All web designers need motivation for designing and there are plenty of resources which are available online which motivate as well as educate web site designers.
Since web design is dependant on the latest technology, it is imperative for web designers to read about what is new in their field and educate themselves with the latest user interface development software. If you are a web site designer, the below mentioned list will be helpful in providing information about some of the sites that leading designers use to update them selves or search for resources for their design:
Images:
One of the most important things which you need in any web site design is images. Sometimes a customer may provide relevant images for the web site but most of the times you have to depend on the online resources for copyright free images which can be used for the web site.
Some of the most popular sites in this category are www.gettyimages.com , www.photos.com and www.corbis.com . These sites provide images but they are usually on a paid basis. Some of them may charge you per image, and some might provide a subscription model where you pay for a year and have unlimited access to the entire image databank. Pricing of images are based on the objective of the image and the resolution in which you want to buy it.
Design ideas:
Even though most customized web sites are designed just for that one customer, designers may look at template databases to get ideas. One of the most popular sites for this is www.templatemonster.com . However, some designers may condone looking at such sites as it might influence their creativity and some of them might consider it to be akin to flouting copyright issues. Design ideas may also be fetched from sites such as www.dynamicdrive.com which good DHTML tips and codes are published.
Flash design ideas and tutorials:
Most web sites have started implementing flash in some form or the other. As a web designer there are some excellent sites which offer flash tutorials, navigation tips, and even feature some of the possibilities of flash in a educational fashion. One of the well known sites amongst web site designers is www.macromedia.com itself. Apart from that, you can see www.flashkit.com and www.cwd.dk to get some more flash related tutorials.
Apart from the graphic inputs, there are many online resources available which can provide you free goodies such as scripts for the web site. Since the rankings of such web sites keep changing on a regular basis, you are likely to get the most updated web site when you search for ‘free scripts’ on Google. Some of the sites which I came up with are www.free-scripts.net , www.javascriptkit.com ( sounded very promising) and www.java-scripts.net .
Apart from the resources web site, there are some web sites such as www.w3.org which provide guidelines for the usage of HTML and XHTML. One site which is very popular under this head is http://validator.w3.org as it resulted in listing many errors on web sites which might not be recognizable by even some of the best web designers.
It is difficult to list all the useful links for web designers. Doing that might take a couple of months and you might need a search engine to search through those links.
The internet is obviously a good hunting ground for all the tools and tips which you need when designing a web site. There are some excellent communities which share experiences and help the members troubleshoot issues faced by them. So go ahead, the internet is the perfect place for all web design help that you need!
http://www.webdesignoffice.us/Online_resources_web_site_designers.html
