We all get sent links to websites, some of them that stir the imagination and creative side, others that give little reason to stay on a page for more than a few seconds.
We make a point of keeping those that impress us and sharing them with people every now and again. Here is a small selection of our favourites so far this year.
Web Design Trends 2009
The people at Smashing Magazine manage to turn out more high quality articles than almost anyone else we can think of. This particular link shows you their insight into the web design trends for the year to date.
If you want to get ideas, inspiration or just keep tabs on what others are doing, this is the place to visit:
Smashing Magazine Web Trends 2009
99 Ways to Get Your Website Noticed
This is an unusual one. A combination of some obvious tips coupled with a few little gems. It’s much more than a sheet of points to get your site noticed though. It’ll keep you on the straight road toward designing a site as well as getting one seen. There are a number of tips that, with a small amount of forward planning at the design stage, can reap real rewards for any website owner.
Pro-dezign.com
10 Creative and Rich User Interfaces
Noupe.com is a site your should bookmark. It’s very much in the mould of Smashing Magazine and is rapidly turning out content just as good and just as often. This particular article has some essential reading if you want to see some of the best user interfaces online.
Noupe.com UI interfaces
The Lightbox Clones Matrix
Lightbox is known by most web designers, if not all. The huge number of lightbox clones is known too. What this link shows is a very easy to read matrix of what each version does and what it works with. It’s remarkably simple and contains links to all the resources you need to immediately begin deployment of one of the variants.
Clones link
17 Wonderful Designer Tools
This time the link is courtesy of Smashing Apps. They’ve collated a small list of links that lead to all manner of free web resource to make your life easier. They’re not kidding either, there is something for everyone.
Make you life easier
7 Websites no Web Developer should be without
Ar-bent-ing have produced a little diamond with this one. You’ll no doubt spot the old favour Web Designer Wall in there, but there are others that you probably haven’t seen – and we think this collection is the perfect example of how the proliferation of links really does lead to resources you’ll use for years to come.
The Essentials
Web Design List
Wow, if this doesn’t keep you busy for the next few years then you should find a new hobby, job, wife, kids and something else too! A mind boggling collection of links to THE definitive web resources. Outstanding doesn’t even begin to describe it. Bookmark it and you can probably cut your favourites list by half, if not more.
The List
30 Exceptional CSS Navigation Techniques
Six Revisions are regularly linked to by Twitter users. This one stood out from the crowd. The used the right word with ‘exceptional’ and it’s a genuinely creative spur. Make sure you return to the Six Revisions home page to look at their other articles though – because there is a mine of information here.
Exceptional Navigation
AllTop
Another collection of resource links, similar to Web Design List but with a more specific target for each link. You’ll find some duplication here but that’s not uncommon when everyone wants to point you to the best of the web – and it’s never a bad thing to see the good things twice.
All of the Top links
10 Professional Looking Free CSS Menus
Minervity have produced a cool list here. It was a DIGG.com popular item for a while but seemed to die a premature death in our opinion. It deserved better, so take a look.
The menus
20 Excellent Javascript Navigation Techniques
If you haven’t done what we told you to and had a proper look around the Six Revisions site – tut tut! You need to see this.
Javascript Navigation
12 jQuery Based Charts
We think the owners of Dreamcss.com miss out on more people than they should do because of the layout of the site. It’s very clean and content is good and informative, but we’re pretty sure a few of their items would get much better exposure with a slightly different look to the place. That said, we spotted this and it’s well worth you taking a look too.
Charts with jQuery
7 Free and Powerful File Managers
DevSnippets publish a huge amount of fantastic code. You can see that by looking at their home page. However, this small list of file managers is one of the best of the bunch in our opinion. Using Ajax, PHP and Javascript there is something for everyone.
File Managers
50 of the Best Websites you can’t live without
Whilst we don’t agree that all of these should qualify, the mere fact there is page upon page of them is enough to indicate there are a lot that deserve their place. They’re not just resources for web designers either, they’re much more generic and carry a lot of value for passing on to the less techy of your friends and colleagues.
How did you manage without them?
Sam Garneaus jQuery Side Panel
We don’t know the guy but this is a single jQuery feature that we’re sure a lot of web designers out there will love. Not a lot more to say about it really, except that it is a very well executed and you need to click the black tab at the top of the page to see what it does.
The Side Panel
We’re currently starting a process of building a collection of the very best web resources online.
If you’d like to submit a link for consideration in the final article (to be published in June 2009), drop us an e-mail to links@clarityitconsulting.co.uk and we’ll add to our list for review. Make sure you give your e-mail the subject of ‘Web link’.
There are a number of criteria:
Firstly, it must be a web resource. That is, articles or resources of genuine value that professionals and anyone interested in web design might learn from. Don’t try and sell goods or services through it. We’ll spot that and we’ll not publish it.
Secondly, it can’t a resource that carries any dodgy advertisements on the same page. Sorry, but we won’t publish that either.
Finally, it must be in English and well written. If it is written in mandarin with more mistakes than line breaks (not that we’d notice them, because we can’t read mandarin) then we won’t publish it.
What we will publish is something that will help us add to what we’d like to turn into the most valuable web resource collection under the sun – and we’ll develop it and nuture it.
The reason is simple, any good web resource encourages good web design and higher standards. We’re very much in favour of that so we’ll give it our backing.
We won’t be asking for reciprocal links or any of that rubbish, because that’s for desperate people in desperate times – and we’re not, and it isn’t.
You could be helping to develop something that will become the staple diet of web designers in need of inspiration, a code snippet, creative change, a new menu, a selection of photoshop tips or merely a single script that lets them finish the perfect project – so take part and let us know what you think merits inclusion.
We do appreciate it if you retweet our articles or publish a direct link to them if you wish to share them with friends, colleagues or associates. By doing so you contribute to the ongoing success of this section and we'll keep bringing your topics to debate and, hopefully, obtain value from.
We'll also respond to feedback from you, so if there is a particular article you'd like to see written - let us know.
Thanks for reading!
