Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Web designer of the Week

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

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Golden Ratio in Web Design

Website Design: Page Anatomy and Layout

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

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

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?"

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

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.
css-layouts

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

Hidden Keyword Search Traffic
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

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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.

a visitor focused homepage

Monday, December 22, 2008

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.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

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.

Emptees

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.

The Discipline of Content Strategy

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.

persona

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.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Stumpedia, The Human Powered Search Engine

Stumpedia

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.

Cisco

Thursday, December 18, 2008

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.

Stack Overflow

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?

process

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.
Badly typeset button labels

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.

Monday, December 08, 2008

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.

Screenshot

Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices

Screenshot

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.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

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.

NY Times

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.