New legislature would do away with tax-free online shopping

via digitaltrends.com

Say goodbye to tax-free shopping! Yesterday, the Senate voted for a bill that if legalized, will take away a nice perk we’ve all taken for granted while shopping online. This bill is called the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would force online retailers to tack on a sales tax for all online purchases. The bill will be voted on in the Senate for a final time on May 6.

The bill would change a 1992 law that didn’t require online-only retailers to pay a sales tax in states that require retailers to charge a sales tax unless this retailer had a brick and mortar store in the United States. Right now, how online shopping works is that if you’re shopping for something on BestBuy.com and Best Buy has a physical shop in your state, you’ve had to pay your state’s sales tax. However, if you bought something from Etsy, and the seller didn’t have a brick-and-mortar location, you didn’t have to pay the tax. If the proposed legislature passes, you will start paying that tax. With this bill, the state you live in will collect taxes for everything you buy online.

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Efficient Web Design - One Page Websites Inspiration

via designresourcebox.com

For one page websites scrolling is the solution to see more content, differently from regular websites where you click on a button that gets you on a page, then another one and if you are not focused and the site is not well structured, you can get lost in all the details that the pages have.

This is different with one page websites. Mostly being landing pages, information is not complex, instead they just have a few blocks of text, even fewer images, maybe a video and that’s it.

But what about designing a site like this? How would you do it? Most of the times, you can make them scroll vertically, but there are designers who decide to make things a little bit more interesting and make the websites scroll horizontally.

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Internet TV is our (near) future

via techi.com

Television is one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the world, if not the most popular. Billions of hours of television are watched around the world every day. However, as much as people love television, they don’t love how complex and inconvenient the linear television experience is...

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Web Typography Collection – Great Tools, Books, Resources and Articles

via onextrapixel.com

Choosing the right font and typography for your web projects is an important part of creating the desired aesthetic. There are many styles, trends and resources available to designers who are looking to create a cohesive, attractive and legible design through the use of high quality fonts, typography creation tools and tutorials pertaining to appropriate font usage and creation...

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35 Website Layouts using Flat Design Techniques

via spyrestudios.com

The minimalist flat design trends have been pouring out onto the Internet in recent months. I have witnessed a large number of new UI kits and website designs full of colorful flat buttons, links, navigation items, and input forms. These are not exclusive UI elements but just a few examples to show how quickly the flat design trend has picked up steam...

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How Mobile Web Time Is Divvied Up

via businessinsider.com

The bite mobile is taking out of desktop Web use keeps getting bigger. In terms of what activities Web users are engaging in, in the first quarter 2013 Experian Marketing Services found that U.S. mobile Internet users spent the greatest percentage of their mobile Web time using email, at a 23% share of time spent. Social networking came in second, garnering 15% of time spent on the mobile Internet. Interestingly, travel occupied a greater share of time on the mobile Internet (9%) versus the desktop (1%).

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So You Want to Be a Freelance Web Designer, Huh?

via designrfix.com

Have you absolutely had it up to here with your boss? Sick and tired of the demanding schedule, the stressful deadlines, the abysmal pay and office politics? Dreaming of days when you can work anytime, anywhere while still in your pajamas? Looking forward with gusto to long, creative-fueling walks spent with exotic coffee in hand?

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10 Story-Driven Websites That Will Blow Your Mind

via onextrapixel.com

Ever since the fall of Flash and the rise of HTML5, we’ve seen a lot of developers experimenting with the possibilities of HTML5. One trend that has gained popularity is the creation of a story-driven website that takes viewers through a series of pages connected with story elements and creative navigation.

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30 Useful jQuery Tutorials Designers Must Know

via grafixdesignmag.com

Today we have collected some useful jQuery tutorials from around the Web. I am confident that these web design and development tutorials will arm you with all the necessary techniques in-order to achieve those latest web design trends.

From jQuery Website – “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.”

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80 Inspirational Design Portfolios to Bump Up Your Creativity

via hongkiat.com

The age of information remains fiercely competitive. You have to raise the bar over and over again to keep visitors interested to come back your website. In these efforts, a few designers stood out of the crowd. Some are impressive, others unusual, and a handful have a splot of humor in the designs, these 80 incredible design portfolios gathered from all over the Web showcase the unspoken talents and technical skills of these amazing designers.

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Top 5 Smartphone Apps for Web Designers

via inspiredology.com

Web designers who use mobile apps and design sites are quickly gaining an edge over their non-mobile-using competition. With the population constantly connected to their devices, it is no wonder more and more designers are using mobile apps—and you should too.

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Retina Web Design - Info, Tools And Techniques

via designresourcebox.com

I was talking with someone the other days and I mentioned the term retina graphics at some point and he immediately stopped me and questioned me about it. What intrigued him was why we should design something just for the visitors who own Apple products and a small number of other devices. For those of you who share his opinion, we should do it because it is the proper way, something like cross-browser optimization but not quite like it.

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How to create a great ‘about’ page

via webdesignerdepot.com

Here’s one thing that never made sense to me: people make websites so others can find out more about them, but most “About Us” pages absolutely suck. They’re either really long and boring or really short and mysterious. Not many people understand the best way to go about these pages.

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35 Creative Single Page Portfolio Designs

via designm.ag

In this post we have collected some beautiful single page portfolio designs. Be sure to check out our previous posts on the topic below.

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100+ Best New Tools For Web Design And Development

via andysowards.com

The great thing about being a Web Designer & Developer is that it is a constantly changing field, full of bright minds that are also constantly changing and innovating. This has yielded not only a fun work environment for creatives, but a useful, informative, and fun web for everyone!

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Tips For Improving Your Site Speed

via queness.com

Designers are increasingly aware that, in this era of Internet branding, their sites have seconds to make an impact. If the ethos, efficiency and professionalism of a brand can be conveyed on first glance, you're onto a winner. If a site is over complicated and difficult to navigate, or if its purpose and layout are unclear, the extra time required to process it will turn users off in a flash. One simple way to make sure that your brand message is received -- and fast -- is to give your site speed a boost.

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12 Best Landing Page Templates for Your Product Brand

via ibrandstudio.com

Landing page job is to promote your product effectively and bring the brand in visitors memory, it is commonly used in online marketing to enhance the effectiveness of advertisements and at the same time increase the sales of the product. A good landing page design must have an effective call to action, good copywriting and a common thread that ties the message well together. So it can even optimize your conversion dramatically and drive more customers to your business.

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30 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Web Designers

via inspiredm.com

From renowned blogs and magazines to the seasoned professionals and rising stars, Twitter plays host to a multitude of web industry related accounts. So many in fact that at times it can be difficult to figure out where to get started. This is why we’ve put together a list of 30 must-follow Twitter accounts for web designers.

Following these accounts will be sure to keep you up to date with the latest industry news and resources as well as linking you with a group of super talented individuals who openly share their knowledge, thoughts, and ideas on a daily basis.

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Wireframing and Sketching for Web Designers: Tools, Utilities and Reasons

via instantshift.com

A website wireframe is a visual guide, or a skeletal framework that will help you define your future website’s characteristics. By wireframing you are basically defining the primary steps and the shape your website or product is going to have. One of the main purposes of wireframing is to set the main priorities and describe the functionality of your future creation.

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35 Nice Examples of Flat Web Design

via inspirationfeed.com

What is Flat Design? As Sabina Idler at Usabilla puts it, “flat design is a two dimensional design for a two dimensional screen.” Flat Design is an ongoing trend sweeping the design community. Well-known companies like Mashable, TheNextWeb, and Microsoft are already utilizing this design aesthetic.

Similar to Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro UI, flat design shakes off unappealing drop shadows, inset shadows, gradients, subtle textures, and heavy bevels. It takes a fundamentally minimalistic approach by only using bare necessities like clean layouts, solid colors, and sharp typography. Holding hands with responsive web design, flat UI design is suited for mobile interfaces and is easier to code.

Skeuomorphic design is meant to look like its physical counterpart and possess real life characteristics. Thanks to Apple, the popularity of skeuomorphic design boomed since the launch of the iPhone in 2007. To find a common ground with users, designers got used to designing skeuomorphic user interfaces, icons, and web designs. The stitched-leather effect seen in many Apple-designed iOS apps is a good example of skeuomorphic design...

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