I’ve put a list together, for the guys at my new company, of all the websites that I read on a daily/weekly basis with regards to web development, design, usability and open source. I can not encourage you enough to spend some time on these sites. They will make you a better person, people will love you and butterflies will spontaneously appear whenever you are around.
A List Apart – http://www.alistapart.com
Jeffrey Zeldman’s awesome website. He’s a well respected guy who gets the top people from all over the world to contribute articles. The site focuses on design, web standards and excellent use of CSS.
Think Vitamin – www.thinkvitamin.com
The best thing about the new world order is that everyone seems to be playing nicely together. Think Vitamin is a place where you can learn a lot from the people on the advisory board like Cal Henderson from Flickr, Dave Shea form CSS Zen Garden and Jeff Veen from Google.
CSS Zen Garden – http://www.csszengarden.com
You can not comprehend the real power of CSS until you spent some time on CSS Zen Garden. Remember that every single design on the site uses the exact same html… it’s only the css that is changing!
Script.aculo.us – http://script.aculo.us/
Want to make your website do all the pretty things that the big boys do? A lot of them, including Google etc get some of their javascript Web 2.0 loveliness from scriptaculous.
User Experience Mag – http://www.uxmag.com/
Again with the big boys, but this time all about user experience…
Matt Cutts’ Blog – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Matt Cutts is one of the few Google employees encouraged by Google to blog. He heads up the team that matters the most – Web Spam… essentially the guys who decide whether you’re invited to the party or not. We also share a wordpress template.
Jakob Nielsen – http://www.useit.com
Jakob is the godfather of usability. He’s been around for a long time and has seen it all before. His site is the epitome of usability and he encourages, sometimes a little too passionately, everyone to follow suit.
Web Style Guide – http://webstyleguide.com/
A website about how to build websites… seem a bit redundant? Think again. Here you’ll learn all the best practices; developing a site specification, information architectures, even how to write your copy so that people stay on your site. This is the knowledge that separates the companies that are constantly struggling against themselves and those that Just Get It Done™
Firefox – http://www.getFireFox.com
Firefox is not only more secure, more stable, more functional and has a better javascript debugger, but it also has some web development plugins that help you do your job faster and better. – Install the Web Developer Toolbar!
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