Many e-commerce websites are not well designed and presented, so it is a real pleasure to find those ones that are. It is a juggling act for the designer to create a great user experience, whilst projecting the style of the company’s products at a glance. The plethora of slider and carousel plug-ins that are currently available go a long way to helping with this dilemma, but a beautifully presented e-commerce website still remains a relative rarity compared to the amount of poorly designed sites.

Many advocates towards mobile web design recommend starting with a smaller layout and scaling up through responsive design. This is a popular set of techniques which have been adopted over the past couple of years. However I would argue there is still room for mobile-specific websites in some particular instances.

In this article I’d like to look over the major differences between a single responsive design and two separate desktop/mobile layouts. There are some obvious benefits to both methods but I think the best solution ultimately depends on the type of website. This means freelancers should understand the needs of their clients and which solution works best on any particular project. The design process isn’t always straightforward and usually requires time for introspection.

Freelancers are generally interested in their field by first reading about it online, or hearing about the experience from a peer. Once you start landing projects you begin to realize how lucrative the freelancing track can be. However building up a portfolio is one task which requires a bit of background study. You’ll need to good work to showcase, along with looking over some example websites for layout structure.

I have put together this huge collection of 40 stunning freelance portfolio layout designs. You can go through our gallery below and figure out which interfaces look right. What kind of portfolio design would work best for you? What would make you confident in your work to share your link around with potential clients? By asking yourself these questions now you’ll be prepared when the time comes to finally sit down and build your portfolio!

Infographics have been around for quite some time, and probably made their debut on road signs as a means of showing at-a-glance information for drivers. In more recent years infographics have entered many fields and are especially helpful for educational purposes.

This article is divided into 4 sections: Infographic Tutorials and How Tos, Online Infographic Tools, Free Infographic Kits and finally an Infographic Showcase.

Frontend web developers must be somewhat familiar with the jQuery JavaScript library. This open source solution gives birth to a whole new method of coding website animations and effects. I remember first getting started with JavaScript in early 2003-2004 and the field was ripe with great information.

But modern day web developers have access to many more resources and tutorials online. Specifically I’d like to use this article to look into the jQuery.ajax() method for calling asynchronous data without reloading the page. AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was a hot buzzword along with web 2.0 but it has now evolved into a technology which even beginners should understand.

It’s that time of year again – ghosts, wolves, zombies and of course pumpkins: Halloween. Depending on where in the world you live, Halloween is celebrated in different ways, but some of the most popular traditions are trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns, telling scary stories and watching horror films. Generally trying to frighten the life out of yourself and each other!

Here is a selection of Halloween wallpapers, some of which are cute, and some quite scary. They are all free, and the first wallpapers are for desktop, followed by a selection of Halloween Retina Display wallpapers for iPhone.

Every website needs some form of marketing to initially garner a responsive audience. You want participating users on your website to offer feedback, utilize all your services, and put your website to good use. But there are so many techniques inside the umbrella of Internet marketing – which ones produce the best results?

I have found that social media is one method which offers a gateway directly into people’s desktops. Everybody uses at least some popular Internet figure whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other brand name website. These networks are also marketing tools for gauging the popularity of your content. In this article I want to share a few techniques you can use to push your website viral on many of these larger social media outlets.

In this article I list several useful tools for designers to simplify their work. Many of these tools are very simple but they allow us to save a lot of time.

After spending enough time on the computer the daily grind can become weary. You need to find small fits of motivation which can push you into finishing projects. But what type of motivators will work? This is an age-old question for working efficiently, and ultimately your needs may be different than other people’s needs.

We can look into some tips for keeping focused on long-winded projects. It’s a tough situation when you don’t care and your thoughts are roaming freely. And as many of us feel each day, this can happen quite frequently! Yet with discipline you can train yourself into a model of thinking which fits a truly productive workday.

If you are fortunate enough (or talented enough) to be a very busy web developer, it can be extremely time saving to use CSS tools and snippets. Many tools are created to resolve a problem, bugbear, or repetitive action the creator has encountered and found a need for. This article is bringing to your attention some very useful CSS tools to enhance your work and save you time, as well as a list of CSS code snippets libraries for you to browse either for inspiration or to grab the code for your own projects.