11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages

You’re about to launch a big online marketing campaign complete with media buys, search engine placement, banner ads and blog buzz. You’ve tested your creative and your clickthrough rate is strong. You know once you go live, tons of targeted traffic will be hitting your site.

Time to sit back and relax, right? Not quite yet.

Best of the Web: BusinessWeek

Best of the New Web

The Web is no longer for idle wanderings or passive viewing. It's about socializing, sharing--and creating

It's A Whole New Web

And this time around it will be built by you

Content: Voices Of The People

Graphic: Home

E-Society: My World Is Cyworld

Graphic: Play

Tagging: Keeping Tabs On The Net

Graphic: Work

School Aid: It Takes A Web Site

Graphic: Public Domain

Ajax: How To Weave A Faster Web

Graphic: Toolbox

Online Extra: A Plethora of Web Picks

Our Best of The Web survey drew a huge response from readers. Compare their picks to those of BW editors

Online Extra: Jakob Nielsen on the Unwieldy Web

The Web usability whiz says some sites are getting better, but far too many remain too complex and frustrating for typical users.

Macromedia Blog Site

For those of you who use Macromedia products [and who doesn't], here's a great blog site that covers a lot.

Design in-Flight

The well respected digital magazine Design in Flight was cancelled a few weeks ago but now it is back in an online edition. With contributors like Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Mark Boulton, Keith Robinson, Molly Holzschlag, Eris Free and others this is one magazine that should end up in your bookmarks.

Back in April Veerle Blog wrote an article about Color Theory: Choosing color combinations that you now can read online for free. So if you ever wondered about the wonderful world of colors maybe it is something for you. Give Design in Flight a try I think you'll love it. Good luck Andy with your online adventure!

Tips for your web site

Illustration by Ron Deviney

Match Colors Between Images in Photoshop
Photoshop's Match Color adjustment is a powerful tool for matching colors between two images. Photoshop Tips

Reinventing the Brand Identity of AG Hair Products
After expanding its line from 4 to 28 products, AG Hair Products turned to Dossier Creative for brand coordination. Graphic Design Tips

Correct Exposures with Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop
The Shadow/Highlight feature, first introduced in Photoshop CS, can reveal shadow detail and enhance highlights. Photoshop Tips

Add Color to Images with Levels and Variations in Photoshop
This black-and-white image becomes hot through the application of a little Photoshop wizardry. Photoshop Tips

Best of Website Design Winners: Step Inside Design

For all your web designers and web designers to be, take a look here for some inspiration on various web site winners, courtesy of Step Inside Design magazine.

DSF - Robust CSS Drop Shadows

Drop shadows are cool, but adding them to elements of a web page can be a pain. You can fiddle with background images, tables, pure CSS solutions, Internet Explorer PNG limitations, or fixed single-use shadows tied to an image and a particular background.

The latest release of TypePad has a new popup (or flyout) interface element which presents the user with a set of options or an expanded view of an object when clicked on. The flyouts are similar to the location bubbles used in Google Maps. They have soft alpha-blended drop shadows that scale with the size of the box. The drop shadows are implemented in valid XHTML and CSS, with no CSS hacks or JavaScript. We call it ydnar Drop-Shadow-Fu.

Article is courtesy of Randy 'ydnar' Redding

Search Engine Watch

Here's a great resource for search engines that provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry, and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.

PCWorld.com - New Version of Firefox Coming in Late Summer

The next version of the Firefox Web browser, which will be called Firefox 1.5, is slated for release later this summer, and development work continues on new features that include an automatic update service.

Background Color Selector

Check out this site for you or aspiring Web artists who want to experiment with a wide variety of text and background color schemes.

Design Project

Here's an interesting web site covering design examples, interviews with leading designers, tutorials and so on.

Usable Web

Usable Web is a stale collection of links about information architecture, human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web.

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.