The 10 Most Important Skills You Need to be a Web Designer Here are my top 10 web design skills that you WILL need to master to become an effective web designer. If you’re serious about mastering web design and marketing, check out the Pro Web Design Alliance. See how Jordan benefited from the course forum and Google hangout sessions to make his and his clients’ sites better. Your priorities may be different (and my priorities may be different a few months down the line). And I’d add that you don’t need all these skills in any particular measure to make it in web design. #1. I’m convinced the #1 most important skill for a web designer is the ability to use words effectively. If you can craft a series of web pages into a conversation that communicates what you need to communicate, informs, and calls your visitors to take the actions you want, your web site can be a great success, even if it’s graphically plain – hey, even if it’s ugly! Effective wording is of singular importance in several highly important factors in the success of web pages: #2.
Search Engine Promotion Tools, Articles And Promotion Software Create a Slick and Minimalist Web Layout in Photoshop In this Photoshop web design tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create a slick and minimal-looking website layout. We will use the 960 Grid System as a template to make it easy to align the design elements on the layout. Preview Here’s a preview of what we’ll be creating together, click the image to enlarge. Create a new Photoshop document 1 We’ll be using the 960 Grid System (download it at as a starting template. Creating the background 2 First of all, right-click on the Background layer in the Layers Panel and then choose Layer From Background. 3 Now select the Gradient Tool (G), set your Foreground color to #efefef and your background color to #cacaca. Designing the header section 4 We’ll add a new horizontal guide at the 50px mark from the top of the document to set our top borders. 5 We’ll start adding our title and slogan; select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type your site’s name and your slogan. "YourName" "some awesome slogan" Creating our navigation Conclusion
Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices | Design Showcas Advertisement Structure and hierarchy reduce complexity and improve readability. The more organized your articles or web-sites are, the easier it is for users to follow your arguments and get the message you are trying to deliver. In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present the information as logically separated data chunks. Search engines almost always use pagination; newspapers tend to make use of it for navigation through the parts of rather large articles. In most cases pagination is better than traditional “previous – next” navigation as it offers visitors a more quick and convenient navigation through the site. Let’s take a look at the good practices of pagination design as well as some examples of when and how the pagination is usually implemented. Good Practices Of Pagination Design(7 Aspects according to Faruk Ates) Related References Mistake #1: Navigation Options Are Invisible But most importantly, the navigation options should be visible. Gallery
8 Re-Stained PaperTextures I'm always looking for ways to combine existing textures to make new and interesting resources for you guys. This time around I took a bunch of paper textures, some of them stained, and combined them in layers with different blending modes in Photoshop. I also used a high-res set of watercolor brushes to add a little extra detail. The outcome is a brand new set of textures for you guys to utilize in your designs. I hope you like 'em! Click on the textures below to download the high-res version or download them all in a zip file at the bottom of the post. If you've used L&T textures in commercial work or earned a profit from them in your designs, please consider making a donation to Lost & Taken.
30 More Excellent Blog Designs | Design Showcase | Smashing Maga Advertisement It’s not hard to design a weblog, but it’s getting harder when you try to achieve a unique weblog design. It doesn’t matter what weblog-engine you are using — frequently used themes tend to become boring over time, and they also don’t necessarily reflect the unique identity of the blogger. To create an original design you need fresh ideas and creative design solutions. However, you don’t need to go too far with your design experiments. Basically that’s a close attention to finest details which makes a weblog stand out and gives it a fresh flavour and soft touch visitors can recognize immediately. We’ve selected some more of them — over 30 excellent weblog designs with unusual design approaches; these blogs don’t only have a unique voice, but they also pay close attention to the finest design details. You might find not all of the designs listed below beautiful; but that’s not what it’s about. Simplicity and Whitespace Andreas Pihlström Theocacao Elitist Snob Blabolnik TNTPixel
Website Design Tutorial How Do I Put My Pages On the Web? Are you confused about how to put your pages on the web? Well, you are not alone. This is probably the number one mystery for most people when they create their first web site. You need to know the address of the where your site is hosted. Lets look at each of these one by one. Address of Where is Your Web Site Located Just like your house has an address that makes it easy to locate, your web site needs an address for people to view pages and an address for you to place your files. Notice that browsing pages and loading your files require two different addresses. Lets look at the sample site below for an example. Your Internet Service Provider will provide you with your FTP address. Your User Name and Password. Dedicated FTP software-- There are programs whose only job in life to to send and retrieve files using file transfer protocol. On-line Site Builders-- On line site builders automatically place your pages in the correct location.
10 great Web site designs/redesigns of 2007 | Webware : Cool Web These are some of our favorite new designs, and redesigns from 2007. We don't often blog about outstanding design as much function at Webware, but it's a very important aspect of how we interact with Webware, and what people see when they first come to a site. All of these sites were either new in 2007, or received major redesigns. Twitter Twitter, which has really taken off this year, took a page from some popular blogging services like Wordpress and Blogger to let users tweak and style the way their user pages look. Apple .Mac photo galleries Apple's .Mac service got a considerable upgrade earlier this year, and even non-members can enjoy the new photo galleries. Continue reading to see the rest... Google Docs and Spreadsheets While the editing tools have remained the same, the front end for managing your online documents on Google's Docs and Spreadsheets service was given a massive overhaul in late June. Adobe Buzzword Pownce Vimeo Picnik Picnik. Current Facebook for the iPhone Fluther
How To Design a Website in One Hour For most professional designers, time equals money. Creating the same quality work in less time means you can earn more money -- so there is a significant incentive to work efficiently. In this tutorial I'm going to explain how it's possible to design an entire website in under an hour, and I'll show examples of the site along the entire process and at completion. You probably don't want to do this for any really important projects you're working on, but hopefully this exercise will give you a few tips to make your design process more efficient while still maintaining really high quality work. Okay, let's take a look at how this works: General Principles There are several principles that make it possible to create a website concept in one hour. Separate planning from designingUse pre-made resources for certain design elements (like icons)Collect all resources and plans BEFORE beginning the design 0:00—Kill Distractions 0:05—Plan & Sketch 0:15—Collect All Materials 0:25—Rough Concept
Thrudb - faster and cheaper than SimpleDB By Ilya Grigorik on December 28, 2007 Amazon's recent announcement of SimpleDB generated a lot of buzz in the community - finally, a database service for our virtual infrastructure! Well, not so fast. SimpleDB is a far cry from the usual RDMBS we're all used to, and it's best described as a key-value store (BerkeleyDB, really), or a meta-data storage layer for your S3 objects. Document-oriented databases belong to a different paradigm and a realization that a run off the mill RDMBS is not a panacea to every problem. However, there is also a new kid on the block, and boy does it look promising - Thrudoc. Thrudb - looking under the hood Thrudb is an attempt to simplify the management of the modern web data layer (indexing, caching, replication, backup) by providing a consistent set of services: Thrucene for indexing, Throxy for partitioning and load balancing, and Thrudoc for document storage. Thrudoc storage engines Disk+S3 - one engine to rule them all Optional memcached layer for speed
Free Stock Photos for your Website 11 Solid Sources :: Echo Enduring Blog Looking for some photos for your website or blog? Looking for an option that won’t break the bank? There are a lot of great stock photography sites out there that offer their wares at reasonable prices, especially for the low resolution images that are typically needed for the net. But, while cheap is good, free is even better! Wouldn’t you agree? When I first started looking for free stock photography a few years ago (on account of working on virtually no budget), I was amazed at just how much material was actually out there! Collections Collections are sites – or parts of sites – that have a standing archive of free photographs for you to download and use in your designs. stock.xchng Probably the largest and most well known repository of free stock photos, stock.xchng is an invaluable resource for finding free stock photos. stock.xchng There is a lot of really great stock on this site, but there is not a lot of consistency. Stock Vault StockVault PhotoVaco PhotoVaco FreeDigitalPhotos Dreamstime
A styleguide for people who don’t like styleguides » LifeClever Most major corporations have strict guidelines detailing how their logos should be used. Some can be cumbersome, espousing rules for everything from minimum size requirements to how it should look on the back of a gas guzzling 4×4. The GE styleguide, for example, is a tome at over 300 pages. Imagine my shock, when I stumbled upon MTV’s identity guidelines. It’s one page! The styleguide shows the main artwork, suggested colors, and some things not to do to the logo. …a styleguide for people who don’t like styleguides. I don’t get the “Hijacking Reality” part, but the idea of creating a minimal styleguide that’s easy for people to understand and distribute is great. I think it’s quite brilliant. Update (September 3): Apologies, I’ve made an error. Update (September 4): Florian Schmitt, Creative Director of Hi-Res, wrote me to clarify the matter: I’ve gone ahead and striked through the parts of the original post that mistakenly credited the one-page styleguide to Hi-Res.