The Principles of Design: In Theory and Practice

If you work on the Web, organizing your time and work is critical. Many professionals—from information architects to graphic designers—find themselves acting as the “glue” of a project, liaising between client and manager. So how do you stay on top of deadlines, drawings, and disputes? Columnist Joshua Kaufman shares his productivity insights as an IA in Part I of “Getting IA Done.” Read more

The Principles of Design

Take a step back from the nitty-gritty of style sheet jigs and alpha-channel jogs to examine the defining principles of your profession. After all, Web design is part of a much larger world of design. If you’ve been getting by on gut feel, here’s your chance to make your projects even stronger with a primer in design basics. Read more

Template Design Competition

It’s hard to believe, but Style Master, Webciv’s full-featured CSS editor, will be six years old on 9 September. To celebrate, Westciv is holding a Style Master Templates Competition with over US $1000 in cash prizes:

The competition challenges designers to develop stylish, standards-based CSS + XHTML templates that can be reused and adapted by developers around the world.

In addition to offering a high-quality CSS product, Westciv has long been a source of knowledge, offering free tutorials on standards-based design from novice- to expert-level, including their famous Complete CSS Guide. Westciv, in tandem with the W3C’s Australian office, is sponsoring this month’s Web Essentials 04 conference in Sydney (and I would be speaking there if not for Mr Stork’s impending bundle)

Inspiration

Looking for inspiration on how to create that next great web site for your customer? Check out some of these great designers web sites and their work:

1. Amy Burnham. Graphic and Web designer extraordinaire.
2. Nick Finck. Here's a mantra: Design, design, design.
3. Lynda Weinman. She is the Empress in my imaginary Tarot deck.

True Colors

Are you practicing safe color? Do you care? While the challenge of interoperable color has been somewhat ameliorated by the spread of better color-management systems, achieving consistent color across computers, platforms, and browsers is still very difficult, if not downright impossible.

The Return on Usability Testing

Subha Subramania offers insights to the benefits of usability testing.

Registration is now open for Web Essentials ‘05, to be held in Sydney, Australia, September 29-30, 2005. WE04 delivered 14 sessions - this year’s edition expands to 22 sessions with 7 International speakers, and 10 Australian speakers.

Everything I’ve heard about WE04 is that it was, quite simply, an oustanding conference.

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

Jesse James Garrett discusses the technology of Google's Ajax. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.

Tableless CSS driven template

Bluewater Island website was developed for a resort in Vanuatu. This is a database driven site, featuring a sophisticated yet easy to use custom built CMS.

Through the use of tableless CSS driven template, it was possible to significantly cut down the size of XHTML files and increase amount & size of images, subsequently making the site so much more attractive.

The site has been developed with the latest standards in mind allowing for maximum accessibility. Written in XHTML this website can even be accessed from most browser capable mobiles.

Completely Rethinking the Web

Dirk Knemeyer, Innovating the Web Experience Columnist at Digital Web, stretches our imagination with his insight on why the Web is broken. Read

Good book on web usability

Read this Book: Site-Seeing: a Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

Google's Web Accelerator hits the brakes

Google says it has reached the maximum number of users for beta software, which has come under criticism by privacy advocates and technology researcher Gartner.

Flash Tips

Actionscript: Mouse Movements In this month's ActionScript walkthrough, Tom Knowles demonstrates how to use the Flash Player to record and play back a visitor's mouse movements

W3C launches mobile push

The Web's leading standards body has launched a ground campaign to promote its mobile Web protocols in the real world.

Webby Awards nominees announced

The Webby Awards--known to its publicist as the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences--announced nominees in more than 60 categories for its June 6 Web site awards ceremony.

Nominees include Boing Boing and Yahoo's Flickr site in the Blog category, Skype in Telecommunications, 43 Things in Social Networking, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken in Humor and Weird, Alexander McQueen in Fashion, the New York Times on the Web in Newspaper, and Rtm86.com in Personal Site. Google, Yahoo, AOL, News.com publisher CNET, PBS, the BBC, Pfizer, SK Telecom, Turner Movie Classics and others got nominations in multiple categories.

Through April 29, the awards show is soliciting votes in its People's Voice Awards.

The Webby Awards unveiled a new designation, "Webby Worthy," which the awards group said applied to less than 20 percent of more than 4,000 entries received this year.

Creating a Site Design Plan

If you’re a small (or one-person) shop, the many approaches to planning a Web site can be dizzying. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guidelines to make design decisions easier? Karen Morrill-McClure guides you through creating a site design plan by outlining business and user needs and defining goals.

Web Style Sheets

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994.

Other style sheet information: Effective Use of Style Sheets, by Jakob Nielsen

Web Site Metrics

So what's your return on investment (ROI) for the dollars spent on re-designing, promoting, and managing your web site. Here's an interesting article to may help provide some guidance on how to measure your results.

Selling B2B Decision Makers

ClickZ's article, by Bryan Eisenberg, touches on how to best reach the 'decision makers' when running a B2B web site.

Web developer tips

Here's a web site [WebDevTips] to browse for new and experienced developers. They have code generators, forums, 'how to' guides and more.