Style versus Design

Jeffrey Zeldman offers his insights into understanding the difference about style and design, and what it's all about. Check out his PDF.

Some tricks to use in CSS

Trenton Moss offers some of his tips and tricks to using CSS.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Wanting to start your own web design company. Here are some helpful tips.

Email Design Guidelines for 2006

As 2005 draws to a close, here are some key email design trends and guidelines to pay attention to now and into the new year.

Top 10 Custom JavaScript functions of all time

For those who like usinging javascript, here's a link to see functions to use on your web site.

Tag, your it

Tagging has quickly gained popularity because it allows human beings to bring intuitive organization to what otherwise would be largely anonymous entries in an endless sea of data. Read more about it here.

How To Be a Successful Freelancer, Part 1

Ryan Carson article looks at how following some easy methods, you can set yourself aprt from the masses.

Design Choices Can Cripple a Web site

Good article by Nick Usborne covers how a well designed website will have a dramatic impact on conversion rates, for better or for worse.

Web Design Studio of the Week

Check our our web design studio of the week. Added Sugar Media is a full service graphic design and advertising agency located in historic downtown Boston. Their design and production abilities have expanded far beyond their humble roots as a web site design company. They have been recognized as a multifaceted design house providing their clients with superior identity and branding solutions capable of capturing the essence of their business philosophy.

A Design Process Revealed

For individuals who are neither designers nor artists, it may seem like those who are, use a lot of smoke and mirrors, magically whipping up each stunning creation. Artistic talent and creativity can certainly aid and enhance the final result, but design, in particular, generally follows a process.

Note: This article also exists in French at Pompage.net, translated (with permission) by Stéphane Deschamps: Les coulisses d’un design.

11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages

You’re about to launch a big online marketing campaign complete with media buys, search engine placement, banner ads and blog buzz. You’ve tested your creative and your clickthrough rate is strong. You know once you go live, tons of targeted traffic will be hitting your site.

Time to sit back and relax, right? Not quite yet.

Best of the Web: BusinessWeek

Best of the New Web

The Web is no longer for idle wanderings or passive viewing. It's about socializing, sharing--and creating

It's A Whole New Web

And this time around it will be built by you

Content: Voices Of The People

Graphic: Home

E-Society: My World Is Cyworld

Graphic: Play

Tagging: Keeping Tabs On The Net

Graphic: Work

School Aid: It Takes A Web Site

Graphic: Public Domain

Ajax: How To Weave A Faster Web

Graphic: Toolbox

Online Extra: A Plethora of Web Picks

Our Best of The Web survey drew a huge response from readers. Compare their picks to those of BW editors

Online Extra: Jakob Nielsen on the Unwieldy Web

The Web usability whiz says some sites are getting better, but far too many remain too complex and frustrating for typical users.

Macromedia Blog Site

For those of you who use Macromedia products [and who doesn't], here's a great blog site that covers a lot.

Design in-Flight

The well respected digital magazine Design in Flight was cancelled a few weeks ago but now it is back in an online edition. With contributors like Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Mark Boulton, Keith Robinson, Molly Holzschlag, Eris Free and others this is one magazine that should end up in your bookmarks.

Back in April Veerle Blog wrote an article about Color Theory: Choosing color combinations that you now can read online for free. So if you ever wondered about the wonderful world of colors maybe it is something for you. Give Design in Flight a try I think you'll love it. Good luck Andy with your online adventure!

Tips for your web site

Illustration by Ron Deviney

Match Colors Between Images in Photoshop
Photoshop's Match Color adjustment is a powerful tool for matching colors between two images. Photoshop Tips

Reinventing the Brand Identity of AG Hair Products
After expanding its line from 4 to 28 products, AG Hair Products turned to Dossier Creative for brand coordination. Graphic Design Tips

Correct Exposures with Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop
The Shadow/Highlight feature, first introduced in Photoshop CS, can reveal shadow detail and enhance highlights. Photoshop Tips

Add Color to Images with Levels and Variations in Photoshop
This black-and-white image becomes hot through the application of a little Photoshop wizardry. Photoshop Tips

Best of Website Design Winners: Step Inside Design

For all your web designers and web designers to be, take a look here for some inspiration on various web site winners, courtesy of Step Inside Design magazine.

DSF - Robust CSS Drop Shadows

Drop shadows are cool, but adding them to elements of a web page can be a pain. You can fiddle with background images, tables, pure CSS solutions, Internet Explorer PNG limitations, or fixed single-use shadows tied to an image and a particular background.

The latest release of TypePad has a new popup (or flyout) interface element which presents the user with a set of options or an expanded view of an object when clicked on. The flyouts are similar to the location bubbles used in Google Maps. They have soft alpha-blended drop shadows that scale with the size of the box. The drop shadows are implemented in valid XHTML and CSS, with no CSS hacks or JavaScript. We call it ydnar Drop-Shadow-Fu.

Article is courtesy of Randy 'ydnar' Redding

Search Engine Watch

Here's a great resource for search engines that provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry, and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.

PCWorld.com - New Version of Firefox Coming in Late Summer

The next version of the Firefox Web browser, which will be called Firefox 1.5, is slated for release later this summer, and development work continues on new features that include an automatic update service.

Background Color Selector

Check out this site for you or aspiring Web artists who want to experiment with a wide variety of text and background color schemes.

Design Project

Here's an interesting web site covering design examples, interviews with leading designers, tutorials and so on.

Usable Web

Usable Web is a stale collection of links about information architecture, human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web.

The Principles of Design: In Theory and Practice

If you work on the Web, organizing your time and work is critical. Many professionals—from information architects to graphic designers—find themselves acting as the “glue” of a project, liaising between client and manager. So how do you stay on top of deadlines, drawings, and disputes? Columnist Joshua Kaufman shares his productivity insights as an IA in Part I of “Getting IA Done.” Read more

The Principles of Design

Take a step back from the nitty-gritty of style sheet jigs and alpha-channel jogs to examine the defining principles of your profession. After all, Web design is part of a much larger world of design. If you’ve been getting by on gut feel, here’s your chance to make your projects even stronger with a primer in design basics. Read more

Template Design Competition

It’s hard to believe, but Style Master, Webciv’s full-featured CSS editor, will be six years old on 9 September. To celebrate, Westciv is holding a Style Master Templates Competition with over US $1000 in cash prizes:

The competition challenges designers to develop stylish, standards-based CSS + XHTML templates that can be reused and adapted by developers around the world.

In addition to offering a high-quality CSS product, Westciv has long been a source of knowledge, offering free tutorials on standards-based design from novice- to expert-level, including their famous Complete CSS Guide. Westciv, in tandem with the W3C’s Australian office, is sponsoring this month’s Web Essentials 04 conference in Sydney (and I would be speaking there if not for Mr Stork’s impending bundle)

Inspiration

Looking for inspiration on how to create that next great web site for your customer? Check out some of these great designers web sites and their work:

1. Amy Burnham. Graphic and Web designer extraordinaire.
2. Nick Finck. Here's a mantra: Design, design, design.
3. Lynda Weinman. She is the Empress in my imaginary Tarot deck.

True Colors

Are you practicing safe color? Do you care? While the challenge of interoperable color has been somewhat ameliorated by the spread of better color-management systems, achieving consistent color across computers, platforms, and browsers is still very difficult, if not downright impossible.

The Return on Usability Testing

Subha Subramania offers insights to the benefits of usability testing.

Registration is now open for Web Essentials ‘05, to be held in Sydney, Australia, September 29-30, 2005. WE04 delivered 14 sessions - this year’s edition expands to 22 sessions with 7 International speakers, and 10 Australian speakers.

Everything I’ve heard about WE04 is that it was, quite simply, an oustanding conference.

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

Jesse James Garrett discusses the technology of Google's Ajax. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.

Tableless CSS driven template

Bluewater Island website was developed for a resort in Vanuatu. This is a database driven site, featuring a sophisticated yet easy to use custom built CMS.

Through the use of tableless CSS driven template, it was possible to significantly cut down the size of XHTML files and increase amount & size of images, subsequently making the site so much more attractive.

The site has been developed with the latest standards in mind allowing for maximum accessibility. Written in XHTML this website can even be accessed from most browser capable mobiles.

Completely Rethinking the Web

Dirk Knemeyer, Innovating the Web Experience Columnist at Digital Web, stretches our imagination with his insight on why the Web is broken. Read

Good book on web usability

Read this Book: Site-Seeing: a Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

Google's Web Accelerator hits the brakes

Google says it has reached the maximum number of users for beta software, which has come under criticism by privacy advocates and technology researcher Gartner.

Flash Tips

Actionscript: Mouse Movements In this month's ActionScript walkthrough, Tom Knowles demonstrates how to use the Flash Player to record and play back a visitor's mouse movements

W3C launches mobile push

The Web's leading standards body has launched a ground campaign to promote its mobile Web protocols in the real world.

Webby Awards nominees announced

The Webby Awards--known to its publicist as the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences--announced nominees in more than 60 categories for its June 6 Web site awards ceremony.

Nominees include Boing Boing and Yahoo's Flickr site in the Blog category, Skype in Telecommunications, 43 Things in Social Networking, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken in Humor and Weird, Alexander McQueen in Fashion, the New York Times on the Web in Newspaper, and Rtm86.com in Personal Site. Google, Yahoo, AOL, News.com publisher CNET, PBS, the BBC, Pfizer, SK Telecom, Turner Movie Classics and others got nominations in multiple categories.

Through April 29, the awards show is soliciting votes in its People's Voice Awards.

The Webby Awards unveiled a new designation, "Webby Worthy," which the awards group said applied to less than 20 percent of more than 4,000 entries received this year.

Creating a Site Design Plan

If you’re a small (or one-person) shop, the many approaches to planning a Web site can be dizzying. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guidelines to make design decisions easier? Karen Morrill-McClure guides you through creating a site design plan by outlining business and user needs and defining goals.

Web Style Sheets

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994.

Other style sheet information: Effective Use of Style Sheets, by Jakob Nielsen

Web Site Metrics

So what's your return on investment (ROI) for the dollars spent on re-designing, promoting, and managing your web site. Here's an interesting article to may help provide some guidance on how to measure your results.

Selling B2B Decision Makers

ClickZ's article, by Bryan Eisenberg, touches on how to best reach the 'decision makers' when running a B2B web site.

Web developer tips

Here's a web site [WebDevTips] to browse for new and experienced developers. They have code generators, forums, 'how to' guides and more.

What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

News websites have been with us for about a decade, and editors and designers still struggle with many unanswered questions: Is homepage layout effective? ... What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? ... When is multimedia appropriate? ... Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?

The Eyetrack

Introduction to Databases

Ever wondered what goes on beneath the glitz and glamour of an impressive e-commerce site? This article, a continuation of Introduction to Databases by Paul Tero, looks at the structure that makes them tick. Read more

Interview with Molly E. Holzschlag on CSS

Respected Web author Molly E. Holzschlag on CSS, presentational hacks, and Dave Shea’s plant counterpart. Read more

Kelly Goto interview

In Digital Web Magazine’s conversation with Kelly Goto, we cover the newest version of her already successful book and the need to move forward with the New Usability. It’s not a new theory, but rather the old theory blended with today’s environment that requires development around shorter cycles. Read more

The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards

Most articles on Web standards talk about how designing with standards helps control the user experience. Now, Alan K'necht explains how you can embrace XHTML and CSS to benefit your bottom line. Read more

Web Monkey for kids

Are your kids looking for help on starting their own web site. Take them here.

Form and function combined

Although web standards give us a better, faster Internet, not many sites use them. The Web Standards Awards aims to promote web site design using W3C standards by seeking out and highlighting the finest standards-compliant sites on the Internet. By showing you standards-compliant sites that make your jaw drop, we hope to show you that web standards aren't a constraint, they are a liberation.

The Firefox Explosion

It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)

Getting Unstuck

Four tips for getting yourself out of a design jam.

Why standards-compliant HTML matters

High-quality, compact, elegant and standards-compliant code is one of the most obvious tools of good web development nowadays. However, it is sometimes difficult to convince the client to invest in that kind of quality. More info here.

Strategies For Information Gathering--Your Take

There are several points during the Web design process that call for information gathering. In general these tend to be at the beginning of a project.

Gorilla Web Tips Archives

Some brief tips on creating better Web forms.

How keywords impact search engine rankings

Keywords are the key to better search engine rankings. That statement, or something like it, has long been a mantra for Web builders. The statement is still true, but dramatic changes in how the leading search engines rank Web pages has forced a significant change in how the statement is interpreted and applied to optimizing Web pages for search engines. Michael Meadhra explains all this here.

Design your Web site to be search friendly

In this article Robert L. Bogue , you’ll learn the basics of how to control searching and techniques to both ensure that all of your pages get indexed and how to make indexing more valuable for the users trying to find your information.

Goodies: Trinkets for you

Here are four goodies from Zeldman.com.

Web-Design Predictions 2005

The "retro" look is officially out of style for 2005, and it's being replaced by the "wicked worn" look, or so says Forty Media, an Arizona interactive marketing firm.

Cascading Style Sheets Tutorial

Killersites.com offers a tutorial on cascading style sheets.

Site Design Tips to Improve Your Sales

The better-designed your site, the better your chances of making the sale.

How well can you use the web?

The web is getting easier to use - but many of the difficulties encountered are partly down to users themselves, says usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen.

GIMP

The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Free Web Design Templates

Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information.

Boosting Your Hits

One of the most talked about subjects is how to get people to the Web page. With millions of Web pages there is sure to be another on your topic and probably lots. So how do you boost hits?