4 thoughts on “Web Design 101”

  1. Jakob Nielsen is a good place to start from the usability side of things, though he is perceived by some as “hating graphics”. He chooses usability over aesthetics, and will take the “usability guru” controversial position at times. His site is considered by many to be very usable, but quite ugly and boring. He does make a lot of excellent points. I like Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability a lot better as a usability guidebook. For one thing, he’s much more lively to read that Neilsen.

    A general visual design reference that I recommend to people is actually a magazine, a book, and a website. Before and After magazine is a very nice, clearly-written site for graphic designers. It’s unlike a lot of graphic design resources in that it’s very down-to-earth; they have a book called Before and After Page Design which is an excellent introduction to visual page hierarchy and layout principles. I think it strikes a nice balance between clean design and aesthetics; you won’t find crazy layouts or cutting edge graphics in here, but it’s a great foundation.

    Another great jumping off point for web development itself is A List Apart, which is the cornerstones of the “web standards” movement. Just starting from there will give you a great overview of topics of interest to the web designer, best practices, and current trends. A good number of the articles are technical, but there are also a lot of trend and opinion pieces that you’d find interesting. Here’s an index by topic.

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