Category Archives: Design

How Many Images is Too Many?

It depends. Theoretically, the less images on a page the better, as your pages will load faster (and put less strain on your server).

There are two types of images. There are template-level images and post-level images. Template-level images exist in your blog’s header/footer/sidebar template, and therefore appear on every page on your site. Post-level images are part of your content, and they belong to an individual posts.

In your template, you should have as little images as possible. When you create a design, you want to keep the essential images to a minimum. Use tiles, well-optimized image blocks, etc. As of this writing, this blog’s design consists of two images (the logo and the tiled edge image). Once you have your mock-up of the design, figure out the best way to break it up. You want as little images as possible, and you want to keep them as small (as in kilobytes) as you can.

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Background Images and Subsites

Lately, I’ve been noticing websites that make use of varying background images for sections within the sites. Unfortunately, I’m having a little trouble thinking of many good examples right now. I’ve assembled a few below, but let me know if you have any to…

Design Spotlight: Macworld.com Goes Web 2.0

The Apple Addicts over at Macworld.com, the website for the popular Macintosh magazine, have been busy redesigning their site. And it really needed a redesign. Let’s start with the header. Here’s what the new header looks like: Note that the logo says “BETA” next…

Box-Model Lunacy

I’ve been doing some design work lately, and I’ve been dealing heavily with the Box Model. If I want to create a 200px-wide box with 3px padding, I have to set the width to 194px. Why? Because otherwise the box ends-up as 206 pixels…

Technorati Revamps *Again*

Technorati has had an overhaul again. They’ve had a redesign (for the second time this year) and they’ve totally changed the main page’s content (for the 3rd+ time this year). The new version of the site looks like this:

Testing Your Site in Multiple Browsers

By now you should know to test your site in more than one browser, so you can be sure that it works for as wide a range of people as possible. The question is: What’s the easiest way to do that? First, make a…

I Read Your Post… Now What?

After I finish reading a post on your blog, you optimally want me to do at least one of the following: Subscribe to your RSS feed. Submit your post to a social bookmarking site. Leave a comment. Read another post. It’s most likely that…

Welcome to Webmaster-Source Version 3.0!

Welcome to the third iteration of Webmaster-Source! Here’s what’s been going on lately… The design has been updated. There have been a few stylistic changes, and more room for peripheral content has been made by adding a second sidebar to the main page. Peripheral…

Halloween Logos

Even though Smashing Magazine beat me to it, I’m still going to go ahead with my original plan and show a few logo redesigns that I saw yesterday. I especially like YouTube’s logo change. It’s down the list a little, but I think it’s…

Design Spotlight: Snook.ca

The blog of web designer and developer Jonathan Snook, Snook.ca has one of the most interesting designs I’ve seen in the past couple of months. The design is clean and simple, yet no space is wasted. My 1024×768 pixels of screen resolution are filled,…