Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

It's deceptively easy to maintain traffic once you've scored that initial boost of visitor hits. In fact, one of the greatest determinations of this relies on a single make or break entry.Every blogger knows, if they look at their web analytics at all, that one of the most consistently viewed pages is the biographical entry. If it's linked on the home page or throughout the blog, the audience will invariably stay long enough to read it, at least 25% of the time if the initial trafficing content is good.Users want to satisfy their cusiosity. If what they read...

I just returned from Dave McClure’s excellent Warm Gun Conference, and I haven’t been this excited to be a designer in a while. The entire event was about design, metrics, and products, and even more importantly the people at the conference were many of the who’s who in Bay Area design. From what I saw and experienced there I daresay there are signs we’re entering a golden age of Design. The evidence: 1. The startups being invested in are designer-led. Take the new Designer Fund that funds startups with designer-founders and helps mentor them. Consider the companies...

Introduction Web Consistency Testing is a new form of Web testing that aims to answer the simple question: does this page look right? It's an automated approach to making sure a page looks the way we expect, whether that be cross-browser, over time (regression), in multiple locales, or whatever else we can think of. Kevin Menard, founder of Mogotest, presented an in-depth talk about what Web Consistency Testing is and presented a roadmap for building such a system at GTAC 2011. You can see his presentati...

Click for a larger imageGhostery, the browser plugin that allows its users to "track the trackers," just released data on the tags, widgets and analytics on websites that are the worst in terms of slowing page loads to a crawl.Update: Ghostery discovered an error in their original data set. It appears that Millenial Media was not on this year's list at all, and the #2 slot belonged to AdFunky. Both the text and the graph above have been changed to reflect this.Any webmaster worth his or her salt already knows that slow page loads adversely affect Google rank and pageviews, but not everyone see...

Web applications are a little more challenging to design than websites. Designers need to anticipate user behavior, make users’ lives easier and make the experience as visually appealing as possible. Many designers tend to do what is easier for them than think about what’s easier for the user. The following is a small list of tips that designers often overlook in the process of designing a web application.1. The Power of a Good TooltipWhen you present your web application to a potential customer, the last thing you want to do is ruin your lovely graphic design work by plaste...

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a design could be liked by me, but disregarded by others. In spite of that, there are few things that are ...

This is a list of best practices for creating websites that do not break when browsers are updated. It's not always possible to follow all of these, but following as many of them as possible will help future-proof your website. This is especially important for intranet applications and other non-public websites where problems are likely to not be noticed during testing by browser vendors.JavaScriptPrefix all global variable access in onfoo attributes with “window.”When an event handler content attribute (onclick, onmouseover, and so forth) is used on HTML element, al...