Web design always changes, but you can become successful if you just keep a few tips in mind. These tips and advice will help you along the way. One of the things that you may want to make sure that you keep apart of your web design is more CSS3+HTML5. These both have been on the horizon of web design for the last couple of years. In 2011, there has definitely been a big explosion of it. Many web designers are beginning to let go of “flash.”Flash really isn’t that hot anymore.

You should also consider simple color schemes, and should consider staying away from black and white. Green, yellow, or even red can go very well as your primary color. You should limit your palette to just two or three colors. It is very remarkable what just a few colors can do for your message.

Another thing that you should consider is going mobile. This is because it can actually create a vacant and impersonal design. Mobile design has really taken a big leap forward with the entire extra added on. Mostly every site has a mobile option for it. Think about using parallax scrolling on your web site. It can be most effective as a secondary element of your design. It can be used as a header, footer, or even back round. You have a few choices when it comes to using parallax scrolling, so you should really think about adding it the next time you design a web page.

Don’t forget to design for touch screens, since technology has really become more tactile. Everything is literally at your fingertips now, instead of using a mouse. You need to keep this is mind when you design your site for visitors. You want them to be able to view everything in the best way that they can.

Large scale back rounds was yet another hot trend for web design in 2011, and has yet to surge some more. All of these images are in high resolution, and cover the entire site. It is an instant way to grab your audience, so think about the back ground while you are designing your site as well.

Create and set a unique Facebook name.

You can do this by going to www.facebook.com/username and selecting your Business Page (not your Personal Profile) from the drop-down list. This unique name will also be used for your unique Facebook URL. Also, choosing your name is one and done once you choose it, you can’t change it, so be sure to double check for errors.

Add interactive Facebook applications.

Facebook offers over 550,000 active applications, many of which help promote your own website and content via your Facebook Business Page. In addition to providing a user-friendly interface, most of the applications are very easy to install and customize. Also, integration and usage of these Applications will promote links to your website, blog, or online retail space. Here are my top five must-haves: Networked Blogs, Static FBML (Facebook’s HTML), Promotions, Slideshare, and Reviews.

Add the Like Button Plug-in to your website.

To encourage your blog followers and website visitors to follow you on Facebook, add the Facebook Like plug-in to your site. This Button is single line of generated code that allows people to share your content with their network of friends. By clicking on the Like Button, a story appears in the user’s friend’s News Feed with a link back to your site. In addition, users have the ability to add a comment, giving more prominence to the published story on Facebook.

Be social, and let your fans, too.

Locking down your Page to limit management time is going to make your page less fun and less interactive for users. Let users to post on your Wall, add photos, tag, add videos and comment on your posts and posts made by other fans. Enabling interactive options may result in a spam post here or there, but you can monitor all activity and delete what you deem inappropriate.

Optimize your status updates with keywords.

It’s significant to note that Facebook Pages are indexed by search engines, meaning public updates from your Business Page (unlike your Personal Profile) often show up in Google’s real-time search results. When posting a new update on your Page, keep your most important keywords in mind. Also, try to add a picture when possible Facebook updates with images posted on Business Pages are clicked on 54 percent more than text-only updates, and even 22 percent more than posts with a video update.

For many small to mid-size businesses, Facebook Pages are increasingly becoming a second homepage. Employing these basic optimization tactics within your Business Page can significantly enhance your visibility and outreach not only through Facebook, but the entire World Wide Web.

Take a look at some of the exciting web trends to look forward to in 2011 including the breakthrough of HTML5, CSS3 and other concepts!

HTML5 and CSS3

You can’t talk about website design trends for 2011 without mentioning HTML5 and CSS3. Both HTML5 and CSS3 make websites easier to build and link with social tools.

This latest version of the HTML enables the designer and developer to create more readable code and build layouts that are semantically meaningful. It introduces advanced features that help you structure mark-up. Other HTML5 features are APIs, dragging, drawing graphics on screen, canvas, keygen, output and progress.

CSS3 is the latest module of CSS, Its much more advanced set of features makes this new version the tool of the future. Some distinctive aspects of CSS3 are features like “border radius”, “box shadow”, multiple background images and text shadow. Animations with CSS3 are made easy, subtle and lightweight.

Minimalism

Minimalism style of designing whether in a website or in print has the capability to create high visual impact designs that create a feeling of space and light. By the removal of superfluous elements and by retaining only essential elements, minimalist designs enhance the message and draw in the user.

Especially With the need for websites to be mobile-friendly, compatible and accessible, design has to be kept simple. The minimalistic approach is easier it is to navigate and comprehend.

Typography

Designers have started to use typography an integral part of the overall work rather than a liability and this trend will be more clearly seen in 2011. With HTML5, CSS3, and new typography programs, there will be many fonts available that do not slow down search engine optimization. With the growing numbers of tools and applications, typography will become a primary design element in its own right. A new trend has begun to gain strength and that’s utilizing big and bold fonts with the exclusive intention of grab the surfer?s attention.

Textured Backgrounds

As you look around in 2011, you?ll see how textures are being used in many different ways by Web designers. The grunge look that was so popular during the nineties has been reinterpreted and adapted to the present time, with a new style of combining grungy textures along with clean interfaces and bold typefaces.

One Page Websites

One pay layouts our like business cards and are becoming a common medium for users to ?get straight to the point? – skills /services/products that the site is offering. The challenge for desiners is to put everything you need in a single page in a way that will get the user attention and interest.

It?s a great way to have a large impact with a small amount of content.

Outsized Logos/ Headers

To make an unforgettable impression on the visitor, the trend for 2011 will be oversized logos on an equally oversized header. Since a header is the first impression a customer gets large and interactive headers with special offers, promotions, and calls to action help increase the number of conversions a website creates.

Hand-drawn Designs

In 2011 the trend towards incorporating hand drawn elements into web designs will be more widely seen. Hand drawn elements will be seen in navigation bars, as backgrounds, as accenting elements, or as an entire site theme. They charm of these hand drawn elements is that they give websites a very unique, out-of-the-box, and organic/realistic look; they can help to set surreal sceneries and also are more lightweight than complicated designs.

Modal Boxes (Lightboxes)

Modal boxes are basically the next generation of pop-ups and a leading trend in designing. They are a cleaner, more user-friendly alternative to the basic JavaScript pop up windows that have been around for years.   Clean, crisp, and focuses the user on the information you are presenting, whether it is a picture, text or a video.  This little tool helps the presentation go a long way.

Enormous Images

Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and covering the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience? they cannot help but to see it and have an.  Trends point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not over shadow your content, but harmonizes with it. opinion about it.can create the stunning visual effect and  add more life to a site design compared to the traditional tiled.

Oversized Footer

Oversized footers may be everywhere already, but 2011 will find them even more exaggerated. Footers are becoming more important every day as designers realize that they?re a vital part of every design and they must be utilized with the same importance than the header.

Footers are now areas where you can place things like social stream boxes, contact forms and tons of information.

Getting your website completed by a reliable web development company may be a person’s solution to success throughout the highly competitive business online industry. Getting your site constructed with the most current in tech advances as well as capitalizing on present-day web trends could make sure that your business goes to as well as stays near the top of your business.

Implementing customized web design solutions can help to be sure that your web-based reputation has the perfect impact on the net. As a result of working with pros it is also possible to have a web site that is practical and simple to use that can help to make sure that people today not simply see your web site, but that they stick there. Also you can get the luxury of working with any content material specialized that will be certain each the illustrations or photos and typed materials about your site is Search engine optimization friendly which could drive your company to the top involving many of the well-known search engines. ratings.

The greatest method is to pick a web development company that gives a wide selection of companies. Try to look for specialised alternatives sucah as social network software packages and e-marketing solutions. These are typically factors that could be added to the web site which will make certain that your company is viewed in a class by on its own. Also take some time to make sure that the business that you will be planning on working together with can provide every aspect of the project creation on-site. This helps to ensure that your web site will be completed inside of a realistic time-frame and you will be in a position to have feedback throughout the process of creation.

CCS3 is changing the way programmers and web designers build websites. Web browsers are quickly becoming compatible with CCS3′s new features, which are opening up a whole new world of opportunities. CSS3 and its feature set are also very well supported in many mobile web browsers like Opera Mini and Mobile, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer for mobile.

Because most all popular browsers provide support for a number of CCS3 features, web developers now have the opportunity to develop more powerful, elaborate and easy-to-manage websites.

CCS3 introduced many exciting features – such as:

Web fonts

CSS3′s @font-face feature allows the attachment of any font to a web page and it is cross-browser compatible. You can use the Font Squirrel @Font Face Generator to convert the font to web formats and then generate the CSS to attach the font to your site.

Transitions

This feature allows you to add an effect when changing from one style to another, without using Flash or JavaScript. Transitions are available in all browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer versions older the version 10.

Transforms (2D and 3D)

These features enable the ability to turn, spin, move, stretch, and scale different elements. 2D transforms feature is available in all current browsers while 3D is only present in Safari and Chrome.
Background-sizeIn CCS3 you can specify the size in pixels, width, height and percentage of background images. The only browsers that support this feature are Opera and Safari.

Multiple Backgrounds.

With CSS3, web designers can apply multiple backgrounds to box elements. The browsers Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer- all support this feature.

Border-radius.

One of the most talked about features; it allows web developers to easily implement rounder corners in their design elements without the need for corner images. It enjoys widespread browser support.

Box-shadow

The box-shadow feature offers web designers the opportunity to specify different values for easily implementing multiple drop shadows on box elements. Browser support for this feature has been on the increase with Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and – Internet Explorer.

There has been a lot of debate about the future of Flash on the web ever since Apple announced that they would not support Flash on their mobile devices. HTML5 has new elements that can reproduce a lot of the same functionality that is currently done with Flash. Apple and others are promoting HTML5 instead of Flash. While many are declaring Flash dead, there are a number of reasons why HTML5 won’t kill Flash anytime soon.

Areas for Flash Replacement
To really understand why HTML5 won’t kill Flash, we must first look at the areas where HTML5 can and likely will replace Flash. Most of these are areas where Flash has been used largely as a stop gap in the past. Video is the most obvious one. There are still a number of challenges regarding browser support of the various video codecs but it is very likely that this is one area where HTML5 will certainly replace Flash.

Another is simple 2D drawing and animation. The new HTML5 canvas element provides a robust API for 2D drawing and animation. This will make it very easy for developers to use HTML5 to build interactive applications such as drawing tools or even an online word processor. In the past, many of these kinds of tools would have been likely developed in Flash.

HTML5 Limitations
HTML5 will definitely replace Flash in a number of arenas. However, Flash won’t die because there are still a number of important tasks that HTML5 cannot do. There are also some important markets that have been increasingly adopting Flash and are likely to continue to do so.

We already talked about video and the likelihood that HTML5 will replace Flash for video playback. While this is true, there are still two areas in which Flash will continue to win as a video player. While there are currently several technologies for streaming video over HTTP (Apple has developed one), Flash is still the best choice for streaming video. The big win for Flash at the moment though is that it can support digital rights management. The current HTML5 codecs do not support digital rights management so Flash is likely to still be the player of choice for protected video.

Another area where Flash will remain is videoconferencing and recording audio or video. HTML5 has no method for controlling a user’s microphone or web cam. This means that Flash will continue to be used for conferencing applications and video chat programs.

Flash in Gaming
Flash is also a popular platform for gaming and even HTML5′s strongest proponents have said that it does not have the flexibility that Flash does for building interactive online games. It is unlikely that you will see a HTML5 version of Farmville anytime soon. Beyond Farmville, Flash has recently been used to build very sophisticated games that mimic real time arcade style games. Flash will likely continue to be the platform of choice for building these types of applications.

Flash in Corporate Training
One market where Flash has made serious inroads is the corporate training market. It has become a very popular platform for corporate training materials. This is because Flash has a number of tools that allow designers to easily develop training programs. This allows instructional designers to build robust training programs without the need for developers and programmers. Flash can be used both online and offline which also makes it a popular choice for corporate use. Training materials can be delivered over an intranet, extranet or on CD.

HTML5 has a number of capabilities that can be used to replace Flash for a number of applications. However, there are still a number of use cases where Flash is a better platform than HTML5. In addition, Flash has made tremendous inroads into the corporate training market. Both of these factors will insure that Flash lives on even as HTML5 replaces it for a number of uses. What are you using Flash for? Do you think HTML5 will replace it?

Web development today is one of the fastest growing and exciting industries to work in. It provides flexibility, diversity and is also rewarding as well as challenging. Furthermore, it is something that can be done in the comfort of your own home.

When starting a freelance career, in any field, it tends to be a lot of work. You have to think about pricing, taxes, working conditions and much more. It can feel overwhelming and a bit stressful but with the tips listed below, the freelance transition can be better.

Niche: Find and define your niche. There are many areas within web development, so crafting a specialty will give you something to focus on and find opportunities. Some web developers limit themselves to only local clients while others may decline to do personal website. It doesn’t matter what you choose, but choosing a specific and focused area will help you find unique jobs.

Charity: You might think this is silly, but doing a couple free public service or random acts of kindness through web design or web developing can open a large amount of opportunity for you. It’s hard at times to start getting clients, but doing charity work proves you know what you’re doing.

Marketing: Sometimes freelancers forget that they are a business entity. With any business, you must market it to get the word out there. There is no exception to freelancing; you’ll still need to market you or your brand. You can always use the internet as a marketing tool with social media and a blog, but also leaving business cards around your town is equally a great idea.

Office: It’s important, as a freelancer working at home, to have a dedicated spot to work that is free of distraction. You may want to turn that spare bedroom into an office, especially so you can separate your work space from your relax space. It can be hard to turn off your mind, when you work at home, so separating the two areas will be beneficial to you.

Technology: As with all fields, you need to be at the top of your game. With web development, innovations are being made on a daily basis.  You’ll need to stay current so that you don’t limit yourself and can provide up-to-date services that most clients will be asking for.

Freelance work can be hard, but you shouldn’t give up. You’ll need to remain self-disciplined and determined, but know that this way of working can certainly be rewarding and fulfilling. Just keep at it and you’ll reap the benefits.

Online marketers understand the importance of getting top search engine rankings in major search engines. Therefore, they spend many time in optimizing website content. However, many of them ignore the fact that web design structure has a role in search engine optimization (SEO). To acquire high ranking, you cannot just rely on web designers because they could be good at web design but not good at SEO.

This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS. It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content.  It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript.  However, the coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. 

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website.  However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website.  In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.


Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and if it annoys your visitors.

Web design, like any type of design, moves through times when certain styles and paradigms are popular. Creating some of the currently popular visual effects can be a difficult task. Added to this challenge are a number of common problems that web developers encounter. Here are 10 jQuery plugins that will help you create stunning visual effects on your web sites and solve many common web application challenges.

Google Feed API Plugin

One common web development task is to include content from another web site or blog on a page. Often this is done in a sidebar or widget. Many blogs and web sites today use Google Feeds to deliver their RSS feeds. The Google Feed API plugin makes it trivial to access a Google Feed and retrieve items to display on your page. This plugin provides a high level interface to the Google Feed API for accessing the feed. After you get the contents of the feed, you’ll have to write code to use the items returned. This makes it possible to literally do anything with the data returned by the API.

Fullscreenr

A common design technique is to have a large background image that fills the browser window. Many web sites have examples of this design element. Fullscreenr is a jQuery plugin that makes it simple to scale an image so that it fills the browser window. This relieves the designer have having to worry about things like screen resolution. Fullscreenr will take into account aspect ratios and will scale a background image to fill the available area. It can also handle centering the the image.

jMagnify

jMagnify is a neat jQuery plugin that adds a level of mouse interactivity. When you mouse over a block of text, jMagnify will animate the text under the mouse pointer. This plugin has many options for creating interesting text effects. You can enlarge the font under the mouse to create the effect of running a magnifying glass over the line of text (hence the name). You can also change color, underline the text under the mouse pointer or put a box around the letters that moves with the mouse.

jQuery Validity

While a web site should never rely solely on client side form validation, performing validation on the client side can greatly enhance the user experience. Nothing is more irritating than to submit a form, wait a few seconds and then get an error that you didn’t use the right phone number format. JQuery Validity is a jQuery plugin that allows you to easily perform client side form validation. It includes a number of common validation techniques including required fields, ranges, match, non-HTML, maximum and minimum length and more. Validity also supports aggregate validators. These are validators that rely on more than one input such as when you retype a password to confirm the value entered.

jQuery SimpleColor

There really isn’t a whole lot to jQuery SimpleColor. It’s a plugin for creating a simple color picker. I’ve included it because color pickers are common user interface elements.

jPaginate

Pagination is a common web development task. While pagination can certainly be down on the server side, jPaginate creates an interesting visual approach to pagination. This plugin allows you to easily create a scrolling list of page numbers. When you mouse over the right or left arrow, the list of page numbers will animate, scrolling in the direction indicated. This makes it easy to browse through a set of pages without having to click an arrow and wait on a roundtrip to the server to see the links for the next 5-10 pages.

jQuery Rotator

This plugin is probably one of the simplest mentioned so far. It creates an animated effect where elements rotate up. While the demo of this plugin is pretty unimpressive, there are ways that this plugin could be quite useful. The demo shows text blocks rotating much like a news ticker, which is certainly one way this plugin could be used. However, since this plugin rotates elements, those elements could technically contain images, story summaries or any other content. This makes it possible to create interesting rotators highlighting different content.

dirtyFields

A common web development problem is how to let users now that a form or page contains unsaved changes. The dirtyFields plugin is one simple solution. This jQuery plugin saves the initial state of form fields and alerts users to unsaved changes by applying CSS styles to fields or even to the entire form. It also works with dynamically added fields.

jQuery Toggable

It’s a common web design technique to have a group of elements that can be hidden or displayed by clicking a single link such as “Show All” or “Hide All”. The jQuery Toggable plugin is a very simple lightweight plugin for implementing this type of behavior. It tracks the status of the toggable elements and animates them appropriately based on their current status.

Element Stack

Element Stack is a personal favorite of mine. I love the effect where a group of images on a web site looks like a stack of photos. Clicking the stack moves the images into a grid making it easy to view them. Clicking again returns them to the stack. Element Stack is a jQuery plugin for implementing this effect. While the effect is most often used on groups of images, it can be used to stack any element. You could create stacks of text or images. It’s a really cool animation effect that web sites are finding new and innovative ways to use.

One of the best strengths of the jQuery library is its ability to be extended through plugins. We’ve shared 10 of our favorite jQuery plugins for creating various effects or solving various web development challenges. Which ones do you use?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a particular discipline within web design, intended to increase the site’s rankings on a search engine. Since many users who search for a topic will select a site from the first page of results, or may stop after only a few pages, most web masters want their content to be displayed at the top of the page rankings.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to promote your web site within the search engine page rankings, and a number of pitfalls to avoid. Since the field has grown and evolved over the years, there is a body of knowledge and professional debate about it, as well as some long-standing myths and hold-overs from previous techniques that no longer work.

Pitfalls include:

- “Magic formulas” for keyword density
- Dictionary-like lists of keywords in page headers
- Filling tags and headers with irrelevant content
- Using invisible tags or keywords to “trick” the web crawler
- Using link exchanges or farms

Time-tested techniques include:

- Offering high-quality, unique content
- Becoming or utilizing recognized authorities
- Carefully soliciting links from high quality, professional contacts
- Structuring your site to be easy to crawl

Getting into SEO means sifting through all of the information available on how to optimize, determining which information is relevant and current, and then applying the best of it to your own project. Doing so cost effectively is critical.

You can choose to do your own SEO on your web site, or contract the work out to professional SEO services. Whether you do the work yourself or hire it out should be a careful business decision, based on the current size and completion level of your site, the amount of user traffic it can handle, the amount of time and skill you can dedicate to the SEO project, and of course your budget.

If you choose to contract the service, do your research on firms that are professional and well respected. As with any other web-based service, caveat emptor. There are good firms and scam artists, clear terms and fine print. Be sure to check the SEO provider’s references, and ensure that you’re paying for site architecture and content changes, rather than simply for pay-per-click contracts. Avoid any that guarantee you a particular page ranking or sound too good to be true.

By far the best technique for increasing your search engine page ranking (SEPR) is simply offering high quality content that users find valuable. The more people value and respect your site, the more respected bloggers and sites will link to you, thus increasing your rankings.

Remember that the point of SEO is to drive users to your site. You should never find yourself sacrificing a user-friendly experience or the quality of your content for the sake of the search engine bots. Search engines are themselves web sites that must offer a high quality experience to their users, so they will heavily penalize sites that use technical “tricks” that degrade their own user experience. More importantly, a high page ranking is irrelevant without a good web site that keeps users coming back.