How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.

Well, maybe not fun, but less annoying for sure!

You’ve probably encountered a 404 or “Page Not Found” error in your web browsing experience. It is an HTTP standard response code indicating that “the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future.” This kind of error is commonly displayed after you click a broken link or follow a link to a page that has moved or no longer exists on a website. (If you want more technical details, check out Wikipedia.)

Of course no one wants their website to have errors, but sometimes they occur. There is definitely value in taking a little time to dress up your “Error” or “404″ page to decrease the frustration when a user encounters it. So what can you do to make the navigation process on your website less of a headache to users?

The Holiday Season is upon us! You may have noticed that Captico.com is experiencing some wintry weather – our developers are making it snow! Now the design team is getting in the festive spirit with an animated gif tutorial designed to make all of your images sparkle and shine!

What is color? According to the dictionary, color is defined as: The characteristics of light by which the individual is made aware of objects or light sources through the receptors of the eye, described in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, and purity. Thus a color can be represented from white to black with all the colors in the rainbow in-between. Now that we defined the word color what does each color represent? Let’s separate the colors into color families: warm colors, cool colors, and neutral colors.

I recently was using Omnigraffle and realized that I wanted to use my own custom icons for a client that was specifically related to fishing. I had already created the custom icons for the client in Illustrator. So I had to figure out how to create my own stencil in OmniGraffle so I would have access to my icons. It was surprisingly easy. If you find yourself in a similar situation here is how to do it and hopefully this is of some help to you!

I don’t know about you but it is an everyday battle with designers, developers and clients on what the proper terminology for a box that holds content on the website is called. As a designer I know it as a module, for developers it is known as a widget and for clients it is known as the whatchamacallit/box/thing.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names?

Sprites originated from video game design from the early days of computers. The computer would grab one image at a time from a large group of images. Contrary to popular belief they are all not all sliced separate images. It is easier to create one large image; you can combine an unlimited number of images into one. In CSS it is the same principle when applying a navigation or buttons in regular and highlighted states.

The social networking behemoth Facebook offers a number of Social plugins to better connect your website with users and allow your content to spread organically. Below you will find links and information on how to take advantage of these features.

It’s time to flex your visual design skills! Create your own version of our illustrator Liz Wheatley’s cartoon bird, and post your photo to the Flickr photo group “Flip This Bird”!

How to create a repeating graphic of a textured background