Designing for yourself is one of the toughest tasks for a web designer. Grace Smith rounds up 10 vital steps you need to take to pave the way for a successful redesign of your portfolio site
Jonathan Longnecker, co-founder of web and graphic design agency FortySeven Media, argues that most responsive sites are boring and comes up with a few starting points to help us create designs that break the mould
In the last of our .net Awards 2011 profiles, we showcase the 10 websites of the year that you have nominated. They all are rich in visual flair and imagination but which one really pushed the boundaries of the web this year?
Creating your own buttons to get people to Like or tweet your own or your client’s pages isn’t always an option. Matthew Smith takes a look at the right way to integrate social networking into your sites
Alex Morris, user experience director at Mark Boulton Design, walks us through some of the rationale, the tricks, the processes and techniques you can employ to build HTML prototyping into your workflow
The Canadian writer, speaker, blogger and designer/developer extraordinaire answers your questions on choosing software, getting inspiration, learning how to architect apps that can scale nicely, and what’s holding back the web
Our creations need to be more human, says Aarron Walter, lead user experience designer at MailChimp. He argues that the task of designing a pleasurable experience is made easier when we create a distinct personality for our interface
On a gallery-style website, we tend to look over the whole view to see what suits our artistic palette. Digestible chunks of copy or images can be processed like a great tapas meal, argues Matthew Smith
Mozilla's Louis-Rémi Babé rounds up the best Firefox add-ons for web designers and developers and explains how to use them to learn more about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, add an FTP client to your browser and more
Another new category in the .net Awards recognises the world's best web designers. Here we profile our shortlist compiled of your nominations. Whose designs rocked your world this year? Make up your mind and cast your vote today!
Californian agency ZURB specialises in helping web startups connect with their customers. Partner Jeremy Britton explains its approach and philosophy to Oliver Lindberg
You hand your beautifully crafted code to a client, colleague or even CMS, and the next time you check in, it's all ruined. Front-end alchemist Scott Lenger explains how bad code happens to good people, why it matters, and the steps you can take to prevent it
As more and more graphic designers and illustrators gain web design skills, illustrations can increasingly be found on the web. UK designer Mike Kus showcases his 10 favourite examples of websites using illustration to enhance the user experience.
If you lack a formal design education, you’ll need to self-educate before you can progress in your career, says Ryan Downie. Here's a checklist of the subjects he studied to help him to understand more about web design
Designers and developers share with Craig Grannell their tools for designing websites and demand something more in keeping with modern practices. The perfect tool, it seems, simply doesn't exist yet, as highlighted by the Project Meteor campaign
Designers and developers accuse Adobe of not understanding the web and creating a tool that could damage rather than aid the industry. Craig Grannell investigates
Web designer Josh Miller, the creative director of Paramore, shows us how to turn an unordered list into a rotating diagonal portfolio with CSS3 and jQuery, just like the one he built for joshmiller7.com
The Brilliant Newcomer Award celebrates the ultimate shooting star in web design and development who really has excelled in their field. Here we profile the top 10 newcomers as nominated by you. May the best one win!