Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said.

He warned that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the “glossy but useless” sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Research into website use shows that sites were better off getting the basics right, said Mr Nielsen.

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Came across this great (and brief) tutorial on how to place a DIV in the exact centre of the browser with just a few lines of CSS, it even works in IE…

The site www.dezinerfolio.com also holds a lot of other useful info for the average web designer, including a couple of great add-ons to Photoshop for easy Web 2.0 styling. Well worth a visit!

Image Concatenation coupled with a bit of CSS magic can greatly improve your page load times. The following article explains how and lists the pros and cons…

When designing web applications, icons and images are used to enhance the user experience, give visual clues and/or simply look sexy. For complex web applications, the quantity and resulting latency of icons and images used can greatly impact page load times…

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As summer approaches lets take a look at some nice warm coloured websites - today we Digg out the best orange sites…

Anyway these great designs should provide inspiration, creativity and ideas to any web designer out there. Something we all need from time to time regardless.

Read more | Digg story

In the past I’ve used Macromedia Dreamweaver’s insert feature ( “Insert -> Media -> Flash”) to inject the necessary HTML tags in order to display short flash movies/commercials on client websites. Recently I discovered that this doesn’t work quite as intended as my sites don’t validate over at W3C any more.

All my recent projects are made using XHTML and since <embed> is not part of the XHTML specification it will prevent the pages from validating. Fortunately there’s a very simple workaround.