Web designer of the Week

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain is a very cinematic designer. His designs feel big; they command attention.

The Golden Ratio in Web Design

The elements of a web page are like organs; they are vital to a properly functioning and aesthetically pleasing web page.

Web Analytics and Information Architecture

Information Architects always want to know how easy our site is to use and how often it is used by the audiences we target. For the most part, few people ask for our data on usability or user experience but we regularly receive this kind of request from other parts of the business, "I need to know how many ‘hits' the website has received this year and how that compares to our competitors?"

Top 10 Sites for Designers

HOW's editors choose the Top 10 Sites for Designers every month. Coming soon: A growing archive of past Top 10 sites in various categories.

9 Top CSS Essential Skills That Every Web designer Should Learn

Here is a list of some techniques, tricks & tutorials for the most essential CSS skills that every web designer should learn.

Keynote with Jeffrey Veen - HighEdWeb 2008 Conference

HighEdWeb 2008 Conference keynote by Jeffrey Veen, founding partner of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool recently acquired by Google.

Jeffrey Zeldman Understanding Web Design

Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy—the ability to think about and empathize with your user—is by far the most important.

Update Your Old Site to Use Web Standards

Web standards? You can't afford to ignore them anymore.

How To Find Hidden Traffic And Use It To Get More Clients

Finding clients isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Working above and beyond to get great customer feedback and solid word-of-mouth advertising isn’t always enough to keep the bills paid and the fridge stocked, so any client-grabbing advice is welcome news to the harried freelancer.

But did you know that underserved, ready-to-buy clients might already be visiting your website? Let’s take a look at how to use statistics tools and SEO plugins to find these “hidden” visitors to your website, and then how you can convert them into clients.

Five simple steps to designing grid systems

The grid is a regulatory system which pre-empts the basic formal decisions in the design process. it's preconditions help in the structuring, division and ordering or content. This is not to say a well designed grid will solve all of your compositional problems, far from it, but it goes some way in creating a coherent structure in design which in turn creates the aesthetic values all of us are after in our designs.

A Simple Guide on How to Effectively Talk to Clients

Learning how to carry on a compelling conversation about web development is a paramount skill that all web developers should possess if you want to keep the checks coming in. Maintaining your audience’s interest and gaining an accurate picture of what they truly need to get done can prove to be a challenging part of any web development project, but here’s a few tips that might help a bit.

25 Tutorials for Advanced Freelance Web Designers

Here are 25 tutorials for advanced web designers.

40+ Inspirational Non-Profit Website Designs

Non-profit organizations obviously operate on a tight budget. In these situations, websites are rarely given priority in terms of dedicating the necessary money and resources to developing a powerful and effective website. These 40 websites say otherwise.

Browsers War - Text Rendering

Whether you are searching on web, reading on Wikipedia or blogging, your main interaction and focus is text. See how browsers deal with this.

Advanced CSS Accordion Effect

Information regarding the accordion effect and ':hover pseudo-element'.

Anatomy of a Successful Graphic Designer’s Website

Here are 9 essential elements that your design company website should have in order to increase your rate of being contacted, meet your visitors (prospects) needs/desires, gain trust in a “faceless” internet and grow your business online.

10 Principles of the UI Design Masters

It takes a real UI Master to understand how to make a terrific user experience on a website. Here are 10 extremely useful principles from some of the brightest minds in the User Interface field.

Simple Layout Can Be Mixed 'n' Matched

In this tutorial you'll learn how to put together a quick, simple but effective layout and then create variations using backgrounds, photos and patterns.

List of Web Tutorials

The following list is the table of contents of all tutorials you can find on woork. Tutorials are about webdev, programming, css, frameworks, database, project management and design.

15 Minimalist Designs

Little or no use of images and a strong focus on the typography and on the content instead of graphical elements can go a long ways with the audience.

Content Strategy

A website without a content strategy is like a speeding vehicle without a driver. Learn why content matters and how to do it right.



A) Every website faces two key questions: 1. What content do we have at hand? 2. What content should we produce? Answering those questions is the domain of the content strategist. Alas, real content strategy gets as little respect today as information architecture did in 1995. Jeffrey MacIntyre defines the roles, tools, and value of this emerging user experience specialist.

B) It’s time to stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. If content strategy is all that stands between us and the next fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site launch, it’s time to take up the torch—time to make content matter. Kristina Halvorson tells how to understand, learn, practice, and plan for content strategy.

User stories or Personas?

Some have a dislike of personas, as they are too much of a cute fit, a caricature, nothing more than stereotypes of your user base. Personas that are not grounded in qualitative, ethnographic research are misleading and potentially damaging to a project.

Website Redesign

We've all been there as web designers...taking someones past work and being called upon to improve it. Here are some things to keep in mind while redesigning a website.

25 Photoshop Tutorials for Web Designers

Adobe Photoshop is the tool of choice for most web designers. From creating a website template to objects and components such as content boxes and buttons, Photoshop doesn’t fail to deliver.

Stumpedia, The Human Powered Search Engine

Stumpedia is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Stumpedia does not depend on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.

It enable users around the world to share their knowledge and interests with one another and provide an alternative to traditional search. Users are encouraged to create custom content pages for any possible search term in the world and submit links that will help people find relevant results and answers to their search requests. Links to social bookmarks, social profiles, blogs, new stories, authoriative articles, videos, images, and web pages are also welcomed here.

21 Simple But Impressive Corporate Web Designs Of Top Brands

If you want to come up with some creative web design ideas or just need to motivate and inspire yourself, browse these 21 simple but impressive corporate web designs of top brands.

10 Resources for When You Need Help with CSS

While there are plenty of great CSS resources available, here's a list of 10 that can be very helpful resources in these situations.

Holistic concept models: an ROI blueprint

A good article on how concept models are rarely used in the right way and are often misunderstood. Are they really worth doing at all?

10 Techniques to Improve User Interface Designs

Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here's a collection of 10 that you'll find useful in your work.

Online Form Building with JotForm

JotForm is an interestig web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors. JotForm now integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, WorldPay, 2CheckOut, ClickBank and OneBip payment gateways, so you can collect payments from your users. Basic features are for free.

Online Advertising And Its Impact On Web Design

In recent years, advertising has become a major revenue source for many websites. Not too long ago, online ads were often met with disapproval from visitors, and advertisers were unsure about their value or effectiveness.

Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices

On content-heavy websites, the search box is often the most frequently used design element. From a usability point of view, irritated users use the search function as a last option when looking for specific information on a website.

Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples

News websites can be intriguing to examine from a design perspective. Regardless of what type of news they cover, they all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability and navigational challenges for the designer.

10 Firefox Extensions for Web Analytics

Firefox extensions help web analyst to test, report and analysis the web data easily. Here are a number of extremely useful third party plug-ins and extensions to simplify manipulation, analysis and graphing of data. analysis analytic, reporting.

15 Things Every Web Developer Should Be Thankful For

Here are 15 things that we all should be thankful for. These are the technologies that we couldn’t live without, or that have previously paved the way and allowed us to be web developers.

Inforgraphics

If ever there was a classic example of a great infographic, this is it.



One more here

Is Your Search Engine Marketing Effective?Search engine marketing involves keeping your content fresh, using keywords that put you at the top of the f

Search engine marketing involves keeping your content fresh, using keywords that put you at the top of the first page and obtaining as many links to your site from other websites as possible.

Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II

Following up on last week's Whiteboard Friday, this week Rand discusses what PageRank means to YOU. How can you use it to your benefit? What can the metric tell you about your site, your pages, and your links to help you target keywords and improve your rankings?

Part 2 is here.

30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials

Check these out these Photoshop text effects!

25 Ajax Techniques and Examples

Ajax allows for rich-internet applications that mimic the responsiveness and complex user interfaces typically associated with desktop applications.

IDEA 2008

The IDEA Conference took place in Chicago on October 7-9. The speakers pushed the boundaries of what it means to design complex information spaces of all kinds. We can all expand our practice by absorbing their experiences and ideas. Review the recordings and presentations here.

30 Beautiful Examples of Grunge in Web Design

Grunge is a stylish design trend that gives web designs a less uniform, less structured, and more organic look-and-feel. It’s characterized by textured/gritty backgrounds, uneven/torn edges, worn, faded and aged graphic elements inspired by urban and industrial architecture and scenery. It gives a way for designers to venture away from the glossy, flashy, and rigid design elements that characterize the "Web 2.0"style – a style that still dominates mainstream web design.

On Page Optimization - A Complete Walkthrough

On page optimization is one of the very first step of SEO which every webmaster should look into. It probably won’t even take you an hour to learn and implement some of these on-page optimization techniques. But you may ask, why it is so important?

19 CSS Menu Tutorial to Spice Up Your Web Designs

Anyone that knows what’s what about web design knows what CSS is, and how invaluable it can be to styling the navigation of a website.

The Top 15 Most Influential Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 is a term coined in recent years that describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and social indexes.

Here is a list of the top 15 websites that have been influential in establishing these methods of functionality on the web.

How 20 designers charge their clients - part 1

David Airey asked some of his graphic design contacts three questions about their financial practices: How do you charge clients? How do you accept payment? Why do you recommend working this way?

Here follows the first of a short series, offering an excellent insight into how graphic designers manage their finances.

Part 2 and Part 3

Webwithoutwords Offers a Wireframe View of the Web

What’s the web without words? Why, it’s a collection of wireframes of course. The rather novel, and aptly named, webwithoutwords.com/blog/ offers an interesting graphic design breakdown of popular websites.

Most developers and designers start with a wireframe — a skeletal outline of a webpage’s basic layout. Once you add words and images it’s often difficult to visualize what the original wireframe might have looked like and even harder to recognize how visual element flow (or don’t in some cases).

For most people that’s the way it should be, but if you’re an aspiring designer looking for some layout inspiration, webwithoutwords has it in spades. And naturally the site employs the same content-blocking visualizations in its own interface. Just rollover the various wire-framed elements to reveal the content.

How To Get 100% Free Advertising On Google

Google Local helps your advertisements show up in Google searches that are made in close proximity to your business which will help you get more traffic, leads and sales.

People Finder: Searching Without Logic?

One of the most frequent tasks on many intranets is finding people within the company. Providing an effective way to search people is thus a key goal in designing intranets.

12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean

Beautiful HTML is the foundation of a beautiful website. Good CSS can only exist with equally good HTML markup. A house is only as strong as its foundation.

Designing User-Centric Web Sites

Chris Messina looks at how we should make sites more user-centric, using forward-facing technologies that are available now.

Make It Modular

Minimalism and modular design can provide inspiration for modern web development, says Jina Bolton.

See Deeper

Powered by faster bandwidth and web 2.0 technology, today’s infographics bust out of their old, static paradigms. Welcome to a world of triple-enhanced data-vision.

Additional information aesthetics

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting (BT) is an advertising methodology in which an advertiser’s creative is shown to users based on the sites they visit and/or what the user does on those sites.

Who should use Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting and PPC

Strategic Design: 6 Steps For Building Successful Websites

Web design isn’t art. It involves a whole collection of different skills — from copywriting and typography to layout and art — all fused together to create an interface that not only features a pleasant aesthetic but that communicates function and facilitates easy access to its content.

Web Information Architecture Deliverables and Diagrams

Web information architecture is a relatively new field which has yet to develop a consistent and universal set of deliverables, and terminology to refer to those deliverables.

Using Personas & Scenarios in web design

Personas are an extremely powerful design tool, which help you to visualise an end-product that you can be confident will suit your users' needs by helping them achieve their goals, and help you test your success.

Using wireframes

Wireframes serve a central function in the development of a web site. It is a key tool in communicating the content and layout of each web page for internal and client reviews as well serving as a blueprint for graphic designers to produce designs and for programmers develop functionality.

5 SEO posts that rock

Here are the top 10 Online Marketing Blog posts that offer practical tips and resources for SEO.

21 Ways Websites Communicate with Visitors

One of the most important responsibilities of a website is to communicate with its visitors. Regardless of whether the site is a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site, or an e-commerce site, it exists to communicate with visitors.

10 Great Places to Find Web Design Jobs

Having trouble finding web design jobs? Well all the good jobs are online nowadays, so forget the papers! There are tons of job boards and other websites that feature web design jobs and there’s been a new trend in blogs having their own web design job boards due to their large audience of web designers.

The real value of keyword-rich domains

Here's a great article on points to consider when think about your domain name for your website.

Dealing With A Dud Client

Once you learn to spot a dud, you can avoid them pretty easily. Unfortunately, many freelancers are caught in a cycle working with those dodgy clients on the bottom of the rungs and have just given up on thinking that freelancing is anything more than this.

Prototyping with XHTML

If you design user experiences for standards-based websites and applications (i.e. those built with XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript), there are several great reasons for adding XHTML prototyping to your UX tool kit. Perhaps you’ve found that traditional wireframes just aren’t sufficient and are looking for more powerful ways to explore and communicate design solutions.

Hot Studio

I admire great web design companies. Here's their blog site. You can also access Hot Studio's home page from the blog site.

Web Designing Trends of 2008

Charlie B. Johnson shares his thoughts on web design trends.

Image Replacement

Here are 5 tutorials and resources for image replacement techniques.

Sources of Inspiration

You're wanting to build a website but not sure where to begin. In most cases you look at other sites for that idea. Minimalist designs are a new trend. Read on.

15 Key Elements All Web Sites Should Have

There are a lot of details to consider when designing and developing a web site. Here are some elements that you should be used consistently.

3 Ways to Keep Your Clients

You’ve worked hard to get the clients you have, and the last thing you want to do is risk any of them having second thoughts about looking for another freelancer down the road. So what do you do?

Think Design

This is a new graphic design blog, aiming to bring you freebies, resources, inspiration and much more. This site was created by Nick Pagano, the (only) designer for Think4: Graphics + Marketing.

October's Best

Okay, I'm a day late but I think you'll still find this article of keen interest. You'll find information regarding web design and development, graphic design, freebies, SEO,...

Improving Yourself as a Designer

Are you constantly looking for ways to improve yourself a designer? Here are some tips and ideas that may help and provide some inspiration.

Web-based Collaboration Tools

If you're a designer or developer, and strapped for cash, take a look at these tools that can help you facilitate remote/web-based collaboration.

Web Personalization for One-to-One Web Marketing

Today's World Wide Web market is becoming more competitive, so it's more important than ever to provide customers with an interactive, personal Web experience.

Personalization is not Technology: Using Web Personalization to Promote your Business Goal

Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content.

100 Web Designers to follow on Twitter

If you’re looking to connect with other web designers on Twitter then this 100 web designers who use twitter will help you.

25 Website Designs To Draw Inspiration From

this will help you get your creative juices flowing!

Why you should care about web strategy

A web strategist is first a real estate agent, then an architect, and then returns to being a real estate agent again. Find out why.

Web strategy to help lower your bounce rate

One of the most interesting statistics to track on your website is “bounce” rate. A visitor who looks at one page on your site then leaves without viewing a second page has bounced.

Frank Deardurff

Check out Frank Deardurff's blog site focused on web strategy.

Userfix: A social feedback hub

The social feedback hub. A community of web enthusiasts crowd-sourcing user feedback by reporting bugs and requesting features for any website. Empowering the users to surface the most requested features and to reproduce the most reported bugs on their own environments.

Edicy

A new kind of a website building tool, which focuses on business users and is localized for a number of different languages and markets. It's a complete service for building a website and publishing it to any web address.

Top 7 most cliche stock images used in web design

Sometimes clients ask us to implement ‘not-so-unique’ elements into our designs and sometimes it seems almost impossible to convince them otherwise, however, hopefully this post can suggest some reasons why not to use the old web design stock imagery clichés.

Is Your Website Cross Browser Compatible?

How many browsers are out there and do all these browsers show me the same exact site that I created down to the very pixel?

11 Free web based tools

Most of these tools are not very well known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Try them out.

So how does one calculate engagement?

Eric Peterson provides some insight into the methods by which to calculate engagement on the web.

Engagement...is it really a metric?

Measuring “engagement” seems to be this long standing quest on the web. Read Avinash's thoughts on this subject.

Behavioral Targeting Resources

Here are some links to great resources dealing with behavioral targeting.

Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them?

Yes, sometimes we do. Should we use them? No, we probably shouldn’t. Splash screen (or splash page) is a front page of a web-site that don’t provide the actual content, but offers visitors some kind of intuition or background information for what the site is about.

Graduated from Link Building High School Yet?

Great article on how to construct inbound links so they affect your search rankings for individual keywords that you want to rank for.

Web 3.0 Conference & Expo

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo, explore the strategies, tools, technologies and the big ideas necessary for building impactful, socially relevant, and profitable Web 3.0 products, services and companies.

The Top 15 Most Influential Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 is a term coined in recent years that describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and social indexes.

25 Refreshingly Blue Website Designs

If you have ever designed a website such as these blue website designs, than you probably have had to come up with a color scheme or were given a color scheme to work with. Choosing colors is often the first and one of the most important steps of any deign process. 

30 Creative Website Headers

One of the first things new visitors will notice upon arriving at your website is your header. Some sites are able to make an excellent first impression by featuring an artistic or creative header. This mini gallery post is a collection of some of the more inspiring headers out there.

8 Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators

My good friend, Avinash Kaushik, points out some examples for choosing good key performance indicators.

Good Websites...Bad Websites...How do you tell?

What determines whether a website is good or bad? Why do we leave a website that we found to be a bad experience? Here are some factors that help influence our decision.

Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications

Online forms can be challenging as even in their utility and necessity, we generally need to lure users to complete them. Afshan Kirmani takes the example of an online email application form and explains some fundamental principles that can help us design effective forms.

David Dairey featured in HOW magazine

www.davidairey.com has been featured in the October 2008 issue of HOW Magazine — the leading creativity, business and technology magazine for graphic designers.

SEO isn't just for web pages

Here are 11 tips for optimizing PDFs for search engines.

Web Site Navigation Design Showcase

Looking for ideas on design navigation for your web site. Review these 70+ examples for ideas.

9 Of The Best Ways To Present A Website To A Client

The design phase of creating a website is fairly standard for most web designers however when it comes to presenting the mock up to a client before slicing / coding the design, some problems do arise.

10 hot web redesigns of 2008

Here are so early web redesigns that bear reviewing.

Yahoo coming up with new look and feel

Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.

User Experinece Week

User Experience Week was held in San Francisco, CA from August 12 – 15. Boxes and Arrows, in co-operation with Adaptive Path, interviewed some of the great speakers for your design listening enjoyment.

How Chrome changed the web overnight

The Chrome browser is a big step forward for the web, and it arrived from Google to your Windows desktop virtually overnight. The open source browser comes in a streamlined package, but packs enough power to treat websites like applications. See which enhancements make the Chrome browser a shocking leap forward for web development.

Twitter and Google Analytics

Justin Cutroni shares his thoughts about discovering Twitters value via Google Analytics.

How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

It’s crucial to have simple web designs to allow the user to quickly find the information they need, especially if you are selling a product. If the page is cluttered with useless text, widgets or unrelated products, the site becomes meaningless.