You know you’ve been there. You have to get a project started. You’re got all the details on the structure and functionality you need. But you sit down and every bit of creative juice that was ever in you has evaporated.

You go online and start surfing around. You open up magazines and books. And still, nothing.

I find myself in this situation more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve found one trick that has never let me down. So what do I do?

I go outside!

When you work and socialize and practically live online, it’s easy to dismiss the thought that anything offline could be a worthwhile source of inspiration. But in my experience, nothing could be farther from the truth.

There are more color combination and different shapes and patterns in nature than any designer could ever dream up.  It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or cloudy, hot or cold, rainy or sunny or if you’re in the city or the country, just relax and look up and around you.

Even if you don’t think you’ll be inspired by the great outdoors, if you’re really stumped, a break and a brisk walk will probably do you some good anyway

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Then, I’d recommend checking out About Web Design or to be more clear About.com: Web Design/HTML.

This isn’t an official review or anything. But as I’ve searched through that site countless times and always enjoy Jennifer Kyrnin’s blog posts (enough to put them on my Blogroll for awhile now) Jennifer is About.com’s Web Design / HTML Guide. I thought maybe it was time to give back a bit and let you all know one of my first stops for all things HTML.

The main reason I love the site is that not only is it clear that Jennifer is an expert, but she does a wonderful job of putting together resources from across the web all in one central look-up site. If she doesn’t have a step-by-step tutorial or complete definition/explanation of something, I guarantee she tells you at least a few places to find it!

She covers a ridiculously large array of topics from all coding, design, web promotion, web design as a business and the list goes on and on! I’m trying to rack my brain for a way to really get across the vast amount of resources there, and I think Jennifer describes her site best:

“The Web Design/HTML site is a forum for those who create Web pages. You can expect to see information about Web design, new XML and HTML standards, HTML tag libraries, Web conferences, and Web development news.”

Jennifer also does a great job of keeping the place interactive and interesting…don’t tell anyone, but pure HTML and CSS tutorials aren’t always the most exciting thing to me! She throws in a lot of quizzes and polls to mix things up a bit.

I also really appreciate her willingness to respond and help people out. She was one of the first people to ever comment on this blog way back when, and she continues to add a lot.

Alright, now this is starting to sound like I’m a bit obsessed with About and Jennifer…so I’m going to leave you with a few of my About Web Design favorites:

Web Development Horror Stories

Who Can Argue With Free Stuff - her take on over 65 free editors

If You Build It…Will They Come? Tips to Promote Your Website

If you haven’t already, check out the site and keep your eyes peeled because she’s putting out a web design book soon too!

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se·man·tics The meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form: We’re basically agreed; let’s not quibble over semantics.

I’m always quick to pull out the old “semantics” argument with friends and family. But when it comes to website design and online marketing semantics are huge! You know what your business is and the words you use to describe it. But you’re already visiting your site, you need to find out the words that people searching the internet use to find businesses in your industry.

This issue came to the forefront of my mind this afternoon when I stumbled upon a site called Geoff’s Google Duel. This site is basically just an application that allows you to compare the number of results for two different keywords or keyword phrases. Just out of curiosity I entered “web design” vs. “website design.” Here are the results:

Now what stands out to me immediately looking at those numbers is that I should definitely be actively targeting “website design” as the competition is far less than “web design.” And it might be a more realistic shorter term search engine goal. If you have a young or newly redesigned site, reaching the top 100 for “web design” could really be an impossible dream, but with a lot of hard work and active marketing, it could be a possibility for “website design” or at least not bring quite as loud of snorts and smirks from the pros as reaching the top of “web design!”

Keep in mind though…that there are other things to take into account. There is probably a reason those numbers are so lopsided. The number of searches for “web design” is probably higher, right?

A quick search on Wordtracker shows that the daily prediction for number of searches is as follows:

• “website design” - 2,030 searches per day
• “web design” - 6,291 searches per day

From a purely free, organic search engine optimization point of view, I for one, would not snub my nose at over 2,000 searches a day. So you might notice me substituting “website design” for “web design” here and there.

After all, it’s just semantics!

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Obviously, if you’re in the market for a small business website, I’d love for you to contact me. But for anybody who is designing your own sites, I was going through several of my different social bookmarking accounts and thought I’d go ahead and put together some of the resources that I’ve run across.

Some I’ve used, others I haven’t…I’m not recommending you use any of them or advising you not to!

Color Tools

• Color Schemer
• Colr.org
• Daily Color Scheme
• Instant Color Schemes
• Well Styled Color Scheme Generator 2

Text HTML Editors

• 1st Page 2000
• Ace HTML
• Alleycode
• Bluefish
• CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor - drag n drop interface with built-in FTP
• Cream
• Crimson Editor
• Cute User-Friendly Text Editor
• Free TextBox
• HTML Kit
• Notepad++
• PS Pad
• SeaMonkey
• TextWrangler
• Top Dawg HTML Editor

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) HTML Editors

• Amaya
• Angel Writer
• PageBreeze - HTML editor with both visual(WYSIWYG) and HTML tag/source modes
• Selida 2.1
• Trellian WebPage
• Web Weaver EZ
• WebDwarf

CSS Layouts

• 12 CSS Layouts from Design Shack
• 3 Col Layout from Saila
• 3 CSS Layouts from Tanfa.co.uk
• Basic CSS Layouts from CSSFill.com
• CSS Layout Techniques and Layouts from glish.com
• CSS Layouts from Stu Nicholls - CSS Play
• Large Searchable repository of CSS based Layouts at Template:css
• Layout Gala
• Layout-o-matic - CSS Layout Generator at Inknoise
• Layouts straight from W3C
• Opensource CSS Layouts at CSS Tinderbox
• Ruthsarian Layouts
• The Layout Reservoir

Menus and Navigation

• 11 Free Sliding Doors CSS Menus by Exploding-Boy.com
• 14 Free Vertical CSS Menu Designs by Exploding-Boy.com
• 30 +free CSS Menus and other CSS goodies from Dynamic Drive
• 9 Free Website Menus and a bunch of other Web Design Tools from SearchBliss.com
• CoffeeCup Free DHTML Menu Builder
• CSS Menu Generator from Webmaster-Toolkit.com
• E-Lusion.com Free Menu Designs
• FlashButtons.com Free Flash Menu Builder
• Free Button Generator
• Free Web Templates for Creating Menus with Lists and XHTML+CSS from Webdesign.about.com
• GRSites.com Menu Generator
• Pulldown Menu Generator
• Scrollovers - interesting link effect

Backgrounds - Textures

• 100’s of Free Background Textures from Julianne’s Background Textures
• 100’s of Free Web Background Images, Tiles and Textures from All Free Backgrounds
• 195 Seamless Textures from Infinite Fish
• 2500+ Free Background Graphics from ABCWebWorx
• 500+ Seamless Background Textures from Absolute Cross
• 700+ Free Texture Images from Texture Warehouse
• 7292 Free Original Background Textures from WebGround
• 800+ Backgrounds from Absolute Designs
• Great Collection of Free Backgrounds from Citrus Moon Patterns
• GRSites.com Absolute Background Textures Archive
• Huge Collection of Free Backgrounds
• Large Collection of Free Seamless Tiles from About Graphics Software
• Media Link’s Free Backgrounds and Textures
• Over 1000 Free Backgrounds from FreeBackgrounds.com
• Over 2000 Free Backgrounds from AAA Free Backgrounds and Textures
• Over 600 Background Tiles from Backgrounds By Carel
• Thousands of Free Backgrounds from Backgrounds Giant

Obviously, this is by no means a complete list of the great free resources that are out there. If you have other free resources that you think belong on the list, feel free to let me know in comments and I will add them in.

Please note that I do have comments that include links set to go into moderation…but I assure you, I’ll get to them ASAP and approve the comments and add your suggestions to the list!

I didn’t use anything other than my bookmarks to compile this list today…but I know there are probably tons of these type of resource lists around…so let me know if you have one of those too, and I’d be happy to add those to this list as well!

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