Design Shack — Web Design Gallery, Articles & Community

UX Design / 18 Jul 2016

How to Design an Interface That’s Built for Speed

Is your website slow? Be honest. Could it be faster? Users demand websites that load quickly and continue to deliver content without lag. If your website falls the least bit behind in meeting this demand users could abandon your site (and they might never return).

Today, we’re going to look at ways to make sure your website interface is built for speed, so you never have to worry about page load times again.

UX Design / 4 May 2015

How to Design Content for User Experiences

Content is a major part of the user experience. Content is more than search engine optimization; it’s more than blogging. It is part of your site, brand identity and why users interact with your design.

Every day it becomes even more important to design for content as part of the overall function and user experience in website and app design. But how can you do it? (We can help you with some case studies and examples, such as The Hen House, which uses a variety of design and user engagement techniques to keep you scrolling.)

Typography / 30 Mar 2015

7 Tips for Choosing the Best Web Font for Your Design

There’s no way to quantify all of the font options available for website designers. Almost every day a new typeface shows up in my inbox or Twitter feed. But not every one one of these typefaces – no matter how beautiful – is right for designing a website.

When it comes to selecting the perfect font, you have think about a variety of things including compatibility, load time and design purpose. Today, we have seven tips to help you select and use the best web font for your design project.

Mobile / 24 Feb 2015

Google Material Design: Everything You Need to Know

You probably keep hearing the phrase “material design” popping up in conversations. The concept is pretty new; it was introduced in the summer and references a new design language from the folks at Google.

But material design is more than just an idea; it is likely to cause designers to completely rethink web and app design processes. Sites are already beginning to role out design schemes using Google’s material design documentation. So now is the time to learn what it’s all about and if a material design framework is in your future.

Mobile / 24 Dec 2014

Designing Hover Styles and the Future of the Technique

Despite arguments that hover styles are dead, these small boxes that pop-up over images, text or other elements on websites are still found all over the web. Designers like them for an added bit of style and information; users like them for functionality. (They are only “dead” because hover styles don’t work without a mouse-over).

The UI function is still there for now. And if you opt to use it, you’ll want to create well-designed hover styles that engage users. You’ll also want to think about how to alter these areas of your website for responsive sites.

UX Design / 14 May 2014

10 UX Phrases and Terms to Know Right Now

It seems like the world of the web – and web design – is changing every few days. Trends, new techniques and users who demand more are driving this change. And we all have to stay on top of it to remain relevant.

Today, we are going to look at 10 phrases that you need to add to your vocabulary right now. Each of these words or phrases relates to user experience, and in essence are part of the design process. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Web Standards / 5 Aug 2013

40 Fantastic Open Source WordPress Plugins

There is an ever-growing library of plugins to be found in the official WordPress directory. These plugins are all free to download and many have also been submitted into Github as open source. It can be fun prowling the Newest and Recently Updated plugins to look for any gems. There are already so many solutions to various problems, but finding new stuff is always fun.

I have put together 40 new WordPress plugins for managing bits of functionality in your website. These are all free to download and you can even install them right from your WP Admin Plugins menu. Granted some of these examples may not prove useful to everyone. But it is encouraging to see lots of creativity from WordPress developers, along with the openness of sharing their efforts with the community.

Web Standards / 2 Apr 2012

The Top 10 Web Design Buzzwords and Hot Topics for 2012

In 2011, there wasn’t a web design blog or magazine in the world that didn’t use “HTML5” or “CSS3” in at least a few headlines. We talked endlessly about the new possibilities that these technologies brought about, argued tirelessly about the hurdles that they presented and had tons of fun creating demos with embarrassingly modest browser support.

Though CSS3 and HTML5 are still at the top of our discussion lists, I decided to look around and see what other terms and buzzwords are major topics for 2012. Read on to see what web designers are ranting and arguing about these days. Along the way you’ll find over fifty excellent articles to check out that will brush you up on each topic.

Mobile / 28 Feb 2012

5 Quick Ways to Make Your Site More Mobile Friendly

If you’ve ignored mobile platforms in the past, it can be intimidating to finally make the jump and begin to support mobile browsing on your existing sites. There’s so much to learn, a million techniques to choose from and a limitless amount of work that you could potentially put into existing projects.

A question that designers and site owners alike always want to know is, “How can I quickly add mobile support?” Sometimes, you don’t have the budget to start from scratch and yet still desire a modicum of mobile goodness. Today I’ll walk you through five things that you can do to make your site more mobile friendly.

Business / 20 Jun 2011

A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Through Social News

The modern web 2.0 landscape features dozens of amazing social networking projects. The most popular include brands such as Facebook or Twitter. Underneath these however lies an even larger industry centered around user participation and information sharing systems.

Web Standards / 17 May 2011

Useful Tips for Building Freelance Web Projects With WordPress

Today We’ve got some useful tips for freelance project work. WordPress will help to advance not only your client’s websites but to save loads of time and patience during the process. The administration panel is easy as pie and even includes the possibility for new updates.

Web Standards / 29 Jun 2010

5 Ways to Be an Ethical SEO Expert

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a huge buzzword among marketers for years. The reason for this is that search engines can be legitimate sources of mountains of traffic for your site and the higher you rank on them the better.

The problem that arose in the early days of SEO was a blatant abuse of the system. What began as a few innocent tricks to earn more visitors morphed into questions of etiquette and heated debates regarding what should and shouldn’t be allowed. The web design community has come a long way in the past decade but there are plenty of marketers that still follow the tactics of the 90s either through ignorance or defiance.

Today we’ll briefly look at how to engage in SEO in an ethical manner by pointing out five key techniques to avoid.