Blog 55

The Internet is full of helpful design tips and tools … search these out and let your designing begin!

RSS Feeds and Magazine Subscriptions – choose your own labels and stay informed with articles and posts that are related to your fields of interest.

Color Matching Tools – in case you get stuck picking a color scheme or just need some vivid inspiration, you can find tons of pre-designed color schemes on the Internet.

Free Icon Resources – spice up your website’s design with helpful icons to link to other sites, create buttons, etc.

Collaboration Tools – these make a nice workspace for a team to share ideas and save projects in an accessible environment.  If you and your team are not physically in the office together, you can at least virtually share your progress.

CSS Generators – quick and easy tool to help you create a CSS page

Design Inspiration Galleries – just in case you need to jump start your creative motor.

HTML5 is slowly rising to top code status.  Now you need to brush up on your CSS language.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3) is a style sheet language that describes presentation semantics of a document written in mark up language.  Basically, CSS separates document content from document presentation – layout, color, fonts, etc.  It is a list of rules that improve content accessibility and flexibility, which is time-saving for Web designers because they can use the list across multiple pages that are similarly formatted.

CSS is now on its third version, aptly named “CSS3.” CSS3 allows a whole new set of rules that account for multi-column layout, new web fonts, text wrapping, text strokes, rounded corners, borders, drop shadows, and image tricks.  Design is being turned up to eleven … a whole new level.

If you are thinking about learning another language, you might want to consider computer-speak …

If you’ve been following the “2011 Web Trends” series, it onlky seems natural that the next big Web trend is going to be mobile accessibility.  Not only are people spending more time on the Internet on their phones, but they have even begun shopping on their phones.  A few major corporations have solid mobile versions of their websites – Apple, Google, Mashable – but truly succinct mobile websites are few and far between.

The Internet does hold a few tools to help you convert your website to a mobile friendly site like Mobify, MoFuse, and Wirenode. They are certainly worth looking into as the Internet and mobile worlds continue to fuse together and could easily bring your business more traffic and revenue.

As more media moves to the virtual realm, more people are investing using new products – iPad, Kindle, smartphones – to get their information.  Web design is quickly replacing printed design in business.  The ability to translate printed information to the Internet is critical, as is knowing how to utilize social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.  These sites are even beginning to replace business cards.

Web design is also becoming a specialized field.  Not only does it include designing and building websites any more, now you are also expected to know how to make websites friendly for mobile devices, create content management systems, and be well informed in search engine optimization.  The increased amount of tasks has created a lot more work in web design and instead of having one person in charge, you are more likely to encounter web design teams.  Being specialized in one or more of these areas is critical, so better brush up on your HTML5, CSS, and RIA interfaces.