Grid Style In Modern Web Design: Showcase and Resources

A Grid is an invisible structure used to guide the placement of elements on your page. Now days using a grid are one of those basic design principles. Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about grid systems and using column grids for website layouts. It’s easier these days to embed a audio/video on the web than it is to set type consistently or align elements to a universal grid.

Most news and editorial designers are working with grid systems someone else designed. No matter what you think about it, how you know about it, you need to understand how to use it. Here, in this Presentation, you’ll find everything you need to know about Grid Based Designs with some excellent resources provided by fallow designers and developers.

For those, who don’t know what is Grid-Style-Based system and what it can do? Then please follow the link below for detailed introduction.

• Introduction to Layout Grids | adobe.net
• Grid Page Layout | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The next generation, representing two decades of excellence. This grid-based system contains everything you need to create high-end design, artistic showcase, portfolios or otherwise very clean and minimal design.

How to Create “Touchable” Web Designs

What are touchable web designs? When most people check out a new website, they sometimes think “yikes, this website looks like crap” or “wow, this is one of the best websites I’ve ever seen!” What is it that makes the great websites look so great? In my experience, when I think of “web 2.0″ and “great web designs” I think of modern web designs that look touchable. In other words, the elements on the page almost look real, as if they have depth and take up space.

The purpose of this post is to explore how this effect can be achieved, outline the major strategies for creating your own touchable web designs, and give examples of some great web designs out there that have mastered these techniques. Let’s get started!

90+ Clean and Minimal Web Designs for Design Inspiration

The web industry nowadays is very productive. During these years there have been many trends followed and every day the designers experiment new techniques creating new tendencies in the art of making website.

Recently is evident the necessity of a direct communication with customers and a website is the first place where a company can make know their cool stuff and services. A well-designed website is important for the growth of a business and often to create a “fresh” and clear image for a company (or a product, or a freelancer) we need the help of the art of simplicity. For these reasons a minimal and super-clean layout can be the perfect solution for an attractive website.

In this post, after a little overview, you’ll see some of the best examples of minimalism in modern web design.

A Web designer always need to improve his design and assembling skills, one can always think that how other designers and developers achieve both beautiful and creative designs. And to improve your design skills all the time you need good sources of inspiration to have a proper vision and to learn from masters who have a profound understanding of design field.

A good web designer always looking for ways to get inspired by new trends as Professionalism is built upon knowledge and experience. The basic point behind this post is to show you that you don’t need to just follow the routine methods for creating minimal design, there are lots of creative work out there to get inspire and break those routine bounds of choosing default design.

Factors Influencing Your Overall Website Design

When most people check out a new website, they sometimes think “yikes, this website looks like total crap” or “wow, this is one of the best website designs I’ve ever seen!” What is it that makes the great websites look so great?

In my experience, Website designing is not a piece of cake. It is something which needs both time and efforts from your part. Plus, there are certain factors that can directly influence your overall website design as well. Although there are many factors, but in this piece of writing, just for your concern, I have decided to disclose the most important and significant ones, and included examples of some great web designs out there that have mastered these factors.

The process has already started, and as a publisher you need to make sure you are adapting your marketing strategy to line up, or get left behind.

Google made the link building algorithm popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a revolution in its time because it provided search engines with a method for identifying the most important web pages for a given topic. However, as has been well documented, spammers have assaulted the algorithm with a wide variety of methods for buying links or creating them in other ways that don't work for the algorithms.

Even if you generate all your links in a pure white hat way, through reaching out to site owners and requesting them without compensation, or are doing high quality guest posts, you aren't necessarily generating the best possible signal for search engines. Certainly this type of link building done properly would not be a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, but from the perspective of the search engines it also doesn't represent a groundswell of opinion raving about your product. It still means something, but it is brute force driven through your efforts, rather than resulting from the enthusiasm of your audience.

I don't believe that search engines will penalize people who link build this way, but I think they will value the link profile that is manually built less than one that obtains unsolicited endorsements from the web.

Prior to the emergence of Google, links weren't a ranking factor in a significant search engine. At that time, any unpaid links were implemented solely based on merit, because the publisher had no other reason to link to someone else's page. Even paid ads were based on the advertiser valuing the traffic from the target site enough to be willing to pay for it, since there was no other benefit - so these too went to highly relevant pages as a rule.

Short and simple: links were a better quality signal when the world didn't know that they were a signal. But, those days are gone.

What the Search Engines are Doing

The search engines are constantly in search of additional signals to help provide better data on the best results to return for a given query, and to make it harder for spammers to succeed in ranking lower quality sites (lower quality than others that are available on the web). The increase in the use of social signals by the engines has been a part of that effort.

However, social signals are relatively noisy. As I documented in "Social Signals and SEO: Focus on Authority," the number of people on the major social sites that are actively recommending sites/content is still a relatively small percentage of the population.

That same article also documented how using social media's "wisdom of the crowd" (showing the most liked articles) was something that Bing tried, but then later removed. I believe that this happened because using social media mentions as votes in the same way that links were used did not really work, even in the limited fashion that Bing tried it.

I expect that for many categories of searches search engines will weight sites that show multiple types of signals more than those that show only one. Back in July I wrote about "The Dangers of a One Dimensional Link Building Plan." However, in addition to not doing one type of link building, you should also be careful to not use old-fashioned link building as your only method for promoting the site. Find a way to get the web to generate other signals about what you are doing!

Some Ideas

The first key is to focus on where your audience is (what sites they visit, what videos they watch, whose columns they read, ...). Think like a pre-Internet marketer would when trying to decide how to spend their ad dollars. Ranking signals can be generated by both your potential customers and the publishers of the content on the web that they visit.

Potential customers can create signals by:

1. Talking about you in social media.
2. Visiting your site.
3. Searching on your brand name.
4. Doing a search for products or services like yours and clicking on your search result.
5. Discussing you in comments on blogs or forums.

There are a lot more methods than these few!

Publishers of the content that your audience consumes can generate signals as well, in the form of good old-fashioned links. So what are the ways to encourage the generation these types of signals?

As per my recent columns, you should certainly focus on authority, and seek to become an authority. Even if you aren't yet an authority yourself, you can do things to get your name out there to start getting exposure to authorities and to build visibility with others. Here are a few specific ideas on how you can do that:

1. Start a blog: But only do this if you can produce unique, high quality content on a regular basis. It is a real time commitment. However, don't emphasize volume over quality. Two great articles a month will do far more for you than 4 decent ones a month, or 10 crappy ones
2. Start a social media campaign: Become an active community member. Read the Become an Authority article for more tips on how to do that effectively. Note that it is better to execute extremely well at one social media site than it is to do an OK job in several.
3. Participate in communities: If you can't start a blog or drive a highly active social media campaign, you can still participate in communities. Comment on blogs, forums, videos, or whatever medium your potential customers consume. In other words, as a fallback to Becoming an Authority, work at becoming known. Drive interactions that take place in front of your target audience. Go to conferences and engage in dialogues. Be the person that asks a great question of one of the speakers during the Q&A.
4. Generate press releases: Issue press releases from time to time, but only when there is something worth talking about on the web.
5. Generate news: Do something newsworthy that someone else would be interested in writing about.
6. Advertise on web sites where your target audience goes: Not for the purposes of buying links, but for exposure to your target audience, and to the people that publish content that your audience consumes.
7. Advertise in search engines: More great exposure!
8. Advertise on Facebook: For the same reasons, but only use this one if you can reach your potential customers here

Regardless of where you are in the process of building your own authority, do some things to attract positive attention to your website. Participating in discussions online is a great place to start. Participating in offline discussions that you can use to help drive online interactions is also a great thing to do.

The key is to create great signals in addition to the links that your site attracts.

Summary

The past couple of years have made us all aware of the growing importance of social media, and Google's Panda update made it common knowledge that other types of user behavior could be a factor in search engine rankings. Expect this trend to continue, and possibly even accelerate. What it means for you as a publisher is that you need to do more than old-fashioned link building.

While this type of link building can and should be a part of your marketing mix, doing it in isolation will send unbalanced signals to search engines. You can imagine a search engine thinking to itself: "Gee - if the link profile of this site is so hot, how come no one is talking about it online of searching for it"?

Search engines will continue to strive to understand how people evaluate the value of a particular website. Their goal is to get as close to that human evaluation as possible.

The process has already started. As a publisher you need to make sure you adapt your marketing strategy to line up. Otherwise, you'll get left behind.

Bing is finally the No. 2 search engine in the U.S., according to the latest figures from comScore. Bing which launched in June 2009 with an 8.4 percent search engine market share, now accounts for 15.1 percent of searches.

As Yahoo dropped to third, Google continued to lead all search engines in December with 65.9 percent market share.

The search engine rankings for December 2011, according to comScore, were:

• Google rose to 65.9 percent (up from 65.4 percent in November). 
• Bing rose to 15.1 percent (up from 15 percent in November). 
• Yahoo dropped to 14.5 percent (down from 15.1 percent). 
• Ask remained at 2.9 percent. 
• AOL remained at 1.6 percent

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December. This is up 2 percent from November. Google lead the way with 12 billion of the total searches; Bing ended up with 2.7 billion, followed close by Yahoo with 2.6 billion. Ask Network with 531 million searches, followed by AOL with 287 million.

In December, 68.1 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while Bing powered around 26.5 percent of searches.

Oracle has planned a huge swathe of security updates for Tuesday this week, with 78 vulnerabilities among the hundreds of its products slated to be patched.

Oracle said in a security update that vulnerabilities will be addressed in the Oracle Database Server, Fusion Middleware, E-Business suite, Supply Chain, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Virtualization, Sun and MySQL products.

Enterprises will be keen to test and install the patches as soon as possible, as some of the vulnerabilities could allow cyber attackers to infiltrate corporate databases and steal valuable data.

The firm admitted that, until patched, the vulnerabilities in the Oracle Database Server may enable attackers to remotely access the database without the need for a username and password.

 It added that these fixes are only applicable to installations that involve the Oracle Database Server itself, rather than client-only installations.

There are also five vulnerabilities in Oracle Fusion Middleware that could allow unauthenticated database access, and one in Oracle's JD Edwards platform.

However, it is MySQL that has the largest number of security flaws to be addressed by the patch, with 27. Oracle said that one of these can be exploited over a network without the need for a username or password.

Oracle recommended that the updates be applied as quickly as possible.

"Some of the vulnerabilities addressed in this Critical Patch Update affect multiple products," it said.

"Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply Critical Patch Update fixes as soon as possible."

Readmore: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2137695/oracle-plans-huge-securityupdate#ixzz1jcXFjlwx
Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.