When developers push aside CSS to concentrate on JavaScript performance, they might be overlooking some great applications of CSS. This eBook, CSS Essentials, explores some practical implementations of CSS, including usage of pseudo elements in CSS, decoupling HTML from CSS, Modern CSS layouts with equal height columns, taming CSS selectors, and many others. These techniques will help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages in various browsers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Backgrounds in CSS: Everything You Need To Know
- The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property
- The Z Index CSS Property: A Comprehensive Look
- CSS Sprites: Useful Techniques, or Potential Nuisance?
- Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics
- Modern CSS Layouts, Part 2: The Essential Techniques
- Writing CSS For Others
- Decoupling HTML From CSS
- CSS Specificity And Inheritance
- Equal Height Column Layouts with Borders and Negative Margins in CSS
- !important CSS Declarations: How and When to Use Them
- CSS Sprites Revisited
- Learning To Use The :before And :after Pseudo Elements In CSS
- Taming Advanced CSS Selectors
- Six CSS Layout Features To Look Forward To

New possible uses of CSS appear every day, and you shouldnt miss any of them. This eBook Mastering CSS3 brings together tips on the newest approaches to CSS, such as CSS animation guidelines, CSS grid frameworks and modern techniques for constructing page layouts, among others. Also, you will get guidelines on how to use CSS in email newsletters and how to code email designs with improved readability and usability for the Web, mobile and email desktop.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- CSS3 vs. CSS: A Speed Benchmark
- Why We Should Start Using CSS3 And HTML5 Today
- Connecting The Dots With CSS3
- An Introduction To CSS3 Keyframe Animations
- The New Hotness: Using CSS3 Visual Effects
- Adventures In The Third Dimension: CSS 3D Transforms
- How To Use CSS3 Pseudo Classes
- CSS3 Flexible Box Layout Explained
- The Guide To CSS Animation: Principles And Examples
- Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D
- Using CSS3: Older Browsers And Common Considerations

Web design, with its wide range of disciplines and fields, is not an easy nut to crack. However, it is possible to put together a book with some of the crucial principles and fundamentals that you will need for every project you take on.

Learn about the harsh truths of corporate Web design and the troubles you are bound to run into. Create effective online portfolios with optimized user experiences, without the usual trial and error. Use storytelling to create engaging user experiences. Impress clients by staying on top of enhancements and Web standards. And in case you are wondering how to handle clients, we have some professional advice on how to deal with exceptional situations and customer requests.

This guide to professional Web design was carefully selected, prepared and edited to bring you the most useful Web design advice from Smashing Magazines articles. Know where you stand, put your situation in perspective, and get the advice you've been looking for.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites
- Portfolio Design Study: Design Patterns And Current Practices
- Creating A Successful Online Portfolio
- Better User Experience With Storytelling
- Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications
- Progressive Enhancement And Standards Do Not Limit Web Design
- Color Theory For Designers, Part 1: The Meaning Of Color
- Is John The Client Dense Or Are You Failing Him?
- How To Identify And Deal With Different Types Of Clients
- How To Respond Effectively To Design Criticism
- Web Designers Guide To Professional Networking
- Group Interview: Expert Advice For Students and Young Web Designers

Since the appearance of the smartphone and tablet computers, we are experiencing a boom in Mobile Design. And, as it happens with the development of new gadgets and technologies, some trends and patterns are already established. With this eBook: Mobile Design Patterns, you will learn the most important guidelines and strategies for Mobile Design, including solutions for forms, tap ahead patterns and UX approaches.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) The Elements Of The Mobile User Experience
2) Picking A Mobile Support Strategy For Your Website
3) Essential Design Patterns For Mobile Banking
4) Seven Guidelines For Designing High Performance Mobile User Experiences
5) Useful Design Tips For Your iPad App
6) A User Centered Approach To Web Design For Mobile Devices
7) Mobile Auto Suggest on Steroids: Tap Ahead Design Pattern

Designing and developing e-commerce websites is a puzzle with thousands of pieces. Not only are the layout and structure of your Web store important, but you also have to keep the user experience and conversion rates in mind. These are what, in the end, really convince your clients customers to click that shiny Buy now button.

In this eBook (eBook 5) you will be studying the universal principles for successful e-commerce websites, which include improving your checkout process and making your product displays more attractive. In reality, optimizing your conversion rates takes little effort. Find out how to resolve small usability issues to immense effect. Are you familiar with A/B and multivariate testing? Use them to figure out how customers respond to minimal changes in design, content structure and check-out convenience. Customers decide whether to stay on a page in just a few (milli)seconds, so you better make them count.

Only outstanding articles have made it into the book, according to Smashing Magazines high quality standards. Our authors are professionals, and their careful research figures largely in the book. Take the advice of experts who know exactly what they are writing about.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Getting Started With ECommerce
- 5 Universal Principles For Successful ECommerce Sites
- 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process
- How to Engage Customers in Your ECommerce Website
- Principles of Effective Search in ECommerce Design
- 15 Common Mistakes in ECommerce Design
- E-Commerce: Fundamentals of a Successful Re Design
- Improve Your ECommerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos
- How To Use Photos To Sell More Online
- Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
- 7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert
- Optimizing Conversion Rates: Less Effort, More Customers
- Optimizing Conversion Rates: Its All About Usability
- Use Conversions To Generate More Conversions
- The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing
- Multivariate Testing: 5 Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates

Designing for Mobile can be very complex: it requires many skills such as programming, usability, typography, creating applications. all of this without forgetting the necessary ingredient of visual appeal. This eBook: Essentials of Mobile Design, will give you an overview of the basic features you need to know for designing beautiful and useful Mobile interfaces and apps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Not Your Parents Mobile Phone: UX Design Guidelines For Smartphones
2) Why We Shouldnt Make Separate Mobile Websites
3) How To Build A Mobile Website
4) Making It A Mobile Web App
5) A Study Of Trends In Mobile Design
6) How To Market Your Mobile Application
7) A Foot On The Bottom Rung: First Forays Into Responsive Web Development
8) From Monitor To Mobile: Optimizing Email Newsletters With CSS
9) How To Use CSS3 Media Queries To Create a Mobile Version of Your Website
10) Creating Mobile Optimized Websites Using WordPress

Unlike its predecessors, the new Smashing Books 3 and 3 and a half have the main theme: Redesign. The books are a professional guide on how to redesign websites, but they also introduce a whole new mindset for progressive Web design. They challenge you to think differently about your work and will change the way you design websites forever.

A detailed look at the business and technical side of redesign is followed by a comprehensive overview of advanced HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript techniques that you can use today. You will get useful advice on innovative UX techniques, learn about the peculiarities of mobile context in Web design and discover useful Photoshop techniques for the new Web. You will explore a practical hands on guide to a bulletproof workflow for responsive Web design. Finally, you will also dive deep into emotional design, content strategy and storytelling.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Preface
- The Business Side of Redesign
- Selecting a Platform: Technical Considerations for Your Redesign
- Jumping Into HTML
- Restyle, Recode, Reimagine With CSS3
- JavaScript Rediscovered: Tricks to Replace Complex jQuery
- Techniques for Building Better User Experiences
- Designing for the Future, Using Photoshop
- Redesigning With Personality
- Mobile Considerations in User Experience Design: Web or Native?
- Workflow Redesigned: A Future Friendly Approach
- Becoming Fabulously Flexible: Designing Atoms and Elements

This Book was written by Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Rachel Andrew, Ben Schwarz, David Storey, Lea Verou, Christian Heilmann, Dmitry Fadeyev, Marc Edwards, Aarron Walter, Aral Balkan, Stephen Hay, Andy Clarke and The Smashing Editorial Team.

With Web design, we can do much more than inform the audience. The power of storytelling and content strategy is in creating engaging, emotional connections that transcend their platforms. In this book, we will review emerging navigation design patterns and understand how to employ a content strategy, which is an important process, often underestimated and dependent on many factors. A case study of Smashing Magazines responsive redesign beautifully illustrates what this approach could look like in practice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) The Missing Element of Redesign: Story by Denise Jacobs
2) Rethinking Navigation: Techniques and Design Patterns by Christian Holst
3) Rework Your Content So It Works for You by Colleen Jones
4) Responsive Smashing Redesign, a Case Study by Vitaly Friedman

WordPress offers a world of possibilities if you are curious enough to explore them. The most popular blog publishing platform is not limited by its default configurations. You can improve your website with the innumerable plugins, hooks and custom fields new versions are being created almost every day by the global developer community! This Smashing eBook "Mastering WordPress" (eBook 11) is exactly about the above mentioned. We've selected only the best articles on how to use extensions for WordPress with an amazing collection of copy paste coding snippets. They explain advanced methods and techniques which go beyond front end experience and show how to customize back end experience. After reading this eBook, you will be able to transform your website into whatever you want you just have to use your imagination. Make sure you add this source of knowledge to your library!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Definitive Guide To WordPress Hooks
Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress
Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers : Reloaded Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plugin
Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know
Create Perfect Emails For Your WordPress Website
Writing WordPress Guides for the Advanced Beginner
Advanced Layout Templates In WordPress Content Editor

It didn't work out as you expected, did it? The freelancing life was supposed to give you more time with the family and free you from that incompetent boss. You even assumed you would be better off financially. Instead, you are working longer hours and are under constant stress, worrying about various aspects of your business. It has to stop.

If you are thinking of freelancing or are close to surrendering to your workload, then this eBook (eBook#2) will be a treasure chest for you. Realizing that you have made the same mistakes as many before you can be a relief. Read up on how to pitch like a pro and handle your finances properly. Get precious tips on a key issue in freelancing: communication with clients and partners. Compelling marketing strategies will brighten your future, win contracts and make your business profitable.

This eBook proves that the hand picked content within, culled from the past two years on Smashing Magazine, makes even more sense when put into context. It has been worth a pot of gold to all those who have already read it. So, make your freelance business successful with minimal investment!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Basic Skill Of Freelance Web Designers
- Communication with Clients & Partners
- Marketing - Convincing Strategies For Freelancers
- Contracts & Pricing

Five years have passed, and the magazine has changed. A small, obscure lists blog has evolved into a professional publication with a publishing policy, editorial plans, in house style guide as well as a dedicated team of experienced authors, research assistants, advisory board experts, editors and proofreaders.

Smashing Magazine is a dedicated, passionate team, but it is also you, you and every single reader who have been reading Smashing Magazine for all those years. Thank you for being with us, we could not exist without you.

This eBook is our humble gift to you for your support, criticism and encouragement over all these years. It contains the best, most useful, most interesting or most inspiring articles that have been published on Smashing Magazine over the last five years. They have been carefully edited, proofread and updated for your convenience and a pleasing reading experience.

This eBook, Responsive Design, gives an overview about responsive Web design, showing many situations and techniques in which this approach can be applied to. Smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers may share the same design, which is adapted according to screen size, platform and orientation of each device. Flexible grids and layouts, images, text and an intelligent use of CSS media queries are included.

User Experience (UX) can be strongly influenced by behavioral factors such as emotions, beliefs, preferences and even cultural backgrounds. Being aware of this, Web designers keep developing strategies to improve the overall UX with the help of storytelling, tools for problem solving, relationship engineering and costumer service improvement. This Smashing eBook User Experience Design provides you with insights on how to improve your website based on the most important UX principles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed
- Design Is About Solving Problems
- A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable
- Designing The Well Tempered Web
- Better User Experience With Storytelling Part 1
- Better User Experience With Storytelling Part 2
- Relationship Engineering Part 1
- Relationship Engineering Part 2
- Taking A Customer From Like To Love: The UX Of Long Term Relationships
- Idiots, Drama Queens And Scammers: Improving Customer Service with UX

The Web changes everyday and, as a Web-developer, you are probably eager to keep up with the various techniques that help optimizing your workflow. This eBook:Mastering HTML5, explains to you the facts and myths of HTML5, shows how to use local storage on websites, teaches how to optimize images with HTML5 canvas and how to sync content with HTML5 video.

Among the most important ingredients for successful Web designs are creativity, planning, coding and design skills. However, many people forget that various psychological factors also play an important role when making design decisions. Psychology of Web Design gives you insights on how the human brain deals with different elements, colors, contrast, symmetry and balance. Combining the usability guidelines from Maslows pyramid will surely help you design closer to your audiences desires.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Persuasion Triggers In Web Design
- Designing For A Hierarchy Of Needs
- Designing For The Mind
- 10 Useful Usability Findings And Guidelines
- 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of
- Designing For Start Ups: How To Deliver The Message Across
- Color Theory For Designers Part 1
- Color Theory For Designers
- Part 2
- Color Theory For Designers Part 3

UX design isn’t a new field. But sometimes new approaches lead to new perspectives. In this book, you’ll learn how lean UX has made the whole discipline more approachable and attractive to startups, and you’ll see that UX issues aren’t just a quick fix, but should also address big-picture issues. Sometimes, the solution to a problem is just to fix a broken UX. At other times, you need to constantly fine-tune in order to keep up with changing demands. You’ll also explore wireframing techniques, research planning and design bias. TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Interaction Design In The Cloud

- Lean Startup Is Great UX Packaging

- Fitting Big-Picture UX Into Agile Development

- You Already Know How To Use It

- Fixing A Broken User Experience

- Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design Process

- Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead

- Designer Myopia: How To Stop Designing For Ourselves

- The UX Research Plan That Stakeholders Love

Are you familiar with the term User Experience (UX) and the principles that determine a user-friendly website? If yes, then all you need to do is to learn some more useful techniques that will make your user interface designs even better! User Experience, Practical Techniques, Volume 1 features seven selected articles on usability principles which will help you design user-centered websites by showing you helpful examples of the best practices and which common mistakes to avoid in your next project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
- Five More Principles Of Effective Web Design
- 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
-10 Useful Web Application Interface Designs
- 12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design
- An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability
- 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

In "Rethinking UX", various UX professionals share their lessons learned and provide practical advice from their very own personal experience. The eBook is packed with interesting thoughts and concepts that let us reflect on our own practices. Every designer has their own user research techniques and strategies, but leaving the office and talking to people on the streets can foster innovation even more as any thought-out strategy ever could. 

Is empathy possibly the best guarantor for great UX? Overcoming traditional patterns and designing with a new type of user in mind is among the many topics of this eBook. 

Of course, you can also get your hands on some future scenarios. The Smashing authors dare to sneak a peak at some new challenges that we could face with the rise of innovative technologies such as Google Glass and Leap Motion, and explore how we can embrace entirely gesture-driven interfaces today. This eBook is a springboard for developing a new perspective and for creating future-proof user experiences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

- Thirteen Tenets Of User Experience Design

- Improving Your Website Usability Test

- Designing For The Multifaceted User

- 50 Design Problems In 50 Days: Real Empathy For Innovation

- Beyond The Button: Embracing The Gesture-Driven Interface

- What Leap Motion And Google Glass Mean For Future User Experience

With the advent of responsive techniques, design patterns and off-the-shelf components, responsive Web design has become more than a technique — but rather a new mindset that requires us all to rethink and extend our practices. Responsive design is also about performance, server-side components, content strategy and conditional loading. With this eBook, you will learn how to go from non-responsive layouts to optimized responsive mobile experiences. We're happy to present techniques to help you overcome outdated practices and set new defaults in your workflow — a new responsive design workflow. TABLE OF CONTENTS
- How Much Has The Web Really Changed?
- Looking Beyond Common Media Query Breakpoints
- Logical Breakpoints For Your Responsive Design
- Preparing Websites For The Unexpected
- How To Maintain Hierarchy Through Content Choreography
- Towards A Retina Web
- Building A Better Responsive Website
- How To Make Your Websites Faster On Mobile Devices

Many claim to be able to teach you how to master Photoshop, so why should you trust this eBook to explain techniques any better than others? Here is why: because the book was written by someone just like you.

Have you reached a dead end and feel like a massive barrier stands between your creativity and the screen? Thomas Giannattasio has been there and knows how to help. He has put together an intuitive guide to color management, as well as detailed instructions on how to get the most out of paths and brushes in this eBook (eBook 3). Handle layer styles like a pro, take your typography to the next level, and make your photographs look like a professionals with native CS5 techniques.

Take Giannattasio's advice: spark your creativity by discovering the vast possibilities of the complex design laboratory we know as Photoshop. Start experimenting today.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Color Management
- Paths
- Layer Styles
- Brushes
- Typography
- Photography
- Exporting