The goal of a "regular" text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.

Responsive design is the hottest topic in front-end Web development right now. It’s going to transform the Web into an all-singing, all-dancing, all-devices party, where we can access any information located anywhere in the world. But does responsive design translate well from the text-heavy Web design blogosphere to the cold hard reality of commercial systems?

If you're just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.

If you're just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.

We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.

Worst of all, these offending organizations are prone to repeating the redesign process every few years like spendthrift amnesiacs. Sadly, redesigns rarely solve actual problems faced by end users. I’m frustrated because it really doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s look at why redesigns happen, and some straightforward and inexpensive ways we might avoid them.

The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity. A consistent button set could reduce a lot of that visual noise and inconsistency. Furthermore, having it in CSS format means that changing the text for certain actions would be a breeze for developers, and it also allows administrators of non-English websites to translate labels into their native languages.

Editor's Note: This post is the first in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that were published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.

The article it headed proved to be equally intriguing, a response by the president of American Type Founders (ATF) to a June 1929 article in the German journal Gebrauchsgraphik by the designer Rudolf Koch, calling the ATF a “highway robber of German intellectual property.” At issue was a typeface marketed by the ATF earlier in 1929 called Rivoli.

Working in a creative field means challenging that theory, or else challenging the schedules and deadlines that managers impose on writers, designers and other creatives. As a project manager in a UX design agency, as well as a writer, I believe it is necessary to challenge both the assumptions about schedules and the belief that creativity implies disorganization.

This article walks you through the current selection of cloud-based tools and provides some recommendations. The number of offerings and amount of functionality are pretty vast. We’ll address two functions: prototyping and wireframing. But if you’re intrigued, you might want to explore cloud-based image editing, mind-mapping tools and other UX activities. These tools are already out there, and surprisingly good.

The Web has become increasingly interactive over the years. This trend is set to continue with the next generation of applications driven by the real-time Web. Adding real-time functionality to an application can result in a more interactive and engaging user experience.

In recent years, the Web has changed—a lot. The Web designer’s tools are now advanced, and browsers are highly capable. Designers have established clever coding and design techniques, and they face new challenges and are embracing new technologies. These changes are fundamental and require us to reconsider how we approach Web design. It’s time to rethink and reinvent: it is time to redesign the Web. The new Smashing books will change the way you design websites for the better.

However, most designers who have been using Photoshop for years may find Fireworks a bit awkward at first. Fireworks does have a slightly different workflow and requires a slightly different approach than you may be used to.

What if someone came to you and said, “I've designed this great website, but people don't stay on it. Why?” How would you respond? Would you ask them whether they have done extensive A/B testing? Would you recommend testing the usability of the website?