When designing a website, or paying someone to create one, you should have at least one thing in mind: usability. Even if a website looks great, if it confuses us, we will leave (and probably not be back). Most of our browsing sessions are limited to a short time span, browsing at will until we find something that scratches our itch. Here’s a diagram from the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug:

How We Really Use The Web - Steve Krug

It’s something that can be lost after countless hours designing the perfect “looking” website, while forgetting the basics or the point of a website. Remember this key fact when developing your website and in your discussions with your web designer.

On a side note, I highly recommend Steve Krug’s book for any business owner, web designer, or anyone involved in the industry (plus it’s a quick read).

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1. Great Blogs for Web Design, Graphic Design, and Business
2. Website Accessibility
3. Validating Your Website

With the amount of blog reading that we do, we wanted to share with you our top picks. We read from these blogs every day in order to stay on top in the industry, and to hone in our skills.

1. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine has the most interesting and up-to-date (in our opinion) information in the industry. Their posts are always educational and informative. What’s great is that they mix it up with a few educational articles, and then freebies or how-to’s helping you further yourself. If you haven’t given Smashing Magazine a chance, try a few of their articles — you won’t be disappointed.

Smashing Magazine

2. A List Apart

A List Apart is one of the top blogs for in-depth coding and web design. Their posts cater to validation, generally the correct way to do anything web design. Their articles are in-depth so plan on more than one cup of coffee, but also plan on expanding your knowledge and become a better web designer in general.

A List Apart

3. Noupe

Noupe offers tons of free goodies with great tutorials as well. Browse around and you are sure to find something that you have been looking for all along. They even post links to other sites regarding industry news which is refreshing.

Noupe

4. You The Designer

You The Designer is a great site for getting inspiration, tips, and freebies as well.

You The Designer

5. Doug Williams

Doug has great information whether web design, graphic design, search engine optimization, and even business help. His blog will help you become familiar with the industry as a whole — a blog you don’t want to miss.

Doug Williams Blog

Well that just about does it for now. Although we do read many more blogs – and there are many other greats, we feel these are the most important to share with you. If you keep up-to-date on these blogs alone, you will have more than enough information to keep you at the front lines of the industry and expand your knowledge to become a leader in your niche.

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3. Website Design Checklist

When writing newsletters, one of the most common problem to reaching your clients is the spam filter. As there are many tips and tricks out there for avoiding this, covering the common “blacklisted” words can help you get through to your clients.

Here are some alot of words and phrases that you should try to avoid in your newsletters (or any e-mails for that matter):

And More:

.

This is a large list, but being aware of these words can keep your newsletter out of the spam filter, and into your clients hands.

This blog post was inspired by:

http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/ezine-publishing/avoid_spam_filters.html

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm

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A fairly new design that has been making its way around, is the horizontal layout. Although gaining popularity, you haven’t seen it on any of your major websites. A horizontal layout is one where you scroll through a website left to right, rather than scrolling down to read more information. The Urban Outfitters blog is a great example of this.

Once you get the hang of using the website, it’s not all that bad — it makes sense. But that’s the catch, people have to figure out how to navigate your website, and with the amount of information that we have at our finger tips, I don’t know if we have the time to learn a new way to browse a website.

The last thing you want your visitors to do is think, especially when looking for information on your website. The ultimate goal is allowing your visitors to find the information they are looking for without a battle. Once they become challenged, they may leave and never return.

One thing is for certain, once you browse a horizontal site it does feel natural. Everything we read is left to right so it makes sense. It is a step that your competitors most likely aren’t making, but then again — there might be a reason for that.

What do you think?

No related posts.

I know this is an old concept to some out there, but many are still not validating their websites. Validation doesn’t exactly lend towards helping finish your client’s website in time, but it has many benefits that can help in the long run.

1. Cross Browser Compatibility

By validating your website, it gives you the confidence that it will look the same in all browsers. It’s actually simple compared to going to Browser Shots every time to see how your website looks, just to dial it in. Or even downloading a ton of browsers, and then testing them individually. My point, by validating you don’t have to do this – saving you time.

2. Search Engine Optimization

With search engine robots becoming increasingly smarter every day, it is very important to create complaint code throughout your website. Reason being, if your website confuses a robot while it’s crawling, it will see this as a beginner level website, and will lower your ranking on Google. Since the validation service will make sure you have certain attributes such as an alt tag with an image, this will also double as making your website search engine friendly, user friendly, and also able to be used by the visually impaired.

3. A Validating Conclusion

Although it might take you more time to validate than not- once you understand the validation systems, you will have taught yourself the right way to code, and therefore giving you a better understanding of back-end web design in general. It will not only help the website that you are working on become more  accessible, but will also act as a benefit to the programmer in the long run.

Validate your HTML / XHTML

Validate your CSS stylesheet

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Here are a few goodies that my fellow web designers will appreciate and add to their toolbox — if they haven’t already.

Creates word clouds and also doubles as a great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool.

Creates custom buttons.

Quickly edit text and recieve the CSS style for it.

View your website from multiple browsers in a matter of minutes.

Tons of free textures.

Great custom background generator.

An open source website tool that allows you to view your hot and cold click zones.

Web 2.0 badges generator.

Allows you to create custom 3-D boxes.

Choose your favorite loading gif.

Create great looking backgrounds.

Find popular buttons.

Quick and easy css tabs.

Create creative text wrappers.

Great color palettes.

Free fonts.

Turn your images into a favorite icon.

Helps you find an html character entity.

Generate HTML and CSS for rounded corners.

Look up Whois information.

Custom stripe backgrounds.

Great CSS grid builder.

Search and find great icons.

Making up words to help with your domain name.

Easy form creator.

Create custom menus quickly.

Upload your image and reflect it.

Lastly, TL Box features a ton of tools for web designers, programmers, and system administrators.

Enjoy!

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