Hold-ups are best avoided not by keeping design and development separate but by bringing them closer together via an iterative workflow. This agile methodology distributes responsibility and assigns value to each team member. Furthermore, departments are not tied to an inflexible plan. All of these attributes of agile thinking help to alleviate designer-developer tension.

The practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community working together to develop Web standards. Although the boundaries of the platform continue to evolve, industry leaders speak nearly in unison about how HTML5 will be the cornerstone for this platform.

In addition to the classic “Web of documents” W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a “Web of data”. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network. The term “Semantic Web” refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data.

By now, we all know that we should be using HTML5 to build websites. One important part of HTML5 that is still not widely understood is sectioning content: section, article, aside and nav. Every Web page has an outline, and checking it is easy using a really simple free online tool.

CSS3 offers some exciting new features to enhance the appearance of a website. Users are coming to expect a website to look awesome as well as operate cleanly. CSS3 makes it easier for designs that will make visitors “ooh and aah” over them to be implemented.

Parallax scrolling (example) is a special technique where designers are using multiple layers to create an illusion of a 3 dimensional space. You will notice background images move slower than foreground image to add nice three dimensional depth illusions to the design.

Large scale backdrops with images in high resolution, and covering the entire site are an instant way to grab your audience– they cannot help but to see it and have an opinion about it. Note, however the background photo must be content-appropriate.