10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. By Dimitry Fadeyev

10 Tips for Creating Calls to Action That Convert

If your site visitor has to figure out what to do next on your site there is a good chance that they will leave. It might be easier to check out the next site found in the search engine results. By Stephanie Woods

OpenFaces

An open-source library of AJAX-powered JavaServer Faces (JSF) components, an Ajax framework and a client-side validation framework: OpenFaces

21 Resources Especially for Lovers of Minimalism

Minimalism a popular style of design because it keeps things simple and user-friendly. By Vandelay Design

A Look into Color Theory in Web Design

Unarguably one of the most important aspects of any design is its colors. Designers create the style of a site, as well as the movement it makes, the emotion it creates, and its purpose based largely upon the color choices they make. By Shannon Noack

The Ingredients of a Successful Website

Jacob Gube shares his thoughts on what he considers to be the ingredients of success and growth for Six Revisions.

35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites

Despite any financial recession and economic stress, online purchasing continues to grow. Expansion of the market and evolving technology that simplifies our daily lives help to set the pace of e-commerce design. Julia May

Create a Clean and Professional Web Design in Photoshop

In this Photoshop web design tutorial you'll see how to design a smashing, clean, and professional website layout in Photoshop. The layout in this tutorial can be used as personal or corporate website design. By Waheed Akhtar

+40 best icons packs that webdesigners should have

When you create a new template you have to think about lot of things : the colors, the pictures, the texts, the links etc. For each of them, there is one thing particularly complex and difficult to do...the creation and use of icons in webdesign. By 2Expertdesign

Get More From Your Site’s Visual Acreage

One of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, parts of web design is deciding what to do with the space that is given you. By Joseph Alessio

10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it’s tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags. By Glen Stansberry

How to Create a Simple iTunes-like Slider

When space is at a premium, making use of sliders is the optimal way to present information. By Siddharth

Handy Tools and Tips for E-Commerce Websites

Running an e-commerce website is a never-ending task, from trying to squeeze that extra bit of conversion rate out of the check-out page to figuring out which referrers give you the best traffic. There’s also a plethora of tools out there to help you achieve your goals. But which ones do what, and why should you use some of them? By Rob Smith

55 Latest Examples of Perfect Slideshow Presentation in Web Design

There are many reasons to use a slideshow or image slider in your web designs as the key to smart strategic web design is finding a smartest and interactive way to display your information to your visitors. By Dkumar M

Designers: How to Search For, Hire, and Work With a Web-Developer

The market for freelance web design is huge. Being able to design a beautiful site in Photoshop is one thing. Programming a website is a whole other story. By Brian Casel

The Ultimate Collection Of Brilliant Web Design Tutorials

Here's a massive selection of great Web design tutorials from all over the design community. All of the tutorials use Photoshop for the main application. By the end, you should have a pretty good idea of where and how to start designing for the Web. By Callum Chapman

30+ High-Quality Free PSD Website Templates to Download

When it comes to designing a website Photoshop is an excellent tool for it. Here are 30+ quality PSD web templates to download. By Deep

Isometric Experience Maps

This interview is a transcript of a discussion between Nathan Curtis, creator of EightShapes Unify, and Jason Wishard, an interaction designer at EightShapes.

Additional information here.

Classifying Experiences

From ‘user experiences’ to ‘The Experience Economy’ to ‘designing for experiences,” not to mention “brand experiences,” “customer experience management,” and “experiential marketing”— experiences are definitely the topic du jour. By Poetpainter

Frameworks, Experience Modeling, Systems Thinking, and So On…

Experience Modeling can be used to distill and visually communicate key experiential elements gathered from ethnographic observations. By Poetpainter

[IA Summit 2008] 'Managing A Strategic UX Team' Model

If you’re managing (or part of) a team inside of a large corporate organization, then you’re familiar with the difficulties of juggling strategic and tactical concerns. By Poetpainter

The Fundamentals of Experience Design

Whether we are designing a Web app or new office building, simply ask: Who are the people we are designing for? What is the activity (or activities) they are trying to do? And what are the contexts in which they are trying to operate? And ‘people’ can be an individual or group. It’s that simple. By Poetpainter

102 Respected Designers You Should Follow On Twitter

Gustavs Jurisons provides a great list of designers to follow on Twitter.

Realism in UI Design

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. By Lukas Mathis

Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences

Most companies think that getting people to sign up is the ultimate challenge, but what about getting them oriented to your site and actually using it? That process of helping people get started is called onboarding, and it's crucial that you give it the attention it deserves. By Whitney Hess

How to Add a Background Image with CSS

Background images, just as the name implies, are part of the BACKGROUND of a website, not part of the actual content. The most common place to add a background image to, is the entire canvas – aka the body tag. By CSSTUTORIAL.net

Elements of PHP

PHP is a scripting language used widely on the Web. With it, you can query other servers, create and process HTML pages and forms, open and write to files on your server, and perform many other essential server-side web development tasks. By Darrin Koltow

Part 2 here

Fantastic Content Sliders for your Inspiration

Sliders can be great focal points on websites and blogs as they instantly draw the audience’s attention and provide for an easy and sleek way for visitors to interact with a lot of information that can be sorted through quickly. By Webdesigner Depot

How to Build a Footer That Doesn’t Stink

As the first thing visitors see, home pages and headers often steal the design spotlight.

But above-the-fold thinking neglects the natural flow of vertical page layout. What happens when people reach the end of a page? By Ben Gremillion

10 Simple Tips for Launching a Website

The process of launching a website can be a daunting endeavor. There are many things you want to do, but not enough time and resources to do them. By Jacob Gube

The basics of CSS3

Here's a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know. By Web Designer Wall

Usability Review of Charity Websites Taking the Lead

Over the years designers have pushed themselves to create unique and inspiring designs. Companies have yearned to have websites which are innovative and make them stand out against their competitors.

Web Design Criticism: A How-To

Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go. By D. Keith Robinson

Print Magazines for Web Designers, Digital Artists, and Photographers

Although much valuable information for all sorts of web and print professionals can be found online, it is often difficult to weed through all the noise and find good quality content. By Louis Lazaris

Create a Professional Web 2.0 Layout

In this Photoshop tutorial you'll learn how to create a web 2.0 layout. As you go through the tutorial you'll see many Photoshop techniques. By Mahmoud

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms)

Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. By Smashing Magazine

Is John The Client Dense or Are You Failing Him?

Meet John the client. John runs a reasonably large website. He is a marketer who considers himself smart, articulate and professional. That said, he doesn’t know much about Web design, and so he needs your help. By Paul Boag

Call To Action

A clean call-to-action is by far the most critical part of any website and for whatever reason, it is often overlooked.

Educating Web Designers on Google Analytics

Most web designers have heard of Google Analytics, but many of them have not taken the time to understand just how valuable the data can be. By Mark Thompson

Thoughts on multilingual web design

The moment you upload your meticulously constructed web pages onto the internet, you’re global. By Mirko

Track Mouse Activity On Your Computer

Anatoly Zenkov provides this nifty tool (Mac and PC) to track your mouse pointer. Really simple. Just start it, let it run, minimize the window, and carry on as usual. In the end, you get this image that looks something like a Pollock.

Mobile Web Design: Tips and Best Practices

Last year, more than 63 million people in the United States accessed the Internet from a mobile device. It’s forecast that by 2013 there will be more than 1.7 billion mobile Internet users worldwide. With those kinds of numbers, it’s imperative that web designers and developers learn optimal development and design practices for mobile devices. By Cameron Chapman

20 Cool jQuery Tricks for Web Developers

For those of you that don’t know, jQuery is a rich JavaScript library that makes it possible for web developers to produce quite remarkable effects with just a few lines of code. By Deep

Pro video tips for web designers

Online video is rapidly taking over the web. Craig Grannell talks to leading designers and developers to find out how to make best use of it on your site.

Building faster websites

In an age of short attention spans, speed is the name of the online game. Craig Grannell looks at how you can make your sites faster and more efficient – making them easier to use and more attractive to visitors.

The problems with passwords

Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen’s advocates a fundamental change to password field design on the web. He believes that the time has come “to show most passwords in clear text as users type them,” abandoning the traditional approach that displays a series of asterisks or bullets in place of the actual password. By Lyle Mullican

Words that Zing

People use websites to make decisions—from what product to buy to what health treatment to seek. When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, web professionals need to understand the rhetorical concept of kairos. By Colleen Jones

5 Ways to Make User Interface Design Work for Everyone

When it comes to UI, there is inherently a balance that needs to be struck between the needs of the user and the needs of the client. By Bill

What’s Next in Web Design?

Thinking about what’s next online is fun because everything you wish to come true will come true. While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, which in part are influenced by the resources needed to create these products, the web is defined by the user. By L'Espresso

50 Inspiring iPhone Application Websites

One thing that many of the iPhone application websites have ‘in common’ is their beautiful and inspiring design. They simply look amazing. By Gisele Muller

Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?

Ever wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. By Jennifer Kyrnin

A Quick Look at Mobile Web Designs

If there’s anything web designers learned from the past year, it’s that mobile web usage will continue to soar. By Brujo Owoh

Mobile Version Of Every Website

Websites should auto-format based on the viewing device. Gmail, Facebook and Amazon have already taken on this standard. There are great tools out there such as Mobify that enable easy and inexpensive ways to achieve this.

What to Expect in 2010: UX/UI Design Simplicity

2010 is the year of Design Simplicity. By Chuck Longanecker

11 Common Web Design Mistakes (Blunders)

There are tons of website on the Internet, and hundreds or probably thousands are created by day. Here’s a very interesting thing to ponder – What are the elements of a good website? By Brujo Owoh

5 Web Design Articles Worth Reading

Web design is all about learning new techniques, discovering new and useful resources and, ultimately, it is about pushing the web experience forward. By Paul Andrew

Hire the Best of Web Designers, By Design

Not only is the article a great guide for hiring a web designer, it is also gives the potential client an idea of the information and resources that a web designer needs to successfully and painlessly build a web site. By Barbara Williams

Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration

Here are some great sites for inspiration. By Speckyboy Design Magazine

A Showcase of Website Navigations with Serious Click Appeal

The navigation of a website is meant to be clicked. It doesn’t need to blend in or be hard to find. By Henry Jones

6 Goals to Reach For When Designing Your Next Website

Goals are important to have in life. They are especially important for website design, because without any goals, you have nothing to shoot for in the end and nothing to measure your success by. By Yugu

7 Tools You Should Be Using For Better Web Designs

We’ve all come across websites with amazing designs only to be frustrated because it was hard to find things or confusing to use. As a web designer or developer, how do you know if this is happening to your website? By Mike Takahashi

10 Things Clients Look For In a Design Portfolio

There’s no formula for a perfect portfolio. There’s no format that’s guaranteed to land you clients, as long as you follow it. By Thursday Bram

27 Trendy And Unique Website Header Designs

One of the most important parts of the website is the header. This is what the visitor will see first, this will need to be appealing to the eye while functional to let the visitor find the navigation easily. By Omar Corrales

50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources a

Planning and communication are two key elements in the development of any successful website or application. And that is exactly what the wireframing process offers: a quick and simple method to plan the layout and a cost-effective, time-saving tool to easily communicate your ideas to others. By Paul Andrew

Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part II

Shelley Powers digs into the technology behind using SVG for your site design.

Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I

Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. By Shelley Powers

A Look into Registration Buttons in Web Design

Designing an informational/content-centered website (such as a portfolio or a blog) is much easier than designing a website where we have to deal with registered users. By Dibakar Jana

How should Web browsers render alternative text?

What is alternative text?

Designing for E-Commerce Personalities

Conversion, return on investment, loyalty, referrals; all of these site metrics are incredibly important to any successful website, and a site that sells product(s) is no exception.

How to Grow as a Web Designer

The field of web design is constantly changing and growing.

Getting in a rut is often the result of not staying up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the industry. By Kayla Knight

The Principle of Contrast in Web Design

A web design is made of many different elements, each having varying levels of importance and some demanding prominence over others. Some elements share a relationship, while others are not related at all. The tricky part is being able to communicate this visually and effectively. This is where the principle of contrast comes into play. By Henry Jones