are very powerful addons to Adobe Photoshop, which many people seem to forget. Plugins are small extensions to make Photoshop even more extensive while retouching photos, adding simple filter effects and more. I selected separate plugins and featured them, however there were also many huge collections of plugins, so it didn’t make sense to copy&paste massive loads of text and images – I just put screenshot and link to them in that case. Hope You’ll enjoy this one and feel free to add Your comment about Your favorites and maybe links I didn’t list here.

Joomla is one of the most powerful, robust and feature-rich content management systems out there. Besides being open-source, Joomla is capable of some really stunning designs through the use of modules and built-in display customizations. Below, we present a list of 20 35 of the coolest, slickest, most eye-catching Joomla template designs…

Over the last several years, developers have moved from table-based website structures to div-based structures. Hey, that’s great. But wait! Do developers know the reasons for moving to div-based structures, and do they know how to? Often it seems that people are moving away from table hell only to wind up in div hell. This article covers common problems with layout structure in web design…

As logo designer You can often find moments, when You cannot think of anything good, but then such inspirational like this can become very handy. There are a lot of logo showcase sites You can inspire from and usually those sites list also all logo on popular categories, so You can see which logos and actually why there are so popular, sometimes artists even add their logo creation workflow there, allowing us to see what’s really happening behind the scene…

Regular Expressions (RegEx) are a set of characters you can use match one or more strings of text. The main reason to use Regular Expressions is that they support wildcard matching, letting you capture a lot of variations (in URLs for example) using a single string of characters. Here are a few examples when Regular Expressions are useful in Google Analytics…

Let’s face it, your website is never really finished. Testing pages is an inexpensive way to manage a constantly shifting audience and market. It’s great for:

1. Increasing ROI on your advertising
2. Teaching you about the likes and dislikes of your customers
3. Trying out alternatives used by competitors
4. Breaking down preconceptions about what works
5. Convincing a stubborn boss to try something new

Complex design techniques are often time-consuming and, well, complex. Some of these advanced effects can add plenty of depth to designs, but when used in the wrong place, they do little more than distract viewers from the project’s intended focus. These effects may be precisely what a design needs to have the impact it requires, but even in these cases, they should be complemented by simpler effects.