I often see webmasters who complain that they don’t have a ‘knack’ for the design element to creating websites. What most people don’t realize, though, is that design skills are a learned aspect for even the greatest designers. Nobody is born a great artist, whether their talents included an easel or a web design template.

In order to create good designs, especially in web design where functionality is so important, one needs to understand design principles. These include understanding color, size, contrast, shape, and what I’m going to be focusing on today, balance.

Throughout the recent months of reading other design blogs, I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers talking about, and using, jQuery. I ignored it at first, realizing it wasn’t a language I wanted to learn at this point. However, I’ve now been noticing that everyone’s been using it, and it is almost becoming a necessity for the web designer in today’s world.

So that is why I have decided to start a series of jQuery tutorials myself. It is a pretty straight-forward language, especially if you’re familiar with JavaScript. I’d like to write this series of tutorials from the perspective of a person who has never even heard of jQuery, because I was this person myself just a few months ago. I am, of course, not an expert at this point, but I plan to grow upon the tutorials as I learn more about the language, and the tricks you can do with it.

If you currently own a website, which I’m assuming most of you do if you’re reading this, chances are you have a big list of mistakes you’ve made as a webmaster. I have my own as well, and even today, after years of creating and maintaining websites, I’m still learning the in’s and out’s of good website creation.

I saw this “Biggest Webmaster Mistakes” title on Helium, and was immediately inspired to write for it. I started thinking, “I spend my time writing articles that tell webmasters how they can achieve this, or how they should do that. But why have I not yet written anything on what they should not do?”

There are plenty of trends in web design, from wooden, to large background, and to barely there. One though that has been growing especially in 2008 is the hand-drawn style. This, ‘sketchy’ style is used on many websites, but still provides an original touch to any design.

In this post I’ve collected a few of the greater hand-drawn designs on the web today, as well as resources and a few tips on how you can achieve this style for yourself.

When I started my website I wanted it too be big. Who doesn’t? I started reading up on how to market my website, and found the power of an SEO consultant. An SEO consultant is a professional that comes in, and optimizes your website for maximum usability and search engine friendliness. Needless to say, this can save you a ton of time and gain you a lot of visitors.

Because of lacking funds, I started doing some web marketing for my website by myself. I decided I’d get a good start at least, and pay for an SEO specialist later.

I soon realized I wouldn’t need that specialist though. After studying SEO for only a month, I had cut my own search engine ranking down by more than 10,000,000. I didn’t even study very hard.

Here’s another tutorial on Photoshop from Kasey. It’s about making 3D text, and the options you can use to go along with it. Very basic tutorial, but a powerful technique for any sort of website design.

All web developers and web designers should know about the wonderful world of free resources. I’ve compiled a list of graphics, tools, tutorials, and generators that will make creating websites a much faster process, and hopefully produce better designers.

Here are 88 resources that can make your life as a web designer/developer much, much easier.