Introduction to Web Accessibility

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.

Stonebriar Community Church Redesign

Chris Merritt is a self-taught freelance web designer from Dallas, Texas. His design studio is Pixelight Creative, which focuses on creating stunning visual designs for standards-based web interfaces. In his free time, he likes to Wii, go to the movies, and hang out with his wife and daughter. Read about how he redesigned the Stonebriar Community Church website.

In The Future, Web Sites Will Design Themselves

Why web analytics will change everything when it comes to web design, as web sites become continuous experiments in optimization and designers embrace 'evidence based design'.

The Open Source Web Design Toolbox

The open source model has, over the last 20 years, proven that collaborative development is one of the best ways to incorporate the newest ideas and latest concepts into design.

In fact, the open source model, which began with programmers, has been so successful that it is currently being applied in government, media, education and private business. But despite these new applications, the unique combination of the open source model with the universalism of web design remains one of the ideal applications of open source. This pervasiveness of the open source spirit in web design now means that you can use open source software to design both graphics and your CSS and HTML, and you can also use the dozens of reliable open source code resources or thousands of web design templates to base your own designs on. In this article we highlight 100 open source web design templates, resources, and tools.

The Best Directories of Free Open Source Web Design Templates

There are tons of free design template directories on the net, but sorting through all of them can be a very tedious process. Instead, we suggest that you start with these four, which we consider to be the best free open source design template directories online.

1. OSWD: Over 2,000 of the best freebie web design templates. Also allows for search capability by color, contrast, validation, and other categories.
2. OpenWebDesign:A large and active community of individuals who share free web design templates. Includes regular design contests and a sub-category of most popular designs to speed up your search.
   
3. Open Designs: Headed by a non-profit board, the open design community has almost 600 designs which have been vetted and moderated by the community’s volunteer board. Also includes a relatively active forum where designers can share tips and resources.
   
4. CSS Tinderbox: CSS Tinderbox prevents you from having to “reinvent the wheel” by providing very basic, yet solid, CSS/XHTML design templates from which you can build off of.
   

Read more here.

SEO Web Design the Basics

When you think about traditional advertising and the respective costs associated with it, we know for a fact that an advertisement placed in the Super Bowl costs more than local newspaper placement, but why?

Tag a Cloud

TagACloud is an Elite group of Web-Developers and Scientists of Marketing who have come together to create one of the most unique website ideas in recent history.

They have culminated their minds and creative powers to create from scratch, a purely intuitive website. They are from Albuquerque.

Retailers Revamp Web Sites With New Functions And Cleaner Looks

Retooling their e-commerce sites is a continuous exercise for online merchants as new technologies, capabilities and user behaviors and expectations evolve. Here's a look at the most recent upgrades at some of the leading CE specialty sites.

How To Organize Your Graphic Design Files and Folders

If you are a designer who works on multiple projects at a time, you know how important it is to stay organized. Saving files in various location, all with different file names, can be confusing and end up costing you time and money.

Tips On Getting Traffic To Your Blog Or Website

Maki discusses some ways you can get some quick traffic to your new blog or website. Do the following:

• Provide baits: these baits are the incentives you give to your visitors to visit your blog again and again. The baits could be quality content, useful tips and tricks, some online free tools, interviews with achievers, etc.
• Generate traffic for your baits: you can do this by letting people know about your baits through social networking websites, user forums and by writing to other bloggers.
• Build a community and sustain it: gather a community of dedicated readers who value your content.

Maki rightly stresses that marketing is really important. He says there should be a 30-70 ratio of content writing and marketing which means you should spend 30% of your blogging time generating content and 70% time promoting your blog. But marketing cannot, in any way, be underestimated because once you start getting a decent number of visitors to your blog or website, it becomes a great motivation to write content regularly, with greater frequency.

Search Engine Optimization

There is not much difference between SEO content and optimized content. As you may already know, SEO means search engine optimization.

Is The Page View Dead?

Nielsen/NetRatings dealt the aging Internet-audience metric its latest blow when the company said that it would no longer provide page-view rankings for Web sites.

Ten Tips for Avoiding Google Hell

Can’t get your site into the search engine rankings? Have pages that have sunk in their rankings? Wondering how Google and other search engines find your pages? Here are ten tips to help webmasters and online marketers promoting a website to understand just how the search engines work and how they get their information.

Ice Templates

Having a professional looking site is really important for the success of any business. If you ever heard someone saying that a website is not important for their business, it is because they have not utilized the proper resources to get their return on investment. Check out Ice Templates.

Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design

Now that PNG transparency is finally getting some IE love, the world is its oyster—subtle gradients, overlays, and watermarks—all perfectly suited to the humble PNG. Jeff Croft gets our creative juices flowing, makes the technicalities clear, and includes some tips for helping older browsers play along, in this chapter from the new and absolutely delicious friends of ED book, Web Standards Creativity, written by some of the finest designers and developers in the web standards community. Read the article here.

Typography and Web Advertising: Making every Opportunity Count

Design principles and goals for web ads and print ads are similar—but the constraints seem starkly different. We can only benefit from standing back and taking a fresh look at our approach to these areas of web pages that need to pack a lot of punch within their tiny dimensions. Digital Web recently spoke with Alexander W. White’s about his new book, Advertising Design and Typography.

10 Reasons Why Content Shold Be Your #1 Priority

Web development isn't easy. There's no get-rich-quick scheme (that actually works) or a golden lamp with a genie waiting to grant you three wishes.

And too often, site development goes the way of the quick-and-easy. Put together a nice design, add some official-looking text, and wait for the traffic to pour in.

But it doesn't work like that.

Writing for the web

When creating, editing and designing content for the web, get the message across as quickly as possible.