Recently someone asked me this: "I'm looking to hire a local web designer. What qualifications should I be looking for?" Make sure you understand the difference between "web designer" and "web developer" before reading as it is the source of a lot of confusion. Assumptions Assuming that by "web designer" we mean someone who will produce a site end-to-end, our main question is pretty basic but one that everyone eventually will need ...

I started writing this as part of a response to a reader's question and it ended up being such a rant, I decided to make it a whole new post. The confusion This is a confusing topic and for good reason. Here's as best a response as I can give. When beginners are starting out learning the basics of creating websites, they're responsible for every aspect of the site. This ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/How_to_Combine_Social_Networking_and_E_Commerce'; In my opinion, there are two ways to combine social networking and e-commerce: 1) Create a social network around your products (Social commerce) 2) Market products to your social network (Modified traditional social networking) - #1 Social Commerce - In this first case, what you have is essentially a supercharged e-commerce store. You build your store as the focus of the site, and tightly integrate community features into it. For ...

In response to the increasing traffic to my company's retail store website, I have decided to redesign the current website to handle more features. My plans are to build the content management system off Wordpress in addition to a couple other social networking features including individual user logins and photo sharing to name a few. Here is the initial comp for the redesign and as always I will ...

I was just over at Thoof.com and something happened out of the ordinary. It sort of happened the other day too but this time, it was a little more intense. Here's the scenario - I registered for a user account at Thoof.com a couple days ago, and their registration process went like this: 1. Click sign up (a couple form fields appear) 2. Enter your email address 3. Click sign up That's ...

Want to create a successful social networking site? Here's 3 things worth keeping in mind: 1. Pay attention 2. Be creative 3. Be exclusive This article focuses on purely the social aspects which work for the leaders in social networking right now. I'll also point out some features of these sites which I think aren't working as well as they were originally intended.

This is my girlfriend's website. She designed it. I wrote it. Our combined web design powers are out of control. http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ysuzuki4/

I want to talk about some aspects of web design and usability. DOM / Ajax technologies are great in that they provide a super fast response to user action but if the user recognizes specific behavior, I believe they naturally come to expect other standard behaviors and so when something other than those expected standard behaviors occur, the user becomes less confidant that they can predict what will ...

I was having a conversation with my roomate this evening about web design. He's studying to become a grade school teacher so I always enjoy conversations with him where we can relate similar opinions to each other from different perspectives. So tonight I mentioned that I believe that every e-commerce site should integrate a community section on their site. Why not? E-commerce sites have built up a user ...

I opened www.dennisplucinik.com this weekend. It's a very simple site so far because I don't have much time to write in more functionality. I have to say that of the logos presented on the site, I have varying depths of involvement in each project from basic logo design to full design and development. Very briefly here is a more detailed description of my involvement in each of the ...

This comp is for a new site which will feature Authentic Bills & Sabres autographed memorabilia.

I own a Motorola Q and use it to access the internet daily. With the coming of the new iPhone I believe we will see a significant jump in the number of people using their cell phone to access information from the internet. This should hopefully bring the data access costs down eventually opening up the opportunity for even more people who could not have afforded it before. In ...

This is a comp for a Magic the Gathering focused subdomain off of my company's current website - www.dacardworld.com. If will focus on different aspects of the game and have several community driven content sections as well as products for sale which should be easier to find than digging through everything else on the main site.

This was an effort to design a usable shopping cart system for a large variety of items.

Here are some of the initial design comps for this site. It has since been completely built and will most likely be live by the end of February.