The list below includes 10 great places to find web design jobs. There are many websites and job boards targeting vacancies related to web design. Companies all over the world use these websites to source creative talent including web and graphic designers. Web designers will find this list useful to find full-time, contract or freelance jobs.

There are many articles and blog posts featuring job boards for web designers. A majority of them however, only list positions based in USA. Although some of the sites in this list target US jobs, due consideration has been given to websites that list web design jobs in UK and other international locations. As far as possible, sites that only target US have not been included in this list.

Websites in this list offer an excellent source for finding freelance web design projects as well as full-time positions. The list will also be extremely useful for other creative professionals such as animators and illustrators.

1. Smashing Jobs
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Smashingmag Web Design Jobs

Smashing Jobs is a job board by Smashing Magazine, one of the leading web design blogs. The website displays jobs related to web design, graphic design and print. It lists both, full-time and freelance positions. You will find jobs from around the world on this website.

2. LinkedIn
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LinkedIn is one of the leading online networks for professionals from all industries. LinkedIn has a popular job section that lists positions from multiple disciplines including web design. In addition to the main job section, different groups on LinkedIn offer niche job boards for their members. You can use the search feature to find groups related to web design. Many of these groups actively list job opportunities related to design.

3. Design Jobs on the Wall
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Web Designer Wall is a popular blog with a large user-base. It has a Job section dedicated to creative professionals. New positions are added every day. All vacancies are related web design, graphic design or web development. Positions from across the world are featured on this website. Employers can post jobs for a fee.

4. Design Related
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Design related is another popular website that targets web designers. They have a dedicated job board with web and graphic design positions mainly based in USA. Both full-time and freelance positions are advertised. It is free for employers to post a job.

5. Freelance Switch

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As the name suggest, Freelance Switch is a website dedicated to freelancers. The website has a dedicated Job section that advertises positions from different parts of the world. Compared to other job sites on this list, remote working jobs are better represented on Freelance switch. It is an excellent website for freelancers who wish to work remotely. It is free for employers to post a job.

6. Job board on Mashable

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Mashable Jobs is one of the leading job boards for social media and web related jobs. It includes jobs in blogging, web design, web development, consulting and marketing. It features many types of positions including full-time, freelance, part-time, contract, permanent and internships.

7. Krop
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Krop is a Job Board and resource website for creative professionals including web designers and developers. Krop is well known and many high profile businesses use it to source creative talent. Although international positions are also listed, majority of the positions are US based.

8. Creative Match
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Creative Match is a website targeting the UK creative industry. It has a full-fledged Jobs sections where job seekers can search for jobs and set up job alerts to receive relevant jobs by email. It is not free for employers to post a job.

9. Design Week
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Design week is a popular design magazine used by many design professionals in UK. Design week offers a number of services including design magazine, blog and a dedicated job section. The job section of Design Week is an excellent source in the UK for jobs in graphic design, web design, advertising & branding. In addition to searching for jobs, users can sign-up to job alerts by email and their CV to the website to let agencies find them.

10. Creative Pool UK

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Creative pool is a website dedicated solely for creative jobs in the UK. It covers advertising, web design, media, publishing and print. Job seekers can create a profile on the website which is accessed actively by many businesses and employers. The website also has a directory where freelancers can advertise as well as a section for articles and resources for designers.

For more information visit Internet marketing & SEO blog or follow web_design_uk on Twtter.

Applying the essential principles of good web design discussed below can help your website achieve its objectives. There is little doubt that businesses today must have a website in order to sell products or services. However due to growing competition, a well designed website it itself is not sufficient to meet your objectives.

Essential principles of good web design are important to turn your website into a powerful marketing tool. Different elements of your website should focus on encouraging potential customers to avail of your company’s services. Although it is important to have professional web design and convey the right message to your visitors, it does not guarantee the success of your website. However if the right web design principles are applied, your chances of success are increased manifold.

There is more to good web design than well crafted content and an attractive web design. Factors such as usability, navigation and correct brand representation are equally important in good web design. Following are 10 essential principles of good web design.

1. Correct use of White Space

White space is a general design term used to describe empty space on a web page. Web designers use white space effectively on websites to reduce clutter and improve readability. Use of white space also allows designers to strike a balance between different elements on a web page. In general it is recommended to provide sufficient white-space between functional elements on a web-page. In addition appropriate line spacing should be provided between text. Line-spacing on website should be at least 1 and 1/2 times the font size. Similarly sufficient padding should be included between the text and rest of the elements.

2. Correct positioning of elements

The positioning of elements is important in good web design. A website may consist of many elements such as menu, login box, search field, enquiry form, Newsletter registration box, main body of text, and so on. Website visitors tend to scan the content on a website from left to right starting at the top left and then moving along the page. There are certain areas of the screen that draw more attention than others. In good web design, the positioning of elements should take this into account.

3. The correct visual design

Design is a vast field. Above all it is relative to situation and needs. Web design that is suitable for one company may not be suitable for another. A mock up should be created to start with. A design package like Photoshop is ideal for this. It will be easier to manage changes at this level than when the website has been built.

4. Correct Font

Font or typography is vital to good web design. There are many choices available and the selection should be given due consideration. There are multiple issues to consider. The correct font size, font type or font face, font colour, line spacing and letter spacing are some important issues to consider. Colour and behaviours of links, size and colour of headings, style of bullet points and lists are some other related issues that should also be taken into account.

5. Consistency

Consistency between pages of your website is an important principle in web design. Slight variations in lay-out or positioning of elements may be necessary to implement e.g. homepage may have a different lay-out to the rest of the pages. However by and large, the entire website should appear consistent. This is also important for branding. Most websites today use a content management system or a blogging platform which utilise a template system for displaying content. It is much easier to maintain consistency between pages as the same template can be applied to all pages. Consistency between different elements within the same page is also important e.g. the same font type should be used in all elements of a page.

6. Navigation

No matter how attractive the design of your website is, you are likely to loose customers if they are not able to find their way on your website.

Navigation should be positioned prominently on the page. Top, left or right columns work well. Menu items should include links to main areas of the website. If you have a large website, consider having separate menus relevant to different sections of the website. Navigational elements like breadcrumb are important as they tell a user where they are currently and allow them to retrace their steps if required. Sitemap can also prove to an important navigational aid for your visitors.

7. Usability

Usability is one of the most important principles in good web design. The website in general should be easy to use. As far as possible no page should be more than two clicks away. Search box should be easily accessible. In order to improve usability, you need to understand the mindset of your target market. You should understand the needs and expectations of users who visit your website. You should then make it as easy as possible for users to get what they want, whether it is buying a product or requesting more information.

8. Structure

A website offers a range of information. Before implementing the website, the information architecture or structure of the website should be planned. Many factors can be taken into account when planning the structure. Users do not like to scroll too much so the content on each page should be limited to a few screens sizes at the most. It helps to divide the content into appropriate sections and categories.

9. Contrast

Contrast is equally important in good web design. It makes the content more legible. A high degree of contrast should exist between the content and its background. As a general rule if you are using a dark background, then use light colours for your fonts and images. Similarly on light background websites, dark font colours stand out more.

10. Call to action

One of the main purposes of your website is to improve sales, enquiries or expand your customer base. This can be achieved through the appropriate call to action elements on your website. Good web design takes this into account. Correct positioning of call to action elements in also important. Call to action are elements on a website that encourage users to perform some action. It can be anything from completing an actual sale, making an enquiry or registering for your newsletter.

There are many posts and articles featuring top Web Design blogs. Lists featuring influential web design blogs are popular and one of the best sources of information related to the web design niche. There is no official ranking for web design blogs. Although some blogs feature on most of the lists, every list is unique as the selection criteria varies.

The web design blogs featured by these lists can prove beneficial for many reasons. Whether you are a web designer or someone looking for information on design related issues, you can benefit from the articles, web design resources and tips offered by the blogs. All blogs offer quality content and most blogs are updated daily.

A web design company or a professional designer can also benefit from active participation on these blogs. A back-links or listing can provide additional benefits and boost your website’s rank on search engines, especially if your website is related to web design.

Although the selection criteria may differ slightly for each list, the following factors play an important role in the selection process:

• General Authority and influence of the blog
• Technorati, Alexa and Google page rank
• Number of subscribers

This post includes the most popular lists featuring the  best web design blogs. All lists focus on blogs related to web design  only.  Blogs tha focus on SEO or Internet marketing are not covered by these lists.

1. 25 Most Useful Blogs for Web Design & Development

Published on: Web Appers
Year: 2009
Tweets: 302
Comments: 155

2. 160+ RSS Feeds For Web-Designers And Developers

Published on: Spyres Studios
Year: 2009
Retweets: 193
Comments: 165

3.Top 37 Design Blogs to Follow

Published on: Web Appers
Year: 2009
Tweets: 94
Comments: 55

4. 14 of the Most Useful Web Design Blogs

Published on: Design Reviewer
Year: 2008
Tweets: 22
Comments: 216

5. Top 25 Web Design Blogs

Published on: Daily Blog Tips
Year: 2007
Tweets: 20
Comments: 76

6. Web Design – Top Web Design Blogs

Published on: Kronik Media Web Design Blog
Year: 2009

We have already discussed the importance of favicon in web design in an earlier article. Favicon is often overlooked by Web Designers but is vital in web design. A professionally designed website should include a custom favicon as it important for website branding.

Favicon is a small icon that is displayed next to the URL of a website in the address bar of the browser. It is important to design a custom favicon for your website for branding reasons.

Most browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari support favicons. New versions of many browsers, support standard image formats such as gif and png in favicons. However for a wider coverage and to ensure the custom favicon for your website is displayed on most browsers, it should ideally be created in .ICO format.

How to design a Favicon in Photoshop

You can easily create a custom Favicon icon for your website without employing the services of a Web Design Company or professional web designer. In this tutorial, we are going to cover how to create a Favicon using Photoshop. Photoshop is easy to use and is one of the leading software used in web design. Other graphic design packages will offer a similar approach.

The process is simple. All you need to do is download the right plugin and place it in the plugins folder. That is all you need to do in order to start creating custom Favicon icons for websites using Photoshop. The steps are explained in detail below.

Step 1: Download the plugin

By default Photoshop does not have the right plugin installed to create a Favicon. You need to download the Favicon plugin first.

You can download Photoshop Favicon plugin for free from http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

Step 2- Install the Plugin

Once you have downloaded the plugin, extract the file if it is compressed. Place the extracted plugin file in the plugins folder of Photoshop. This is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\File Formats

The folder path may differ slightly depending upon the version of Photoshop you are using.

Step 3 – Design custom icon for your website

Once the plugin is installed, you will be able to create custom icons to use on your website or other web design projects. Create a custom small square image based on how you wish to present your website or your brand. You can use graphic, text or your logo. As Favicons are tiny, it is important to Keep the graphic simple.

Step 4- Resize and save your graphic

Once you have designed the right image, resize your graphic to 16 pixels x 16 pixels. In Photoshop, you can do this via the ‘image size’ option under ‘Image’ menu at the top. Enter 16px in width and height in the image size pop-up window and press OK. This will resize the image to the correct size. Save your image with the name ‘favicon’. The file should be saved as .ICO format. You can do this by selecting ‘windows (.ICO)’ in the file type option in the ‘Save As’ pop-up window.

STEP 5 – Upload custom icon to the web server

Finally, you will need to upload the custom ‘favicon.ico’ image you have created to the web-server where your website is hosted. You can do this by FTP. Place the file in the main folder where the website files are located. If a Favicon icon is already present on the server, overwrite this with your custom image. That is all. When you visit your website next, you will see your custom icon displayed next to the URL in the address-bar of the browser. Remember to refresh the page to see the change.

When you are designing a website for your company, you will be presented with a choice of many open source web design or content management systems. Of the many web publishing platforms, Joomla, WordPress, Typo3 and Drupal are some of the most popular and widely used. For E-commerce websites Magento, OsCommerce and Joomla compatible Virtuemart are some of the widely used open source platforms.

Although most platforms can be used for developing professional websites of any kindm many professional web designers favour Joomla for developing websites and WordPress for a blog.

Both Joomla and WordPress release new versionsofthe software frequently to solve bugs and security vulnerabilities. Both have an established development community and as such they are able to releases patches and version improvements in time.

The launch of Joomla 1.5x platform which is a significant improvement from its earlier 1.0x platform, the usability of Joomla has improved considerably. Both Joomla and WordPress have become popular platforms for developing and designing websites in the last few years. Although there are other powerful open source content management platforms, Joomla and WordPress have soared in popularity in recent years.

In my over 8 years of web design experience, I have used a combination of approaches for designing websites. At first I relied mainly on hand coding a site from scratch. In recent years I have used both WordPress and Joomla on many occasions. In my personal opinion, both software have advantages. I find WordPress to be the ideal choice for blogs or informational websites where the business logic is simple and complex workflow is not required on the website. On the hand when complex functionality or business process needs to be implemented on the website, I find Joomla to be the better choice. This article compares the two software and provides an insight into suitability for different situations.

WordPress versus Joomla

Usability

Most users find WordPress to be more user friendly than Joomla. However it is vital to note that Joomla’s administration offers a wide range of administration features whereas Wordrpess administration screen offers a fewer set of features. It is also worth noting that Joomla 1.5 has made significant improvements in usability over previous versions of the software.

Admin Features

Joomla has a more powerful administration interface thanWordPress. Compared to Joomla, WordPress offers an easy to use and simple interface where updating content and images is the key function. Joomla on the other hand has a much more advanced administration interface with a vast collection of core as well as add-on features.

The powerful back-end of Joomla can be used for a range of websites including large e-commerce (Shopping cart) websites, document management system, etc.

Versatility

Although WordPress can be used to develop a variety of websites, some developers argue that it lacks advanced content management capabilities offered by Joomla. Some developers and web designers see WordPress as a Blogging tool as opposed to a CMS platform. I have personally also used WordPress for developing standard business websites and have found it be very useful and easy to use.

Search Engine Optimisation

WordPress is excellent for search engines especially Google. Blog posts or pages created in a WordPress site are optimised properly for search engines and stand a better chance of ranking than most other web platforms. Joomla on the other hand may lack some of the SEO capabilities of WordPress in its default settings. However Joomla can be customers for search engines. With the right custiomisation, Joomla websites can rank equally high on Google.

Scalability

Some developers argue that Joomla has advantages over Wwordpress with regards to scalability. WordPress is an excellent software for designing blogs or standard websites where web publishing is the key requirement. Joomla on the other hand is suitable for developing simple websites as well complex web applications of any scale.

Joomla is equally good for designing start-up company websites as well large bespoke web based applications.

Integration with third party tools

Joomla has a powerful development API that can be used to integrate Joomla websites with almost any other external system of source. The core website elements can be extended and integrated with other systems as required.

Development of bespoke features

As discussed above, Joomla is more versatile for advanced development. It offers a well developed API that can be used to develop custom features to meet the specific needs of a business. Web designers and developers have been quick to offer thousands of bespoke add-on features for Joomla that are readily available for installing on websites. WordPress too is easy to extend and it is possible to develop bespoke features. However they are comparatively light-weight and limited.

Blogs have increased in popularity in recent years. There are thousands of blogs covering every niche from Web Design, and Web development through to travel and personal blogs. This list identifies the top blogs related to web design and web development. Similar to other topics, there are thousands of blogs related to web or graphic design.  It is not surprising to find Web design to be one of the more covered niches on the internet. In spite of the large number of design related blogs, the quality and influence varies significantly. While some web design blogs have turned into useful resources for web designers, there are others that are still in their early years that do not post as frequently as the established sites.

This is a list of some of the leading web design and development related blogs on the internet. The list is a mix of influential web design blogs as well some new blogs that show promising potential for growth in future. It is a diverse list that addresses a number of factors not just popularity and traffic.

1.    Smashing Magazine

www.smashingmagazine.com

Smashing Magazine - Web Design Blog

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web design

Web design industry has been influenced significantly by open source software in recent years. The last few years has seen a shift from static websites to the design of dynamic Web sites and web applications powered by powerful content management systems and other useful features. The rise in the popularity of open source software has revolutionised the way a web design company or an experienced web designer builds websites.

Web Design Companies and freelance web designers often claim that it offers many benefits compared to the average commercial software. Commercial products may appear favourable initially, however this could be easily influenced by the way they are marketed and presented to users.  Most commercial products emphasise the features that are common and in high demand. However it is often difficult to measure the intrinsic qualities such as stability and scalability of the application in the long run.

Read the rest of this entry »

web-design banner

Web design has become less complicated than what it used to be a few years ago. With changes in web design industry and technological advancements, designing websites has become a relatively simple process. There is an abundance of web design software and web authoring tools available in the market today. State of the art web design authoring tools such as Dreamweaver and Go Live have made designing a website a far less technical experience than what it used to be in the early stages of web design.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photoshop in Web Design

A Web Design company may use Photoshop for many reasons. The use of graphic design tools such as Photoshop can reduce the time required to develop a website and also leads to better quality of design. Photoshop is one of the leading graphic design software available in the market and popular with Website design companies, freelance web designers and other graphic design professionals. Photoshop is a must have tool for a web design company as well as any other business that has regular communication and media requirements. One of the main advantages that make Photoshop different to other graphic design software is its simplicity. Read the rest of this entry »

Designing a website has become relatively easier with time. There are many web design authoring tools and software that can help you design a website with basic experience or skills. Whether you are designing a professional website or personal one, there are some basic web design tips you can use to improve the quality of the website.

There will be many questions when you wish to design your website. Would the website work properly, whether it will be able to attract your clients and so on. Here are some favorable tips that can help you to keep track when you design a website

Screen Resolution

For Web design company or freelance web designer, this used to one of the biggest concerns when designing a website for their clients. Recent advancements in technology have meant that browser inconsistencies have been largely reduced. Today, ensuring the design of the website appears consistent across different screen resolutions is not be a major concern however a web designer nevertheless needs to address this issue during the design phase of a project. An innovative website demands an accurate design layout otherwise customers may experience problems and simply choose to close the browser window or navigate to a competing website. Customers need to feel comfortable and only then only will they remain on your website long enough to read your content.

Navigation and Links

Easy to use navigation and active links on your website are important. Web design companies and web designers have always argued that navigation is one of most important factors in usability of the website. Navigation issues can be easily addressed with common sense and thought. It is important that it should be done properly on your site to ensure coverage of all web pages on your website. Research has found that clients only read the current page if the navigation doesn’t work and is not easily visible. Poor navigation can prevent users from exploring your website further.

Loading of your web page

Time is becoming increasingly important for internet users. Internet users do not want to waste there time in finding information that is useful to them. Users expect to find valuable information within a few minutes. Web design experts often advice on minimizing graphics, flash and scripts on a web page in order to reduce the time of loading and making it faster to display the information on your web page. Unwanted tags and scripts that are not being used but often left on a web page can also contribute to higher loading time of a website. Try to optimize all possible large files on the server. Using coding techniques such as SSI (Server Side Includes) to reduce page size can also prove useful for your website.

Attractive and readable Layout

Although other factors discussed above are important for a website, the design itself will play a major role for your website. It is better to use a clutter free lay-out with sufficient empty space between website elements. The use of white space is a certain and necessary method that enhances your website and makes it easier to read.