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Like fashion and architecture, web design enjoys an ever changing ebb and flow as trends become popular, become mainstream, and then become passé. To maintain a modern and aesthetically-pleasing look, web designers should examine current trends, estimate their staying power, and implement those techniques that will have the best and longest effects.

As Whitney Hess stated earlier this year: UX Design isn't just "a step in the process." Users themselves experience much more than just the look and feel of an application.

This article highlights 5 further principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design - approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

When working in the design industry it's easy to find inspiration everywhere you go, by everything you see, hear and touch and you don't need to be sat at your computer to get inspiration either.

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren't enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will briefly define search engine optimization (SEO) and information architecture (IA), describe one of the many places where these marketing specialties intersect, and explain how easy and natural thematic structure and linking really is. I've also included a video. I should point out that this technique is very intuitive, and many site owners or designers are probably using it to some extent naturally. We are simply putting a name to these natural tendencies.

""We really love this new website you've built! Now we'd like to send out an email to all of our customers, friends and anyone, and it should look exactly like the website except with a spinning mailbox at the bottom, and have my photo, and my cat's photo…" Ever had that conversation with a client? You've built plenty of websites in your time and could knock off a blog template in your sleep, but HTML email? Seriously? HTML email has the reputation (often well deserved) of being a horrible design medium."

Link opportunities are abundant if you know where to look. Sometimes there is value in linking outside the box as your site is only as strong as its weakest link. Are You an SEO Link Opportunist? by SEO Design Solutions. Each link has value, for example a PR0 link from a page already present in the Google backlink algorithm using the link:command has far greater value than a PR6 link from a page that has weak internal linking or is not crawled frequently.

What should be the role of marketing in the semantic web? Should there be any? According to the W3C, the semantic web is about common data formats that make it easy to integrate and combine data from diverse sources. It's about mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that facilitates automatic processing, where software can programmatically comprehend how different pieces of data are related. It's a web behind the web of animated banner ads and branded UI designs.

The average e-commerce site is effective in getting shoppers to buy less than half the time. Web site design gurus say usability testing can help bring profitability up.

Ideally, your landing page should be a place where you can get visitors to do what you want, whether that be buy a product, click on links, or even just read through information without having to do any additional work. There are a number of things that you can do to improve your site's page. Here's a list of 100 resources that can help you get on the road to building better landing pages.

Last year we posted cart buttons from over 100 top online retailers. Just over a year later, I spotted 46 out of the 111 retailers using different button designs. But does that mean they're testing? Not necessarily.

Once the party's over, are you leaving customers out in the cold? Thank you pages typically don't receive much design or marketing attention. After all, by the time a site visitor sees a Thank You page the chase is over, right? The visitor purchased a widget, filled out the signup form, or downloaded a white paper - in other words, the web site has won, and another conversion stat has been chalked up in the company's analytics package. Success! Check out our positive ROI!

The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.

As email marketers, we never know what mindset email recipients will be in at any given time. So a good idea is to design your copy and creative to speak to all personality types/buying modalities: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic. If this makes you go "hmmm?" make sure you check out our explanation of the buying modes in our personas webinar and webinar recap.

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

From the "Research that Makes Spammers Giddy" department, Jordan McCollum over at Marketing Pilgrim points to an interesting new study from Ball State University's Center for Media Design and ExactTarget. The study, Messaging Behaviors, Preferences, and Personas looked at how different groups of people interact with media and which sales channels work best to reach them.