What is web design?

Web design – pretty pictures & art?

No.

My friend Olaf, gave me a great definition:

"Designing stuff on the World Wide Web, hopefully in such a way that it works in any browser with any feature set, degrading gracefully if some desired features are not present."

Or, you might prefer A List Apart's considered opinion:

"Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity."

Resources

Web Design 101 has lots of excellent resources I've found; check it out.

Want more links? See Kx's Web Design 101

Inspiration & ideas on Twitter

Some really excellent resources on Twitter for web design. My favourite is @smashingmag; I also highly recommend @imjustcreative & @blellow.

They're all prolific tweeple (so if you use a desktop application that allows you to group tweets, that would be ideal – I use TweetDeck, which uses Adobe AIR and so works on Windows, MacOS & Linux etc).

I'll add to this page as I find more resources.

How to find resources

I'm really good at finding useful & interesting resources for stuff I'm interested in; currently I've been focusing a lot on web design in particular. You can get started really easily by reading other people's recommendations – there are absolutlely loads at the above links. Once you start, just keep clicking through to the recommendations you find there – you'll soon be overwhelmed! The trick is to look for specific information when you need it and not to let yourself get distracted. If you have a lot of spare time, then feel free to read more then; just don't let it get in the way of actually achieving stuff.

Please do comment or email me; I'd really like that. If you'd like to add to this resource so that we can all benefit, please tag links in Delicious with both "for:inspirewithhope" + "web-design-101". I'll add useful links to the relevant places in Delicious.

Enjoy!