Web 3.0 Conference & Expo

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo, explore the strategies, tools, technologies and the big ideas necessary for building impactful, socially relevant, and profitable Web 3.0 products, services and companies.

The Top 15 Most Influential Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 is a term coined in recent years that describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and social indexes.

25 Refreshingly Blue Website Designs

If you have ever designed a website such as these blue website designs, than you probably have had to come up with a color scheme or were given a color scheme to work with. Choosing colors is often the first and one of the most important steps of any deign process. 

30 Creative Website Headers

One of the first things new visitors will notice upon arriving at your website is your header. Some sites are able to make an excellent first impression by featuring an artistic or creative header. This mini gallery post is a collection of some of the more inspiring headers out there.

8 Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators

My good friend, Avinash Kaushik, points out some examples for choosing good key performance indicators.

Good Websites...Bad Websites...How do you tell?

What determines whether a website is good or bad? Why do we leave a website that we found to be a bad experience? Here are some factors that help influence our decision.

Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications

Online forms can be challenging as even in their utility and necessity, we generally need to lure users to complete them. Afshan Kirmani takes the example of an online email application form and explains some fundamental principles that can help us design effective forms.

David Dairey featured in HOW magazine

www.davidairey.com has been featured in the October 2008 issue of HOW Magazine — the leading creativity, business and technology magazine for graphic designers.

SEO isn't just for web pages

Here are 11 tips for optimizing PDFs for search engines.

Web Site Navigation Design Showcase

Looking for ideas on design navigation for your web site. Review these 70+ examples for ideas.

9 Of The Best Ways To Present A Website To A Client

The design phase of creating a website is fairly standard for most web designers however when it comes to presenting the mock up to a client before slicing / coding the design, some problems do arise.

10 hot web redesigns of 2008

Here are so early web redesigns that bear reviewing.

Yahoo coming up with new look and feel

Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.

User Experinece Week

User Experience Week was held in San Francisco, CA from August 12 – 15. Boxes and Arrows, in co-operation with Adaptive Path, interviewed some of the great speakers for your design listening enjoyment.

How Chrome changed the web overnight

The Chrome browser is a big step forward for the web, and it arrived from Google to your Windows desktop virtually overnight. The open source browser comes in a streamlined package, but packs enough power to treat websites like applications. See which enhancements make the Chrome browser a shocking leap forward for web development.

Twitter and Google Analytics

Justin Cutroni shares his thoughts about discovering Twitters value via Google Analytics.

How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business

It’s crucial to have simple web designs to allow the user to quickly find the information they need, especially if you are selling a product. If the page is cluttered with useless text, widgets or unrelated products, the site becomes meaningless.

10 Tools for evaluating web design accessibility

Testing for web accessibility (how usable a website is by individuals with disabilities) is an often neglected part of web design and development.

Here are 10 free tools to help you evaluate and correct issues which decrease your website’s accessibility.

Interview with Jacob Gube of Six Revisions

Jacob Gube is the man behind Six Revisions, a popular web design and development blog. He is easily one of the most responsive and helpful bloggers that I’ve come across in the design blogging niche. Go to the interview here,and then go to Jacob's blog site.

Sitemasher

At Sitemasher, they believe that building and maintaining websites should be much easier than it has been to date. Their philosophy is to simplify and streamline the lifecycle of building, managing, and optimizing powerful, fully functional websites.

Looking for good design community news resources?

In the design blogging niche many sites are starting to post community news sections where readers can submit a link to one of their own posts or to someone else’s post that they appreciate. I found DesignM.ag to be a good source.

Here are a few more you may find of interest:

1. Vandelay Design

2. 11 websites to promote your design news

9 amazing websites

Here are 9 amazing sites based upon excellence in creativity and design, courtesy of positivespaceblog.com.

13 hand-picked Vertical and horizontal CSS Menus

This is a list of vertical and horizontal CSS menus, it includes 13 various styles of navigation menus, vertical menus, and tab menus. Navigation menus is one of the most important elements for web design.

Woork

Here's an interesting blog by Antonio Lupetti (Rome,, Italy) focused on the web.

Firebug

Firebug is a web development tool for tweaking CSS, debugging JavaScript and more. In part, it's like juiced-up "view source" for seeing how sites are put together. But Firebug really shines when it's used to streamline your own development.

Pixel perfect with Firebug

Firebug gives you control to change the position of elements and see the changes immediately in the browser. No Save-Cmd-Tab-Reload going on here. One thing missing from Firebug is the ability to see a mockup image of a site overlayed on the actual site. This feature exists in a Firebug extension called PixelPerfect.

Some HTML purists will tell you that attempting to obtain true pixel perfection will inevitably result in messy code. But I say if it's possible to easily make your web page look exactly like you designed it, go forth and be a perfectionist.

With PixelPerfect, you set an overlay graphic and give it a transparency level. Then you can make CSS adjustments, check them against your mockup, and then make a few more tweaks.

SEO

If you're interested in best practices for search engine optimization, here's a good seo blog site that I just discovered.

5 advanced css and javascript coding solutions

Here are 5 advanced elegant coding solutions. You should probably have some CSS-knowledge already before starting reading this article.

The Art & Design Video Tutorial Library

The professional designers and artists of Sessions faculty share their secrets to producing beautiful work. Each video delivers either a desktop or in-studio view of the designer at work as they walk you through a technique that will improve your skills and enhance your portfolio.

Get free, immediate access to the Art and Design Video Tutorial Library. Sign up now

Photoshop Tutorials & Plugins

Check out this great PhotoShop support website. You're bound to find anything and everything for PhotoShop here.

Javascript resources

Here are some great javascript resources to se on your website.

Two Designers, Two Years, One Facelift...

While this article from boxes and arrows is from Feb/2007, the information covering usability, visual design, web standard, and more, is very interesting.

It’s back, it’s improved, and it’s hungry for your data. It’s A List Apart’s second annual survey for people who make websites.

Tips for creative soloprenuers

When building your market, don’t start from scratch if you can avoid it. The foundation of your business should be rooted strongly in something you know well and in which you already have some expertise.

Tools & Techniques for managing website evolution

Here's a great resource of information centered around user centered design.

Creating user centred taxonomies on FUMSI

This is the first in a two-part article about the mechanics of creating user centred taxonomies.

How will you use the power of web 2.0?

Lynda

If you're looking for great web resources, solutions, online training; check out Lynda.com.

Web design studio of the week

Urban Eye Media is a globally oriented Technology and Web Design company designed with the dynamic business manager in mind. Boasting of highly experienced personnel dedicated to various disciplines of web development and web design, Considered to be a Maverick in the Indian web design.

Upgrading to Web 2.5

Design styles and trends have their place – there is more to their use and their success than simply their visual appeal to other designers. The masses respond well to the web2.0 idea …

How to boost traffic to your website

Most important is to make it easy to find your web site and identify relevant terms to use for search engines.

Keyword analysis tools identified in this article: Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

The real value of keyword-rich domains

David Airey discusses what the real value is behind 'keywords'.

Adaptive Path explores the future of the browser

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series.

Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

What Makes Someone Leave Your Website?

So what's the secret to keep your audience from leaving your web site right away, rather than staying around and probing deeper into your site?

SEO and the web designer

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that cannot truly be accomplished by designing a website in a particular way, although a designer can cripple a site’s chances with a poor foundation.

Creative Navigation

While navigation is key to a website, getting creative can allow the opportunity to present some attractive visual elements to a site.

14 design retrospectives

Looking at the results of a good website design helps improve and inspires our own designs, getting into the mind of a designer can be invaluable.

Typographica

Typographica is a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.

Fuzzy Thinking and sharp type

Customers want their logos, buttons and fonts to be 'shapened'. It's not that easy.

Designing a guided tour

Here are some helpful tips when designing and laying out the pages for a website. As the author points out, it’s important to keep in mind that each page has a specific job to do according to the needs, desires and expectations of our client and the site’s end users.

Partnering and client relationships

Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of the job. Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible.

The Employable Web Designer

Here's a great article for those aspiring to be a web designer.

MAX

Register for Adobe's biggest event of the year, MAX 2008, where you can join thousands of other Adobe users to share ideas, find inspiration, and learn from industry experts.

This year, we’re offering more for design professionals than ever before. If you plan to design websites, create rich interactive content, bring video online, build experiences for mobile devices, or use print and web together more effectively, then you can’t afford to miss MAX 2008.

Live or Die by the mockup

This article by Luke Wroblewaki is a little dated, but the message is still valid today.

Strategy with design

What's changed in the last several years that gave designers a seat at the boardroom table and why do we have technology and information overload to thank for it?

Creating the iPhone interface on Fireworks

Fabiano is going to show you how to do the interface on Fireworks.

Adding Flash Files to a webpage in Dreamweaver

Janine Warner walks you through the process of adding a flash file when using Dreamweaver.

Layers

If you're an avid fan and user of Adobe products, then you'll want to go to their magazine, Layers.

You find tutorials, reviews, forums, and more.

Pixel2life

Pixel2life.com is the internet’s largest tutorial index catering to graphic designers, webmasters and programmers, with 41,410 tutorials listed in 87 categories! They also feature a massive and diversified community with 33,831 registered members that participate on our Forums. P2L is also the provider of many additional resources to members and guests, such as articles, programming script and code gallery, hardware reviews, free graphics and stock photography and much more!

How does your website look in different browsers?

Check out this little website called BrowserShots where you can test your web design in different browsers. This is great for web designers and web developers alike who need to save time and see what a particular website looks like on other peoples computers.

It is a free open-source online service and 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 so you can see what your website looks like on different browsers. Its really nifty!

User Ranked Free Fonts

There are an infinite amount of resources and lists for great free fonts. Have a look at the current highest ranked font from a list of 11 quality font websites.

45 excellent free web templates

Free Design Templates don’t have to be ugly, cluttered,and boring, Some web-sites offer high quality templates for free you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions.

Convert your image to vector online...for free

If you would like to convert any image to vector, there is an easy way to do that without using any software like Photoshop or Illustrator. Vector Magic allows you to convert images to vector directly from their website.


Just upload any image from your computer. It is very easy to use, just follow the instruction and you will have your vector image. Then select the output vector (EPS) or in Bitmap (PNG) to download. They have are different prize-plans, but if you register new you will get 2 tries for free.

Create Web 2.0 Progress Bars: jQuery, DHTM, JS CSS, Photoshop

Progress Bars is one of the most interesting components that web designers like to use in their projects. They can be used in various places such as: page loading, redirecting, uploading files, sending information using Ajax and so forth.

Steps to gaining more web traffic

Anyone who has ever looked at a successful blog, or website will tell you that the reason it is probably successful, is because of the content. There is usually lots of copy, and even with the large quantity it is still extremely easy and not overwhelming in the least bit to navigate. Set some goals, grab a cup of joe, and improve your traffic right now!

Making Animated Flash Web Banners in Keynote

7 Female Graphic Designers That'll Rock Your Socks Off

In this article Kelly Erickson showcases 7 truly unique and inspirational female graphic designers with a brief bio on each.

Anatomy of a redesign

Redesigning an established website can lead to boom or bust. Dan Grabham looks at three sites that have worked hard on renewing their online presence. Theres a free PDF download.

csswebsite

Css Website is an innovative gallery of simple websites. Its purpose is to showcase designer’s work and to expand the CSS design community. We propose a classification by color and contents for a better usability.

   

How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients?

This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a designer to “speak business” — even if it’s just to get your foot in the door or land a big project.

Welcome To Web Topia

Thank you to those who keep coming back to Web Topia. To help keep providing you more insightful information for designing web sites, we've been busy adding additional information for you.

If you look to the right navigation column you'll see we've added additional links under 'General Design Information', and have added the following categories:

1. Web Design
   
2. Resources
3. Show Cases
4. Development
5. Adobe

We'll be adding more, so we hope you'll keep coming back, plus spread the word about our blog devoted to web design. Thank you.

Using CSS to Do Anything: 50+ Creative Examples and Tutorials

For those who could've find it from the previous blog entry, here's the link to the CCS tutorials.

CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Tips, Demos and Best Practices

The main idea behind CSS-based layouts is offering more flexibility and enhancing the visual experience of visitors. Some important tips and related key-factors can help to learn basics and keep essential techniques in mind.

Learn icon designing: The best of tutorials and articles

Maybe you think that designing an Icon is very difficult and just some professionals can do it.

Well, here are some professionals to teach you how to design your own simple icons via tutorials they have written.
The tutorials are broken down into 3 categories; Articles, Photoshop, and illustrator Tutorials.

Simple Tabbing System

Here's a blog site showing how to create simple tabbing system. It is a very common technique nowadays. Especially for those magazine site, news or blogs that contain a lot of sections or contents.

Slicing and dicing

How slice your web layout.

50 must-read resources for incredible web design

Here are some resources to help you if you're a new web designer or for those who've already started. Learning how to design and build beautiful web sites takes time, effort and a little sweat. Read on.

20 best web design studios from around the world

As web designers and developers we all strive to be the best. But the bottom line is that you are only as good as your client list. This collection of leading web design and interactive agencies not only talk the talk; they walk the walk as well.

14 Design competitions with deadline in August

Have you thought about a competition that will recognise your skills and will give a consistent prize for your talent and imagination? Well, there are 14 design contests in here with various themes that will surely attract some of you.

10 Tips to Finding Great Web Design and Development Services

Gain a better understanding of what to look for in a Web design and development company, how to ask for it and how to ensure that what you pay for is really what you need, writes Molly Holschlag.

30 CSS Websites for design inspiration

Here's a collection of 30 creative websites designed using CSS which will certainly provide inspiration to many of us. These websites reflect ingenuity and innovation. Please note that most of these websites are image heavy, so be patient while they load in your browsers.

The Internet is Color Blind

In the U.S. 7% of the male population – or about 10.5 million men – and 0.4% of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently.

For those of us who see colors just fine, it is hard to imagine what those with color blindness are seeing. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter.

See examples here.

Studio 7 Designs

Studio 7 Designs Inc is located in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. They’re a forward thinking design company specializing in creating strong branding for social and environmentally-conscious companies.

Tools and techniques for managing website evolution

This post started from the ideas of a two-part post written last year by Seth Gottlieb & Brice Dunwoodie. The post is a point of reference for those involved in the daily running and development of sites that are continually evolving. Read the article here.

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.

Start conference

Been thinking of starting a company? Maybe started one recently? Or just have entrepreneurial tendencies in your blood? Check out Start. Friends and colleagues, Jeffrey Veen and Bryan Mason, are hosting a one-day conference in San Francisco on August 7 “for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.”

SynthaSite Launches New Interface To Simplify WYSIWYG Site Creation

SynthaSite, an AJAX-based webpage editor that lets users create websites by dragging-and-dropping, has relaunched with a new interface that it hopes will make the site more appealing to casual web designers. While most of the feature set will stay the same, the company believes that the new interface will expose users to features that were hidden in confusing menus in the last iteration of the site.

One of the most useful features of SynthaSite is its integration with Picnik, an online image editing site. Users can easily manipulate the images they’ve uploaded to SynthaSite using Picnik’s browser-based editor, with the changes seamlessly reflected in their SynthaSite library.

Mark Boulton's Freelance Design Secrets

Mark Boulton Design is a small design studio based in Cardiff, UK, which specializes in designing simple, beautiful interfaces for the Web. In this interview, Mark Boulton, owner and designer, talks about how it all happened, and to share some important factors of running a successful design business. Read the interview here.

Why make sites’ prototypes

Part of the whole web development process is making prototypes of a page or a whole site. Why do this? How to do this? What are the benefits of doing it?

Future of web design

Mark it on your calendar.

WebsiteTips

WebsiteTips.com is an educational Web site design and development resource especially for Web site owners, Web designers, Web professionals, webmasters, teachers and educators, students, and anyone wanting to learn about Web sites.

15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages

Here’s a few useful, free tools to help you create and sustain high-performance web applications.

Inspiredology

Inspiredology is a new resource that covers everything that inspires . Most sites show Best of galleries and massive databases of thumbnail sized screen shots of css sites. This site provides insights to get inspired. If you find yourself stuck or looking on how you can make your project better, visit inspiredology.com to get yourself out of that dark creative hole.

Designoogle

A custom search engine that lets you search for inspiration based on keyword or keyphrase.

Website of the week

StylizedWeb is blog about web trends and tutorials, KnowHow community forum and InspireMe inspiration gallery, designed and maintained by Dejan Cancarevic. Visit StylizedWeb.

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.

10 SEO Rules for Designers

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a vital component of any website. As a web designer or blogger, it’s important you understand how SEO works. Here are ten easy rules that will immediately improve the SEO on all of your web sites.

Faux Absolute Positioning

There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

25 Websites With Beautiful Background

Backgrounds are one of the most important aspects in the overall design and feel of a web page, Designers try to impress visitors with appealing design elements, Background images are one of those , unfortunately they are often overlooked or misused, This section will attempt to Give some examples of websites which used page backgrounds impressively.

Top 10 Navigation Menus

The navigation menu is a fundamental part of a web design, no longer is it okay to simply have a load of hyperlinks linking to the different main pages of a website. It is now normal to see hover effects on menus and in this collection. Check them out.