This tutorial starts with the Photoshop stage of the blog design process, and shows how the design and layout are created to form an initial concept from which the fully coded blog will be based on.

One area in which few Linux users see any representation is Web typography. In 2003, Linux user and software developer Jeremy Zawodny howled about the dearth of decent fonts for Linux. At the time, he was right. But that situation has since changed, even though many Web designers still believe fonts designed for (and included with) various Linux flavors are all just icky.

That’s not true any longer either. But the perception remains.

When writing for the Web, writers should always keep one analogy in mind: the Internet is a jungle and Web users are information foragers within it. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen championed this comparison based on his studies that found that the majority of Internet users only scan websites in their quest to find useful information as quick as possible.

There are quite a few reasons why having basic Photoshop skills beyond slicing PSD’s to XHTML/CSS is essential to any web developer.

The curves adjustment tool is an integral part of every professional’s knowledge base and image editing package. Even if you’ve taken a good photo, chances are it can be improved or it needs to be adjusted to work in a collage or collection. Or even to just to intensify a mood. You can always make a good thing better – and curves is a one-stop-shop way to do that.

“Mathematics is beautiful.” This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”

Proper use of image compression can make a huge difference in the appearance and size of your website image files. But compression is an often-misunderstood topic, partly because there’s a real lack of understanding on what the different types of compression are good for. If you don’t understand which type of compression to use for different types of images, you’ll likely end up with one of two results: either images that don’t look as good as they could, or image file sizes that are way larger than they need to be.

When designing a large website, especially one that contains a store, you may be required to design a system for ordering online, or a multi-step process of another sort. Walking users through this process by making it easy and intuitive is key to helping increase conversion rates. Any frustration along the way may cause them to leave and pursue other options. Progress trackers are designed to help users through a multi-step process and it is vital that such trackers be well designed in order to keep users informed about what section they are currently on, what section they have completed, and what tasks remain.

Web development is time consuming and quite challenging. There are many ways to help combat that challenge, helpful applications from security to traffic analysis as well as CSS-concepts to give us clean, condensed code and faster load times, reducing time efforts and assisting designers and developers with critical improvements to workflows.

To become a professional web designer, you need effective tools that would help you implement beautiful designs with solid coding techniques. Handy ready-to-be-used solutions and smart design tools are always nice to have, but good ones are often quite hard to find.