Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops

E-Commerce websites are often thought of as typically being unattractive or poorly designed. Here's a list of 35 appealing designs of online shops. Those featured in this post include examples from a variety of different industries and showcase several different styles of design.

Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices

The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design. It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to facilitate content browsing.

Vital Techniques & Best Practices For Effective Web Design

Creating beautiful, unique websites seems to get harder every day. There are so many amazing website designs out there that coming up with something fresh and different is getting close to impossible.

40 Creative and Inspiring Website Backgrounds Techniques

Web designers compete to impress visitors with distinctive and appealing visual elements. Background images are one of those visual elements that when designed properly, can create an amazing atmosphere and convey the style the designer has chosen.

Inline Validation in Web Forms

Web forms aren’t great conversationalists. They ask a bunch of questions, then wait until you answer them all before they respond. So when you register for that cool social network or use an e-commerce site, it’s pretty much a monologue.

HTML 5 gallery

See how several sites are already using the new HTML 5 elements. Use the source, Luke!

Get Ready for HTML 5

With support in Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Opera, and Safari, HTML 5 is coming at you like a runaway train. Here are some suggestions to help you prepare to get on board rather than be left at the platform or tied to the tracks.

35 Websites To Teach You How To Use CSS Effectively

CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets) are the modern standard for presenting website. Combined with structural markup language like HTML, XHTML – CSS fully take care about presentation part, creating that good concept – HTML = Content, CSS = Presentation.

91 Trendy Contact And Web Forms For Creative Inspiration

This article showcases modern and interesting contact/web form solutions found around the Internet.

38 jQuery And CSS Drop Down Multi Level Menu Solutions

Here you’ll find 38 mainly jquery and CSS based drop-down or just multi level menu tutorials with down loadable files and explanations as well.

The Case for Conservative Web Site Design

Web design isn't about creativity alone. It depends crucially on reader expectations.

Essential Tips for Designing an Effective Homepage

The homepage is what many people see when first encountering a website, and it can lead to a lasting impression (negative or positive) that can affect their decision to return to it.

30 Creative Examples of Javascript Slider & Scrollers

Some days before we are using flash for buttons, gallery etc, later now JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Mootools , Scriptallicious and Prototype replace the flash with a light weight code and we can get the same effect like flash, that gives web designers and developers a lot a space for creative thinking

But how to use them effectively in such a way it won’t distract the users attention and it should add value to the website.

How to Make a Mega Drop-Down Menu

Jon Phillips of Spyre Studios brings us a great Mega Menu tutorial. This tutorial is suitable for all levels of web designers and developers. All the files are attached so you can work your way from beginning to end.

Editorial Style

People read differently on the web, and a new writing genre designed to accommodate the reading habits of online users has emerged.

Video Demo: New and Notable on Cisco.com

Martin Hardee [Director of User Experince at Cisco] recently, put together a breezy and informal overview of some of the improvements implemented to Cisco.com. There are a couple of nifty "hidden secrets" featured on this video, so it's worth a look.



(Note that a couple of features we labeled as "Coming Soon" have already gone live in the few weeks since we recorded this for Cisco Live!)

Mastering CSS, Part 1: Styling Design Elements

Here are fresh tips and techniques for creating and styling design elements with CSS.

HTML5 and The Future of the Web

Some have embraced it, some have discarded it as too far in the future, and some have abandoned a misused friend in favor of an old flame in preparation. Whatever side of the debate you’re on, you’ve most likely heard all the blogging chatter surrounding the “new hotness” that is HTML5.

35 Beautiful Photography Websites

Interest in photography has exploded over the last 10 years, largely thanks to the developments in digital photography.

CSS 3 Cheat Sheet (PDF)

Here's a CSS 3 cheat sheet that provides the main features of CSS 3 in a handy, printable reference card.

Quality-Price-Ratio in Web Design (Pricing Design Work)

The quality of a design and the monetary cost of producing or procuring that design have absolutely no relationship whatsoever.

40 Really Useful Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

No matter you want to design a banner or logo, text effect is very important. Why? It is because a beautiful text effect on the banner or logo will attracts the visitor and also delivers a better message.

110 Fresh Logo Designs For Design Inspiration

A logo is a graphical element that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand.

Beating The Creative Blocks – A Creative Discussion #1 Wrap-up

How do you beat the creative block? This is a question we often tackle alone, but it seems that when it is opened up for discussion, we have a lot of the same ideas and ways we deal with the blocks that bar us from getting our creativity on.

6 Easy Ways To Cure A Nasty Case Of Redesign-itis

Why d0 you redesign so many times? Why weren't you happy with those previous designs?

8 Important SEO Techniques To Kickstart Your Website

When you are starting a website or blog, it is important to have your search engine optimizing techniques ready. Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) is important, because if SEO is implanted correctly, the search engines supply a large number of visitors for your site.

28 Sites Producing Podcasts And Screencasts To Help You Grow As A Designer And Developer

Reading blogs and tutorials is pretty good, in fact it’s great! You can learn a lot by doing this, but actually seeing and hearing (video and/or audio format), is a whole different world.

Rejected Designs and What We Should Do With Them

When it comes to web design, a standard practice in the industry is to create multiple mock-ups of a design and have the client choose which one they think is most suitable like the most. What usually happens is that rejected designs get thrown away or stored deep down in the murky depths of a hard drive somewhere to never be seen again.

30 Awesome and Well Designed Mac App Websites

Here you can admire 30 absolutely amazing mac software, iphone app websites. Feel free to download any cool app when you are browsing through.

9 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Easy Web Development

If there is one reason web designers love using Firefox, it must be the huge variety of add-ons. Firefox is very flexible. There are thousands of add-ons available on Mozilla’s site and we can add them to our Firefox freely.

Using htaccess files for pretty URLS

While some claim pretty URLs help in search engine rankings, the debate here is fierce, we can all agree that pretty URLs make things easier for our users and adds a level of professionalism and polish to any web application.

20 Inspirational, Clean E-Commerce Website Designs

Many e-commerce websites tend to get very cluttered and suffer from not being user friendly. In this post you'll see a showcase of 20 e-commerce sites that have taken a different approach.

9 Characteristics of Well-Designed E-Commerce Websites

E-commerce web design and development presents some unique challenges that you won’t always face with other types of web design.

How to Make Your Web Design Stand out from the Crowd

All web designers want their work to stand out from the crowd … but what does that take?

Seven Reasons to Switch Web Analytics Tools

Most organizations are on their third or fourth Web analytics tool by now. The funny part is that some are switching from tool A to tool B, while others are switching from tool B to tool A. Are they all so bad? Yes, they are -- and here are the reasons.

20 Excellent Examples of Using Animals in Web Design

Well-drawn animal illustrations can make for a fantastic design element for websites and web applications.

HOW Designers’ Bootcamps

The HOW Designers’ Bootcamps are a series of in-depth, seminar-style workshops designed to help you grow your design business, finesse your career, perfect your marketing efforts or move smoothly into web design

Amazing Watercolor Effect in Pixelmator

This tutorial will show you how to create a really cool effect using some watercolor brushes mixed with photos.

The UXD Stack: Looking At Projects

Many people in our profession use different kinds of “briefs” when they get started on a project. A brief is a short paper defining the background and preliminary understanding for a project. Some of these documents are called “Strategic Briefs” or “Creative Briefs”.

Optimise your site for iPhones

Craig Grannell explores some ideas for fine-tuning websites for Apple’s increasingly popular smartphone and its very smart browser, Mobile Safari.

Navigation and Wayfinding

In his book The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch coined the term “wayfinding” to describe his concept of environmental legibility—that is, the elements of the built environment that allow us to navigate successfully through complex spaces like cities and towns.

SEO and Website Design

Ben McKay is a SEO Manager for Mediaedge:cia, WPP, and writes about SEO consulting and the evolving challenges in his blog, Just Me and My.

PNG Optimization Guide: More Clever Techniques

As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format.

The Definitive Guide to Using Negative Margins

Out of all the CSS concepts designers have ever used, an award probably needs to be given to the use of Negative Margins as being the most least talked about method of positioning.

Text rotation with CSS

Jonathan Snook shares a simple example that works in Safari, Firefox and even Internet Explorer (using the Basic Image filter).

50+ Fresh and Unique Personal Portfolio Websites

Designers have an urge to stand out as unique, specially when building their own portfolio websites to showcase their work and skills to future employers.

40+ Vector Characters Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials

Having a unique design is a must to get your visitor’s attention. Vector characters can establish a memorable image of your site in the reader’s mind.

35 Inspirational Shopping Cart Page Designs

Shopping carts are an integral part of the online shopping experience. E-commerce designers face challenges in creating an attractive, yet user-friendly, website that will provide customers with a pleasant purchasing experience.

GIMP Training Videos

Probably more known to the Linux users, GIMP is an GNU Image Manipulation Program, also available, though not supported officially for Windows.

Reinventing the Color Picker

If you do any form of design work on the computer you’re probably familiar with the color picker.

8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces

There is a lot of information out there about various interface design techniques and patterns you can use when crafting your user interfaces and websites, solutions to common problems and general usability recommendations.

How to Listen to the User and Hear the Experience

When someone is speaking, do you think about what the other person is saying, or do you think about what you are going to say next?

Ten Simple Guidelines for Choosing the Perfect CMS

The content management system you choose can really make a huge difference in how much time you (or your clients) spend keeping a site updated and maintained.

Beautiful Gradient Effects On Web design – Research: Part 2

Here's a showcase of beautifully done gradient effects used effectively in web-design and logo design creation.

10 Tools to Improve Your Site’s Usability on a Low Budget

Testing the usability of your site is one of the smartest things you can do.

Google Chrome OS: So What?

The new Google Chrome OS is the big news in the tech world today. For those of you living under a rock, the gist is that Google's coming out with an operating system, layered on top of a Linux kernel, that will power netbooks, and eventually desktop PCs. Applications will all be Web-based, accessible via Google's Chrome browser.

Introduction to RDFa II

Learn how to add properties to an image, and how to add metadata to any item—and we’ll add a few more rules to that list.

Content Templates to the Rescue

As an industry, we’ve mostly figured out that if we don’t want content problems to sabotage our web projects, we have to plan ahead.

50 Free High-Quality and “New” (X)HTML/CSS Templates

Here are 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files). You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.

IBM - Smarter Planet

IBM leverages its branding power and smarts to try to make the planet a better (and smarter) place to work, live and do business. If you are looking for new grid designs and graphs, you'll find clean pages, graphs-a-plenty, and a very snazzy set of colorful icons... And that's just what you see on the surface. It's all about the ideas and how they can help make things better for all of us.

Understanding JavaScript Closures

JavaScript closures are considered to be advanced stuff, reserved for the gurus of the field.

Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play.

Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up

This post is not about Adsense and its simplicity. This post is about understanding Adsense and all its rules, optimization and ad placement, but mainly it’s about maximising your sites potential earnings using the different types of ads that Google offers.

Search Me

Inside the launch of Stephen Wolfram's new "computational knowledge engine."

So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources

Here's a list of resources covering — publications and blogs, books, local events, organizations, mailing lists, webinars, workshops, conferences, and schooling.

Covering the Walls

Martin Hardee from Cisco shares his office to reflect how to see a panorama view of what you're working on.

Meaning-Making in Landing Page Optimization

Trying to generalize universal truths from a single landing page test result is often a horrible idea.

'Desktop View' websites

Some creative 'desktop view' websites to check out.

12 Excellent Social News Sites for Web Designers

Social news/bookmarking websites are a great for finding useful resources, tutorials, and information on the web. These sites typically puts users in the driver’s seat by giving them the ability to submit links, vote on other people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that they don’t like.

50+ Ultimate Collection of Glow and Light Effect Tutorials in Photoshop

Glow and Light effect is very popular now a day. You can see these effects sometimes on a posters or advertisements. Here are some tutorials on the subject.

Using Wikis to document UI specifications

How your design team can benefit from wiki collaboration while avoiding its pitfalls.

UI Pattern Documentation Review

To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization.

Wellknown.as Case

Here's a tutorial on using Fireworks when building a website.

Planning the perfect site

We all want to hit the ground running when we start a new project, but a little forethought can reap huge dividends in the long run.

Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About me”-Pages

The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites.

25 Free Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap.

10 Useful CSS/JS-Coding Solutions For Web-Developers

Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them.

Handcrafted CSS

A new book by Dan Cederholm

15 Effective Tips and Tricks from the Masters of CSS

There are thousands of sites out there offering tips and tricks for using CSS. But how do you know where that information is coming from?

Web Marketers to Change User Tracking

Companies that track consumer behavior online for advertising purposes are vowing to make their practices more transparent and to give people a way to decline being shadowed.

How to make an eye-catching logo

Anybody can mock-up a logo but only good designers can make it stand out and make it a good branding tool. Here are a few tips on how you can be a better logo designer.

Introduction to RDFa

RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.”

Art Direction and the Web

Great article on principles and techniques of the art director — which relate closely to web design — and show how these can influence the overall effect of a website.

Visual Decision Making

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

30 Creative Javascript navigation menu examples

Successful, eye-catching and mainly user-friendly site navigation sometimes is key to whole web design, because users usually search for navigation at first, when they visit website.

Free Seamless Vector Pattern Resources

Patterns actually can be found almost everywhere – in print design, web design, graphic design etc.