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 spiders recognize a site, giving better rankings to sites with quality, well written content and social media engagement. For web professionals, this created something of a panic, as static sites that were not particularly well written and stuffed with keywords began to fail.

One of the most important tasks on your plate as a web designer is usability. Usability is defined as a gauge of the quality of the user’s experience when interacting with your website. Any website you design should always be seamless from the standpoint of the user. They should find your site easy to navigate without having to first undergo special training. Usability is normally based on several different factors.

A person looking through your site wants their ease of learning to be top-notch. They’ll want to quickly learn the user interface so that they can jump right in and accomplish fundamental, navigational tasks. Efficiency of use is another factor: after they’ve learned to navigate your site, they’ll want to accomplish tasks speedily. Even if the user has used the site before, they’ll need to easily remember enough of the process to be able to use the site effectively the next time. This is called memorability. When they’re using your site, they may experience some errors, but are these errors frequent or severe? Finally, after they’re done with your site, is the user’s subjective satisfaction high or low? They should have liked using your site.

Of course, you can’t please all site visitors all the time, but some standards are common to ensure good usability. What mediocre web designers take for granted, you should not. Here is a rundown of the top three usability errors that web designers should avoid at all costs.

The most frustrating aspect of web design for designers trained for print, is the persistent lack of typographic control.

Careful typographic choices are the hallmark of quality work and the lack of that quality online never ceases to be jarring for those of us that know what we’re looking for.

Fortunately, the level of control that we have is increasing all the time and support for more advanced typographic rendering is also increasing. Whilst it’s certainly not possible to deliver the kind of treatment that applications like Illustrator deliver — where every letter can be tweaked if required — there are tools available to increase quality. One of the least known is the text-rendering property.

I’ve always had trouble getting large groups of shapes from Illustrator over to Photoshop without rasterizing them all in the process. Up until recently the only way I knew how was to copy and paste each shape one by one – a process which soon becomes tedious.

However, recently I discovered a method which takes less than a minute, regardless of how many shapes there are in your file. The only catch is that it involves using Adobe Fireworks.

Here’s a simple three step guide on how it’s done.