Examples of great web designs, how to make web designs of your own and other information related to designing your web site.

Posts in the Web design category
New Design for 2008 - 01 Apr 2008

I’ve created a new design for the site. The current one is old and stale and it’s high time for a change. Before it goes live though, I’d like your feedback. Do you like the color scheme? Is it an improvement over the current design? Is it easy on the eyes? Is it easier to […]

Forge a fantastic favicon from a photo - 19 Mar 2008

Since I last wrote about creating a favicon from a picture, several new methods have been created. After all it was almost 4 years ago (nearly to the day) and a lot can happen in four years. I discovered that not all favicon generators are created equal. To create a new favicon for my coin […]

Free charting and graphing solution - 14 Feb 2008

Have you ever wanted to see a graph or chart of some data on the web? I have several times and none of the solutions I found were easy to use. Additionally, many of them didn’t look all that great either. Google has a chart API that creates an image based on the URL you […]

Hiding answers on your page - 07 Sep 2006

I started a weekly Tuesday Trivia on my coin collecting site, but it took me a while to find a good solution for displaying the questions and answers. I had the following requirements: 1. Easy to enter, since I have to do it every week. 2. Easy for the reader to get the answers, but […]

testing your site on different browsers - 28 Jun 2006

I have a list of ideas that I’d like to implement (I use MediaWiki, the same software that runs wikipedia.org, to manage all of my lists and things I want to remember. It’s turned out quite nicely). But back to my original point. On the list of things to implement, I had the idea to […]

mambo - 09 Nov 2004

I just found out about an incredible looking open source CMS called Mambo. They’ve been nominated as the Best Free Software Project in the 2004 Linux Format Awards (which I hadn’t heard of before but if you’re a Linux user you would probably enjoy voting), and from the short time I’ve looked at their product, […]

opera redirect not working - 04 Nov 2004

For some reason Opera cannot handle having an anchor in a URL to redirect. I wrote a simple test with a form that has a single hidden field containing a URL with an anchor. When submitted, the form sends the hidden value to be used in a call to the header function, which is supposed […]

gzip compression - 01 Sep 2004

Amit wrote about how to enable gzip compression on sites using PHP, and since almost all of my sites use PHP it was a perfect match. A few months ago I turned on mod_gzip in Apache but I ran into some snags and eventually turned it off. All I had to do for this solution […]

bread crumb trails - 31 Aug 2004

I’m linking to 7nights.com for two reasons: One, I was interested in the value of bread crumb trails on web sites. Two, I like the navigation menu. At first glance I thought it might be images and javascript, but viewing the source showed it was done with CSS.

effective link text - 24 Jul 2004

How to write effective link text on evolt made several good points, but after reading #2 and #4 I realized that my site could be hard to navigate if someone were color blind or had poor vision. In an effort to make my sites easier to use I’ve added underlines on all links outside of […]

avoiding empty submissions - 20 Jul 2004

I use Atomz search to allow users to search my site and the weekly report always has the same top query. It is (drum roll please): blank query I have no idea why someone would search for nothing, because you get just that as a result, but search for nothing they did. I decided to […]

refreshing error pages - 06 Jul 2004

Gmail used a novel way to deal with an error situation that I’d like to point out. It won’t work in all situations, but in their case, when a heavy load on the server was the cause of the error, it was very useful. They made the error page refresh (every 30 seconds I believe), […]

raising windows on amazon - 02 Jul 2004

Amazon’s use of Javascript to raise the window when it loads has really ticked me off because it completely disrupts my browsing experience. While reading a site I’ll pop off a few background tabs to load while I continue reading, and then all of a sudden, WHAM, I’m on the Amazon tab. It’s like a […]

basic css tutorial - 18 Jun 2004

I found a basic CSS tutorial that I would recommend to people who are brand new to CSS. It may be useful to the more seasoned web designer, but I’d recommend skipping the first few sections. Once you become a CSS guru, you can begin making dynamic menus without Javascript. These sites show how to […]

quick color chooser - 02 Jun 2004

If you want to find a set of colors that complement each other, Quick Color (requires Flash) can be a big help. It has a clean, easy to use interface too. (via massless)

gurus vs. bloggers - 28 Apr 2004

The web site designs of web gurus and bloggers were pitted against each other in the battle of the century. The result? Bloggers by a landslide. I wonder why that is. I would have thought professionals would take the time to create a web site that is clean, usable and aesthetically appealing, but I would […]

favicons from pictures - 12 Mar 2004

I never meant to keep the favicon of the little cabin that’s been on my site for so long now, but I’m not very skilled in graphical manipulation, and I never got around to making one of my own, until now. I found a site that has solved all of my favicon-making problems. The site […]

browser cam - 22 Aug 2003

A few years ago I had the idea to create a collaborative site where web designers could see what their site looked like on different operating systems and web browsers. If enough people joined, there would be near-complete coverage of testing platforms and designers would be able to share screenshots and usage issues. It was […]

successful google listing - 28 Jun 2003

I received an email today from a guy wanting to know how to get listed on Google. My response was that it takes time and effort. Google optimizes their algorithm constantly to keep people from finding and using loopholes or quick fixes. The best solution is to play by the rules and provide plenty of […]

are web designers obsolete? - 23 May 2003

Who needs a web designer when you can generate designs yourself? It only took a few reloads to produce an appealing design and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, but I doubt it will make much of a wave in the web design industry. There are too many skilled designers making elegant designs. For […]

navigational aids - 12 May 2003

Soon after I upgraded to Opera 7.1, a toolbar began appearing for certain sites. Intrigued, I viewed the source of one of the sites and saw <link> tags that correlated with the buttons on the toolbar. I proceeded to add the tags to my site and shazam, the toolbar appeared. I then added <link> tags […]

hitbox tools - 19 Apr 2003

Free web site tools from Hitbox. They require you to register, but it’s free. Funny how the first tool has a spell checker, but under ‘Custom Meta Tag Generator’ it has a spelling error (“Createing meta tags has never been so easy…”). They should use some of their own medicine.

css layouts - 17 Apr 2003

I typically learn through examples, so the three column CSS examples using float and absolute are ideal. The CSS support charts are also useful to determine what browsers will render certain styles. (via zeldman)

courteous web design - 08 Apr 2003

When I visit a web site for the first time, there are a few things that will keep me from returning. One is auto-refreshing the page, ostensibly to boost page views and increase advertising revenue. I don’t mind banner ads, but having the entire page refresh every minute or so shows they are willing to […]

font sizes – relative or absolute - 07 Apr 2003

Jakob Nielson wants users to be able to control their own font sizes, but that’s easier said than done. I made all of the font sizes relative on my site, but it was a different size depending on the browser and OS. I don’t like the idea of forcing a certain size font on everyone, […]

w3c CSS buttons - 01 Apr 2003

Now there’s a slick way to show you’ve taken the time to validate your pages without using images. Slim W3C buttons, done entirely with style sheets. They look good in all the browsers I’ve tested so far (except Netscape 4.79 on Linux, but that’s no surprise). (via mark via zeldman)

there’s always a way to optimize - 30 Mar 2003

Test your site for optimization information and hints. If you want to see major optimization in action, view the source at google.com. Most of the newlines are stripped, the javascript code has one or two character variable and function names and comments are non-existent. The result? One of the fastest loading sites on the web.

regular link checks - 24 Mar 2003

I found out that I had a broken link on the contact page of one of my web sites. It would have been nice if someone had let me know it was broken, but I’m ultimately responsible for maintaining the links. Thankfully, the World Wide Web Consortium has the W3C Link Checker to make my […]

the size of an image - 09 Jan 2003

When you look at an image on a web page, the viewable size and the actual size can be a confusing distinction. The actual size is the number of bytes in the image, or how much space the file would use on a hard drive. The viewable size is determined by HTML tags which allow […]

tricky - 24 Sep 2002

Carolyn Snyder at IBM has listed 7 tricks that many web users don’t know about. It was a very useful read for me because I wouldn’t have called them tricks. I thought most of them were common knowledge for the majority of web users. It makes me wonder how many other things there are that […]

blue heron design - 20 Sep 2001

I finally made another design. I have been slacking off on new web designs ;) I’m fairly pleased with it. There is one more design that I really want to finish, but it’s taking its sweet little time in forming how I want it to look in my mind. Things are going pretty well – […]

new design - 13 Jul 2001

I just finished a new design and submitted it to oswd.org. I think it turned out okay but I still don’t think I’ve made one that I really love. I think it’s the colors mostly that I have to work on. Sometimes it’s hard to get colors that work well together and look good.

new design added - 30 Jun 2001

I just added a new design called steve and submitted it to oswd.org. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

designs - 21 Jun 2001

I finally took some time to submit some web page designs to oswd.org under the handle “Jaden”, which I used to use on the MUDs. The designs are just ones that I tweaked from sites I already made. I still want to make some completely original ones that I’ve thought up, but haven’t had time […]