Up Down Top 10 Firefox Addons for Web Designers

A look at the top 10 firefox addons that web designers shouldn't be without.

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Web-based Favicon Generators and Favicon Resources

Your website’s favicon is a key trademark to its look. It shows up in the navigation bar as well as on browser tabs (for most browsers at least), helping users quickly pick out your website out of the crowd.

Creating favicons is simple, and with these online favicon generators, you’ll have your own favicons in no time! Further down the article are some more resources related to favicon design and inspiration.

Check it out here.

Social media site dedicated to design

Design Bump is a social media site dedicated to design.

They're about design, the web, social media, art, inspiration, and sharing. They want to bring design to the masses.

What is the best way to find relevant design-related content quickly and easily? Put the searching and sharing in the hands of the community. Design Bump categorizes the huge amount of design-related content available on the web into neat and easy to navigate pages of articles in order of importance/relevance.

Using moo.rd to Create Image Galleries

Riccardo Degni, is an Italian Web Designer who develops client and server side applications.

In the article he talks about his latest project - moo.rd - a JavaScript library based on the MooTools framework, as well as walk us through the steps of creating image galleries using moo.rd.

• Fx.Cycles demo
• Virtual Box demo

Read the article here

Expression Engine

Expression Engine. This is very, very slick. There’s a lot of new technology under the hood. It’s too early to comment on the details, as I expect the product that launches will be pretty different from the early peek we’re getting now. None the less, I’m excited to start using it. Launch is expected for “Summer 2008”. In other words, don’t hold your breath!

Check out Expression Engine's website.

Design View

I came across this website that offers various topics dealing with designing a guided tour on a website, how and why of styling text links, bad layout conventions, and more. Check it out.

Website analytics

Some owners and managers of websites and intranets, say they have ‘tracking’ on their website, but probing deeper you find they are referring to simple web statistics (read “hits”). This old style web stats is just not sufficient these days.

Demystifying Information Architecture

Here's a great article and presentation covering the fine art of information architecture.

Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha

Internet startups are generally as successful as a nerd in a singles bar. Ventures that get off the ground rarely get knee-high. Why?

Review: Building Findable Websites

Aarron Walter’s new book, Building Findable Websites, attempts to bridge the gap between code and strategy to take a look at the more general and business-focused subject of ‘findability’ (a term first popularized by Peter Morville in his 2005 book, Ambient Findability)—and, at least partially, it succeeds.

Read the review here.

Web Design of the Times

Khoi Vinh has emerged as a leading critical voice in the evolving discipline of web information design. He talks about the challenges of integrating traditional and internet design.

How Firefox Outran the Hounds

The gains of Mozilla's Web browser broke Microsoft's grip on the market and showed the merits of open-standards software.

20 Useful Tools to Make Web Development More Efficient

There are many available tools to help make web development projects quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, testing, and debugging tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently.

Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs

Effective web design doesn't have to be pretty and colorful — it has to be clear and intuitive; in fact, we have analyzed the principles of effective design in our previous posts. However, how can you achieve a clear and intuitive design solution? Well,...

4 Steps Missing From Your Web Design Process

There are steps in the web design process that aren’t as fun as creating a beautiful design or coding an ajax rich interface, and for this reason they are often neglected or completely omitted. These steps may not be necessary to take a site from concept to production, but in terms of achieving the objectives defined by the project’s stake holders, they could make all the difference.

99 Sites ALL Designers Must Know About

Here's a list of 99+ graphic design resources, in English and (and a few other languages), that all designers must know about.

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

Be Part of a New Web Design World

Join your colleagues and top experts in the Web field as Web Design World returns to Seattle July 21-23 for three dynamic days of information, interaction, insight and inspiration.

Design Anti Patterns - How to Design a Poor Web Experience

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UX Design-Planning Not One-man Show

Holger Maassen posts his ideas about the process of planning and designing for User Experience Design-Planning (UXD-P) as Expectation Design.

Web 2.0 Nav Bar

Create an amazing Web Navigation Bar with a Web 2.0 Style

Expression Stuido

One short year after Expression Studio was introduced at MIX 08 was announced we're seeing a major update to the suite with Expression 2, which shipped last Friday. See here for information on some of the great new features such as PHP support in Web and Silverlight support in Blend as well as things that make Expression easier to install and update and even own via new subscription based pricing.

Expression Studio also has great support via the Expression Community with active forums and great articles, links and training about how to integrate Expression Studio into your design studio.

8 Degrees of Jakob Nielsen

Webmonkey recently included an excerpt from Jakob Nielsen's new book "Prioritizing Web Usability". The exerpt includes "Eight Problems That Haven't Changed". Check out the review here.

Top 5 Web Browsers That Aren't IE, Safari, or Firefox

Those three browsers take up a collective 97.1 percent share of the market. But what about the rest of us slobs who protest anything corporate, reject anything mainstream, and don't even know why? There is surprising amount of excellent web browsers that get no love at all.

Five Best Start Pages

Whether you use it to keep up to date on the latest news or as a launching point for the rest of your browsing, you want to find a solid start page to fit your surfing habits.

9 Common Reasons A Website Is Not Drawing Visitors

Building a successful website obviously involves attracting visitors to the site. There are any number of ways to draw visitors to your site, but if you’re not having success it’s important to know what is causing the problems.

Web Monkey

Check out the new revised Web Monkey site. The entire site is a wiki, so all of the articles posted on Webmonkey are written and edited by the people who understand these topics the best: web developers like you.

40+ Extremely Beautiful Icon Sets Hand-picked from deviantART

Here are 40 incredible icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop.

Google Factory Tour of Search

Website of the week: Web Concepts

Web Concepts specializes in creative and dynamic web site design for small to medium-sized businesses and charitable organizations.

Opera Dragonfly alpha

Welcome to Opera Dragonfly alpha, the foundations of Opera's upcoming Developer Tools. Debug JavaScript, inspect CSS and the DOM, and view any errors – Opera Dragonfly makes developing using Opera easier than ever, both on your computer and mobile phone. Check out our alpha release for a taste of things to come.

Thoughts on Interaction Design

Interaction Designers are the shapers of behavior. Behavior is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue. These topics are discussed in the four sections of this text.

SEO Basics, introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the on-going process of making sure that your web site performs as well as possible on specific search engine searches.

This article aims to explain the absolute basics of SEO that every web site designer, developer, or owner should know.

Explaining Web 1.0, Web 2.0 & Web 3.0

It seems that everyone has their own idea of what Web 2.0 means. That is one of the pitfalls to using a single buzzword to define everything you see on the internet.

Google Analytics How-To Videos

If you've recently signed up for Google Analytics, but aren't sure how to start interpreting and acting on your data, you can find a couple of videos at Conversion University Playlist on YouTube to help you out.

For an under-10 minute lesson on the data to look at first, what it means, and what to do about it, watch Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting on Your Data. Also embedded here:

Stylish Design

This website is founded and operated by Robert and Andrei. Working in the art and advertising industry for over eight years, along with his team of well experienced writers, share insight into the world of art, culture, and design.

50 Tips to Speed Up Your Website

By now, nearly everyone knows that an effective Web site must be speedy. Users have short attention spans and are generally not willing to wait for a bloated Web site to load. Take advantage of these tips, tools and resources, and you'll have a much better time capturing visitors' attention.

Top 25 Web Design Blogs

Review this great blog site covering the top 25 web design blogs.

Useful Podcasts For Designers And Developers

Podcasting is an engaging medium that is available in both audio and video formats. Podcasts often refer to audiocasts, but now with iPods and other media players being able to play video, videocasts are just as popular. Check out this site about a podcast for those who design, develop or run websites.

5 Steps to Successful Behavioral Targeting

Ad network, web analytics tool vendors, agencies etc. all now claim to have behavioral targeting capabilities. Weather they really have the behavioral targeting capabilities or not is a topic of another blog topic.

40 Excellent Web Based Tools to Help You Design from Anywhere

In today’s busy world it can be hard to be tied down to one computer. With web based applications becoming so advanced it is now possible to still get work done anywhere there is a computer without installing any software. From image editing to Word documents, you can do it all online.

Here are 40 excellent web based tools to help you design from anywhere.

20 Sources for Outstanding Photoshop Brushes

Having a wide variety of brushes gives designers a larger toolset when creating images. Grunge brushes can be used to create a textured site design, floral brushes can help fill empty voids and even more brushes can be used to create nice little touches. Check it out.

CSS Menu Writer debuts

Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

Jesse James Garrett talks about how every web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams he's encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.

IA Summit: Content page design best practices

Luke Wroblewski's presentation on Content Page Design Best Practices talks about a framework for thinking about how to optimize content pages for the dynamic ecosystem of the Web instead of the structured hierarchy of a Web site.


Content
Download the slides:
Content Page Design Best Practices (4MB PDF)

Information Architecture

Here's a great slide show from Peter Morville, covering search patterns.

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Does Flash irk me?

On Veerle's blog, she replies to many readers who likely assume that she has a natural distaste for anything Flash related. It’s not because she prefers HTML/CSS that she doesn't like it or hate it as some people do. Flash/Flex have their place. With that out of the way let’s continue…

Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience

Part 1 of this series, The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals, discussed the difficulties of creating effective information architectures for portals, dashboards and tile-based information environments using only flat portlets, and introduced the idea of a system of standardized building blocks that can effectively support growth in content, functionality, and users over time.

42 Must-Bookmark Resources for Web Designers - Inspiration, Design, Color, Fonts and More

Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned veteran these tools, tutorials, lists and other resources are great sites for any web designer.

Draw With the Line Tool in Flash CS3

The line tool can be used to draw lines in Adobe Flash CS3. In this video tutorial, you will learn how to draw with the line tool in Flash CS3.

Web Design Mistakes

Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch

This tutorial puts together a high-end web design using a crisp, thin font, gorgeous background images and clever use of space and layout. You can easily use the technique to create your own unique designs.

Firefox 3's new bookmarking system

Firefox 3 introduces a few new features to bookmarks that I think makes them much, much easier to use, more useful in general, and much more useful in particular for catastrophically disorganized folk like me. The three main features being introduced are: Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders.

30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples

30 excellent CSS techniques and examples that showcases the capabilities and robustness of CSS. You’ll see a variety of techniques such as image galleries, drop shadows, scalable buttons, menus, and more - all using only CSS and HTML.

7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design

An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.

Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly? Find out more here.

45 Essential Web Design Resources [w/links to 100s more]

Organized into 6 helpful categories (awesome design inspiration, web design guides, handy color tools, great free fonts and more) this collection links directly to dozens of essential resources for web designers and design lovers as well as other to other invaluable web design resource lists. This is one that designers of all kinds should bookmark!

10 Principles of Effective Web Design

Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has established as a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. In order to use the principles properly we first need to understand how users interact with web-sites, and how they think.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Jeff Parks had the opportunity to speak with Milissa Tarquini on her article, Blasting the Myth of the Fold. They talk about how this long held rule in web design is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compatibility.

Read the article or listen to the podcast.

Be the Bot

In a rare case when you’re not able to view the solution even by accessing the Google Cache, you can use Be The Bot.

First look: Firefox 3 beta 4 brings new Vista hotness

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 beta 4, which includes new icons for Vista. Ars takes a first look at the new features and concludes that Firefox 3 is almost ready for widespread adoption.

30 Fonts that all designers must own

Here are 30 of the Best Fonts / Type Faces that every designer must own sorted by alphabetical order.

iPerceptions

A friend of mine, and well known web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, has called out attention to a great site for gathering feedback from your customers...and it's free.

You can check out their program at iPerceptions. If you like to see a YouTube video [09:52] by Avinash, explaining this great program, go here.

Persona and Role of Design Documentation

As personas have become part of the design orthodoxy, they have become a target of often intense debate. Andrew Hinton digs deep down into the origins of the persona to find how a great idea has lost much of its original context and reflect on how modern business uses (or misuses) design documentation.

Findability.org

A "selective, seriously incomplete, and perpetually evolving collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability." Despite its disclaimers, it offers a wide spectrum of links to topics, people and organizations.

Better Living Through Taxonomies

Large websites and intranets can benefit from improved methods of search and navigation. These include site maps, A-Z indexes, sophisticated search engines, and generally improved navigational design—and playing a potential role in all of these methods is well-planned taxonomy.

Taming the World Wide Web

A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data.

G0-Daddy's Hail Mary TV-to-Web Strategy

Once again, GoDaddy saved its biggest ad blitz for the Super Bowl. And once again, the goal was to drive as many viewers as possible to the end zone: GoDaddy.com

Common sense web design with Steve Krug

Steve Krug, the author of Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, is a highly respected usability consultant, and he has worked with companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, BarnesandNoble.com, Excite@Home, and Circle.com. Krug's book is packed with practical techniques for developing a highly usable web site. Before you create or redesign your web site, make sure your designer has read Krug's book.

SEO for FireFox

Are you curious why a certain page on Google or Yahoo! ranks better? Do you ever wonder how many links your competitor has, but don’t feel like logging into your SEO tools? If so, the SEO for FireFox extension is for you. Created by Aaron wall - it will save you countless hours of research frustration and complexity.

8 web design mistakes that developers make

An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design.

100 Photoshop tutorials for creating beautiful art [w/pics]

Each tutorial starts as a thumbnail that can be hovered over to display more information. A truly great resource.

Getting your site indexed before you launch

Most SEO articles focus on what to do after you launch your site. What tends to be neglected is the advantage that you can gain by getting your site indexed before you launch. With a little planning and a few hours of work it's easy to be indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN before your site goes live.

The Name Game: Using Keywords in URL Filenames

Keywords...an often overlooked aspect of site design and SEO that can clearly bring benefits.

Browershots

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

CrazyEgg - Measuring Web Site Usability

How can you measure the usability of your site? A number of new tools for tracking site visitors are raising the bar for website statistics tools. Particularly, instead of tracking the flat lists of usage and showing you illegible user paths, the next generation of site trackers is focused on giving you the insights on how people use a site. CrazyEgg, offers innovative ways of doing just that.

Read the article here .

Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?

Everybody is using it, but (almost) nobody really knows how it works. Google PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient. But how is it actually done? How does Google PageRank work, which factors do have an impact on it and which don’t? And what do we really know about PageRank?

Adobe Flash Tutorials

This article provides hand-picked professional Flash tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. Most sources can serve as the entry point for further tutorials.

101 CSS Techniques of all time...Part 1

CSS has fundamentally changed web design, it has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make various techniques to make your pages just look right.

Here's a round-up of 101 CSS techniques designers use all the time. The second part will be coming soon, stay tuned and Enjoy!

9 Essential Principles For Good Web Design

Web design can be deceptively difficult. Getting a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent...

Web Design File

Web Design File is informational common site where it introduces the Web site where a novel, wonderful technique is used. In the WEB design production, the refined Web site where creative that stimulates designer’s inspiration is high is filed.

How to use Keywords in Web Site Design

A good website needs to be user friendly and have the potential to be ranked in good position in Search Engines. The key to success lies in the right choice of keywords that are known both to the search engines and the visitor alike.

Geek Trends: 15 Footers with great usability

Footers are becoming an essential strategy to engage visitors. Leaders in the industry are moving toward implementing effective footer features and creating a place for presenting, displaying and branding to their audiences in a very personal way by providing intuitive nature.

Creating a cool 3d web design effect

Here are some very easy techniques, using gradients and layer styles, that you can use to produce nice subtle 3D effects in our web designs.

Fawnt makes font hunting easy

Fawnt is a new font link directory that's got a variety of interesting and neat-looking fonts for your computer.

Clicking on any of the font links will take you to its site or origin, where you can go download and install it on your machine. The site also keeps track of how many clicks each font has, giving you a quick way to see what's been popular. Many of the fonts are free, but several are not--unfortunately, you don't find this out until you get there.

Creating Web 2.0 Effects With Photoshop, Part 1

Corrie Haffly, walks you through the process on how to add Web 2.0 graphic goodness to your site design using non-destructive techniques. It may even take your site from boring to trendy!

The new msnbc.com

If you haven’t paid it a visit already, the new msnbc.com is worth a look. Nearly two years of research, planning, iterative design, and development went into this behemoth overhaul. It isn’t merely a redesign with a more lively, vibrant brand, but a genuine realign that thoroughly repositions the website as a separate entity from the cable channel, among other things.

Web Design 101: Floats

As browsers get better and better, creating layouts with CSS becomes easier and easier. A reliable workhorse in CSS layout options is the float property.

Here's a great article by Virgina DeBolt covering the fine art of using this web technique.

Web 2.0 Still Unheard of to Some Industries

Believe it or not, there are many businesses out there who are still not Web 2.0 savvy. Here's a great article that calls out that point.

Non-Profit design

Inside tips on designing for non-profits.

SEO tutorial for web designers

Here's a simple SEO primer for website builders and those who are more used to designing than worrying about search engines.

BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs

Welcome to the BIGLIST of SEM and SEO blogs! Here you'll find a collection of over 400 blogs maintained by the staff at TopRank Online Marketing. This edited list includes blogs that cover a range of internet marketing topics ranging from SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) to blog marketing, marketing with social media and online public relations.

Splash Pages: Do We Need Them

Yes, sometimes we do. Should we use them? No, we probably shouldn’t. In fact, there are some situations in which we might want or might even need to use them.

Dynamic Drive CSS Library

Welcome to Dynamic Drive's new CSS library! Here you'll find original, practical CSS codes and examples such as CSS menus to give your site a visual boast.

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

Take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites.

Color Theory for Web Design

Good use of color can have a big influence on a web site.

Web 2.0 & Online generators [100+]

Check out some of the more popular web 2.0 generators. These make it easy to add stuff like badges, stripes, loading gifs, rounded corners and more to your site.

300 Images From 1800 Sites

The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for brainstorming, if you will.

25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs

Here are 25 websites that make use of very little unnecessary design elements but still manage to pull off a beautiful appearance.

Check out more here at Webcreme.

How to Write a Web Site Creative Brief

Here's a good page talking about tips to writing a creative brief.

A Wall of Imagination, Ideas, Tutorials, and Web Trends

Web Designer Wall is designed and maintained by Nick La, who also runs N.Design Studio and Best Web Gallery. He likes to share ideas and design techniques. This site serves as his public blog where he posts design ideas, tutorials, and talks about modern web design trends.