What separates the world’s best web designers from the rest?

By Mick Gibson

Q: What separates the world’s best web designers from the rest?

A: The pros appreciate that true design excellence can only be achieved with a great design process.

Our new book “The Web Designer’s Roadmap” will help you consistently produce world-class web designs, time and time again. Before you jump into your next design, learn how the best of the best go about it – with insights and interviews from the likes of: Donald Norman, Daniel Burka, Shaun Inman, and a host of others design pros.

Join author Giovanni DiFeterici, as he walks you through the concept for the book, and what you’ll likely glean from it.

As usual, we have a great launch special:

Save 50% when you order the PRINT and DIGITAL EPACK Bundle
Save 42% when you order the DIGITAL EPACK (epub + mobi + pdf versions)

Meet the author

Mick Gibson

Mick is a digital sales architect with over 13 years experience on the web. He helps businesses, clients and start-ups - plan, action and measure their digital sales success. Including getting hands-on with Google AdWords, conversion rate optimization, retargeting and email marketing.

Mark Drake

Just a question – but why does an advertisement like this get mixed into the blog entries on the home page? I expect the links from the home page to be articles with educating or informative information.

It’s just my opinion, but as a frequent reader of the site this is just what I expect. I know you display ads and market your books and services, but could you not waste a blog entry on them and mix them into your normal article format?
- Thomas Vanhoutte
  
  Because blending advertisements into the ‘normal’ content is a way of maximizing the profit for that advertisement. I’ve seen it before many times. Even Facebook does it with their sponsored stories for example and twitter with promoted tweets.
  
  If you are not interested after clicking the article (because it’s an ad – or any other reason) simply close it and don’t look back! ;-)
  - Mark Drake
    
    Blending advertisements into normal content may be what Facebook does, but it’s not what you should do if you want to keep people using your site, especially for those of us who have been turning to SitePoint since they started. And I’ve done my fair share of supporting SitePoint, I’ve purchased books and dedicated time on the forums – so my opinion, though it may be valued as the 2 cents it’s actually worth – is that this is a bad practice, providing a bad user experience, and alienates some of us who take it a little too seriously (because I don’t want this to keep happening).
- Mick Gibson
  
  Hey Mark, hey Thomas
  
  Thanks for your feedback and comments about this post. I appreciate both of your points-of-view. I guess though, like everything in life it’s all about balance, and to be fair, we do keep the vast majority of our online content weighted towards adding immediate value and rewarding our readers with the insights they’re looking for. Every know and then we do however need to promote our ‘published’ content and that is what this post is about.
shiva

I’m on your side Mark.
- Mark Drake
  
  Thanks Shiva, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to not trick readers. I think SitePoint has a really good community (or had). I know I used to check this site every day because I knew it would be on topic – it was something I either wanted to read, or didn’t know I wanted to read until I did.
  
  It’s a rare thing to have a web site, newspaper, magazine that you know is going to be of some use every time you go to it.