Web Design articles and blogs for web designers and anybody who works with websites

At CollectiveRay, we started off this website as a learning mechanism as we entered into the world of web design. As we were acquiring our skills and mastery of the Joomla CMS, we documented all that we learned as web design blogs, for those who were in the same position as us - trying to improve their web design skillset.

The site was hugely successful in the initial years of Joomla, when it was still competing with WordPress for the domination of the world-wide-web.

The web design world was very different back then, there were fewer websites doing great tutorials around. We were one of the first writing extensive useful content (before it became a trend) and our articles ranked nicely without any SEO.

As the dominance of our original CMS subsided, we wanted to make sure we didn't lose our influence on the web design world, so we started shifted our focus from Joomla to other frameworks such as WordPress.

We also started writing about things which were not strictly one framework or another, but pure web design, opinions, tutorials and generic articles about web design, web development, hiring designer or developers, concepts around web design and much much more.

We decided to share these informative content in their own section on this site - and the Web Design > Opinion section was born.

Here we share stuff about web design, which is generic in nature sometimes, or more specific to a certain technology, but for which we don't have an appropriate home on this website.

But what do we write in this section, let's call it the web design editorials section?

It would be best if we discuss some of our most successful web design articles and why they are so popular.

Hiring Web Designers and developers

Finding the right people to work on your web design and development projects is never an easy task. Today, with offshoring, remote jobs, freelancing and contracting becoming the norm, there is an ever-growing pool of great web designers.

But, there is a negative side to all of these resources. There are plenty of charlatans out there. The ones who are not able to tell the difference between Java and Javascript, the ones who don't get the difference between client-side and server-side scripting.

So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? In these articles discussing hiring and or finding great designers and developers to work on your various kinds of projects, we discuss such things to look for, certain things you should avoid when reviewing candidates, which marketplaces and companies are reputable for hiring, and plenty other essential information.

Web Design Blogs, Trends and other changes in the industry

Few industries evolve as rapidly as the worlds of web design and web development. New technologies emerge on a nearly daily basis, what was cutting-edge today, could be dead in the water in 6 months time.

It goes without saying, that if you don't keep yourself abreast with the current developments in the web design world, you'll soon be left behind in the dust, never to be hired again.

So how do you make sure you're on the ball?

You follow the industry's influential web design blogs of course, with CollectiveRay becoming one of those voices you should be following.

We've gone and worked on finding the absolute greatest web design blogs to follow. But not only that, we've also made it easy for you to get a firehose of articles to read - by creating an OPML file with all of the RSS feeds of all of the major web design blogs.

But not only that - each year we look at emerging trends and discuss the evolution of the web design industry - what's been popular in the past year and what we believe will be the next big things in the upcoming months.

Particular aspects of web design or similar niches

As part of this section, we also sometimes dig deeply into one specific topic. For example, we've featured an article about how to go about creating a dark web design which combines dark colors into a design to a winning effect. 

We've also discussed User Experience, what will happen Post Flat Design, i.e. what will have after the Flat Design trend passes, and we've analyses Responsive Web Design deeply, with respect to how it actually works, from a technology point of view.

Generic website stuff

The web design niche touches and sometimes overlaps with plenty of other industries. So of course, if we've got a burning itch about something, you can rest assured we're going to be writing about it.

We've written about Email Outreach, including things you definitely should not be doing! We've also spoken about how to fully setup a website for ecommerce. We also discuss stuff such as how to find web design clients, protecting your business from a legal perspective, and how to start a career in web development or design even if you're not young.

If it's in or around the design industry, or is interesting reading for web designers, you'll find it here.