Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.
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Create Sidebars of Equal Height with Faux Columns
CSS can sometimes be a tricky business. There are times when even the simplest of layouts take some serious brainstorming! One of those frustrating times is when you want to create a series of columns of equal height, but the content in one column might be longer than the next. Here’s where the Faux Column technique steps in, let’s take a look at how this solution can make even the most complicated layout a breeze to code up.
Create a Letterpress Effect with CSS Text-Shadow
The letterpress effect is becoming hugely popular in web design, and with a couple of modern browsers now showing support for the text-shadow CSS3 property, it’s now simple and easy to create the effect with pure CSS. No Photoshop trickery here!
10 HTML Tag Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit
You better watch out, because the HTML police are about. They scour your code and pick out the most unspeakable crimes against HTML markup. This handy list of ten HTML tag crimes sheds some light on some of the most common coding mistakes and helps provide an alternate solution. Tips include writing valid markup, making semantic choices, avoiding deprecated tags and more!
Create a Clean Modern Website Design in Photoshop
Build a complete website design mockup for a fictional design studio, starting with the creation of the initial layout then moving on to designing the individual page elements. The result is a modern, crisp and clean web page layout ready for coding.
Web Design Trend Showcase: Horizontal Bands / Horizontal Layouts
The use of horizontal bands in website design has been a growing trend over the last few years with results of a fantastic looking website layout. Not only does the use of these horizontal strips provide specific containers for each page area, but it also spans right the way across the user’s monitor.
This is especially handy when taking into consideration those with an exceptionally large monitor, helping prevent the main site content being lost in a sea of flat color.
Check out this collection of excellent websites that use horizontal bands or horizontal layouts to feature their content, and follow through to a quick walkthrough of how to create the effect yourself.
The Harsh Truth About Life as a Designer – 9 Hilarious Videos
Life as a designer is great, right? You spend the day doing what you love, producing creative design material for big name brands and seeing your work being admired around the town in the form of ads, leaflets or even as a website.