Internet Brain » Webpage Design

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas

Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine

According to classic principles of web design, everything at the bottom of the page isn’t that important. Most users think like that. And most designers are convinced that this is true. Site elements at the bottom of the page aren’t really able to catch visitors’ attention which is why footers are often forgotten or ignored and not given the attention they deserve.

In fact, most footers are rather boring and uninspiring. Designers often use the bottom area to mention everything they haven’t found place for at the top of the site. E.g. disclaimers, W3C-buttons, copyright, “back to the top”-link and contact details. But if most designers forget it, why don’t make use of it? Why don’t use footers to impress visitors with something they actually don’t expect at all?

This post presents creative examples of footers and ideas for footer design. We’ve tried to identify some trends and some interesting approaches you may want to use or develop further in your projects.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

65 Resources for Grid-Based Design

65 Resources for Grid-Based Design | Vandelay Website Design

Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Cheat Sheets

Scott Klarr >> Programming + Linux + Computers

A directory of links to cheat sheets on a variety of topics

Laura in Cascading Style Sheets, Color, General Coding Links, Javascript, PHP/SQL, Webpage Design § No Comments

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Style Your Website’s Search Field with JS/CSS

Style Your Website’s Search Field with JS/CSS | Css Globe

Continuing to provide unobtrusive solutions, CSSG is happy to present SearchField. It serves as a way to style your search field and add behavior without any additional JavaScript or modifications in your markup. It features plug & play onfocus and onblur behaviors and auto suggestion like you’ve never seen before Again, all you need is two lines of code, links to JavaScript and CSS files and that would be it.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Pow!

Pow! - Free Stock Photos - Cheap Stock Photos - Stock Photo Search

Canonical List of Free and Cheap Stock Photos

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Friday, September 14th, 2007

Prototyping for Designers

adaptive path » blog » david verba » Prototyping for Designers

I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between it’s current state and Bill’s vision for it’s future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.

The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.

The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those 3 iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.

Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in it’s current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design

10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design | 456 Berea Street

In case you’re wondering why I care (and why I think you should care) about the colour contrast of a website, it’s very simple. If text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have problems. People with colour blindness or other visual impairments as well as people browsing the Web under less than ideal circumstances (bad monitor, window reflections, sunlight hitting the screen) may not be able to read the text, at least not without difficulty.

And you don’t really want that, do you? If you publish text on a website, as most people do, I’m guessing that in almost all cases it is because you want people to read that text. So colour contrast, whether you think about it or not, is important to you, your clients, and your end users.

Laura in Color, Webpage Design § No Comments

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

FlashDen

FlashDen - Download Stock Flash, Audio, Video and Pixel Fonts

Laura in Graphics, Webpage Design § No Comments

Friday, August 10th, 2007

iwebtool

Free Webmaster Tools and SEO Tools from iwebtool by WebAppers

Free Webmaster Tools and SEO Tools includes Backlink Checker, Google Banned Checker, Pagerank Prediction, Keywords Suggestion, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Alexa Traffic Rank and Broken Link Checker, etc. There are a lot more useful tools can be found in iwebtool. We should know our web application/website better in order to improve it.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

WebAppers Simple Ajax Progress Bar

\ WebAppers Simple Ajax Progress Bar with CSS by WebAppers

Sometimes, when we are building websites and web applications, we need a percentage bar / progress bar to show the progress of a specific task. However, it is very difficult to find a working and easy solution without using Flash. Therefore I have created a simple Ajax based Percentage Bar / Progress Bar which is inspired by Bare Naked App. Bare Naked App taught us how to display Percentage Bar with 2 images only by using CSS. And then I used a little bit of Ajax to make it more interactivity.

Laura in Javascript, Webpage Design § No Comments

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Browsershots

Test Your Website in Different Browsers and Platforms by WebAppers

Wanna test your web application or website in different browsers and different patforms? Browsershots can help you. It makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server of Browsershots. It supports Windows ( Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 5.0 and 6.0 ), Mac (Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.0 ), Linux ( Iceweasel 2.0, Konqueror 3.5 ).

Laura in Online Services, Webpage Design § No Comments

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Pretty URLs - a guide to URL rewriting

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Pagination 101 - KuraFire Network

One of the most commonly overlooked and under-refined elements of a website is its pagination controls. In many cases, these are treated as an afterthought. I rarely come across a website that has decent pagination, and it always makes me wonder why so few manage to get it right. After all, I’d say that pagination is pretty easy to get right. Alas, that doesn’t seem the case, so after encouragement from Chris Messina on Flickr I decided to write my Pagination 101, hopefully it’ll give you some clues as to what makes good pagination.

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Fancy Form Design Using CSS

Fancy Form Design Using CSS [CSS Tutorials]

Forms. Is there any other word that strikes as much fear into the hearts of grown web designers?

I think that the reputation of forms as an untamable, ugly necessity has arisen for two reasons:

Form elements are derived from native operating system widgets, which makes them particularly difficult to style.

Forms are often critical to the function of a web site — they’re most often employed as search boxes, inquiry forms, or shopping cart checkouts — and need to function as smoothly as possible in order to meet user expectations.

However, it’s still possible to incorporate both these points into designing a form tailored to the style of the rest of your site. This chapter, which is fresh from The Art and Science of CSS, will explore the ways in which you can design a great-looking form, and provide you with the necessary code, which we’ll work through together.

Laura in Cascading Style Sheets, Webpage Design § No Comments

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Make your site mobile friendly

Vitamin Features » Make your site mobile friendly

How do your web pages fare in today’s mobile browsers? Virginia DeBolt outlines some of the issues you’ll need to think about, and suggests some techniques for testing that you can try…

Laura in Webpage Design § No Comments