A lot like the fashion industry, web design, and more generally, design, tends to go through comparable trends.

In the constantly changing web design landscape, we find it always pays off to watch what others are doing for multiple reasons

• Inspiration and motivation
• Keeping the web active, and
• Some things people do are just plainly awesome.

Here’s the top 5 web design trends we’ve been seeing early in 2014.

1. Single page sites

As corporate businesses develop their online strategies, a lot tend to be changing their home page to a “brochure” style, single page layout. Even we recently updated our main site to reflect upon recent times.

2. Flat design

When CSS3 first started being support by major browsers, a flood of designers and developers decided to take advantage of the new technology by adding a whole heap of text and box shadows to their site designs. Personally, I think this “hype” will be comparable to the “web 2.0″ bubble. A few years down the track we’ll look back and laugh at these whacky styles.

More recently, the industry tends to have been going back to basics and using “flat” design techniques. (I.e, no drop shadows, fancy borders or effects)

Take a look at this website which utilizes flat design principles.

3. Photography as a design

More and more designs are popping up that solely rely on photography to do the heavy lifting for the pages aesthetics. Take a look at the Clouds Over Cuba website to see a heavily photo influenced design.

4. CSS3 animations & lazy loading

As more and more browsers are both supporting CSS3 and improving its performance, designers and developers alike are taking advantage of its animation features to “spice” things up. Take a look at the Spotify home page for a good example.

5. Half screen, or big menus

Drop down menus have slowly integrated their way into the “norm” for user interfaces on the web. Once upon a time only “cutting-edge” sites were using drop down menus (and they were usually buggy), but in today’s age it’s quite normal for a site to have them.

One trend we have seen slowly developing, especially in the e-commerce interface scene, is big drop down menus. Take a look at the Kogan product menu.

Open source content management and blogging engine WordPress has just released a minor maintenance update for WordPress 3.8 users.

The fix primarily targets 31 bugs and a few visual and usability fixes within the new 3.8 administration layout.

You can read the complete summary of changes over on the WordPress.org press release page.

Ensure you backup your site before pressing upgrade.

Just in case something goes wrong whilst your updating.

Happy WordPressing

A successful website relies on a few things, primarily, preventative maintenance and regular updates. Keeping a flow of regular, interesting content is important for both your visitors and SEO.

1. Keep your site up to date

Keep your visitors up to date on what you’re doing – this includes news, blog posts, images and all other shiny forms of media. Nothing screams “neglected site” more than a site that hasn’t been added or edited in a few months, or even worse, a few years.

2. Fix bugs as they become apparent

It’s notoriously difficult to get a site to display 100% universally against all browsers and devices in todays age, there is just too many. However, if you decide to browse your site on a different device one day, and notice some things are broken, make a note and get them fixed. Keep hacking away at making the site universally awesome.

3. Preventative maintenance is important

A lot of people, usually in the crowd that doesn’t fully understand technology, simply think that once their site is built, then that’s it. But in truth, that’s what it would be like in an idealistic world.

Cyber attacks are a constant growing concern, so it’s super important to keep all of your site and software up to date. WordPress for example, suffers a couple of major vulnerabilities every so often, which usually does not prove to be a problem if you keep it up to date and locked down.

4. Keep a scheduled backup

A regular backup is important for the rare case that something does happen to your site. Think corrupt database, server failure, or worst case scenario, you got hacked (See point 3 to prevent this)

If you’re using content management, focus on backing up the important stuff: The database. Templates and designs can be remade, but thousands of user generated entries in a database cannot.

5. Treat your site with love and respect

Decreasing the effort you put into your site will definitely show. Take a look at this example for instance. Put in the extra time to do it properly, and you’ll be rewarded by the results.

Wrapping it all together

Putting all of these points into one:
Don’t neglect your site!

In recent times, linux, and more specifically Ubuntu, Mint and a few other distributions have gained popularity in both the consumer and corporate work station markets.

As a long time developer and linux user, I’ve slowly watched both the linux kernel and assorted commercial and open source software grow to maturity on these platforms. Don’t get me wrong – they still have a long way to go before being “ready” for the consumer markets, but the technology behind it essentially, super similar to popular products such as Android and Mac OSX.

Benefits of running Ubuntu for web development

Being a web developer usually means having a range of assorted software to help you do the job, and considering all of the work we produce at eMarketeer Australia in linux based web software, it only makes sense to have a linux environment to work.

1. Super easy integration with servers streamlines development

Connecting to your whole variety of servers comes native to most modern distros. Remote server connections make it easy to use FTP / SCP / SFTP to easily “drag and drop” files, or directly edit files on another machine.

2. Open source software is made with love, and it’s free

I’ve found that most mature open source projects are superior to commercial software. Picture a software developer, writing code purely because he enjoys it. Now compare it to a 9 – 5 work who is writing software just to pay their rent. The former is made with passion and love.

3. The community is huge, and finding help isn’t difficult.

Seems pretty self explanatory.

Web development software for Ubuntu that we use

For graphical work

• GIMP 2.8+
• Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator CS6 (via Wine)
• Inkscape for the occasional SVG edits

For development

• Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Ruby (All easily installable)
• PhpMyAdmin
• Go language
• C++ and C
• Git and SVN for version control
• Rsync for various tools

IDE’s

• Geany – great for lightweight, non-project based edits
• Komodo Edit – probably the best open source IDE for Ubuntu
• Sublime Text 2 – probably the best commercial based IDE for Ubuntu

Other stuff

• Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
• Lightning plugin for Thunderbird calenders, with Google calender plugin
• Libre Office suite
• Remmina remote desktop client
• Docky for window management
• Gnome 3.10 desktop environment
• Open SSH

And a whole lot more. We’ve just listed our favorite and most frequently used.

Is linux a viable OS to use for web development?

Considering I’ve used it full time for past 5 years to do primarily that, I will say yes, definiately.