See Deeper

Powered by faster bandwidth and web 2.0 technology, today’s infographics bust out of their old, static paradigms. Welcome to a world of triple-enhanced data-vision.

Additional information aesthetics

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting (BT) is an advertising methodology in which an advertiser’s creative is shown to users based on the sites they visit and/or what the user does on those sites.

Who should use Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting and PPC

Strategic Design: 6 Steps For Building Successful Websites

Web design isn’t art. It involves a whole collection of different skills — from copywriting and typography to layout and art — all fused together to create an interface that not only features a pleasant aesthetic but that communicates function and facilitates easy access to its content.

Web Information Architecture Deliverables and Diagrams

Web information architecture is a relatively new field which has yet to develop a consistent and universal set of deliverables, and terminology to refer to those deliverables.

Using Personas & Scenarios in web design

Personas are an extremely powerful design tool, which help you to visualise an end-product that you can be confident will suit your users' needs by helping them achieve their goals, and help you test your success.

Using wireframes

Wireframes serve a central function in the development of a web site. It is a key tool in communicating the content and layout of each web page for internal and client reviews as well serving as a blueprint for graphic designers to produce designs and for programmers develop functionality.

5 SEO posts that rock

Here are the top 10 Online Marketing Blog posts that offer practical tips and resources for SEO.

21 Ways Websites Communicate with Visitors

One of the most important responsibilities of a website is to communicate with its visitors. Regardless of whether the site is a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site, or an e-commerce site, it exists to communicate with visitors.

10 Great Places to Find Web Design Jobs

Having trouble finding web design jobs? Well all the good jobs are online nowadays, so forget the papers! There are tons of job boards and other websites that feature web design jobs and there’s been a new trend in blogs having their own web design job boards due to their large audience of web designers.

The real value of keyword-rich domains

Here's a great article on points to consider when think about your domain name for your website.

Dealing With A Dud Client

Once you learn to spot a dud, you can avoid them pretty easily. Unfortunately, many freelancers are caught in a cycle working with those dodgy clients on the bottom of the rungs and have just given up on thinking that freelancing is anything more than this.

Prototyping with XHTML

If you design user experiences for standards-based websites and applications (i.e. those built with XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript), there are several great reasons for adding XHTML prototyping to your UX tool kit. Perhaps you’ve found that traditional wireframes just aren’t sufficient and are looking for more powerful ways to explore and communicate design solutions.

Hot Studio

I admire great web design companies. Here's their blog site. You can also access Hot Studio's home page from the blog site.

Web Designing Trends of 2008

Charlie B. Johnson shares his thoughts on web design trends.

Image Replacement

Here are 5 tutorials and resources for image replacement techniques.

Sources of Inspiration

You're wanting to build a website but not sure where to begin. In most cases you look at other sites for that idea. Minimalist designs are a new trend. Read on.

15 Key Elements All Web Sites Should Have

There are a lot of details to consider when designing and developing a web site. Here are some elements that you should be used consistently.

3 Ways to Keep Your Clients

You’ve worked hard to get the clients you have, and the last thing you want to do is risk any of them having second thoughts about looking for another freelancer down the road. So what do you do?

Think Design

This is a new graphic design blog, aiming to bring you freebies, resources, inspiration and much more. This site was created by Nick Pagano, the (only) designer for Think4: Graphics + Marketing.

October's Best

Okay, I'm a day late but I think you'll still find this article of keen interest. You'll find information regarding web design and development, graphic design, freebies, SEO,...

Improving Yourself as a Designer

Are you constantly looking for ways to improve yourself a designer? Here are some tips and ideas that may help and provide some inspiration.

Web-based Collaboration Tools

If you're a designer or developer, and strapped for cash, take a look at these tools that can help you facilitate remote/web-based collaboration.

Web Personalization for One-to-One Web Marketing

Today's World Wide Web market is becoming more competitive, so it's more important than ever to provide customers with an interactive, personal Web experience.

Personalization is not Technology: Using Web Personalization to Promote your Business Goal

Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content.

100 Web Designers to follow on Twitter

If you’re looking to connect with other web designers on Twitter then this 100 web designers who use twitter will help you.

25 Website Designs To Draw Inspiration From

this will help you get your creative juices flowing!

Why you should care about web strategy

A web strategist is first a real estate agent, then an architect, and then returns to being a real estate agent again. Find out why.

Web strategy to help lower your bounce rate

One of the most interesting statistics to track on your website is “bounce” rate. A visitor who looks at one page on your site then leaves without viewing a second page has bounced.

Frank Deardurff

Check out Frank Deardurff's blog site focused on web strategy.

Userfix: A social feedback hub

The social feedback hub. A community of web enthusiasts crowd-sourcing user feedback by reporting bugs and requesting features for any website. Empowering the users to surface the most requested features and to reproduce the most reported bugs on their own environments.

Edicy

A new kind of a website building tool, which focuses on business users and is localized for a number of different languages and markets. It's a complete service for building a website and publishing it to any web address.

Top 7 most cliche stock images used in web design

Sometimes clients ask us to implement ‘not-so-unique’ elements into our designs and sometimes it seems almost impossible to convince them otherwise, however, hopefully this post can suggest some reasons why not to use the old web design stock imagery clichés.

Is Your Website Cross Browser Compatible?

How many browsers are out there and do all these browsers show me the same exact site that I created down to the very pixel?

11 Free web based tools

Most of these tools are not very well known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Try them out.

So how does one calculate engagement?

Eric Peterson provides some insight into the methods by which to calculate engagement on the web.

Engagement...is it really a metric?

Measuring “engagement” seems to be this long standing quest on the web. Read Avinash's thoughts on this subject.

Behavioral Targeting Resources

Here are some links to great resources dealing with behavioral targeting.

Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them?

Yes, sometimes we do. Should we use them? No, we probably shouldn’t. Splash screen (or splash page) is a front page of a web-site that don’t provide the actual content, but offers visitors some kind of intuition or background information for what the site is about.

Graduated from Link Building High School Yet?

Great article on how to construct inbound links so they affect your search rankings for individual keywords that you want to rank for.

Web 3.0 Conference & Expo

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo, explore the strategies, tools, technologies and the big ideas necessary for building impactful, socially relevant, and profitable Web 3.0 products, services and companies.

The Top 15 Most Influential Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 is a term coined in recent years that describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and social indexes.

25 Refreshingly Blue Website Designs

If you have ever designed a website such as these blue website designs, than you probably have had to come up with a color scheme or were given a color scheme to work with. Choosing colors is often the first and one of the most important steps of any deign process. 

30 Creative Website Headers

One of the first things new visitors will notice upon arriving at your website is your header. Some sites are able to make an excellent first impression by featuring an artistic or creative header. This mini gallery post is a collection of some of the more inspiring headers out there.

8 Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators

My good friend, Avinash Kaushik, points out some examples for choosing good key performance indicators.

Good Websites...Bad Websites...How do you tell?

What determines whether a website is good or bad? Why do we leave a website that we found to be a bad experience? Here are some factors that help influence our decision.

Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications

Online forms can be challenging as even in their utility and necessity, we generally need to lure users to complete them. Afshan Kirmani takes the example of an online email application form and explains some fundamental principles that can help us design effective forms.

David Dairey featured in HOW magazine

www.davidairey.com has been featured in the October 2008 issue of HOW Magazine — the leading creativity, business and technology magazine for graphic designers.

SEO isn't just for web pages

Here are 11 tips for optimizing PDFs for search engines.

Web Site Navigation Design Showcase

Looking for ideas on design navigation for your web site. Review these 70+ examples for ideas.

9 Of The Best Ways To Present A Website To A Client

The design phase of creating a website is fairly standard for most web designers however when it comes to presenting the mock up to a client before slicing / coding the design, some problems do arise.

10 hot web redesigns of 2008

Here are so early web redesigns that bear reviewing.

Yahoo coming up with new look and feel

Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.

User Experinece Week

User Experience Week was held in San Francisco, CA from August 12 – 15. Boxes and Arrows, in co-operation with Adaptive Path, interviewed some of the great speakers for your design listening enjoyment.

How Chrome changed the web overnight

The Chrome browser is a big step forward for the web, and it arrived from Google to your Windows desktop virtually overnight. The open source browser comes in a streamlined package, but packs enough power to treat websites like applications. See which enhancements make the Chrome browser a shocking leap forward for web development.

Twitter and Google Analytics

Justin Cutroni shares his thoughts about discovering Twitters value via Google Analytics.

How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

It’s crucial to have simple web designs to allow the user to quickly find the information they need, especially if you are selling a product. If the page is cluttered with useless text, widgets or unrelated products, the site becomes meaningless.

10 Tools for evaluating web design accessibility

Testing for web accessibility (how usable a website is by individuals with disabilities) is an often neglected part of web design and development.

Here are 10 free tools to help you evaluate and correct issues which decrease your website’s accessibility.

Interview with Jacob Gube of Six Revisions

Jacob Gube is the man behind Six Revisions, a popular web design and development blog. He is easily one of the most responsive and helpful bloggers that I’ve come across in the design blogging niche. Go to the interview here,and then go to Jacob's blog site.

Sitemasher

At Sitemasher, they believe that building and maintaining websites should be much easier than it has been to date. Their philosophy is to simplify and streamline the lifecycle of building, managing, and optimizing powerful, fully functional websites.

Looking for good design community news resources?

In the design blogging niche many sites are starting to post community news sections where readers can submit a link to one of their own posts or to someone else’s post that they appreciate. I found DesignM.ag to be a good source.

Here are a few more you may find of interest:

1. Vandelay Design

2. 11 websites to promote your design news

9 amazing websites

Here are 9 amazing sites based upon excellence in creativity and design, courtesy of positivespaceblog.com.

13 hand-picked Vertical and horizontal CSS Menus

This is a list of vertical and horizontal CSS menus, it includes 13 various styles of navigation menus, vertical menus, and tab menus. Navigation menus is one of the most important elements for web design.

Woork

Here's an interesting blog by Antonio Lupetti (Rome,, Italy) focused on the web.

Firebug

Firebug is a web development tool for tweaking CSS, debugging JavaScript and more. In part, it's like juiced-up "view source" for seeing how sites are put together. But Firebug really shines when it's used to streamline your own development.

Pixel perfect with Firebug

Firebug gives you control to change the position of elements and see the changes immediately in the browser. No Save-Cmd-Tab-Reload going on here. One thing missing from Firebug is the ability to see a mockup image of a site overlayed on the actual site. This feature exists in a Firebug extension called PixelPerfect.

Some HTML purists will tell you that attempting to obtain true pixel perfection will inevitably result in messy code. But I say if it's possible to easily make your web page look exactly like you designed it, go forth and be a perfectionist.

With PixelPerfect, you set an overlay graphic and give it a transparency level. Then you can make CSS adjustments, check them against your mockup, and then make a few more tweaks.

SEO

If you're interested in best practices for search engine optimization, here's a good seo blog site that I just discovered.

5 advanced css and javascript coding solutions

Here are 5 advanced elegant coding solutions. You should probably have some CSS-knowledge already before starting reading this article.

The Art & Design Video Tutorial Library

The professional designers and artists of Sessions faculty share their secrets to producing beautiful work. Each video delivers either a desktop or in-studio view of the designer at work as they walk you through a technique that will improve your skills and enhance your portfolio.

Get free, immediate access to the Art and Design Video Tutorial Library. Sign up now

Photoshop Tutorials & Plugins

Check out this great PhotoShop support website. You're bound to find anything and everything for PhotoShop here.

Javascript resources

Here are some great javascript resources to se on your website.

Two Designers, Two Years, One Facelift...

While this article from boxes and arrows is from Feb/2007, the information covering usability, visual design, web standard, and more, is very interesting.

It’s back, it’s improved, and it’s hungry for your data. It’s A List Apart’s second annual survey for people who make websites.

Tips for creative soloprenuers

When building your market, don’t start from scratch if you can avoid it. The foundation of your business should be rooted strongly in something you know well and in which you already have some expertise.

Tools & Techniques for managing website evolution

Here's a great resource of information centered around user centered design.

Creating user centred taxonomies on FUMSI

This is the first in a two-part article about the mechanics of creating user centred taxonomies.

How will you use the power of web 2.0?

Lynda

If you're looking for great web resources, solutions, online training; check out Lynda.com.

Web design studio of the week

Urban Eye Media is a globally oriented Technology and Web Design company designed with the dynamic business manager in mind. Boasting of highly experienced personnel dedicated to various disciplines of web development and web design, Considered to be a Maverick in the Indian web design.

Upgrading to Web 2.5

Design styles and trends have their place – there is more to their use and their success than simply their visual appeal to other designers. The masses respond well to the web2.0 idea …

How to boost traffic to your website

Most important is to make it easy to find your web site and identify relevant terms to use for search engines.

Keyword analysis tools identified in this article: Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

The real value of keyword-rich domains

David Airey discusses what the real value is behind 'keywords'.

Adaptive Path explores the future of the browser

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series.

Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

What Makes Someone Leave Your Website?

So what's the secret to keep your audience from leaving your web site right away, rather than staying around and probing deeper into your site?

SEO and the web designer

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that cannot truly be accomplished by designing a website in a particular way, although a designer can cripple a site’s chances with a poor foundation.

Creative Navigation

While navigation is key to a website, getting creative can allow the opportunity to present some attractive visual elements to a site.

14 design retrospectives

Looking at the results of a good website design helps improve and inspires our own designs, getting into the mind of a designer can be invaluable.

Typographica

Typographica is a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.

Fuzzy Thinking and sharp type

Customers want their logos, buttons and fonts to be 'shapened'. It's not that easy.

Designing a guided tour

Here are some helpful tips when designing and laying out the pages for a website. As the author points out, it’s important to keep in mind that each page has a specific job to do according to the needs, desires and expectations of our client and the site’s end users.

Partnering and client relationships

Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of the job. Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible.

The Employable Web Designer

Here's a great article for those aspiring to be a web designer.

MAX

Register for Adobe's biggest event of the year, MAX 2008, where you can join thousands of other Adobe users to share ideas, find inspiration, and learn from industry experts.

This year, we’re offering more for design professionals than ever before. If you plan to design websites, create rich interactive content, bring video online, build experiences for mobile devices, or use print and web together more effectively, then you can’t afford to miss MAX 2008.

Live or Die by the mockup

This article by Luke Wroblewaki is a little dated, but the message is still valid today.

Strategy with design

What's changed in the last several years that gave designers a seat at the boardroom table and why do we have technology and information overload to thank for it?

Creating the iPhone interface on Fireworks

Fabiano is going to show you how to do the interface on Fireworks.

Adding Flash Files to a webpage in Dreamweaver

Janine Warner walks you through the process of adding a flash file when using Dreamweaver.

Layers

If you're an avid fan and user of Adobe products, then you'll want to go to their magazine, Layers.

You find tutorials, reviews, forums, and more.

Pixel2life

Pixel2life.com is the internet’s largest tutorial index catering to graphic designers, webmasters and programmers, with 41,410 tutorials listed in 87 categories! They also feature a massive and diversified community with 33,831 registered members that participate on our Forums. P2L is also the provider of many additional resources to members and guests, such as articles, programming script and code gallery, hardware reviews, free graphics and stock photography and much more!

How does your website look in different browsers?

Check out this little website called BrowserShots where you can test your web design in different browsers. This is great for web designers and web developers alike who need to save time and see what a particular website looks like on other peoples computers.

It is a free open-source online service and when you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server so you can see what your website looks like on different browsers. Its really nifty!

User Ranked Free Fonts

There are an infinite amount of resources and lists for great free fonts. Have a look at the current highest ranked font from a list of 11 quality font websites.