WEB DESIGNERS, SitePoint is giving out a FREE BOOK “The Photoshop Anthology - 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks, and Techniques”.

Amazon.com Book’s Description:

The Photoshop Anthology is full-color, question-and-answer book for Web Designers who want to use Photoshop to build Websites and create better looking web graphics more effectively.

The book covers:

* Photoshop interface tricks & shortcuts
* Basic Skills: Transparencies, rounded corners, blending images, matching colors and more
* Buttons: Creating buttons and tabs in various shapes and form factors
* Backgrounds: Making various gradient and textured backgrounds
* Creating text effects, texturing and shadowing text, wrapping text around a curve, and more
* Adjusting Images: Removing blue tints, darkening and lightening images, fixing red-eye, removing dark shadows, sharpening images and more
* Manipulating Images: Creating fish-eye effects, removing imperfections, making product shots for ecommerce and more
* Creating Web Interfaces: Best practice & time saving ideas including how-tos on slicing images, creating rollovers, and more
* Advanced: Generating thumbnails, animated GIFs, bulk watermarking, sharing Photoshop Actions and more

Additionally, the book will walk you through the entire process of designing a Website in Photoshop - from using layers to keep organized to using the slice tool to create individual Website elements.

Amazon’s Rating: 3 1/2.

Download Now.

The power of JavaScript and DOM Scripting has certainly made the behavior of a web very much dynamic and easy to implement.

One of the examples that benefit from this technology is in creating an alternating color rows table (so called striped table). Alternating color rows are very helpful in differentiating each row in a table. Therefore, it certainly helps in the presentation of your information in a table.

With a little bit of JavaScript, you can easily create one or more striped tables by simply embedding a class into your table tag.

Please see our example on alternating color rows table and its brief tutorial.

How many of you have ever gone for a roadtrip? How many times you get lost because there are no clear signs on the road to guide you? This is the same for website design. Without a good navigation, people actually can get lost in a website. This is extremely important if your website is hosting many multi-tier web pages such as e-commerce site, social networking site, web 2.0 sites, and others. So what happen when people get lost in a website?

There are many scenarios of what can happen. The following is what I think I will do:

1. I am adventurous. I will look around the website to figure out where I am and where I can go.
2. I am a try-er. I will go back to the homepage and move from there.
3. I am a give-up. I will just quit the website.

Regardless whether which option I will choose, each of these options might bring a damage to your website reputation. For instance, when someone left an e-commerce site because he/she does not know where he/she is, the site will lose a potential buyer. Or other consequences.

Thus, it is important to have a site with user-friendly navigation. What are the factors that determine if a website design has a user-friendly navigation?

A List Apart identifies 3 important aspects of user-friendly navigation. A website navigation is user-friendly, when the user is able to answer the following 3 questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where can I go?
3. Where have I been?

If your user is able to answer the above questions without looking at your website URL, congratulation, your website design has a very user-friendly navigation.

However, if you think that you need to improve on your website design navigation, A List Apart provides 3 important tips in designing your website design navigation:

1. Do not link to the page where you are on.

Many web pages actually have a link from its page to itself. This creates a confusion for the user. I am on this page and why I am being directed to the same page again.

This challenge can be overcome if there are appearance differences to let the user know that this is actually the link that goes to this same page. For instance, you can easily change the color of this link to another color using CSS.

2. Tell your users where they are now.

This can easily be achieved by:.

- Using breadcrumbs: home > section 1 > you-are-here-now page.
- Highlighting the proper section / page correctly. Use different CSS styles to signify the section / page that the user is in.

3. Think before you link

Make a thorough thinking before linking a page from your website.

Some important points to consider:

- Is this link needed to be linked in the global navigation? Or is it possible just to keep it in a sectional navigation?
- How many links should I have in the global navigation?
- What sections do the users want to access frequently? (You can create quick links for this)
- Many others.

All of these tips come just to one goal - provide your users a friendly navigation in terms that they can access your website contents easily, know where they are now, know where they can go later, and know where they have been.

Do not let your users lost in your website.

John Connolly from Web Designer Library wrote an article, “Dont let your Web Designer ruin your Web site “.

With the many advancements in website development, web designers sometimes tend to be over-creative in developing a website. They will include many flash movies, audios, and other “multi”-medias to really make the website stands out. John says that having all of these present two problems:

1. The website will be slow to load. Why should we wait for all medias to load when all we need is just the contact information?
2. Not all medias are indexed by search engines. If the website has many ideas, yes, it seems attractive in the user’s eyes but from Search Engine’s (SE) eye, multimedias do not get indexed. Thus, the SE does not read anything except the “real text” in the website. It is possible that the only thing that get indexed is just the copyright text (even printed in small).

Hence, what John says about making a website simple is true. In having a website, we should have information available easily for the user as well as for the SEs; having an attractive design; provides an easy navigation (people are getting lazy in clicking nowadays - the less clicks you have for your users to get the information they want, the better your website is); and many more tips are available in John Connoly’s article.

Thus, make sure the KIS principle is taken into consideration when having a website. What is KIS? Keep-It-Simple.