9 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Easy Web Development

If there is one reason web designers love using Firefox, it must be the huge variety of add-ons. Firefox is very flexible. There are thousands of add-ons available on Mozilla’s site and we can add them to our Firefox freely.

Using htaccess files for pretty URLS

While some claim pretty URLs help in search engine rankings, the debate here is fierce, we can all agree that pretty URLs make things easier for our users and adds a level of professionalism and polish to any web application.

20 Inspirational, Clean E-Commerce Website Designs

Many e-commerce websites tend to get very cluttered and suffer from not being user friendly. In this post you'll see a showcase of 20 e-commerce sites that have taken a different approach.

9 Characteristics of Well-Designed E-Commerce Websites

E-commerce web design and development presents some unique challenges that you won’t always face with other types of web design.

How to Make Your Web Design Stand out from the Crowd

All web designers want their work to stand out from the crowd … but what does that take?

Seven Reasons to Switch Web Analytics Tools

Most organizations are on their third or fourth Web analytics tool by now. The funny part is that some are switching from tool A to tool B, while others are switching from tool B to tool A. Are they all so bad? Yes, they are -- and here are the reasons.

20 Excellent Examples of Using Animals in Web Design

Well-drawn animal illustrations can make for a fantastic design element for websites and web applications.

HOW Designers’ Bootcamps

The HOW Designers’ Bootcamps are a series of in-depth, seminar-style workshops designed to help you grow your design business, finesse your career, perfect your marketing efforts or move smoothly into web design

Amazing Watercolor Effect in Pixelmator

This tutorial will show you how to create a really cool effect using some watercolor brushes mixed with photos.

The UXD Stack: Looking At Projects

Many people in our profession use different kinds of “briefs” when they get started on a project. A brief is a short paper defining the background and preliminary understanding for a project. Some of these documents are called “Strategic Briefs” or “Creative Briefs”.

Optimise your site for iPhones

Craig Grannell explores some ideas for fine-tuning websites for Apple’s increasingly popular smartphone and its very smart browser, Mobile Safari.

Navigation and Wayfinding

In his book The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch coined the term “wayfinding” to describe his concept of environmental legibility—that is, the elements of the built environment that allow us to navigate successfully through complex spaces like cities and towns.

SEO and Website Design

Ben McKay is a SEO Manager for Mediaedge:cia, WPP, and writes about SEO consulting and the evolving challenges in his blog, Just Me and My.

PNG Optimization Guide: More Clever Techniques

As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format.

The Definitive Guide to Using Negative Margins

Out of all the CSS concepts designers have ever used, an award probably needs to be given to the use of Negative Margins as being the most least talked about method of positioning.

Text rotation with CSS

Jonathan Snook shares a simple example that works in Safari, Firefox and even Internet Explorer (using the Basic Image filter).

50+ Fresh and Unique Personal Portfolio Websites

Designers have an urge to stand out as unique, specially when building their own portfolio websites to showcase their work and skills to future employers.

40+ Vector Characters Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials

Having a unique design is a must to get your visitor’s attention. Vector characters can establish a memorable image of your site in the reader’s mind.

35 Inspirational Shopping Cart Page Designs

Shopping carts are an integral part of the online shopping experience. E-commerce designers face challenges in creating an attractive, yet user-friendly, website that will provide customers with a pleasant purchasing experience.

GIMP Training Videos

Probably more known to the Linux users, GIMP is an GNU Image Manipulation Program, also available, though not supported officially for Windows.

Reinventing the Color Picker

If you do any form of design work on the computer you’re probably familiar with the color picker.

8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces

There is a lot of information out there about various interface design techniques and patterns you can use when crafting your user interfaces and websites, solutions to common problems and general usability recommendations.

How to Listen to the User and Hear the Experience

When someone is speaking, do you think about what the other person is saying, or do you think about what you are going to say next?

Ten Simple Guidelines for Choosing the Perfect CMS

The content management system you choose can really make a huge difference in how much time you (or your clients) spend keeping a site updated and maintained.

Beautiful Gradient Effects On Web design – Research: Part 2

Here's a showcase of beautifully done gradient effects used effectively in web-design and logo design creation.

10 Tools to Improve Your Site’s Usability on a Low Budget

Testing the usability of your site is one of the smartest things you can do.

Google Chrome OS: So What?

The new Google Chrome OS is the big news in the tech world today. For those of you living under a rock, the gist is that Google's coming out with an operating system, layered on top of a Linux kernel, that will power netbooks, and eventually desktop PCs. Applications will all be Web-based, accessible via Google's Chrome browser.

Introduction to RDFa II

Learn how to add properties to an image, and how to add metadata to any item—and we’ll add a few more rules to that list.

Content Templates to the Rescue

As an industry, we’ve mostly figured out that if we don’t want content problems to sabotage our web projects, we have to plan ahead.

50 Free High-Quality and “New” (X)HTML/CSS Templates

Here are 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files). You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.

IBM - Smarter Planet

IBM leverages its branding power and smarts to try to make the planet a better (and smarter) place to work, live and do business. If you are looking for new grid designs and graphs, you'll find clean pages, graphs-a-plenty, and a very snazzy set of colorful icons... And that's just what you see on the surface. It's all about the ideas and how they can help make things better for all of us.

Understanding JavaScript Closures

JavaScript closures are considered to be advanced stuff, reserved for the gurus of the field.

Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play.

Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up

This post is not about Adsense and its simplicity. This post is about understanding Adsense and all its rules, optimization and ad placement, but mainly it’s about maximising your sites potential earnings using the different types of ads that Google offers.

Search Me

Inside the launch of Stephen Wolfram's new "computational knowledge engine."

So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources

Here's a list of resources covering — publications and blogs, books, local events, organizations, mailing lists, webinars, workshops, conferences, and schooling.

Covering the Walls

Martin Hardee from Cisco shares his office to reflect how to see a panorama view of what you're working on.

Meaning-Making in Landing Page Optimization

Trying to generalize universal truths from a single landing page test result is often a horrible idea.

'Desktop View' websites

Some creative 'desktop view' websites to check out.

12 Excellent Social News Sites for Web Designers

Social news/bookmarking websites are a great for finding useful resources, tutorials, and information on the web. These sites typically puts users in the driver’s seat by giving them the ability to submit links, vote on other people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that they don’t like.

50+ Ultimate Collection of Glow and Light Effect Tutorials in Photoshop

Glow and Light effect is very popular now a day. You can see these effects sometimes on a posters or advertisements. Here are some tutorials on the subject.

Using Wikis to document UI specifications

How your design team can benefit from wiki collaboration while avoiding its pitfalls.

UI Pattern Documentation Review

To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization.

Wellknown.as Case

Here's a tutorial on using Fireworks when building a website.

Planning the perfect site

We all want to hit the ground running when we start a new project, but a little forethought can reap huge dividends in the long run.

Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites.

25 Free Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap.

10 Useful CSS/JS-Coding Solutions For Web-Developers

Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them.

Handcrafted CSS

A new book by Dan Cederholm

15 Effective Tips and Tricks from the Masters of CSS

There are thousands of sites out there offering tips and tricks for using CSS. But how do you know where that information is coming from?

Web Marketers to Change User Tracking

Companies that track consumer behavior online for advertising purposes are vowing to make their practices more transparent and to give people a way to decline being shadowed.

How to make an eye-catching logo

Anybody can mock-up a logo but only good designers can make it stand out and make it a good branding tool. Here are a few tips on how you can be a better logo designer.

Introduction to RDFa

RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.”

Art Direction and the Web

Great article on principles and techniques of the art director — which relate closely to web design — and show how these can influence the overall effect of a website.

Visual Decision Making

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

30 Creative Javascript navigation menu examples

Successful, eye-catching and mainly user-friendly site navigation sometimes is key to whole web design, because users usually search for navigation at first, when they visit website.

Free Seamless Vector Pattern Resources

Patterns actually can be found almost everywhere – in print design, web design, graphic design etc.

Web Strategy: The Three Spheres of Web Strategy (and the skills required)

What’s a Web Strategy? It’s the balance between the three spheres for effective long-term planning of a website.

Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter

If you’re responsible for the direction of your online strategies for your company or organization, you’ve probably been hearing buzz about Twitter, a next-generation instant messaging tool. Even if you’re new to Twitter, this will serve as a guide to educate you, help you make a decision, link to resources, and provide a starting point for your strategy.

15 Grandiose Green Website Designs

Many of the sites deal directly with the environment or nature in some way, but others simply enjoy the emotion green color and imagery inspire in a viewer.

20 white and clean website Designs for Inspiration

White the color of peace is also one of the best color which inspires me while designing any website. The main thing I like about the color its easy to use (not like gradients, image effects, etc.) giving a more clean and professional look to a website.

What's Niggle all about?

Niggle is an independent feedback service that delivers your feedback directly to business owners and managers.

Overview of the New AdWords Interface

For years, the Google AdWords interface has maintained the same look and feel, leaving advertisers comfortable with navigating around campaigns and making adjustments. Google has decided to shake things up with their AdWords appearance by not only giving it a fresh coat of paint, but an extreme makeover.

How Much Weight Do Keywords in the Domain Name Still Have ?

Keywords in the domain used to be a very powerful way to be the first in Google SERPs for those keywords.

Whiteboard Friday - SEO for Local Search

David Mihm takes us through some of the fundamentals of performing SEO for Local Search by explaining how Google uses information from different sources, and what you can do with those sources to help your local rankings.

How AJAX Works: 10 Practical Uses For AJAX

AJAX can provide a lot of additional functionality that could not be accomplished any other way.

Switching to Freelance: How to Negotiate to Work Less Hours in Your Job

Freelance businesses can have small beginnings.

webdesignfanboy

Twitter site, Webdesignfanboy is a self-proclaimed web design fanboy! I enjoy browsing designs and learning jQuery, Wordpress and Expression Engine.

Users Place More Weight on Design

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated "poor visual presentation" as the number one element that drives them away from websites.

12 Excellent Free Tools for Monitoring Your Site’s Uptime

A website or web application’s high availability is very crucial; users who constantly encounter problems accessing the content of a site will not likely come back.

Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. Here are a few to check out.

Why Web Developers Don’t Need A Mac

As Web developers, we never stop hearing about the Mac. A lot of people love to talk about their Macs, but despite the “elite” status of the Apple computer, is there any need for a Web developer to splash money on one?

Indexing the web - it's not just Google's business

Interface responsiveness is one of many details web developers must consider in their quest to deliver a good user experience.

Why designers should learn how to code

For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, you'll read about some reasons why designers should learn how to code.

30 Best Photoshop Web Layout Design Tutorials to Design Decent Websites

Photoshop is an excellent tool. No design software gives you quite so much control as Adobe Photoshop in designing a website. Here is a collection of 30 layout design tutorials that will help you with designing a decent looking website.

Six Useful Tips for Web Designers and Developers

Here's six useful tips for all you web designers and developers out there. They cover various topics including: accessibility, SQL, web developer plugins for Firefox, HTML emails, design and jQuery.

Effective Maintenance Pages: Examples and Best Practices

Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it’s just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it’s an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes.

Notable

A feedback application for teams to quickly and easily provide feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving the browser.

Drop down menu with jQuery & CSS

Studies show that top navigation's tend to get the most visual attention when a user first visits a site. Having organized and intuitive navigation is key — and while most drop down menus may look aesthetically pleasing, developing them to degrade gracefully is also essential.

Changing outdated information architecture

Shifting user needs and an older, outdated information architecture and design demanded a revolutionary redesign of the Changemakers site.

13 Beautifully Designed Mac and iPhone App Websites

The Apple brand is synonymous with good design. It also seems that a lot of applications made for Macs and the iPhone seem to possess a little something extra when it comes to aesthetics.

How to Recruit Participants for User Research

Conducting user research and usability tests with real participants who match the audiences you’re targeting for your site or application is a perennial challenge.

Design and Code a Slick Website from Scratch – Part I

With the Internet becoming more and more popular every minute, a great-looking website is somewhat of a must-have.

In this first part, you'll learn how to design a neat-looking website that you can easily adapt to your business. After going through part 1, jump over to part two.

40 of the Best Websites of Non-Profit Organizations

Budget limitations are common with non-profit and charitable organizations. As a result, organizations often compromise on the need for an effective and attractive website. However, the websites shown here represent some of the most well-designed websites of non-profits.

The CSS Box Model

Every element in web design is a rectangular box.

A self-defeating design process

Designer Dustin Curtis was so disgusted with the American Airlines Web site that he redesigned it, and posted the results as an open letter to the company. Guess what?

How To Make Your Next Website Design Pop

Web design is one of those areas that when done right, you know it. It looks polished, refined and generally, just well done - it pops! There are a number of ways that you can achieve this and that is by ‘polishing’ off your design. Here are some ways to do it.

Just Creative Design Goes Mobile

Just Creative Design now has a mobile version. This means you can read JCD’s articles on your iPhone or mobile device while having the pages & images load up to 7 times faster.

45 Step-by-Step Tutorials on Web Design with Photoshop

While many web designers create mockups in Adobe Fireworks and Dreamweaver, no design program gives you quite so much control as Adobe Photoshop. The lessons collected here will show you how to create gorgeous and functional complete websites, blogs, layouts, nav menus and headers in Photoshop.

12 Tips For Designing an Excellent Checkout Process

Shopping online can be a great experience. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn’t designed correctly.

How to Brand Yourself with a Twitter Background

When marketing yourself, you want all pieces to look similar and cohesive: logo, business cards, letterhead, envelope, website, brochure, media kit, marketing materials, signage, etc.

Twitter profile backgrounds are another tool to help market and promote your self. The background should match your existing brand or look. Twitter backgrounds get noticed: if they’re unique, fresh and stand out from the crowd.

Apple vs. Microsoft - A Website Usability Study

The two giants pride themselves for producing cutting edge consumer and business products, and are leading the developments in software and hardware.

But what about their websites? How do they both compare, and more important, which one is better and more usable?