Popular Web Sites for Web Design Resources

smashing magazine is a weblog dedicated to web-developers and designers. If you are looking for resources this is the place to start. Visit this web site for Wall papers, Themes, Freebies, Free Icon Sets, Fonts, Tools and Tutorials.

Highlight: Inspiration section is comprehensive list of inspired works of designers.

Visit: www.smashingmagazine.com

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Learn Web Design with Free Web Design Tutorials and Articles on usability, graphic design, HTML, CSS, web page production, Javascript. “Web Design from Scratch” is a complete guide to web design for everyone interested in creating effective web pages - whether novice or expert.
A guide on essential skills for designing effective web sites.

Highlight: Web 2.0 how-to design style guide.

Visit: www.webdesignfromscratch.com/

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W3Schools is a web developer's portal, with tutorials and references relating to web development subjects, including HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript. W3Schools is free of charge, and is funded through text and display advertising.. The tutorials and references on the website and the related code are proprietary.

Highlight: Browser Statistics, Web Validation, Web Standards, Web Glossary and much more

Visit: www.w3schools.com

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KnowFree (KF) is a web portal with a slogan: "KNOWLEDGE IS FREE", so it is place for users to exchange freely e-books, video training and other materials for educational purposes, self-practice only.

Highlight: You can download everything for free of charge.

Visit: www.knowfree.net

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Art - community of artists and those devoted to art. Digital art, skin art, themes, wallpaper art, traditional art, photography, poetry / prose. Art prints.

DeviantArt is an international online community for artists. It was first launched on August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens and Angelo Sotira, amongst others. DeviantArt, Inc. is headquartered in Suite 788 at 7905 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, United States.

Highlight: DeviantArt aims to provide a place for any artist to exhibit and discuss his or her works.

Visit: www.deviantart.com

Web Design - A Beginners Guide

To learn Web Design I suggest the following path to become successful.

• Understand the concept.
• Learn Software Skills
• Develop promotional strategies.

A Good web designer concentrates on six aspects to develop a quality web site:

• Content
• Accessibility
• Layout
• Navigation
• Interactivity
• Maintenance

Content

The content is the king. Quality parameter for content is very simple. It should be original and fresh (updated). Any original content comes out of the right brain and it has got its value. Every human being is unique. Everyone is a blend of unique skills. Hence original content benefits every visitor. The subject could be anything depends upon the purpose of your site. Authenticated information, with simple writing, necessary illustrations, Animations are key ingredients of good contents.

Accessibility

Make the content to access by everyone. Categorizing content properly, using right colours, text size readable by all age groups, considering the people of inabilities all these makes your content.

Layout

The layout is wireframe for all design works. Always Design for content. Need not to make the content for design. You need to understand the content first and draw a wireframe model on paper before working in computer. Simple websites consists the following sections:

• Header
• Navigation
• Submenu
• breadcrumb trail (a navigation technique)
• Body for content
• Footer for text link

Navigation

Navigation should be visible and easily recognised by everyone.

Interactivity

Web is an Interactive media. Not like Television. Make your visitor to interact. Usage of forms helps the users to interact with you and your website users.

Maintenance

Updating information regularly, improving quality by adding new features and Maintain data backup helps your site grow steadily in terms of traffic and achieve the goals of website.

Essential Software Skills to begin Web Design

• Learn some HTML basic Tags head, title, body, H1, H2, P, UL, LI, DIV, Table, IMG, A, etc. from http://www.w3schools.com/ and Learn any HTML editor like Adobe Dreamweaver
• CSS
• Javascript
• Any one Graphic Design Software such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw etc. Learn to use simple tools like irfanview to reduce the file size and managing your web graphics
• For animation learn Adobe Flash
• If you want to develop interactive dynamic web site learn any programming language such as PHP, ASP or Java

For Promotion of Web Site

Learn the SEO. SEO basic rules can be summarized as follows:

• Develop useful content. So that others will give you a link without request.
• Take a minute to write your Title and Description tags for every page. Don't use same Title and description in all pages. Write separately suitable title and description with keywords for every pages. Search engines stores web pages not sites.
• Use keywords in h1, h2, text links, filenames and sub directory of your web pages.
• Use original content. So search engine will not delete your link as duplicate content.
• Always get organic (natural) traffic. Analyse your visitors traffic report regularly and keep your get updated and fresh.

Web Design - Junction of Arts

Once I read about cinema as Junction of Arts. Acting, Makeup, Dance, Music, Costume, Writing, Photography, Lyrics etc. performed by creative persons make the cinema to be a glamourous media to make and watch. The web design is too becoming such an Art junction. Technology takes back seat when creative team works together to create a successful website.

Persons with multiple skills also excel in this web design business as it satisfy their multiple creative skills. It is a wonderful feeling when you make a site with your orignal ideas and it becomes success.