Grid design has been a growing trend in web design and were pioneered by Khoi Vinh, a Creative Director of NYTimes, and a talented web designer Mark Boulton from the UK in recent years. The Grid System is another great resource to help you get started in designing site using grids. The creator demonstrated the concept and implementation very well by putting together the site using... grid.

Well, it's a great resource, give it a look!

I implemented dnnGallery using the similar approach. But I think it's time to go back and a take a look at the pixel perfect in designing using grid for the site.

Adobe announced the release of Creative Suite 4 today with multiple collections including Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection.

According to the corporate web site, there are major enhancements focusing on workflow virtually across almost all applications.

So far, there isn’t much exciting features from a web design perspective that I have seen in this new release. Unless Adobe can prove the upgrade worth the price tag they are asking for. If not, then I’ll be ready for the waiting game.

Vanda is finally done with school. This is exciting for both of us because we both can move on with life now. I decided to take her on a mini vacation in California (she’s from LA originally) and visit family.

When browsing the Internet to find a deal on airplane tickets for both us, I landed on Expedia.com, a site that many are familiar with when booking travel packages online. Anyway, I found the tickets and then started the checkout process but then encountered some frustrations in filling out their forms.

Here is the screenshot. (Screenshots available at full post)

From the above screenshot, there is no assistance in telling me, as a web user, that there are required fields I must provide before proceeding to the next screen. So I skipped the “Home Phone” field, then it started yelling with red box.

It seems a bit obvious to offer some advices in designing a great web site after I posted the principles of DotNetNuke design. But since I ran into many questions asked by friends and clients repeatedly and also saw people made mistakes in the community, I decided to put together this short list in no particular order. Hope it helps in your next projects. 

1. Design your site for users, not machines.
2. Navigation is key to better user experience.
3. Leave the creative work to the pros.
4. Build a web site, not creating panes.
5. White space is your friend.
6. No detail is too small.

BusinessWeek.com has recently published an article called “The 10 Commandments of Web Design” to give advice about the principles in web design. The article relies on the BusinessWeek brand to hype itself up compared to the actual quality of the content. The principles make sense in web design or for a start-up business. But what struck me is that it took an entire team of industry experts to come up with something so obvious and simple that everybody in the industry should know.

I’d recommend the article to beginners in web design to read or you can also find similar or more helpful information out there on the web. For DotNetNuke community, I think this article is a perfect example that many developers and designers should follow.

Here they are:

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.

A good friend of mine, Ian Robinson (also a Lead Instructor for Module Development at Engage), went to Texas a few weeks ago to provide training for clients. When he was approached by a potential client asking about skinning, he immediately mentioned my name thought it just helps carried on the conversation. The gentleman took it seriously and asked more about what I have done in the past. Ian struggled to pull out the hard evidence because he doesn't know all the projects that I've worked on since we haven't had time to keep our portfolio up-to-date.

Today, I introduced a quick page listed some of the projects I've done and hope it helps to give a better idea to potential clients of Engage. Although the page you find lacks of detail about the projects, it does carry external links (if applicable) to the live sites so you can have a better look. Some of them are Engage projects and some are my personal work.

I intend to provide more detail about the projects when I get some free time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to talk through the detail of each.

Also, if you find thumbnail images without the links, it's either a work in progress project or an off-line site. But I sure will provide detail of all the screenshots.

I’ve seen many developer created websites and skins with very similar mistakes lately. They all lack of knowledge about principles in web design. In my post about the truth of DotNetNuke Skinning, I mentioned that skinning is not a skill; it takes a bit of knowledge and understanding of the DotNetNuke framework as well as aesthetic design. Many seems to master the first part, however, they all missed the second. By learning how to use Photoshop doesn’t make one becomes a graphic designer.

To assist with future skinning approach, here are the five principles of building a DotNetNuke site or to design a skin. These principles are of course extended to web design and development in general, but the lack of implementation in DotNetNuke community intrigued me to put them together. I hope you all enjoy!