Tips posts

SEO has always been a tricky business, not only do experts have to spend time on researching keywords and following the best practices, they have to be prepared for the changes which search engines inevitably put into place.

Last year saw search giant Google make two major algorithm updates — Panda and Penguin — that saw many a site plummet down the rankings, as they were penalized by the new rules.

This was because the changes were implemented in order to rank poor quality sites, such as content mills and link farms, down and give more weight to sites that produce quality content.

This is carried out by making changes to how Google’s...

Whilst the term “flat design” might not be a phrase you’re yet familiar with, you will definitely have noticed the concept and the design features whilst browsing the internet.

For those of you that have noticed an increase in the “drop shadow” trend in web design, the easiest way to describe flat design is to say it’s the opposite of that. Flat design is designing a website that has left behind the drop shadow and the 3D effects, and that is by all intents and purposes flat.

Flat design looks modern, fun, fresh and refreshingly simple compared to it’s 3D counterpart. Flat design is embracing...

Remember the good old days? You know which days I’m talking about; the days not so long ago when we used to design websites to fixed widths. Looking back now they seem like such a simpler time; a happier time; a time when I could recite every font that was available to use online without a second thought. The truth is that Responsive Web Design changed everything. The world was flat and now it’s round, I was blind and now I see, the web was pixels and now it’s percentages.

With the introduction of RWD, it is vital that we as designers evolve our workflow to better suit the demands of the new web. Many of us have voiced our frustrations on how Photoshop’s fixed pixel approach is unsuitable for designing the fluid layouts needed for a responsive website but no useful alternatives have been offered. The web design world is desperate for a bespoke software that is built from the ground up with RWD in mind. Products like Adobe Reflow are a great start, as it shows that Adobe are at least working on a solution, but after spending a few hours with it...

With so many new websites and start-ups springing up every day, a high-quality, professional web site is no longer optional — if it ever was. If you want your company to be taken seriously, let alone stand out, you need to have a design that is both memorable and professional.

However, getting to that point can be difficult. With the exception of start-ups focused on design, most new companies are not founded by people who are naturals at Web design and few have much in the way of resources to throw at the problem.

This can create a major dilemma for a startup, causing some to either push a non-designer into the role of Web developer or simply ignore the problem until they have more money and time down the road. However, if you want your company to thrive...

Do you want your website to load blazing fast? This article will teach you how to make your website load faster than you ever thought possible.

In order to understand why having a fast website is important, check out these statistics: the average smartphone user will leave a website if it does not load within 3 seconds; Google now considers page speed a major consideration for search engine rankings; 75% of internet users agreed that they would not return to a...

Cards on the table: First and foremost, I’m a writer. And while I’ve worked with more than my share of design gurus, I’m not one myself. But that doesn’t mean we don’t share some commonality—namely, an affinity for the creative, and an aptitude for having that creativity blocked.

Anyone who taps into the right brain—from artists and musicians...

Any time you choose an artistic career path, such as web design, you are in for a mix of triumphs and challenges. One of these challenges is bound to be financial. But if you find ways to operate within a budget, you will be able to maximize the money you earn while doing the work you love.

Whether you are a recent graduate, a new freelancer or...

Along with the introduction of CSS3 comes many new features that are available for use in creating great effects; one of the most useful is the transition property.

The transition property is an important new development in CSS. It can be used to create a dynamic change effect on a div or class using a simple structure:

There is one persistent problem with CSS; it doesn’t support variables. Each time you specify a color, for a block of text, or an image border, you have to repeat the hex code. When you want to change the color, you have to do so everywhere. Of course there’s the ‘replace all’ option in your text editor, but lack of built-in support for object oriented styles is a huge downside to CSS.

Numerous projects have attempted to solve the issue, and one of the most popular is Sass.

For those of you who aren’t very familiar with it, Sass is a CSS preprocessor that effectively expands...

Creative thinking is an integral part of design and all art-related professions. Hyper-creative people appear to conceive of brilliant ideas as easily as magicians pull rabbits from hats, but the truth is that we all meet with creative blocks.

Usually, lack of creativity or originality isn’t the problem — if it was, we wouldn’t have chosen these professions — but we must learn to be creative regularly and according to a work schedule rather than with unpredictable bursts of inspiration.

Plenty of tools and techniques have been invented to address...

Nothing is more important than readability when it comes to the text on your website.

Absolutely nothing.

If you can’t read the words, then what good are you doing? Who is getting your message?

Just as important as the words themselves is the design of the text – from fonts, to hyphenation, to how it is all organized on...