Custom Website Design

I’m sure you’ve seen advertisements for a few different services that will convert your PSD files into HTML and CSS. If you’re looking to save some time on your next project you may want to consider trying one of these services. In this post I’ve compiled 40 different options. If you have experience with any of these companies please feel free to leave a comment.

CSS Rockstars
Turnaround - 2 Days
Starting price - $149
Additional pages - $65

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Flickr is of course the most popular photo hosting and sharing service online. Many Flickr users also want to display their photos on their website or blog. Fortunately there are a number of different options for users. Here we’ll take a look at some of the best choices.

Official Flickr Badge - Flickr allows you to choose between two types of badges - HTML or Flash. Photos can be selected by using tags. (You’ll need to be logged in to Flickr to access this page).

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Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.

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If you’re looking to improve a website by using Photoshop to enhance a photo to make it clearer, more interesting, or more exciting, here are 45 of the best tutorials to show you some of the possibilities.

Telling stories with shadows

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Last month I published a collection of 45 Photoshop Tutorials for Better Navigation, which quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog. Due to the response, I spent some time finding more great Photoshop tutorials. Here are 50 of the best tutorials for working with text.

Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text

Smooth Glass Type

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Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.

Articles:

Grids Are Good - Presentation in a PDF document

Grid (page layout) - Wikipedia

Why Use a Grid - Mark Boulton

5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Preface - Mark Boulton

5 Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems: Part 1 - Mark Boulton

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Lists of Great Fonts:

40+ Excellent Freefonts for Professional Design - Smashing Magazine

80 Beautiful Typefaces for Professional Design - Smashing Magazine

60 Brilliant Typefaces for Corporate Design - Smashing Magazine

30 Fonts that All Designers Must Own - Just Creative Design

Most Popular Free Quality Fonts - Tech Magazine

Great Fonts for Web 2.0 - Modern Life is Rubbish

13 Typefaces Every Graphic Designer Needs - David Airey

25 Best Free Quality Fonts - Vitaly Friedman

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Recently I had the privilege to do a brief interview by email with 10 excellent designers. I asked each designer the same five questions, and all of their responses are included below. You probably are familiar with most, if not all, of these people, and I’m sure there is plenty that we can all learn from these interviews.

The participants are:
Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe
John Phillips of Freelance Folder
David Airey
Matt Griffin of Liquid Design Media
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks
Connor Wilson
Thord Daniel Hedengren of Splashpress Media
Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design
Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design
Dejan Cancarevic of StylizedWeb

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Web designers have plenty of online resources available for design inspiration. There’s no shortage of CSS galleries out there to help you by displaying some creative and high-quality work, but offline sources of inspiration can provide new perspectives and encourage you to stretch your boundaries further than you have before. Looking at other websites for inspiration can only take you so far, and sometimes you’ll enjoy taking in the design concepts used in other mediums.

Design inspiration can come from just about anywhere, and in this post we’ll take a look at a number of the best places to look. There are several links and resources included in the post to demonstrate how inspiring these sources can be and to make the post as useful as possible. However, don’t limit yourself to just visiting these links or you will be missing the point of offline inspiration. Look to some of these sources and see what you can find to be applicable to your web design projects.

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Web design is a profession that requires constant growth and development of abilities in order to remain competitive. Technology is obviously changing constantly, and design trends certainly do not stand still either. A designer who is not committed to improvement will eventually become a designer that is searching for work.

A few weeks ago I published a post that examined a number of different skills that web designers can work to improve, including coding, graphic design, project management, SEO, marketing, communication, and more. If you haven’t seen that post there are links to some great resources that you may want to check out. Taking that idea of constant improvement a step further, putting yourself in challenging situations is a great way to promote growth. Sure, challenges are sometimes uncomfortable, but if you are actively seeking out the right types of challenges you can drastically improve your marketable skills as a designer.

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