Design Resources and Articles

As you embark on the long and often frustrating journey into the world of webdesign you will often come to a stumbling halt as when a carefully planned design collapses in front of your very eyes.

You could of course contact me for help but should you wish to try and fix it yourself, here are some resources that might help.

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Usability and Accessibility

Jacob Nielson’s usability guides: useit.com

US Usability website: usability.gov

Accessibility advice from the WWW consortium: w3.org

UK accessibility guidelines: acc.nics.gov.uk

Themeing through Siloing: brucecaly.com

Design Advice

The only design forum you’ll ever need: cre8teasiteforums.com

Comprehensive design guidance: webstyleguide.com

Making your Links Work: seoresearchlabs.com

Writing Content for the Web: useit.com

How to use Metatags: searchenginewatch.com

Positioning Primary Navigation topic at cre8asiteforums.com

Make your own Favicon: favicon.cc

HTML Help

A range of easy to use tutorials from htmldog.com

Using lists and floats: maxdesign.com.au

Get to grips with the tags and atributes: w3schools.com

Website Builder Heaven – A Guide to HTML: shopify.com (thanks to Samantha and the rest of the sudents at Colorado Tutors for this link idea).

HTML for beginners – a great starter from whoishostingthis (Thanks to the Children of the Seattle Computer Club for the suggestion).

Cascading Style Sheets

CSS Tutorials: w3schools.com | maxdesign.com.au | htmldog.com

CSS Experiments: csszengarden.com

Expert CSS help: mayerweb.com

Cutting edge CSS design: meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge

CSS Creator Forum: csscreator.com

CSS guidance: thenoodleincident.com

Styling for Print: alistapart.com

Website Navigation

A Study of Website Navigation Methods: eastonmass.net

Positioning Primary Navigation topic at cre8asiteforums.com

Colours

Websafe Colours: mandarindesign.com. and web-source.net

Color Names: w3schools.com.

Colour Theory: colorsontheweb.com, shopify.com and color-wheel-relationships (thanks to the Daly City outreach group for this suggestion)

Link Colours: matthewwoodward.co.uk.

Webpage filter for colourblindness: toptal.com

Color deficient vision resources: visibone.com/colorblind/

Colour palettes: colourlovers.com and colorschemedesigner.com

Fonts and Typography

Typography tutorial: webmonkey.com

Text sizing: thenoodleincident.com

Free fonts: webpagepublicity.com

Browser Issues

Browser bugs: positioniseverything.net

Browser compatibility: anybrowser.com or browsercam.com

Website Speed Test: dotcom-tools.com

Tutorials

W3C online tutorials: w3schools.com

Search Engine Optimization Guides

Webmaster guidance: Yahoo Guidelines | Google Guidelines | Bing Guidelines | Ask Webmaster Information

SEO Quick Start Guide: cre8asiteforums.com

101 SEO Tips for 2006: seobook.com

Beginner’s Guide to SEO: seomoz.org

The famous SEO glossary: seobook.com/glossary

SEO experts recommendations: clambr.com

Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page : backlinko.com

Search Engine Information

Industry monitors: SearchEngineWatch | Pandia | SearchEngineGuide

Page rank explained: webworkshop.net

Search Engine Spider simulator: www.searchwho.com

The google cheat sheets: google.com/help and feedsforme.com/google

Page speed checker: gtmetrix.com, tools.pingdom.com, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com

Tools

Image compressor: compressor.io

Testing download speeds: websiteoptimization.com

Page Validator: validator.w3.org

Google site map builder: gsitecrawler.com

User testing: usabilityhub.com

General Articles

What We Saw Through Their Eyes: poynterextra.org

How to get it wrong: webdevelopersjournal.com

Corporate stupidity here: webpagesthatsuck.com

Interviewing Web Developers: seomoz.org

Payment Portals: paymentbrain.co.uk