Business Habitat

78 Great Small Business Web Design Resources

Here are 78 of the finest resources available for website design for small businesses. If you know any resources that belong on this list, please share them by leaving a comment below!

Learn How to Improve Your Blog Design/Layout

1. Pro Blog Design – Michael Martin’s advice

2. SimpleBits

3. Smashing Magazine – Design tips and tricks

4. Vandelay Design – Lots of useful advice, especially for blog design

5. Tuts+ – Tutorials on various topics, including Web design

6. Demystifying Usability

7. Elated – Advice and templates for your website

8. CSSBeauty – All about Cascading Style Sheets

9. Six Revisions

10. W3Schools.com

11. The Best Designs

12. SEOMoz – Advice for the SEO aspects of Web design

13. A List Apart

14. UnmatchedStyle.com

15. Usability.gov

16. WebRadiance

17. Web Page Design for Designers

18. Stylegala

19. Web Creme

20. Signal vs. Noise

21. CSS Reboot

22. Smiley Cat

23. 456 Berea St

24. CSS Mania

25. SEO Book – A membership site teaching SEO

Books & E-Books

26. CSS Mastery

27. Designing With Web Standards

28. Don’t Make Me Think!

29. Save The Pixel

30. The Design of Everyday Things

31. The Unusually Useful Web Book

Associations & Conferences

32. World Wide Web Consortium

33. The Web Design Group

34. Carsonified Events

35. An Event Apart

36. dConstruct 2009

Experts

37. Brian Gardner

38. Eric Ward

39. David Airey

40. Jakob Nielsen

41. Steve Krug

42. Selene M. Bowlby

43. Randa Clay

44. Douglas Bowman

Articles and FAQs

45. W3 Consortium on CSS

46. Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen

47. Fast Loading Website Tips

48. Color Theory and Mixing

49. Humour in Web Design

50. Color Matters – Color Theory

51. The Anatomy of Web Fonts

News

52. Design Float

53. Design Shack

54. Digital Web Magazine

55. Favourite Website Awards

56. mezzoblue

Services

57. Rackspace – Web hosting.

58. Media Temple – Web hosting.

59. Bluehost – Web hosting.

60. stock.xchng – Stock photos.

61. everystockphoto – More stock photos.

Software & Tools

62. 960 Grid System – To help you frame your Web pages.

63. Browsershots – Take screenshots of your website in various browsers.

64. ColorSchemer

65. COLOURlovers – Share and create color palettes.

66. CSSCheck – Check whether your CSS is valid.

67. CSS Validation Service

68. Dafont – Choose from a great many fonts.

69. light on dark – Learn how to use a light-on-dark theme.

70. LogoPond – Get a crowd-sourced logo.

71. Montastic – Monitor your website’s uptime and downtime.

72. Typedia – A shared encyclopedia of typefaces.

73. Typetester – Test different fonts.

74. Userfly – Watch videos of your site visitors visiting your site.

75. Website Grader

76. Vischeck – See how color-blind people see your website.

What NOT to Do

77. Web Pages That Suck

When You’re Really, Really Tired of All This Web Design Stuff

78. Turn Off The Internet

image: Gary Denness

What’s your favorite resource for small business Web design?

10 Business Blog Mistakes I Hope You Never Make (Again)

I hope this list saves you some grief in your professional blogging.

Note: These are all serious mistakes! Do NOT do them!

10. Publish sporadically.

9. Spend too much time consuming content.

8. Spend too little time creating content.

7. Fail to plan effectively or not at all.

6. Expect the world to adore your blog without any marketing effort on your part.

5. Fail to pay close attention to numbers that indicate blog growth rate.

4. Fail to produce content that serves your intended audience.

3. Fail to serve the right audience.

2. Fail to love your audience to bits.

1. Give up.

Take the opposite of this list and you’ll have a pretty good sense of my top 10 business blog success tips.

Further Reading

• Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Blog? by Brian Clark at Copyblogger – Five sinister mistakes and their cures.
• Blogging Mistakes: Final List by Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips – Dozens of bloggers got together in 2007 for a group writing project on blog mistakes they had made.
• How to Overcome Blogging Failure – A Visionary Blogging post from May 2008 featuring advice from author Barry Moltz.

What’s the worst blogging mistake you’ve ever made or seen someone else make?

photo by dkalo