Webdesign Blog, Tutorials and Books

No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction [...]

This update to The Web Designer’s Idea Book is a source of visual inspiration to web designers to help them see what others have done and how they can adapt those ideas to their own needs. It includes a chapter on web-design principles and a chapter about trends in HTML email design. _

The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems It’s been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don’t Make Me Think: A Common [...]

For user experience designers in the field or in the making “If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. “  — Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft [...]

Optimizing the User Experience Thoroughly rewritten for today’s web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various “rich” interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating [...]

Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions With the recent advent of Ajax and the resurgence of Flash for developing web sites and applications, new patterns of interaction have emerged on the Web. In this book, Bill Scott provides insight on how to best take advantage of the power of these technologies for designing a great [...]

The Design of Sites, Second Edition, is the definitive reference for the principles, patterns, methodologies, and best practices underlying exceptional Web design. If you are involved in the creation of dynamic Web sites, this book will give you all the necessary tools and techniques to create effortless end-user Web experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve [...]

Everything you need to know to create dazzling Web designs is in one of these minibooks A Web designer is a graphic designer, creative organizer, visual communicator, markup language technologist, and cutting-edge trendsetter, all in one. This All-in-One guide helps you wear all those hats without losing your head! Learn to lay the groundwork, follow [...]

Cascading Style Sheets can turn humdrum websites into highly-functional, professional-looking destinations, but many designers merely treat CSS as window-dressing to spruce up their site’s appearance. You can tap into the real power of this tool with CSS: The Missing Manual. This second edition combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show [...]

Sitting at the foundation of every site is HTML. It’s the only language that’s essential to a web site’s very existence. On the surface HTML may seem simple but there’s much more to it that meets the eye. With different versions, many infrequently used elements and attributes, and varying ways that browsers interpret the language, [...]

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it’s hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn’t read Steve Krug’s “instant classic” on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day.  In this second [...]

Have you ever wondered why your websites didn’t quite match up to the success of your competitors or peers? Have you ever looked at other sites and thought: Why didn’t I think of that? Have you ever spent too much time trying to find basic information that was buried deep in a needlessly complex website? [...]

The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design The Web Designer’s Idea Book includes more than 700 websites arranged thematically, so you can find inspiration for layout, color, style and more. Author Patrick McNeil has cataloged more than 20,000 sites on his website, and showcased in this book are the very best [...]

Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate your message effectively, guide visitors through your website with ease, and get everything approved by the accessibility and usability police at the same time? Head First Web Design is your ticket to mastering all of these complex topics, and understanding what’s really going on [...]

Tired of making web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don’t look nice? If so, then The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is for you. A simple, easy-to-follow guide, illustrated with plenty of full-color examples, this book will lead you through the process of creating great designs from start to finish. Good design principles [...]

Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning — defining how the Web and web pages work — and builds from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you’ll [...]

Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques. This book introduces you to HTML and CSS as you follow along with the author, step-by-step, to build a fully functional web site from the [...]