Shorthand CSS When you’re designing a website, you’ll often find yourself adding class after class to your CSS Stylesheet. Eventually your CSS file becomes incredibly bloated and loading it takes forever and a day. Shortening down your CSS file, quite obviously, is the perfect way to make your web pages load faster, and the best way to go about making your CSS file smaller is to use shorthand CSS. Shorthand CSS is simply a way of writing CSS in a must more palatable form; a way to make your CSS tidier.

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. (via Wikipedia)

When it comes to web design, usability, in essence, is how easy your users can get around your site. It all comes down to you making your users think about what they have to do as little as possible. When the user has to think about something as basic as getting around a site, it can become tedious and can turn your user off your site.

As a designer, typography is very important to me. It’s how I convey messages and how I catch the attention of the people I’m trying to give the information to. Typography is an art form in itself, with type artists forming beautiful characters to create famous fonts that are used across the world. Below I’ve created a list of fonts that everyone should own, as well as free fonts that you’ll also find interesting.

Pseudo classes are those things with colons in them, you know, like :hover or :link. They let you control the CSS of stuff in different forms, states and places easily and efficiently, without taking up too much room. CSS3 is going to introduce a ton of new pseudo classes, and they’re going to make our lives a lot easier (if you take browser compatibility out of the equation). They help both aesthetics and usability, and can make things that were once hard easier than ever before.

I watched Avatar the other day and I’ll admit, my first reaction wasn’t “Gosh, this’ll make an awesome article”. However while thinking about the movie one day I somehow managed to relate it to web design, and I thought it’d be a fun way to explain something I was already thinking of writing. There might be a few spoilers in here, so if you haven’t seen the movie you mightn’t want to read this (or you might, I don’t know).

In Avatar the main protagonist, Jake is brought to the mysterious world of Pandora, where he faces a lot of challenges that force him to make quick decisions on what to do. A lot of the stuff Jake goes through can be related back to web design, and below I’ll explain how.

Twitter is arguably the website that defined 2009: it’s quick, easy to use, and popular. Not only that but it allows you to get your name out there, contact people, and even make new friends. It’s especially exploded inside the design community, where it’s quite hard to name a design website that doesn’t use it in some way or another.

For websites that use twitter therefore, it’s important that they can tell their users about it, so that their users will be able to keep up with the site even when it isn’t updated for a while, giving them a sense of continuity. For this reason, twitter icons to allow your users to follow you are important. So below I’ve brought together over 150 attractive twitter icons for use with your website.

Red is one of the most powerful colors in the spectrum and for that reason it is usually used badly in websites, as it can easily overpower everything else. When used correctly though, red can be a great color to use in web design, and can add a strong touch to it. It can be used to highlight something, or even to make the website stand out more, helping to drag the user in. Below are over 30 red websites that make great use of the color red.

Color is one of the most important parts of both web design, and design in general. Color helps to make things stand out, to give something purpose and to create an atmosphere. Color can define a brand, and it can be used to warn or to welcome.

Depth and 3D effects are just another part of the web design process and they’re becoming more and more common across the web. I mean, what better way to drag your readers in than to have your design sit off the screen? So in this tutorial I’ll go over some of the key ways you can make your design ‘pop’ as it were.

In my opinion, how you organize your website is very important: If you organize your website right you’ll be able to find everything when you eventually need to fine tune it, which can be quite hard if your files are scattered all over the place. At some point or another though, you’re going to end up with a query URL, for instance ?id=1. To make this more search engine friendly, you’re going to have to alter it somehow, and that’s where mod_rewrite comes in.