The most common initial SEO strategy is to follow best practices for building user-friendly, well-formed websites. Optimizing your content and HTML, using good web page titles and generating links to your website are all ways you can help search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing index your site better and more accurately.

What goes into your sidebar? Some site owners may choose to fill it up with anything - a place for anything and everything, just like a website junk drawer. However, a sidebar can be valuable real estate on any website, and depending on what the website's purpose is, can help further reach the goals of the website.

Page navigation is arguably the most important aspect to any properly constructed website. How easily your visitors can travel from page-to-page will affect the overall emotion and user interface of your website.

Great web designers always keep a surprise around every corner, and navigation menus can feature this big time. From fullpage to corner links Jake Rocheleau shared a few great examples of unusual website navigation. Hopefully these ideas can incite a barrage of creativity within yourself and any future projects.

"About me" pages have the ability to engage and inform your site visitors in a personal and friendly way. For web professionals, our "About me" page can be critical in establishing a true connection with potential clients, and it can set us apart from a sea of other designers and developers.

For different types of websites, keep in mind that the About page could be structured differently. For example, an About page for a blog or news site can be vastly different when compared to the same page for a portfolio website.

In this collection, Stephanie Hamilton has rounded up 30 excellent "About me" pages from the web portfolios of amazing designers, artists, illustrators, and developers. Enjoy!

Designers have a love affair with Apple products that stretches back decades, but as Apple shifts their focus towards low-power devices that fit more towards a mainstream audience, are designers being left behind?  We all know that the iPad is fun — but is it a legitimate business tool for designers? We’ll take a look at a few tools that will help you use your iPad for professional-level design work.

Mobile web browsing is expected to turn into the next major Internet platform. It is now easy to browse the net from nearly anywhere utilizing mobile devices that fit in a hand because of technology. Being short in good usability implementation in mobile web design makes it difficult browsing your way around various popular mobile websites. Designing for mobile devices needs to be simpler than its standard website and more task-based to get the job done because users look for something specific and urgent.

Single page websites have been a hot trend for a while now, and their popularity doesn’t seem to be losing any momentum. Going this route isn’t right for every project, but there are times when it’s fitting and just makes sense. For instance, when a site doesn’t have a lot of content, and you know the content won’t be growing very much in the future, it might makes sense to go with a single page design.

A Web form which works well on desktops won’t necessarily work on mobile devices. With the nature of desktop computers, Web forms are not designed to be efficient. Due to the constraints of a mobile device and its context of use, efficiency is extremely important when filling in a mobile form. This article offers strategies that you can apply to design a more efficient and less error prone mobile form as compared to your Web form.

It really makes users sad and sometimes even angry when the homepage of a website couldn’t be found. Visitors don’t get upset if an error page is presented in a funny, unusual or elegant manner. In such an effective way you can save your clients and they will, surely, came back to your website where the 404 page has an original design, offers the solution of what to do and provides useful information about the error.

The best designers never stop learning. Only the mediocre ones think they know it all, that there’s nothing else to learn. But you don’t don’t want to be a mediocre designer, do you? That’s right – you want to be a great designer. One that’s always hungry to learn a new technique to make your first web and visual design project slick, cool, user-friendly, and just plain awesome. There is only thing holding you back – How to do it all!