You’ll often be told that the gallery sites are one of the first places to turn to for inspiration—but, while they can reveal the current trends in blog design, they don’t tell the whole story. For true inspiration—and a touch of education—Kimberly Elam took a look instead at how the super-successful approach the design of their own websites.

Whether you’re embarking on the research phase of a new project, in need of some more design inspiration, or just looking for a quiet place to work, it is all too easy to overlook one enormous free resource. William Hicks wants you to know how to be a better designer by taking it offline—at your local library.

What sort of state is your desk in right now? Clutter on your website, just as in your environment, can have a negative effect on your visitors’ state of mind. Kyle Mueller takes a look at some of the common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

2008 has been a quiet year for good web design and development books. The standout thus far is Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design”, published by Rosenfeld Media, both in terms of content and design. Digital Web’s own Matthew Pennell reviews “Web Form Design” and finds LukeW’s design thinking far outshines focusing on the humble web form.

This week we take a step back from the web development rock-face to look at a more business-oriented topic. User-centered design is all very well, but how do you join the dots when it comes to managing your customer relationships long term? Entrepreneur Tej Kohli discusses the benefits to your business of investing in some Customer Relationship Mojo.

Web designers use Photoshop, right? Always have, always will. At least that’s what I thought—but speak to enough designers, and you start to notice that a little program called Fireworks has just as many adherents as Adobe’s flagship graphics app. So which is best? We gathered a handful of great designers, fans of both Photoshop and Fireworks, to slug it out in search of the definitive answer. Your referee tonight is Nathan Smith. Fight!

The web industry has never been short of zealots. Since the age of the spacer-gif, there have always been designers ready to fight for their preferred technique—and none more so than CSS nerds. If you’ve ever agonized over finding the perfect semantic class name, this is the article for you. Martin Ringlein tells us why being sexy is overrated.

Are you a member of all the latest and greatest social networking sites? Tired of re-entering your personal details? Need to keep your information up-to-date across a myriad of accounts, and enable your user base to do the same? You need the foundations of the social web, brought to you by Ben Ward.

You might know your Facebook from your Odeo, but most companies couldn’t give a Flickr about social media. How do we let them know the opportunities that a Web 2.0 world can hold for them? Britt Parrott explains how to develop a coherent and buzzword-free web content strategy.

Between choosing the most semantic markup, wrangling IE6 CSS bugs, and arguing which JavaScript library would win in a fight, it is easy to forget that the future of web design rests in the hands of a small group of people—those with responsibility for educating the next generation. Columnist Tom Green reports on the sad state of post-secondary education, and what it might mean for the future of effective web development.