Web Design Resources is a simple list of useful websites and resources of great use to web designers and beginners alike.
CSS Showcases
- CSS Zen Garden
An excellent website that allows designers to send in their own style sheets to change the appearance of the website.
- CSS Drive
A gallery showcasing mainly web designers and company websites.
- The Daily Slurp
A showcase of varying different websites, which is updated every day.
- CSS Import
Very basic CSS gallery with a good list of websites.
- CSS Remix
A fairly new website with an excellent showcase of websites. Possibly my favourite gallery.
- CSS Mania
Large gallery of CSS websites.
- CSS Vault
Extensive gallery of good CSS designs.
- CSS Beauty
Another good gallery of CSS designs.
- Stylegala
Monthly gallery of CSS designs as well as news and features on design and development.
Firefox Extensions
- ScreenGrab
A very good extension, which allows you to take full-page screenshots within Firefox.
- Web Developer Extension
This handy extension adds a toolbar to Firefox that allows you view various items about the page you are viewing.
- ColorZilla
Allows you to pick any colour from the page you are viewing, as well as zoom in and measure the distance between two items.
Fonts and Typography
- 25 Best Free Quality Fonts
Article and links on some of the best free fonts around.
- Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
A guide on how to improve the use of typography.
- Font Guide
A list of fonts used on mac and windows.
- Serif vs Sans-Serif
Comparison of Serif and Sans-Serif fonts for use on the Internet.
- Design Matters: Fonts
Article on how to use fonts on screen and in print.
- Da Font
Huge list of readily available fonts.
- Typetester
Very useful website that allows you to test out various fonts and styles applied to them. Also generates the required CSS of your final selection.
Reading Material
- A List Apart
Development magazine with a focus on design, content and accessibility.
- 456 Berea Street
Very useful resource for tutorials and articles on website design and development.
- Design Principles
Good resource for articles on design, typography, accessibility, web standards and development.
- htmldog
HTML, CSS tutorials, resources and articles.
- Stopdesign
Articles on design and implementation methods as well as examples.
- The Way Forward with Web Standards
Article on the effects of web standards on business and how they can improve websites.
- Developing with Web Standards
Good article from 456 Berea Street's Roger Johansson, explaining how to develop websites while saving time and money.
- Brainstorms and Raves: Semantics
Article on HTML, XHTML, semantics and structure.
- Max Design
Good tutorials on lists, floats and selectors.
Royalty Free Images
- Stock.Xchng
Large gallery of shared imagery from photographers
- Morgue File
Free high resolution images for corporate or public use.
- Design Packs
Collection of high quality image packs, free to use for commercial and personal web design.
- Image*After
Free to use images and textures.
- Yotophoto
Internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs. Indexing over a quarter of a million images.
Software
- Smart FTP
Free GUI FTP for easy drag and drop transfer of files to and from your desktop.
- FileZilla
Another free and easy to use FTP program.
- SciTE
Simple and effective text editor.
- Notepad++
Another good free and customisable text editor, supporting many languages.
- GIMP
Free image manipulation program for retouching, authoring and composition of images.
- Inkscape
Open source scalable vector graphics editor.
Miscellaneous
- famfamfam
A nice man called Mark James has created 1000 very good free to use icons.
- Steal Some Buttons
A very large list of buttons you can steal.
- OC Host Review
A very good website with user reviews and ratings on various hosting companies.
- domCollapse
Very effective JavaScript that allows the expansion and collapse of selected elements. Used on this website.