Top Website Design Forums

Posted by on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 9:32 am.

Personally, during my early web design years and still today, I find that one of the most effective ways of getting constructive feedback on my latest website design prototypes was to ask for the honest opinions of other web designers.

Before doing this, I use to gather my friends and family, who knew nothing about web design, to gather around my dusty computer and say ‘What do you think?’. Of course, the problem was that even if my website design looked like a 5 year olds child drawing, their natural bias would always give it the thumbs up. I’m sure a lot of other designers can relate to this based on their early experiences.

Taking an active part in website design forums allow you to get many different perspectives on your latest work including technical, usability and visual ideas. Although opinions may sometimes be brutal, it’s the honesty of other designers that will motivate you to continually improve upon your skillset.

I’ve asked our web design team to give their recommendations on some of their favourite web design forums and overall, these were top of the pack:

DesignersTalk

http://www.designerstalk.com/forums/

DesignersTalk contains Web Development advice suitable for all levels of designers

Fellow blog writer, James Kemp, uses DesignersTalk on a regular basis as it simply is a great source for web development, graphic design and especially beginners SEO tips. With 600,000 members in total, it’s grew in recent years to become one the most popular designers forums online.

PhotoshopForums

http://www.photoshopforums.com/

Community of budding Photoshop Users including many Web Designers

Although PhotoshopForums is primarily focused on all areas of Adobe Photoshop, there is a number of fantastic resources and a really vibrant community of web designers who also take part in this forum looking for advice on all areas of XHTML, CSS and much more.

SitePoint Forums

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/

Large community of Web Designers, PHP Developers and Javascript Coders

SitePoint’s discussion forums are home to one of the largest web development communities online with a number of sections that contain not only web design advice, but also tips on PHP, MySQL, Javascript and Web Hosting.