The 15 Most Popular Text Editors for Developers

For many developers, a trusty text editor is all you need for even the most complex web applications. Whether you’re creating a site from scratch, editing a CSS file, or messing around with configuration files on the server - a good, solid text editor will do the trick just fine.

Grid Based Design Toolbox

Looking for tools to build grids? Check this out.

Grid design basics: Grids for Web page layouts

Since tables were co-opted for layout purposes, columns have become key to many Web design layouts, and this thinking continued when CSS took over from tables (at least in the minds of savvy designers) for Web-page presentation. However, other fields of layout design don’t think in arbitrary columns, they work with grids, and these form the basis for the structure of page designs.

Enhance Your Designs with the Principle of Unity

Unity in graphic design is what ties everything together. It is the sense that the design is consistent, it agrees with itself in each element, there is nothing sticking out that says, “I don’t belong!” Sometimes people refer to the principle of unity as harmony.

16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing

Gary Barber from radharc has published a great article on Sitepoint that covers 16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing. He covers the usual suspects: OmniGraffle Pro, Visio, Axure RP Pro, iRise Pro, Balsamiq Mockups, ConceptDraw Pro, etc… but he also goes into detail on a few well-known tools that can be used for wireframes and prototypes such as Keynote, PowerPoint, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash and plain ol’ XHTML. Lastly he also mentions some lesser-known tools such as SmartDraw, MockupScreens, Lucid Spec, iPlotz, Pencil (not the drawing instrument), and yes Go Analogue (yes, we mean pencil and paper!).

Top Five Ways to Make Your Site More PopularThe Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn't always the easiest thing i

The Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn't always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a Website yourself, you're dealing with the other end of this issue. How do you get noticed online, and is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.

Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices

As a general rule, most Web developers, especially usability enthusiasts, say it is bad practice to use drop-down menus because they are confusing, annoying and oftentimes dysfunctional. From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout.

13 Great WordPress Speed Tips

Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.

Internet User Experience 2009

The Internet User Experience conference [March 30 - April 2,2009] is back for its fifth year! It features keynotes, technical presentations, and training tutorials designed for web professionals and stakeholders of all skill levels. Over 24 top speakers and trainers in web site design and strategy,usability, content development, search engine marketing, and social media will fill this program. Also included will be special demonstrations, exhibitors, and a bookseller.

Best Practices for Designing a Social News Website

How do you get your daily news these days? Well… you may be visiting your favorite sites and blogs, but that’s inefficient since those blogs may not have any updates. Perhaps you subscribe to them using RSS, which delivers all the new articles straight to you, but in this case you’ll have to sort through all the new stuff to find what’s interesting to you. Another option today would be to visit a social news site.

Microsoft Announces SuperPreview for IE Browser Testing

Browser testing is a hot and frustrating issue among web designers and developers alike. In most cases, developers design for one target browser and once they’re done, they start tweaking their design to make it compatible with other browsers.

Authentic Designers on Twitter

This list covers 16 designers who are extremely friendly, genuine, and have something to offer to the design community.

Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

This article by Matthew C. Clarke, covers proposing a model for collaboration that links the various elements of collaboration, comment on the so-called “collaboration software” currently available, and make some tentative suggestions about IA and UX requirements for a real collaboration platform.

Sites of the week

Here are some great sites for inspiration, such as FRONT and SkilledConcept, the amazing Flash site for Patagonia and more.

The next Web of open, linked data: Tim Berners-Lee on TED.com

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009 in Long Beach, California. Duration: 16:23.)

Usability Analysis of Apple.com: Why is it so Good?

As designers, we all have been influenced in some way by Apple, whether it be their brilliant OS, stunning industrial innovation, or the trends they have started in web/application design. Apple focuses a lot on usability. This can be seen in their products, and Apple.com. It is important for Apple.com to be a usable site, because it leaves a good impression on users, and they will therefore be more likely to buy products from Apple.

Getting a Form's Structure Right

Jeff Parks talks with Afshan Kirmani about her article, expanding on various subjects including her User Experience Model.

Designing The Democratic

It is increasingly rare that our users are all from a single nation or culture. Often, our designs must meet the needs of several groups at once. Jamie Owen talks about how our own cultures affect our design decisions.

What You Need to Know About Improving the User Experience

This report outlines key findings from surveys that explored factors that drive online experience as expressed by the three different subject groups – nonprofit organizations and cities, web designers and firms, and the general public.

Fantastic Typography Blogs For Your Inspiration

Some say that web design without typography is like an orange without its peel, it just isn’t complete. Typography encompasses the reality of effective web design and achieves success in creating web page identity, eye-catching sites, and the enhancement of visual appearance.



Read the article here.

Dynamic buttons using CSS sliding doors techniques

Navigation buttons are commonly created in the exact size to fit the text characters on it. But it won’t be practical if you have to create new image every time you want to change the text that accordingly could have longer or shorter number of characters.

Line25.com - A New Web Design Blog

Line25.com takes on a focus on web design articles, tutorials and inspiration.

7 SEO blogs and 21 useful articles

As a self-employed graphic designer, it makes sense to learn how to improve Google rankings. Here are a few helpful SEO blogs, with links to particularly relevant articles.

5 Writing Tips for Web Designers

Poorly written web writing misleads visitors and wastes millions of hours daily. For today’s more than one billion Internet users, that translates to frustration. For your web design clients, it means missed opportunities.

Search Engine Academy West: March 30,2009

Get your certification in beginner or advanced search engine optimization and marketing skills from the Search Engine Academy of Western Canada and gain a huge advantage over your competition. You will receive expert training in SEO methods and leave with clear strategies to start improving your rankings right away.

40 Web Developers to Follow on Twitter

Here’s a list of the top web developers on Twitter (in no particular order).

SEMpdx's Searchfest 2009: The Best of the Bunch

Rebecca from SEOMoz.org shares her thoughts about various blogging myths.

40 Beautiful Examples of Vintage and Retro in Web Design

Retro and vintage web designs have become increasingly popular. Ironically, the more and more the web progresses, the more designers start to revert back to old retro styles. For your design inspiration, here are 40 beautifully-designed websites that revert back in time to retro and vintage styles.

Redesigning Craigslist With Focus On Usability

Craigslist is obviously one of the most popular websites in the world, and each month it serves millions of users who post and view classified ads on the website. At the time this article was written, Craigslist was ranked as the 28th most-visited English-language website in the world by Alexa. Despite the fact that Craigslist receives such a huge amount of traffic each month, it is also criticized for its design, which seems to be at least 10 years out-of-date.

Read the article here.

Slideshows In Web Design: When And How To Use Them

The key to smart strategic Web design is finding an appropriate and interactive way to display information. One comes upon endless possibilities when searching for ways to display information.

Beautiful Forms - Design, Style, & make it work with PHP & Ajax

Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. There is a great bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch forms.

20 best beautiful dark designs

Looking for dark website designs inspiration? Just have a look at these 20 beautiful dark designs. These designs are some of the best in dark web design today.

10 Ways to Save Time While Building a Website: Improved

The more web work you can do, the greater your income will be and/or you’ll have extra free time to do as you wish with. Here's a list of 10 tools and resources that can help you reduce the amount of time you spend developing considerably.

Inspiration: 21 Vibrant Websites

There are either all dark websites or websites with a lot of white and a few accents. Well this list will go against those color schemes, this is a list of vibrant websites.

When To Separate Style Sheets

Three factors influence whether or not it makes sense to use separate style sheets: Probability, meaning (aka semantics), and granularity.

First Principles of Interaction Design

The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment.

Luke Wroblewski walks you through the importance of utilizing visual organization to communicate central messages, guide actions, and present information on the Web.

CSS Quick Tricks #1 - Where to put your CSS

Tips on where you can place your CSS, the most efficient way.

35 Inspirational Website Designs from the Music Industry

Within the music industry there is a great variety in terms of the quality of websites. Some bands have excellent, creative websites, and others have sites that are not so friendly for visitors. Here's a list of 35 websites from the music industry.

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

Here's a great article on a best practice study to examine the development practices of in-house teams designing web applications—across multiple industries, in companies large and small.

Portfolios That Accomplish Goals

Here's a short list of portfolios. They may not be completely perfect, but if you’re looking for an example of the right direction, hopefully you’ll find it here.

8 Tips to Design a Charity Website

So how does a charity get the most out of its website? It needs to let users find out information about the charity, but the main objective of the site is to get people involved with the charity, usually resulting in the user donating money.

10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS

Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?

The Elements of Social Architecture

Christina Wodtke, at A List Apart, walks us through designing space to meet human needs and promote happiness. It doesn’t take great imagination to apply these architectural principles to information architecture—taking them out of the real world and into the digital world.

5 Inspiring Web Design Conference Speeches you Shouldn’t Have Missed in 2008

Web design conferences are fantastic for keeping up to date with the industry changes and for gaining useful advice from big name contributors.

10 Steps To The Perfect Portfolio Website

You may have a personal portfolio website for a number of reasons. If you’re a freelancer, then you’d need one to showcase your work and allow people to contact you.

The Power of Online Storytelling

The web today is more than a repository for old t.v. shows, films, and user-generated content. Today’s new media professionals are developing original properties that are part of a new narrative structure for viewers: whether through transmedia storytelling – across multiple platforms – or through online “serials” that hone a dedicated web audience.

However, the story is integrated with the medium, the online storytelling trend is being shaped by a wide range of players, and many of the industry’s leading practitioners call New York City home. This panel, presented with the Screenwriters Colony and The New School, will look at where the original web creation and distribution market is headed.

Re-Thinking The Focus Group

Consumers can get feedback to any brand in real time—networks amplify what they have to say and sentiment spreads at light speed. Companies need now have to listen, learn, and adapt at all phases of an initiative.

How many unique visitors do you really have?

This article seems to suggest that web logs are not as accurate as panels because they count bots and multiple browsers or computers per user.