It’s a classic case of Photoshop versus website. Existing wireframing and prototyping tools are incapable of accurately reflecting the environment of the web.

They produce static designs that can’t be seen through the variable known as the web browser. And when you build the final website, some elements won’t look exactly like their draft counterparts, and the client will notice those minor differences in fonts, positioning, etc.

You may be more comfortable with a graphics program, and rendering the design iterations may seem to take longer if you have to hand-code the HTML.

However, the advantages of creating a wireframe in HTML from the start are beginning to outweigh the alternatives: not only do we have new layout elements in HTML5 and more powerful selectors and styling in CSS3, but by combining them, we can throw together a simple layout quickly.

We’re hearing a new company every day (37Signals, Atomiq and others) explain its adoption of HTML prototyping. Their main reason is that the process is surprisingly easy when you have the right tools in place. You’re about to learn how easy this process can be, and when you’re done, you’ll have a head start on your next build. Read more

The way you handle color in your web designs is about to change. Perhaps you’ve been playing around with hexadecimal color values since you were a wee web-babe; if you were, get ready to to grow up fast. CSS3 has arrived, and your palette is about to get a whole lot bigger.

Compared to what’s coming, it’s sas though designers have been color-blind, working with only a small part of the chromatic spectrum. No, new hues will not be added to the rainbow.

What will happen is that color values will be defined in new ways, the entire spectrum of opacity levels will be added and gradients based on pure CSS rather than images will be thrown in, too.

Some forward-thinking websites, such as the impressive 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends, are already playing around with RGBa for text and background color effects—and the results are great. Read more

By now most bloggers using WordPress should have upgraded to the latest version of WordPress which is officially at version 3.0.1.

Along with updates to the core framework, when version 3.0 was released the WordPress team also added a new default theme, replacing the now obsolete Kubrick. The new theme, as most of you are probably aware, is called Twenty Ten.

Not to sound too corny here, but from the first moment I laid eyes on Twenty Ten, I fell in love with it. But I’m not talking about theme’s visual design (which is pretty humdrum); I’m talking about the front-end code, which has seen a number of improvements over the previous default theme.

In this article, I’ll discuss some of these improvements that I feel are worthy of examination and imitation.

And keep in mind that this is not a discussion of the features of the theme itself; this is a discussion of the structure and organization of the HTML and CSS and how it provides an excellent model to follow for front-end developers. Read more

Though the methods used to gather website traffic statistics call into question the validity of the stats themselves, the fact is that some of your website’s visitors will have JavaScript disabled.

You could divide your traffic sources into four broad categories:

Search engines, mobile visitors, visitors using screen readers and visitors who have JavaScript turned off.

When planning your information architecture and design, you must figure out how to deal with these special groups.

I have assembled a few recent real-world scenarios to find clarity on the issue. Read more

The beauty of being a web designer is creating a detailed, creative, and original web design in Photoshop, without having to (for the most part) think about how it will be coded.

During the design phase, it’s all about the look, and either the coding can be taken care of later, or be outsourced to a developer.

Either way, not thinking about the development usability or functionality is a great way for a designer to not feel limited in the design process.

This is a great way of thinking, and can lead to the best designs. However, once it does need to be coded, we as designers are in a tricky spot.

In this article, you’ll find a few simple tips that can help designers learn basic XHTML/CSS conversion efficiently for a quick-loading website that is accurate to the original PSD. Read more

It’s really easy to find yourself wondering how your CSS got to be such a mess.

Sometimes it’s the result of sloppy coding from the start, sometimes it’s because of multiple hacks and changes over time.

Whatever the cause, it doesn’t have to be that way. Writing clean, super-manageable CSS is simple when you start off on the right foot and make your code easier to maintain and edit later on.

Here are 11 tips for speeding up the process, writing CSS that is slimmer, faster and less likely to give you a headache. Read more

In traditional JavaScript coding, if you want to get any information from a database or a file on the server, or send user information to a server, you will have to make an HTML form and GET or POST data to the server. The user will have to click the “Submit” button to send/get the information, wait for the server to respond, and then a new page will load with the results.

Because the server returns a new page each time the user submits input, traditional web applications can run slowly and tend to be less user-friendly. With AJAX, your JavaScript communicates directly with the server, through the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object.

With an HTTP request, a web page can make a request to, and get a response from a web server, without reloading the page. The user will stay on the same page, and he or she will not notice that scripts request pages, or send data to a server in the background. Read more