tripwire magazine

For web-developers and designer it is important to have a list of great of websites and blogs for hunting inspiration and, structured information and answers to difficult questions. The “supply” is huge but it is not everywhere you will find truly high quality content. It is like every day there is a new blog or magazine being put online and they all look very professional. This makes can make it a bit difficult to choose favourites to follow. Tip: you can always use alexa.com or compete.com to see how long a site have been online and how much traffic its attracting. As a rule of thumb loads of traffic (low rank) means good content, regular updates and good structure and navigation.

I have compiled a short list of the website I personally find useful and worth recommending. Go take a look and see if you find yourself home somewhere! What website do you follow closely? Share your favourites in a comment it will be highly appreciated!

sixrevisions

This is one of my favourite blogs that I follow closely. The primary author of Six Revisions is Jacob Gube, who writes really good and relevant articles on most aspects on web development and design. There’s a lot of activity in the comment section and valuable feedback from the community. There are great tutorials. lists of useful tools and websites waiting for you here! Jacob also invites guest bloggers to assist in writing articles making the articles vary in a positive way.

Smashing magazine

This is simply one of the most heavily trafficked blogs/magazines in the web design and development arena – and for a reason. Smashing magazine is so loaded with tips, tricks, tutorials, round-ups of resource that are useful for web designers and developers. I personally think that in the area of web design best practice and usability smashing magazine is one of the best (if not the best) places to visit today. Some of the articles I refer to here was featured earlier here: 35+ Essential Web Design Resources on Best Practice, Tips and Techniques

Smashing magazine is also releasing a book soon called the Smashing book and it looks like a must have for web designers….did I preorder? Sure I did!

Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability

Besides Smashing magazine Jakob Nielsens website is a key resource when it comes to usability. I think some people think Jacob takes it far when it comes to “keep it simple” but it is his signature and really there’s a lot of his principles that makes good sense.

webdesignerwall

webdesignerwall is a great resouce for both developers and designers filled with inspiration, good tutorials, scripts and more. There is loads of regular giveaway contests there (incl. the famous Breadou Donuts).

speckyboy

This is an awesome design and development blog. You will find really great articles on icons, photographs, front end development etc. And then Speckyboy have something quite unique that I simply love. You will find collections of a lot of things created in logo in a fun way – like famous covers music covers created with lego. Sounds odd but believe me it really fun and could be inspiring!

Smashing Apps

Smashing Apps is a great blog that I follow. It focus mainly on finding great applications that make our lives easier but you also find large collections of inspirational art, photos and tutorials.

webappers

This website is in blog style but I really consider it as a repository of scripts, tools and applications that you can use to solve specific programming needs. It’s very nicely organized into meaningful categories and it makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. Fx. the category for charts provides 22 solutions/tools you can investigate. It is also possible to filter on license types – a really useful feature.

codingforums

If you need help, inspiration, second opinion on some ideas related to development this is a good resource. There are very active and helpful forums on most commonly used development languages and platforms. The forums for Javascript, HTML/CSS and PHP really heavily active and trafficked so for anyone fiddling with fx. Wordpress or Joomla this may be a good place to resolve problems related to core development.

mootools

mootools is a lightweight framework that simplifies the way you write JavaScript and provides you with powerful AJAX classes, effects, and fuctions. It has been around for a very long time and is widely used and very mature. The web is flooded with great uses of mootools and you can find numerous scripts and tutorials to get started if moo is not already one of your “best friends”

jQuery

jQuery is a javascript framework like mootools. jQuery is very popular and you can find free plugins solving nearly any requirement you can imagine with regards to front end development. You will be able to find most of the really great scripts and resources here. 60+ Must Have jQuery Toolbox, 25+ Create Amazing Image Effects with Some of the Best jQuery Plugins Available and 30+ Essential Javascript Framework Supported Navigation Techniques.

A List Apart

This is one of the sites I have enjoyed reading articles from. They have very high standards and never leave anything out making you only understand half of the problem. I also like their illustrations and almost found in the top of each articles. It’s clearly a that they spend time on preparing articles for us. The can be great for both developers and designers.

code.google.com

For a code.google is a great place with many tools and best practice on how to code “the google way”. It can’t that bad to do like google I would think A really interesting thing to monitor over the next couple of month is the google wave platform. Check this video out if you have no idea what the wave is! But OK the good old stuff like Google Earth etc. is also what makes this place a magnet to developers. (who would not try to build some kind of a google earh mashup?)

DZone

This site is a hot upcoming social bookmarking application mainly for developers. It has picked up popularity very fast and I think for a reason. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg are so broad and it is not that easy to filter out only serious developer resources. Still Digg / Technology is a very good place to visit but it is not only articles related to development you find.

Dzone have also recently started releasing a series of really high quality cheat sheets.

del.iciou.us

Being a very simple bookmarking tools delicious could be mistaken for just a place to store your bookmarks. It turns out that delicious have become a key resource for picking up latest articles in the design and web development space. The front page and popular pages section is flooded with articles that are relevant for designers and web developers. On delicious the popular article list is constantly updated and it makes it a site that can be visited several times a day to be inspired. This makes it not too hard to get on the front page but the amount of traffic earned is not to be compared with a digg or stumbleupon featuring.

QuirksMode.org

dynamicdrive.com

This site is truly an oldie but still one of the best resources for ‘copy n paste’ javascript ideas

sitepoint

Sitepoint is a huge site and you will find around 20 development related blogs, books, articles. Some resources like books and selected articles are not free. There is also a great forum here covering popular development languages and is very active.

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