Showcase of Web Design in Ireland

This post is the second article of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started last week with Russian web design. We continue now with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso).

If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details.

Ireland. The land of the leprechauns, green fields and Guinness. But what about the web industry in Ireland? There have been a host of interesting things happening both North and South of Ireland recently. Nicholas Felton talked in Belfast, Ze Frank talked in Dublin, FOWA came to Dublin for the first time and FOWD came to Belfast. Are all these high profile events an indication that there are exciting things happening throughout Ireland? [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 23rd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Mark Jardine, Mutant Labs, 8Interactive, Purple Raincloud and Ballpark. [Detail]

Showcase of Web Design in Russia

This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed for more similar posts.
If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details. [Detail]

7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good

Everyone and their grandfather (and dog) seems to have a website these days. The Web is getting more crowded by the day, with literally dozens of websites being added as you read this article. It is becoming harder and harder to get noticed among the masses.
“Fortunately” for us designers, not everyone seems to understand what makes or breaks a Web design. Granted, Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes. [Detail]

Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices

Comment forms are an essential part of our blogs, social networks and websites. Comment forms are our websites’ communication channel. Through these forms we get feedback on our content; therefore, it’s necessary to design them in such a way that they are easy to understand by our user base.
A good comment form should align with our website’s main design, but at the same time it should be interesting enough to encourage easy commenting. It must be usable and accessible if we want to capture all of our visitors’ feedback. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 16th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from 53mondays, Site Wave, Julio Fragoso, Andries Reitsma and Okay. [Detail]

Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices

Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now!") or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. "Learn more…") that asks the user to take action.

How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click? We’ll try to answer this question in this post by sharing some effective design techniques and exploring some examples. [Detail]

Best of the Web: September

September was yet another exciting month for web developers. New Javascript libraries, major acquisitions, and monster open source projects were some of the things that happened as Summer died out. And that's not including the usual plethora of excellent tips and articles published from top-notch web development sites. [Detail]

Tips for Designing an Awesome Coming Soon Page

Unlike the traditional under construction pages from the early days of the web, coming soon pages can nowadays prove to be handy tools when launching a new website. Forget yellow hard hats and flashing signs, let’s take a look at what benefits can be seen from some of the best launching soon pages. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 9th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Nosotros, Boompa, Freelenz, Monk and Anthony J Zinni. [Detail]

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design

Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.

Below are 15 of the most common mistakes that e-commerce sites make, as well as advice on how to avoid or fix them. Take the advice under consideration before embarking on a new e-commerce project or when thinking over your current ecommerce site, and make efforts to follow the recommendations outlined here. [Detail]

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.

We recently faced this very challenge while designing two Web-based applications, including an enterprise-level content management system. What follows are several techniques that have helped us streamline complex applications into lightweight user experiences. [Detail]

30 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Layouts and UIs

Photoshop is great for many projects like retouching photos, but it can also be used to create website layouts. In this post I’ve collected 30 of the best website layout Photoshop tutorials. Some of them are geared more towards bloggers while others have a more corporate feel to them.

Those tutorials would be a great starting point if you’re looking to perfect your Photoshop skills or simply need a web layout to later code to html/css. I hope you enjoy this post! [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 2nd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Ride Oregon, 31Three, Agami Creative, Odopod and Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin. [Detail]

Inspirational Showcase of Business Card Websites

The term ‘business card website’ has become widely associated with the popular style of website that has cropped up on the personal domains of designers and developers. The site is essentially a simple, single page design that displays personal information, contact details and links through to other social profiles, much like a traditional tactile business card is used to display basic information.

Business card websites come in all shapes and sizes, but popular charactersitics include a compact, lightweight design, often small in size. Business card sites also tend to make use of Javascript to enhance the user experience and are commonly designed with a fresh take on the interface, taking inspiration from the clean style of Apple’s OSX.

Let’s take a look at an inspiring collection of examples, each with an individual twist on the original business card idea. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 25th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Rick Nunn, Ride Oregon, Toggle, May and Subernova. [Detail]

Create a Horizontal Scrolling Website

You’ve probably seen a few sites that scroll horizontally and wondered how it’s done? This tutorial by Tom Walker, takes you step by step through the process. Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’ll be ready to add your own twist and make it your own. [Detail]

Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How -to

Simplicity in website design doesn’t necessarily equate with a minimalist design aesthetic. Simple sites just remove all unnecessary elements from the design, content, and code. While minimalist sites generally fit this criteria, there are plenty of sites that wouldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered “minimalist” that still fit the definition of simple. [Detail]

Styling Design Elements: 5 Beautiful Post Headings

We will start a new set of posts that will demonstrate different way of creating and styling various design elements. Today our focus will be on “Post Headings“, how to style and markup this important block that comes before any post. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for September 18th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Branded07, CoTweet, Hull Digital, Yellow Bird Project and Trent Walton. [Detail]