Improve Your Website’s Usability in 7 Easy Steps

A user is not a technical aristocrat as a web designer or a developer is and is basically looking for a swift, simple and sorted and effective way run across the web site. One of the conundrums that a designer faces is to strike a balance between impressive looking web sites, high on designs and appeal, and its simplicity and usability. By Crazy Leaf

Getting started with HTML5 geolocation

In an exclusive excerpt from The HTML5 Cookbook Christopher Deutsch and Marc Grabanski explain how to access the W3C Geolocation API and what you can do with this data using Google Maps and other third-party libraries like SimpleGeo. By .Net

15 top web design and development trends for 2012

 

Craig Grannell quizzes the industry’s finest about the web design and development trends that will occur over the coming 12 months and that you need to be mindful of. By .Net

Five skills you need to make AB testing work

 

Multivariate and split testing can be crucial for sales conversions but how do you get the most out of it. By .Net

Liz Danzico on web design education

 

Part-educator, part-designer, part-UX consultant, Liz Danzico is one of the best-connected people in the industry. By .Net

Five essential Google Analytics tips for web designers

Discover how to fuel your creativity with the wisdom of insight from Google Analytics, and unlock the true potential of your web design talent. By .Net

Designing for nonprofits

Freelance web designer Sonali Agrawal recently tweeted that whatever she had learned was only done so through building websites for nonprofits. By .Net

Ethan Marcotte on responsive web design

 

The godfather of web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, talks to Ethan Marcotte, guru of responsive web design, about what it means, how it fits into the big picture and the best ways to put it into practice. By .Net

Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good web design

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design. By .Net

Design the perfect URL

 

Graphics, content and navigation are all well and good, but it’s important not to neglect the URL. Faruk Ates explains how to get the most from your site’s address. By .Net

Seven lessons learned from responsive web design

What’s good for the developer isn’t necessarily good for the customer. Vince Allen, senior front-end developer at Lot18, gives the background on why responsive web design is the right focus for web development. By .Net

Designing The Well-Tempered Web

 

As technology evolves, so does the art and craft of Web design. New technology creates new challenges, which require new solutions. By Smashing Magazine

What Successful Products Teach Us About Web Design

Web design is a craft that is constantly evolving and yet also sometimes sabotaged. The moment a design is released, a new version is born. By Smashing Magazine

The UX Research Plan That Stakeholders Love

UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. By Smashing Magazine

The Proxority Principle in Web Design

In web design, the position of design elements and the layout of web pages is everything. So many cool, exciting techniques are available to help us lay out our designs (especially with CSS3 at our disposal) that we often forget that structure is as important as aesthetics. By Six Revisions

Which Elements of Your Site Must be Highlighted?

This article covers the elements of the site that must be highlighted in design to attract visitor’s attention. This will allow to make your site the most effective and understandable for people who visit it. By Crazyleaf

Most Beautiful and Inspirational Websites of 2011

This is our 4th yearly edition of the “Most Beautiful and Inspirational Websites” series by Crazyleaf. They started these yearly roundups with the 2008 edition and so far have had over 1 million visits on the 3 previous editions (2008, 2009, 2010). By Crazyleaf

3 Facts You Should Know About Website Design

It is not that easy to build a good website and it’s much more complicated to make it usable. Modern Internet users are very fastidious, they know what they want and will abandon a website in 3 seconds if don’t find what they need. When your clients order a website for their needs, forget these needs, they are secondary, the needs of their clients are primary and you should constantly keep that in mind. By Crazyleaf

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Web Content Strategy: Sites vs Apps

Website content should be easy to read. Your eyes should easily scan through the text and end the article with little effort or eyestrain. By Contentini

How to Create HTML5 Apps on Windows Phone with PhoneGap

In this article you'll find out about the added values of PhoneGap for HTML5 applications are. By SitePoint

Free Download: Cheat Sheet For Designing Web Forms

Forms, forms, forms: so often overlooked in design. In this post, Joe Leech provides the Form Design Cheat Sheet. By Smashing UX Design

An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability

Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable. Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability. By Smashing UX Design

Responsive web design is boring!

Jonathan Longnecker, co-founder of web and graphic design agency FortySeven Media, argues that most responsive sites are boring and comes up with a few starting points to help us create designs that break the mould. By .Net Magazine

Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It

Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course. By Smashing Coding

Responsive Web Design Techniques, Tools and Design Strategies

Responsive design continues to get a lot of attention, but considering how different it is from the “traditional” way of designing websites, it can be a bit overwhelming for those designers who have yet to try it. By Smashing Magazine

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned web professional, creating responsive designs can be confusing at first, mostly because of the radical change in thinking that’s required. As time goes on, responsive web design is drifting away from the pool of passing fads and rapidly entering the realm of standard practice. By Think Vitamin

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• Psychological Impact of Website Designs (pixelcrayons.com)

Responsive Web Design Demystified

What exactly is responsive design, and how do you create a responsive website? This tutorial explains the concepts, and walks you through the basic steps for creating a responsive website layout.  By Elated

Web Design Trends in 2012

As you read this article, keep in mind that the shift in trends from one year to the next may be subtle, and you will probably recognize some of these trends already. By Web Design Ledger

60 Examples of Responsive Website Design

Responsive Website Design is nothing new, back in the day tablet based designers either chose the fluid or static route. Today’s responsive websites take a comparable approach by using fluid widths in percentages and ems. They do not stop, but take a step further by using scalable images and adjustable layouts. All of which is based on what kind or screen-size you are using while browsing the desired website. By InspirationFeed

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Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows

 

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. By Smashing UX Design

CSS 3D Transforms

Firefox and Internet Explorer teams have decided to join the 3D party by implementing 3D Transforms in pre-release versions of their browsers. By Smashing Coding

New High-Quality Free Fonts

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. By Smashing Magazine

A User-Centric Guideline To Product Pages

 

Product pages for e-commerce websites are often rife with ambitions: recreate the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, provide users with every last drop of product information, build a brand persona, establish a seamless check-out process. By Smashing UX Design

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How to Generate Sales Leads With Killer Meta Description Tags

Meta descriptions are like silly old Uncle Bob who gets ignored at Thanksgiving get-togethers. But did you know that Uncle Bob is actually a multi-millionaire looking for a decent niece or nephew to include in his will? Like Bob, meta descriptions are often ignored or duplicated on multiple pages by website page creators and editors because they just don’t care. By Slingshot SEO

Free Plugin For Dealing With Grids In Photoshop

Take a moment and think about creating a multi-column grid in a Photoshop comp. Have your palms started to sweat? Yes, creating grids in Photoshop is a pain indeed. Some designers just estimate and drag guides arbitrarily onto the stage. By Smashing Magazine

Writing Better JavaScript with CoffeeScript: The Basics

Javascript's popularity has really surged in recent years with the advent of rich internet applications (RIAs), Ajax and web development libraries like jQuery that makes JavaScript more appealing and accessible to a broader audience. By Six Revisions

20 Free Online Tools for Website Speed Testing

We all should be aware by now that Internet users are impatient when it comes to waiting for a web page to load. Thus, your website’s performance and ability to render speedily is critical to its usability and, ultimately, its success. By Six Revisions

Creating Websites Optimized for Google’s Panda Algorithm

Whether you’re in the process of building a new website or redesigning an existing site, it’s vital to build it with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. By Six Revisions

30 Beautiful Dark-themed Web Designs for Inspiration

Using a dark color theme in a website can convey many types of feelings and emotions towards its visitors. Edginess, elegance, modernity — these are just a handful of things that can be associated with dark colors. By Six Revisions

Will the Browser Wars Invade the Mobile Web?

Until recently, there were arguably only three major players in the mobile device world: BlackBerry, iPhone and Android. These devices still hold a big chunk of smartphone users – 73% of the market share of mobile operating systems in the second quarter of 2011 — Microsoft is trying to keep things relevant with their latest mobile OS. By Six Revisions

Minimalist Web Design: How Minimal is Too Minimal?

 Minimalism, interestingly enough, is usually born out of excess. In all arts, in all ways of life, we start out by taking and adding whatever we can. By Six Revisions

Should We Always Deploy Content Management Systems?

Content management systems are a wonderful tool for empowering website owners. Most of us have witnessed the power and ease of use of CMSs like Drupal and WordPress. They have changed the web development industry in a significant way. By Six Revisions

Smashing Magazine Six CSS Layout Features To Look Forward To

A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. By Divya Manian

A Guide To Heuristic Website Reviews

 

In this article, we’ll explore a scoring system for rating and comparing websites, we’ll visualize those ratings using infographics, and we’ll see what data and structure this method provides for reviewing websites. By Leigh Howells

How Do You Deal With Overstressed, Irrational Clients? An Entrepreneur’s View

Good article on best practices when dealing with irrational clients. By Brian Scordato

What I Learned About the Web in 2011

Some readers share their thoughts on what they learned about the web in 2011. By A List Apart