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High-quality usability has been the center of discussions in the industry in the past ten years, as it becomes more and more important for users. Good usability can also help build brand awareness and can generally improve a user's opinion of a website and even a company. There is so much focus on usability today because big and small companies showed how important a good usability strategy can turn out to be. Good usability has been in the past couple of years at the heart of successful start-ups. Simple ideas are most of the time the most innovative and this is mainly what usability is about: making a feature or a product easy to use, while still keeping the product quality at a high level. Today's article comes a lot down to common sense. It seems that after years and years of discussing this issue, web designers still have a hard time understanding it. Usability is not a joke anymore and the advices below should be printed out and pinned on the wall in front of your desk.

Unless you are really HTML-savvy, writing articles directly using HTML is not ideal. First, you have to wrap the content properly with the tags in order to format it, and secondly you will have to go back and forth from your code editor to the browser to see how it looks. If you are a frequent web writer, I think it's better for you to write using Markdown. Markdown allows you to write content in plain text that later can be translated into a valid HTML format, and with the help of a tool, you can instantly see the output.

E-books about principles of design, and specifically about web design, are getting more and more popular. Years ago these kind of information can only be found on universities, but now they're everywhere and people are taking them in like hungry lions. If you don't know this, well, seriously, what rock have you been living under last year? Sacha Greif wrote "Step by Step UI design" Jarrod Drysdale wrote "Bootsrapping Design" Nathan Barry wrote three e-books, "App Design Handbook", "Designing Web Applications" and "Authority".

The pseudo-classes are used to target elements without having to add extra classes, attributes or ID; that is why it is called in that way, pseudo-class. Throughout our previous posts, we have covered a few new CSS3 pseudo-classes, including :not, :before and :after, :first-of-type and we also use pseudo-classes in ...

We are gradually getting used to the fact that professional designers don't have limits; they just simply push boundaries of general conceptions and recreate whatever comes to their minds. One of the best examples confirming this notion is website design with depth perception. Despite the fact that initially it is a two-dimensional medium, nowadays, designers [...]

Just in time for Google's annual I/O developers conference, the web giant launched a pretty dramatic redesign to its Google+ social networking arm and Google Maps. And Google is on-trend. The design scheme, while not completely flat, is almost flat and could evoke a whole new design trend of its own.

There are hundreds of brand new mobile responsive website layouts published every month. The trend has swept through the design world and taken web development to a new level. In the past we have written on some other amazing responsive websites and I want to use this gallery as another comparison.

Fries by Jaune Sarmiento just reached version number 1.0. The project offers a framework for the development of web apps in the look and feel of native Android apps. If you are familiar with Android's UI from version 4 on, you will definitely know your ways around, once you get a hold of Fries. In its current iteration, Fries is optimized to cooperate with PhoneGap, thus letting you build native Android experiences.

We're starting a new series of blog posts featuring " Case Studies " of unique projects that experiment with the boundaries of the Web and create trends. Most of them have been Site of the Day on Awwwards.

Over the last three years, responsive web design has been gaining popularity and is now considered to be one of the best ways to design websites that look great on any device: from smartphones to smart TVs. In this hand-picked collection, you'll find dozens of beautiful responsive sites in every category, and I hope you'll find them as inspiring as our team does. The screenshots on the left were taken on a tablet and the ones on the right were taken on a smartphone.

When it comes to the style of a website's design there are all kinds of options. Part of having an effect website involves having a design that helps to prioritize the right content and elements on the website, which results in users/visitors pay more attention to those important elements. One of the best ways to control the parts of the website that will get the most attention from visitors is to remove things that are unnecessary and might cause a distraction. In recent years the minimalist design approach has drawn a lot of attention, especially from designers who appreciate the beauty of simplicity. However, designing a website to avoid clutter and distractions doesn't mean that it has to be completely minimal with very few images and visual elements.

You often find interesting pieces of information, from videos, images and articles online that you want to save. There are a number of ways to do this: you can use a bookmarking feature that comes with most today's browsers, or else using social bookmarking sites, like Digg...........

The web is crammed full of words. There is enough content to keep you reading until you take your last breath, even if that moment is still 100 years from now. So far for the good news ;-) The bad news is, the web grows faster than you could ever possibly keep up with. Sooner or later, any netizen will suffer from information overload. I know I do already. This will become a growing problem for brands and their communication strategies as they will need to cut their messages short or risk to not get noticed. If you ask me, one of the best ways to deal with this necessity is the infographic…

In this video post I will guide you through the whole process of how to create a responsive WordPress site without you touching a single code. Well, at least for the first part. The first video focuses on how to setup a responsive WordPress site using Bluehost as your host, and along with it is a special discount for 1WD readers.

There is so much to learn about WordPress theme development. The Internet is home to hundreds of articles about building WordPress themes, to countless theme frameworks that will help you get started, and to endless WordPress themes, some of which are beautiful and professional but not a few of which are (to be honest) a bit crappy.

Today I will teach you how to create a simple contact form in HTML5 and CSS3 that you can download for free. Many WordPress plugins come with fully functional contact forms that can be installed and used right away, but we believe in beautiful design and in your right to style it however you choose.

Organic website design is a style of design that uses natural textures such as wood and paper, as well as scenic or floral imagery. There are many, many sites that could be considered organic in their design, and in this collection we have selected 30 of the best we could find that are beautifully presented and use organic elements to their very best effect.

There are a number of great methods for handling user redirects on mobile. Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS brands on the market. So it makes sense to work around these problems by putting together a two-way split for website themes.