Resources for the professional web designer

this is a list with the best design links submitted to 101out.com.

1. Creating Beautiful Interfaces with CSS 18 points (video.google.com)

   Drop-down menus and sophisticated interface elements have traditionally been implemented using JavaScript and kludgy coding workarounds that often don't work. It's increasingly practical to deliver rich, beautiful, functional interfaces using semantic markup and CSS. Learn how modern markup can deliver great Web interfaces that are fast and reliable.

2. Business side of web design 17 points (www.centernetworks.com)

   A interesting 40 step plan presented by James Archer of Forty

3. Web Standards - Business Benefits 15 points (boagworld.com)

   This presentation introduces you to a web design approach called Web Standards. It aims to explain exactly what web standards are and why they provide huge business benefits that will increase the exposure of your site, attract new audiences and make the running of your website considerably more efficient. In short we will explain how web standards will improve your return on investment.

4. CSS Formatter and Optimiser 14 points (www.cleancss.com)

   CSS Formatter and Optimiser (based on csstidy 1.1)

5. Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage 12 points (www.codinghorror.com)

   What can we do to reduce a website's bandwidth usage?

6. 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part1) 12 points (tutorialblog.org)

   There are loads of handy scripts, bits of html and widgets that you can incorporate into your websites and blogs - here we bring together 25 of the most helpful in the first part of this series...

7. Website Launch Flowchart 12 points (www.virante.com)

   The flowchart is a detailed guide that covers optimized website design, development and multichannel marketing integration. Web design doesn't exist in a vacuum nor does marketing. The most optimized, easiest functioning and best performing sites are those that find a balance between design, content, business tool complexity and marketing integration.

8. Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design 12 points (www.ojr.org)

   OJR's design experts review usability research and offer suggestions on how you can make your online articles better connect with readers.

9. Creating the foundation for robust architecture 12 points (www-128.ibm.com)

   The answer to "What is architecture?" depends on who you ask. What it takes to develop a strong architecture is even more difficult to define. However, there are well-known tenets you should employ when doing architecture.

10. Best Practices for form design 12 points (www.lukew.com)

    Rules, requirements and suggestions for quality form designs. A nice presentation by Luke Wroblewski.

11. 71 CSS Menus for free 11 points (razvan.seopedia.ro)

    Great list of resources for CSS developers [ro]

12. Creating User Friendly 404 Pages 11 points (www.codinghorror.com)

    We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak...

13. Web Page Readability / Usability Research 10 points (hubel.sfasu.edu)

    An interesting collection of resources related to variables that relate to readability of text displays on web pages.

14. Nice and clean table CSS designs 10 points (icant.co.uk)

    Data tables and cascading style sheets gallery.

15. Rss 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared 10 points (intertwingly.net)

    People who generate syndication feeds have a choice of feed formats. As of mid-2005, the two most likely candidates will be RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. The purpose of this page is to summarize, as clearly and simply as possible, the differences between the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication languages.

16. No more tables: CSS layout techniques 13 points (video.google.com)

    Creating complex multi-column layouts used to mean having to nest multiple HTML tables, a technique that's cumbersome and introduces accessibility and compatibility problems. You've heard it's possible to eliminate those layout tables by using Cascading Style Sheets, but you haven't made the jump yet. In this session, CSS guru Doug Bowman will walk you through the steps of a real-world conversion. Learn the advantages of doing away with tables, and see how to avoid common pitfalls.

17. 168 CSS Layouts made in Cross Browser, Standards Compliant CSS. 9 points (layouts.ironmyers.com)

    These CSS Layout offers full Grade-A browser support. That means that these CSS Layout will look and behave the same in internet browsers like Internet Explores 6 (IE6), Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Firefox, Opera, Safari and so on.

18. Designing With Grid-Based Approach 9 points (www.smashingmagazine.com)

    The main idea behind grid-based designs is a solid visual and structural balance of web-sites you can create with them.

19. Why you should be using HTML instead of XHTML 9 points (www.google.com)

    If you're a web developer, you've probably heard about XHTML, the markup language developed in 1999 to implement HTML as an XML format. Most people who use and promote XHTML do so because they think it's the newest and hottest thing, and they may have heard of some (usually false) benefits here and there. But there is a lot more to it than you may realize, and if you're using it on your website, even if it validates, you are probably using it incorrectly.

20. Help to make the internet a prettier place 9 points (www.openwebdesign.org)

    Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. A good resource for web designers.

21. Ten Common Database Design Mistakes 8 points (www.simple-talk.com)

    No list of mistakes is ever going to be exhaustive. People (myself included) do a lot of really stupid things, at times, in the name of "getting it done." This list simply reflects the database design mistakes that are currently on my mind, or in some cases, constantly on my mind.

22. Measuring Web Site Usability 8 points (www.readwriteweb.com)

    In Jakob Nielsen's latest book, Prioritizing Web Usability, the usability guru presents his latest discoveries on how to design usable web sites. His meticulous research is based on lab experiments, with thousands of users of diverse backgrounds.

23. HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web 8 points (www.digital-web.com)

    XHTML2 is XML - just as XHTML 1.0 is - but it doesnt have backward compatibility to HTML 4.01. HTML5 (also sometimes referred to as Web Applications 1.0) is a technology developed by the WHATWG, an open community started by three of the four major browser vendors: Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. HTML5 is not so much a replacement for HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 as it is an upgrade or evolution.

24. Guidelines for Desigining User Interface Software 8 points (www.hcibib.org)

    This report offers guidelines for design of user interface software in six functional areas: data entry, data display, sequence control, user guidance, data transmission, and data protection. 944 guidelines compiled by U.S. Air Force, most of them related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s.

25. The beauty of data visualization 8 points (pingmag.jp)

    This list brings up the most beautiful outpourings of information aesthetics. This is a symbiosis between creative design and information visualization: form follows data and evolves in such unique graphs that you can call them art.

26. How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters 8 points (video.google.com)

    Nearly all programmers occasionally function as API designers, whether they know it or not. A well-designed API can be a great asset to the organization that wrote it and to all who use it. Good APIs increase the pleasure and productivity of the developers who use them, the quality of the software they produce, and ultimately, the corporate bottom line.

27. The 32 Best Photography Sites in 2007 8 points (www.photosbyjay.com.au)

    The 32 Best Photography Sites in 2007. There are some photography sites here you may know, as well as some Australian and obscure ones you may have never seen before.

28. Choosing the right font 8 points (www.designersmind.com)

    Designers spend a large portion of their work time contemplating the aspects of text and/or font. In order to help understand the importance of font, ask yourself What differences are there between the font and text of professional designs as opposed to low quality work?

29. Murray Gell-Mann on Getting Creative Ideas 8 points (video.google.com)

    Famous theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann gives a talk on Getting Creative Ideas. Followed by an interesting question sessing. From the Google Tech Talks, March 14, 2007.

30. High Performance Web Sites: The Importance of Front-End Performance 11 points (developer.yahoo.net)

    Steve Souders is Yahoo!'s Chief Performance Yahoo!. This is one in a series of blogs describing the best practices he's developed at Yahoo! for improving performance. This article is based on Chapter 1, The Importance of Front-End Performance from Steve's forthcoming book High Performance Web Sites, published by O'Reilly.

31. Handbook of Software Architecture 7 points (www.booch.com)

    The primary goal of the Handbook of Software Architecture is to fill this void in software engineering by codifying the architecture of a large collection of interesting software-intensive systems, presenting them in a manner that exposes their essential patterns and that permits comparisons across domains and architectural styles. [registration required]

32. Proposal for a scalable class of graphical models for Social Networks 7 points (www.cs.cmu.edu)

    This proposal is about new statistical machine learning approaches to detect evolving relationships among large numbers of entities. One example is the set of friendship relations among participants in Friendster.

33. Listamatic: CSS and lists 7 points (css.maxdesign.com.au)

    Take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list. Good resource.

34. CSS: Advanced Formatting and Organization 7 points (jarrodspillers.com)

    Gone are the days of the table based layout days where CSS, if used at all, would simply be a replacement for the notorious font tag. In this day it is very common for a stylesheet to contain many times more line of code than its corresponding XHTML document. Part of the challenge of witting good CSS is not just learning the correct properties to use, but formatting and organizing your document in a way that allows for easy maintenance and speedy display bug fixes.

35. Software design for users 7 points (www.infoq.com)

    Unless you're writing programs for a bunch of burned out computer geeks, your user isn't you. ... This is very hard to get through somebody's head; it's very hard to get rid of this notion that what you like your user is going to like... Again, your user is not you.

36. Color Matching Guide 7 points (www.elogodesign.com)

    Learn basics about colors and color matching.

37. Static vs. Dynamic urls 7 points (video.google.com)

    Matt Cutts answers Google questions on Static vs. Dynamic urls: Does PageRank flow the same to both? What pitfalls should I avoid with dynamic urls? Can Sitemaps alert webmasters when their site has been hacked?

38. Icon Design: Sizing 7 points (mezzoblue.com)

    "One of the more deceptively time-consuming things youll do when creating an icon is producing out size variations. If you require a single icon in more than one size, the time you spend designing the first size is only about two thirds of the work youll end up doing; the other third lies in tweaking it for different dimensions."

39. Research Supporting How Line Length Affects Usability 7 points (www.webusability.com)

    Certain aspects of usability have been researched for over 120 years. One active area of investigation has been the influence of line length on the speed of reading prose text. Cohn (1883) confirmed that 3.6 inches (90 mm) was the best length, and that 4 inches (102 mm) was the longest admissible line length.

40. Video Tutorials on how to use the Firebug Extension 10 points (www.litfuel.net)

    Firebug is a must know tool for web developers now. If you've heard of it but haven't had time to play around with it please look at these videos to see what you're missing out on. The first tutorial covers an introduction to debugging ajax applications with firebug. The second tutorial shows you how you can manipulate CSS live on your webpage without having to change code, reload, change code, reload.

41. Complete Logo Design Guide 10 points (www.elogodesign.com)

    A list of quality resources that can help you to learn more about everything related to logo design. From the start, why do you need a good logo; which software to use and why; how to use software, which format is used for what and why; how to choose colors; how to choose fonts; where to ask for help and direction; where to find inspirational help, what other logo designers know and you don't...

42. Faux Column CSS Layouts 10 points (www.code-sucks.com)

    There are 42 Faux Column CSS Layouts available for download. All of these css layouts use a background image to make it look like all the columns are of equal height.

43. Website Optimizer [from Google] 10 points (services.google.com)

    Their description: "Website Optimizer, Google's free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images)"

44. Top 50 Sources for Web Design Inspiration 6 points (www.fuzzyfuture.com)

    This list is intended to help you with your designer's block and give you the inspiration you need to come up with the perfect design for your next blog, community portal, social networking hub, or corporate e-commerce resource.

45. My Favorite Free Fonts 6 points (www.elogodesign.com)

    Collection of favorite free fonts.

46. How to make sexy buttons with CSS 6 points (www.oscaralexander.com)

    This tutorial will teach you how to create pretty looking textual buttons (with alternate pressed state) using CSS. Dynamic buttons save you heaps of time otherwise spent creating graphics and will basically make you a happier person at the end of the day.

47. Use text instead of graphics on your website | Improve the Web 6 points (www.improvetheweb.com)

    Numerous eye-tracking studies, done by multiple large research companies (many of which having been researching website usability for a while), have shown that, though humans are sometimes attracted to graphics...

48. CSS creme of the month 6 points (www.roscripts.com)

    Every once in a while we try to identify what's hot in one of our categories and this time we picked CSS since it's becoming more popular with each day that goes by. More and more web designers become interested in learning every trick. A good way to do it is by good examples which is what this list will try to showcase. The best CSS examples of the month.

49. Ajax and XML: Five Ajax anti-patterns 12 points (www-128.ibm.com)

    You can learn a lot about how to do things correctly by understanding how things are done incorrectly. Certainly, there's a right way and a wrong way to write Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) applications. This article discusses some common coding practices you will want to avoid.

50. Keep It Simple, Stupid! 12 points (www.smashingmagazine.com)

    Simplicity is more complex than you probably think it is. To design a web-site in user-friendly tones, presenting all information and removing unnecessary details isnt easy. In fact, many designers dont manage to find the right mix between details and their presentation on the screen, which usually results in an information overkill and/or decreased usability. However, some designers do manage to find the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts.