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