7 Key Secrets of a Successful Website

 

Many successful companies, it seems, can create anything – except an effective website. By Just Creative Design

How Content Can Drive Web Design

In the Internet’s first few years of evolution, people were awed by the seemingly limitless design techniques that could be incorporated into a single website. Web designers implemented outrageous Flash introductions for sites and the sites themselves were crowded with the latest design tricks. Content took a back seat to the flashiness of the design. However, in the past few years, the design tide has turned. By Webylife

20 Free Online Tools for Website Speed Testing

In order to help you build faster websites and identify troublesome website performance bottlenecks, consider incorporating some of the following tools into your web development process. By Six Revisions

10 reminders for usability web design to make site visitors adore you

No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website. There is always a critic. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down when trying to present a professional site. By Cre8pc

Responsive Web Design

"The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.” By Ethan Marcotte

Responsive Layout Wireframe

As we design for more devices, considerations for more responsive layouts which scale gracefully across varying screen sizes could be gaining in importance. By Wireframes Magazine

Proto.io – Mobile App Prototyping

Proto.io is a new UI prototyping tool specifically tailored for mobile and tablet applications. The web based environment allows you to start off by creating a project for either the iPad or the iPhone. By Wireframes Magazine

Creating a Flash Website for a Business Project: My Experience

Good tutorial on using Flash for your website. By Crazyleaf

The 8 Best Freelancing Books for Designers

Freelancing has become a more popular way to earn a living every year for the past decade, and it is finally starting to get the respect it deserves as a viable business structure and shedding the bad reputation it somehow gained as the hobbyist’s label. By Crazyleaf

How to Move Users Around Your Web Pages With Visual Aids

It’s common knowledge that attractive people work well in advertising images. Most marketers also know that the placement of images is influential to where a customer clicks. An aspect that’s not as well documented however, is the huge impact of where the subject in an image is looking or gesturing towards. By Crazyleaf

A Few Short Tips on Designing a Professional Website

If you are planning to create a website or brochure for your business, one of the most important things on your list is design. As far as websites are concerned the time to grab attention is short and gorgeous design and graphics can be a great tool in achieving this. By Crazyleaf

Personality in Design

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter (A Book Apart, 2011). By Aarron Walter

Organizing Mobile

An excerpt from Chapter 4 of Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski (A Book Apart, 2011). By Luke Wroblewski

How to Bulletproof @font-face Web Fonts

You’re interviewing for your dream job, and you’re ready to kick some butt. A small group is gathered around a conference phone and some coding exercises, and they’re pulling up your portfolio on a projector so that everyone can review it.
It looks great, except for one thing: All of your beautiful web fonts are gone and have been replaced with… Arial. By Six Revisions

7 Blog Design Tips from a Content Strategist

For blog design, content issues are particularly important to pay attention to, because, fundamentally, the purpose of a blog is to deliver quality content to a strategically defined audience or community. By Six Revisions

Showcase: 30 Beautiful Blog Designs for Inspiration

A beautiful and well-designed blog can leave a lasting impression onto its readers. With so many sites competing for the attention of Internet users, the appearance of a blog can be a large factor in helping it stand out from the crowd. By Six Revisions

Comprehensive Review Of Usability And User Experience Testing Tools

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it’s an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there’s a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible. By Smashing Magazine

Web Designer, Be Your Best Promoter

Have you ever had someone flirt with you and they did nothing but demean themselves the whole time? Did that make you attracted to them? Doubtful. Yet, this is how so many individuals seem to handle their business today. By Smashing Magazine

The Role Of Design In The Kingdom Of Content

If content sits at the top of the food chain, why do we spend so much time talking about the finer points of design? Every day we debate, experiment with and discuss topics that easily fall into the category of aesthetics, enhanced functionality and layout; in fact, relatively rarely do we talk about content. Nevertheless, even though we should concede that content is king in this realm, this doesn’t mean that design should be devalued. By Smashing Magazine

Understanding Designer-Developer Workflow

The most appealing software applications developed today are produced by a close collaboration of designers and developers. By UX Magazine

Designing the Right Team for UX : An Art and a Science

As brands and partner agencies become more invested in the discipline of user experience, building the right UX team will also require significant commitment and investment. By UX Magazine

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

How do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really. By Margot Bloomstein

Free Download: Cheat Sheet For Designing Web Forms

The designers of the crib sheet have spent years designing and testing forms, and they’ve decided to summarize the most common problems and issues that come up in their projects. By Joe Leech

16 Pixels: For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

Why 16 pixels should generally be the minimum size for body copy in modern Web design. By Smashing Magazine

50 Color-Creative Website Designs

Eye catching web design starts with good use of color. Creative color combinations can instantly tell users what a website is about and why they should care. Ideal placement of color on a web page can lead the eye to a desired action spot, or simply set the mood. By Crazyleaf

Top 10 : Must-Have Apps for a Graphic Designer

Starting out in the freelance graphic industry isn´t easy, but with a little help from Smartphone apps, it could become that much easier. From color creation tools to task management apps, simplify your life and maximize your potential with our guide. By Crazyleaf

Creating a Flash Website for a Business Project

Here's how to create a Flash website without complex software and outside assistance. By Crazyleaf

Design Inspiration

Here are some very nice looking websites to help inspire your own work. By Crazyleaf

3 Ideas For Capturing Feedback

 

Various ways in capturing feedback on web projects. By Wireframes

Steve Jobs, Thanks

Quote from Steve Jobs.

Not Your Parent’s Mobile Phone: UX Design Guidelines For Smartphones

Smartphones are what younger generations know as just phones. The iPad (aka the tablet) is giving your grandma’s PC a run for its money. You certainly are holding some amazing futuristic technology in your hands. It will be even better tomorrow, though, so why does it matter to us or to users? By Tim R. Todish

30 Strikingly Vibrant Web Designs for Inspiration

Working with bright, high-impact colors in your designs can prove to be a powerful tool in your creative arsenal. Bright colors are able to grab attention and they make a design appear fun, youthful, cheery and modern. By Jacob Gube

Designing a Website’s Introductory Text: Tips and Examples

Many websites choose to display a short explanatory text in a prominent position of their web page layouts to inform visitors what the purpose of the site is. This introductory text, when crafted well, can help users quickly decide whether they’re in the right place or not. By Jacob Gube

7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability

 

Writing content for web users has its challenges. Chief among them is the ease with which your content is read and understood by your visitors (i.e. its readability). By Jacob Gube

Improving the Usability of Web Content (Elsewhere on the Web)

 Writing content for web users has its challenges. Chief among them is the ease with which your content is read and understood by your visitors (i.e. its readability). Jacob Gube

Graphics in Photoshop: 6 Beginner Tips for Web Designers

Photoshop is an industry-standard tool used by both graphic designers and web designers. What follows are some simple tips to follow as you create graphics meant for use on websites. By Jen Stroman

11 jQuery Plugins That Can Enhance Your Typography

Here is a list of top jQuery plugins that serve a wide range of purposes related to web typography, from helping you implement @font-face to providing your users with better usability and functionality when it comes to your website’s fonts. By Ken Hattori

10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer

Here are some solid tips on streamlining your web development workflow and making every part of the development cycle move quickly and smoothly. By Delwin Campbell

7 Crazy Tips That Will Help You Become a Better Coder

There are a whole slew of developers writing amazing and practical code and there are thousands of public code repositories on sites like GitHub. Meanwhile, the rest of us are content with just cutting and pasting the code of these industry geniuses. By Louis Lazaris

How to Make a Light Textured Web Design in Photoshop

This web page design tutorial on Design Instruct (our other website) will show you how to create a beautiful, modern and subtly textured web page layout in Photoshop. By Jacob Gube

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

This article discusses five important usability tips that your site can’t live without. By Brujo Owoh

10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies

 

This article discusses usability findings of research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys pertaining to website usability and improvements. By Cameron Chapman

Usability Testing Tips and Tools (Elsewhere on the Web)

Testing usability is an art and a science. There are many times when usability testers rely on qualitative measurements, intuition, opinions and feedback from users and experience. However, there are also factors you can test quantitatively to ensure that a site is usable. By Jacob Gube

Are You Using CSS3 Appropriately?

CSS3 is exciting. When it was introduced, it seemed like the untapped potential of Web Design was finally unlocked. By Delwin Campbell

10 Web-based Sandbox Tools for Testing Your Code Snippets

One of the greatest benefits the Internet provides web developers is the ability to share and collaborate with other professionals. When you’ve hit a coding roadblock, you can reach out on your social networks to see if your friends can give you a hand. By Jacob Gube

Upcoming Web Design and Development Conferences in 2011-12

Here's a list of upcoming web events in 2011 and 2012. By Louis Lazaris

The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience Strategy

There’s a fundamental problem with stating that your goal is to “create a good user experience.” It’s not specific, directly measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable. Thus, it will create disagreement and disorganization, sending many projects into chaos. However, we can avoid this by using S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting criteria when defining user and business goals. By Dickson Fong

CSS3 Flexible Box Layout Explained

The flexible box layout module — or “flexbox,” to use its popular nickname — is an interesting part of the W3C Working Draft. By Richard Shepherd

How Metrics Can Make You A Better Designer

User analytics are what you might get from Google Analytics, KISSmetrics or Mixpanel. They tell you things like which pages users have viewed the most, which call-to-action buttons they’ve clicked, and how many tasks they’ve performed while using your product. They can also show you where people drop out of critical flows, such as registration and purchasing. By Laura Klein

Improving The Online Shopping Experience, Part 2

Great tips looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and to guide them through the check-out process. By Lyndon Cerjo

Content Prototyping In Responsive Web Design

A content prototype is an HTML-and-CSS-based fluid-grid prototype, consisting of layout and typography, that consists of the project’s actual content. Its greatest usefulness may be in determining where to apply media queries to make the Web design responsive. By Ben Callahan

Conversation Techniques For Designers

This creation of visual artifact is widely regarded as our most effective means of communicating thought through a product. However, creating a product takes more than just documentation, and much of it is communicated not visually, but verbally. By Darren Geraghty

The Whys And The Hows Of Textures In Web Design

Due to its frequent misuse, its benefits have long been overlooked. Texture can bring a website together, but should not be the main focus. By Jon Savage & Simon H.

A Quick Look Into The Math Of Animations With JavaScript

There is a lot of math in the visual things we do, even if we don’t realize it. If you want to make something look natural and move naturally, you need to add a bit of physics and rounding to it. By Christian Hellmann

Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors

It’s easy to see your top-visited pages, navigation patterns and conversion metrics using visitor-tracking tools like Google Analytics. However, this data doesn’t show the roadblocks that users typically run into on your website. By Lara Swanson

Resizing: Fixed, Fluid, or Responsive Layouts

A fluid or liquid layout is designed with percentage-​​based widths, so that the container stretches when you resize the browser window. By Jason Beaird

Beauty vs. Function: On Redesigning

The thought of producing the best possible design, either from scratch or redesigning something, gives jitters to the heart of many designers. Even professionals in the field can’t quite balance beauty and function. By Rean John Uehara

When is the Perfect Time to Redesign Your Website?

Very rarely will the people who visit your site return because of your website’s design. Their only priority is finding the content, information, or product they want and it’s important that your site has what your customer is looking for. By Salman Saeed

6 terrible web design trends

Here‘s an eleven-year-old article discussing the web’s worst design mistakes. By Mathew Carpenter

How a content management system can ruin your search engine positions

A content management system (known as a CMS) is a facility that allows a user to manage text, images, etc on their web site without having any web design skills. By Texelate

How to add a good contact form to your website

Contact/enquiry forms are the lifeblood of a lead generation website. If you can’t get enquiries the website is pretty much useless. This blog post simply outlines how to add a good contact form to your website. By Texelate

Should you disclose your web design budget?

The web design budget is of great interest to both parties involved. The client wants to know how much it will cost his or her business and the web designer wants to know whether it’s viable to take the job on. By Texelate

Make your text easy to read

It’s much easier to read a book than it is to read text on a website. Website visitors tend to be impatient and scan quickly through content. As a website owner you want to make your site’s content as easy to read as possible. So here are some points detailing how to make your website’s text easy to read. By Texelate

Dark and Powerful Web Designs – 22 Superb Examples

When choosing the color palette for your website, it’s important to make sure it gives that exact feeling you want to pass on to your readers. It also needs to fit in with the rest of your concept. By Reencoded

4 Creative Ways to Attract More Visitors to Your Website

Taking a website from zero to a few hundred or even a few thousand visitors a month is not easy, but it's eminently doable -- as long as you recognize a harsh truth about the Internet:

The online world is an attention economy. Attention is finite, and therefore scarce. So if you want people to pay attention to you, you need to earn it. By Mark McGuinness

Sideways headers

How to make header tags rotated 90-degrees and align along the left of a blog of content rather than at the top. By Chris Coyier

Fold out popups

The trick with using hidden checkboxes/radio buttons, the :checked pseudo class selector, and adjacent sibling (~) combinators really enables some neat functional possibility with pure CSS. By CSS-Tricks

Project Management Apps for Freelancers and Designers

Managing client projects is a major requirement for efficiency and for creating a positive experience for clients. Regardless of whether you freelance, work for a small agency, or work for a large agency, there are a lot of details and communication involved in client projects. Having an efficient system for managing those projects is essential. By Vandelay Design

Design Trend: Ribbons, Badges and Banners

If you browse around many websites, especially design galleries, you’ve probably noticed the trends of using elements like ribbons, badges, and banners in web design. Ribbons with a 3D look are especially popular right now. By Vandelay Design

Showcase of Sketches and Doodles in Web Design

Using a hand-drawn style of design is one way to create an interesting web design that visitors will remember. There are a lot of different approaches to using doodles and sketches, and in this post we’ll showcase examples for your own inspiration. By Vandelay Design

Mobile First (book) Release Date

 

Mobile First is a short but information-packed book that makes the case for why Web sites and applications should increasingly be designed for mobile first. By Luke Wroblewski

Why Separate Mobile & Desktop Web Pages?

As use of mobile devices continues to skyrocket across the globe, we're seeing more ways to tackle the challenge of creating great Web experiences across multiple devices. But which approach is right for any given project? By Luke Wroblewski

30 Beautiful Clean and Simple Web Designs for Inspiration

Beautiful typography, strategic use of colors and graphics, and obstruction-free aesthetics devoid of visual clutter are a few of the characteristics shared among web designs that are clean and simple. By Jacob Gube

Breaking The Rules: A UX Case Study

Design guidelines aren’t one size fits all. Sometimes you can improve a process by breaking a few rules. The trick is knowing which rules to break for a particular project. By Laura Klein

From Monitor To Mobile: Optimizing Email Newsletters With CSS

HTML email has a reputation for being a particularly tough design medium. So tough, in fact, that many designers regard coding and testing even the simplest email design to be almost as bad as fixing display quirks in Internet Explorer 6, and only slightly better than a tooth extraction. By Ros Hodgekiss

New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms

 

For many of us, logging into websites is a part of our daily routine. In fact, we probably do it so often that we’ve stopped having to think about how it’s done… that is, until something goes wrong: we forget our password, our user name, the email address we signed up with, how we signed up, or even if we ever signed up at all. By Luke Wroblewski

The Semantic Grid System: Page Layout For Tomorrow

 

CSS grid frameworks can make your life easier, but they’re not without their faults. Fortunately for us, modern techniques offer a new approach to constructing page layouts. By Tyler Tate

How To Become A Web Design Expert

Have you ever wanted to take a client by the collar, shake them around vigorously and demand that they take you seriously because you are the expert? If so, you are not alone. By Paul Boaq

The UX Of Long-Term Relationships

Taking a customer from like to love. By Des Traynor

The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette

 

The great divide between designers and developers is well documented. Designers complain when developers would rather backgrounds not have any images. Developers gripe when given a Photoshop document with missing fonts. If those were the only problems we face, we’d be thrilled. By Dan Rose

Optimize Images With HTML5 Canvas

Images have always been the heaviest component of websites. Even if high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and more widely available, websites will get heavier more quickly. By Sergey Chiluyonok

Elements Of A Viral Launch Page

Google+, Hipster, Connect.me and Instagram! They all hit a gazillion users in no time at all — and you can even read all about it in everyday media today. This is every product creator’s dream. By Simon Schmid

Reliable Cross-Browser Testing, Part 1: Internet Explorer

In a perfect world, cross-browser testing would be straightforward. We would download a legacy version of a browser, run it, and be able to instantly test our pages and scripts without a single care in the world. By Addy Osmani

A Primer on A/B Testing

Data is an invaluable tool for web designers who are making decisions about the user experience. A/B tests, or split tests, are one of the easiest ways to measure the effect of different design, content, or functionality. By Lara Swanson

Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web

Storytelling is a buzzword with lots of different interpretations. Either the internet is killing stories, or it’s the best thing to happen to them since the printing press.

 By Elizabeth McGuane/Randall Snare

30 Beautiful Clean and Simple Web Designs for Inspiration

Beautiful typography, strategic use of colors and graphics, and obstruction-free aesthetics devoid of visual clutter are a few of the characteristics shared among web designs that are clean and simple. By Jacob Gube