Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

This is the resource for you: How to Design a Website: 5 Brilliant Homepage Designs to Get You Started. In this free lookbook, you can explore homepage designs from businesses all over the world in several different industries, including: 

- Agency & Studio

- Entertainment

-Food & Drink

-Nonprofit

-Software & Tech

-Ecommerce & Retail...

If you’re feeling overwhelmed when attempting to select a theme for a WordPress site that will work for you, you’re not alone. There are so many to choose from, that after a while, all the good candidates begin to look alike.

The real problem could be that you’re unsure of what theme characteristics to look for. After all, you want to build more than just websites; you want to build web experiences.Here’s what to look for....

Craigslist is one of the ugliest websites on the Internet. The home page is an indistinct wall of links and text, the site is tough to navigate, the postings are cluttered, and the design has barely changed in the past 15 years. At a time when websites are competing to offer the best digital experiences, Craigslist is the pinnacle of user unfriendliness. And that's exactly what makes it brilliant, says Pascal Deville.

Deville is founder of Brutalist Websites, a site dedicated to the most frustrating design on the web. The site takes its name from the controversial architectural movement Brutalism. To some, Brutalist buildings are poetry in concrete; to others, they're chilly monoliths. Web design, Deville argues, has a similar dichotomy. Here's how he describes a Brutalist website:

In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today's web design.

Appropriately, Deville's website has some of the hallmarks of the content it espouses—a rudimentary layout, one of the most basic typefaces (Courier), an infinite scroll, and no tabs or ways to sort the dozens of blog posts....

Your portfolio website is one of the first things your clients will see, so it’s important to get its design just right. Are you designing your very first portfolio website? Or do you need motivation to redesign an existing one? Check out these excellent portfolio websites for ideas and inspiration.

If you’re a practicing web designer, then you have a few favorite tools for website creation.

What are they, when and why do you use them, and do they stand the test of time? Have a look at what else is out there. Get inspired and potentially discover essential means to build websites for your clients this year.

Check the list below with 15 hand-picked platforms and tools for creatives in our profession. Most of them found their place here because they’re proven to be helpful, and easy to use. In 2015, we’re definitely looking at more streamlined ways to complete client projects....

If you’re looking for examples of niche, it’s difficult to imagine a slimmer area of focus than one page websites. It sounds obvious, but you’re building a site for an audience — so why wouldn’t you consider their experience and ways to communicate with them?

Hope explained that he personally contacted the teams behind the first 500 sites he found to let them know they’d been featured and ask if they thought their work had been presented in the best way possible.

They then visited his site and shared the fact that they’d been featured with their followers on social media, forming the foundation of One Page Love’s own following. When they asked if he could make an award banner for their own sites so they could show thatthey’d been featured, he did it — now they’re passively sending him traffic.

Hope suggested that you focus on your users’ experience – don’t make them jump through hoops to find the content, enter a gallery, or navigate around. Don’t have unnecessary clutter, ugly ads or, as he puts it a “social Christmas tree of sharing buttons” if they don’t add any value. Make it easy for visitors to follow you and subscribe to your site, and try out new features often to see what works best for them...

One Page Love is a One Page website design gallery showcasing the best Single Page website designs from around the web.

Why have I used the adjective 'sensible' in my headline, instead of something more click-worthy like 'crucial'?

The answer is that web design trends in 2017 should be all about meeting the user's needs.

Gone is the temptation to show off what the browser can do, in its place is a passion for proper design; form follows function.

Ignore all the web design trends pieces that tip their hats to virtual reality or to eye-catching animation; 2017 is about utilitarianism.

Here are the 10 trends I think will be most noticeable....

Light colors are easy on the eye, which means that they aren’t as likely to take attention away from the main goal or goals of a site. Negative space, on the other hand, makes websites look less cluttered and easier to navigate. Even though negative space can actually be filled with any color, white is typically the safest bet. For example, a brand like Best Buy is associated with the colors blue and yellow, but the company primarily uses these colors in the navigation menu of its site, which leaves plenty of whitespace to help guide visitors' eyes to calls-to-action (CTAs) like "Shop" and "Find out more."

Some brands, however, are okay with challenging the rules of Web design and are doing so with colorful designs that are pushing the best-practice boundaries. Although colorful designs are certainly not for everyone, they can be successful when they are executed correctly and used for the right brand. For some inspiration, check out the six colorful websites featured below...

When it comes to social media, it’s a pretty well-known fact that images automatically do well. Users are attracted to visuals much more than they are plain text. However, sharing an image that isn’t the right size can be terrible for you or your brand.

SurePayroll has created an infographic (featured below), giving you the inside scoop on making sure your image is perfect, no matter where you choose to share it.

From Twitter and Facebook, to Pinterest and Tumblr, this infographic has guidelines for getting your image sizing right on the seven most popular social media sites. The next time you have an image you’d like to share, double check the size before posting to ensure that your picture isn’t too big – or too small – to make an impact....

Responsive web design has been discussed for the last several years. And, there's a perfectly good explanation why. Responsive web design can be viewed as the welcome mat for a website, which has to satisfy visitors who are viewing the site on multiple devices.

However, when only 18 percent of the web (at most) are making use of responsive web design, there remains a lot of work ahead for website owners. If you want to improve the experience of your customers, boost your search engine ranking, and stay relevant, then you definitely should consider giving your site a responsive web design update. And, here are 25 templates to help get you started....

It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have of a programming language, framework or CMS, you will always need to, from time to time, refer to the official documentation or, and more than likely, a handy quick reference cheatsheet, as it’s literally impossible to remember and know absolutely everything.

In this post I have collected an avalanche of useful cheatsheets, references, guides, checklists and docs, covering almost all aspects of web design, that will not only help to improve your productivity, but will also help to solve some of those frustrating programming issues that often arise (I’m looking at you PHP!).Just click on the ‘view’ button beside each resource and either save the PDF or bookmark the page....