Let’s face it, we designers love to start from scratch. For example: How may times do we revamp our own portfolios? Staying simple is crucial when starting from scratch.

We hear this “staying simple” phrase a lot these days. Is it just a bunch of jargon or is there something to it? We found one approach that you probably haven’t considered.

We all know that we need to focus the website visitor’s attention on a few core features which bring value to the visitors. The minute you start adding too many features to please every visitor, you bargain for too much attention.

The result is that visitors get overwhelmed and confused without understanding the value. You’ve got to show the value to the user right away. You can’t waste too much of their time.

So the question becomes: what do you do when you have a crucial core feature that you want to add to a web product but you fear it might push the product too far from its core and overwhelm your visitors without showing value? The answer is: you build a new product. This is not just a theory. We tried it, and it worked like a charm. Read more

Over the past year, new techniques and tricks involving HTML5 and CSS3 enhancements have been shared on a number of websites, giving developers new possibilities for improving the user experience.

Of course, the plethora of information online is hard to keep up with, and some of it may be out of date, inaccurate, or may fail to promote accessibility, progressive enhancement, or other best practices methods.

To that end, designers and developers today may prefer to have a desktop reference in the form of a good old ink and paper companion.

So in this article, I’ve compiled a list of eleven books that will be released in 2010 that focus on HTML5 and CSS3. Many of the authors listed alongside the titles below will be familiar to us, since some of them have established themselves online as zealous proponents of best practices and standards-based code.

Read more

Adobe will unveil its new Creative Suite 5 on Monday April 12th at 8AM PDT, just a few hours from now.

You can catch the official launch online here, however, if you can’t wait, we’ll be revealing all the juicy details before the official launch… right now!

The Adobe team kindly invited us to an exclusive sneak peak demo of Creative Suite 5 and they also provided us with a pre-release copy for this review.

In this post, we’ll be sharing some of the highlights of each application in this exciting new release, with some detailed info on the new applications. We’ll also discuss whether we think CS5 is worth upgrading to or not.

That being said, get ready to be amazed… there are tons of new features to get excited about in this release. Read more

The visual language of a website impresses a visitor far beyond their first glimpse.

In fact, in observing the best websites, you notice that the small details speak to you subconsciously and that consistency improves your experience of the website and as a result makes you more likely to return.

In this article we’ll explore what makes a design consistent, and we’ll showcase some of the most consistent website designs out there.

Please comment at the end of the article about the consistency of these websites and feel free to add links to others that follow this principle. Read more

Let me first get this out of the way: my blog posts at WDD are not for sale, and I stand to profit in no way from this post.

That being said, I want to tell you about my success in finding great web hosting, as well as a good hosting deal for WDD readers that also lets you do some social good (more about this below).

Choosing the right web hosting provider is one of the most difficult business decisions I’ve had to make.

I realized early on in the game that the quality of the hosting and support is much more important than the price, because a website can build or break your reputation, and I didn’t want to mess around with hosts that would leave me in embarrassing situations. Read more