Social networks are getting more and more popular. People use them to connect with friends and colleagues, stay up-to-date on things that interest them, you can even use them to assist in your job search. But there are so many different ones out there. I have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account focused primarily on this site. But are there other social media sites that you use?

How did you become a web designer? Fill out this form (be sure to include a photo) to be featured on the home page of About.com Web Design/HTML: Share Your Experience.

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Back in April, Google announced that they were adding a new signal to their ranking algorithm – speed. I have been told recently that web page sizes are no longer as important because many people have high speed internet connections. Google has found in their tests that the slower a site loads, the less time people stay on that site. So, even if all your customers have DSL or better connections, they still will benefit from a fast site. And you will benefit from happier customers. One way to speed up your site is by having the web server compress the files before delivering them. This can reduce load times significantly. How to Speed Up Your Web Pages

• How to Compress Websites with Gzip Compression
• Speeding Up Your Web Page
• White Space in HTML Can Slow Your Pages
• Remove Comments from HTML to Speed Download Time

The trailing slash on URLs is often left off, but that is a mistake as it can affect how quickly your pages load from the web server. That slash may not seem important, but it serves a purpose. More Help Naming Your Pages and Creating URLs

• Why do URLs often end with a slash?
• What Should I Name my HTML File?
• What is the index.html page?
• What's My URL? - Learn to Find your URL

In previous years, when I've asked this in the past I've gotten a lot of responses from people who write HTML from scratch insisting that knowing HTML and CSS is critical to doing the job. But as spreng says in a comment last week, word processors used to require that you know codes to get them to print and now they are all WYSIWYG. I've heard from beginners, hiring managers, and others, what do you think?

If you're looking for inspiration for your next design project, I would suggest looking at the images displayed on deviantART. This site hosts all types of art from photography to anime, but the part that I find most inspiring is the web interface design section. I love browsing through these when I'm bored or looking for my next idea for a project. Many of the designs are quite beautiful.

• Inspiration: deviantART Web Interface Designs
• Where Do You Go For Inspiration or a Fresh Perspective?
• Solving Designer's Block - 6 Ways to Get Unblocked
• Poll: What is your first source for design ideas?
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

XML can be a very easy language to learn, but if you don’t follow some specific rules, it won’t work for you. Make sure you know these five common XML errors when you’re writing XML (or XHTML) and you’ll find your documents will be more correct. More XML Articles You May Have Missed

• Five Common XML Errors
• What is the Difference Between XLink and XPointer?
• What is DocBook?
• Write Simple XLink in XML

If you have been unsure about whether to move to HTML 5 video or not, one more hurdle has been removed. MPEG LA has announced that the license for H.264 video will be free forever for anyone who provides their videos free to the end user.

Since this was the main objection groups like Mozilla had against using this codec, chances are that Firefox will soon be updated to use it. Then you'll only need to save your videos in two formats: H.264 and Flash (for IE). And when IE 9 comes out, you will only need the one format.

Choosing a layout method is often very personal. One person might prefer absolute positioning while another only uses floats with relative sized blocks. An elastic layout is often considered the most flexible, because it sets a specific size for major text blocks while leaving the rest of the layout to stretch to fit the available space. But fixed width layouts give the designer more control over how the page will look. And others prefer a completely liquid layout because the page stays consistent no matter how big or small the browser is. And of course, some people still prefer tables for layout despite the many reasons to use CSS instead. What layout style is your preference?

I received a submission today from a web designer who is, in his words "sick of code". He would like the web programmers and web developers out there to know a little secret "the future of web design is design" and that coders should stick to writing code that he can slide into his designs "without knowing all about tags or code". My interpretation from this rant is that Polomo does not want to have to learn HTML or CSS. He's a designer, and knowing those things just hinders his creative process.

What do you think? Does learning the back end of web design (HTML and CSS) hinder a designer's creative process? Or does it help? Do you find developers as annoying as Polomo does? And what about the developers out there? Do you agree? Should you be focused only on the code and making sure it slides into a designer's vision with no hiccups? Or do you find web designers just as annoying?

Thanks, Polomo, for taking the time to post your feelings. It should make for interesting debate.

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Many people were taught to use all capital letters to emphasize text or make it stand out more. But with all the different typographic options we have for decorating headlines all caps just becomes difficult to read. Find out why you should never use all caps for headlines on your web pages. Decorate Your Headlines in Other Ways

• All Caps Make Bad Headlines
• Learn How to Make Fancy Headlines with CSS
• Making Things Stand Out - Emphasis in Web Design
• Emphasis - Basic Principles of Design

Creating a site favicon doesn't require that you invest in an icon editor. This site will take any picture you upload and convert it into a favicon for you to upload to your website. There is even a readme file that tells you how to get your favicon to display in the browser. If you've wanted a custom favicon, but didn't want to create one yourself, this is a great tool. You can also use it to convert your site logo into a favicon.

• Create a Favicon: Favicon from Pics
• Adding a Favicon or Favorites Icon
• Favorite Favicons - What's Your Favorite?
• Are favicons a security risk?
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

We’re all human, and make mistakes in our spelling and grammar at times. But there are some errors that jump out at your readers often with disastrous results. You wouldn’t think a missing apostrophe would be bad, but if you regularly write its instead of it’s for "it is" some people will stop reading your site and tell others to stop reading it too. Also, some typos can result in broken links and even broken pages. By checking for these common spelling errors and grammar errors, you raise your site’s credibility and keep your readers happy. Good Web Writing

• Spelling and Grammar Errors that Can Ruin Your Site
• What spelling and grammar errors are most annoying to you?
• 10 Tips for Web Writing
• Formatting Rules to Live By
• Web Writing Rules to Live By

The meta description tag is an important tag for SEO because nearly every search engine uses this as the description of the page in their search results. But many people don't have time to create a description for every page that they put up. Do you change your meta descriptions or do you have a default one that you use for most or all pages on a site?

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I read a lot, and yet the text that often grabs me when I first glance at a page is not the headline, but the pull quote. This is a small blurb pulled out of the body copy and made to stand out in some way. I have gone through magazine articles reading only the pull quotes. But many web designers don't use them. And they are a great way to add visual interest to a page that is otherwise dry and boring text. Plus, like headlines, pull quotes stand out and bring a reader through an article. By creating effective and dynamic pull quotes you can help your readers along and keep them interested in your site. This article explores how to style pull quotes in more exciting ways. And none of the methods use cutting edge CSS! So why not consider using a pull quote in your next web article? Learn More About Using Pull Quotes

• Advanced Pull Quotes
• Submit a Site that Uses Great Pull Quotes
• What is a Pull Quote
• How To Use Pull-quotes
• Create a Pull Quote with HTML and CSS

It’s easier to view your typography and make changes to it as you watch, and the CSS Type Set helps you do that. You can set one of 10 font families, your font size (in pixels or ems), the font color, alignments, and other font styles. Then, what’s useful is you can change the letter spacing, word spacgin, and line height with sliders. You slide them back and forth to see how your font looks. I wish there were more font families to choose from, but the 10 they have are fairly common on the web, so at least you would know that most people could see the font you chose. This is a useful tool for quickly getting a sense of how your word-, letter-, and line-spacing affects your text.

• Web Typography: CSS Type Set
• Web Typography
• Good Typography on the Web is About the Little Details
• Using Ems to Change Font Sizes
• Web Typography Pet Peeves - Annoyances in Web Typography
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

Jacci, the Desktop Publishing Guide on About.com posted an interesting blog entry yesterday: What's a Good Alternative to Helvetica? No Not Arial. Helvetica is so ubiquitous, and it's virtual twin, Arial, isn't far behind. I admit, a lot of my default font stacks are "geneva, arial, helvetica". I tell myself as I throw that in there that I'm going to look at the typography as soon as the layout and other major design decisions are made. And yet, there that font stack is in my designs years later! Are you guilty of lazy typography in your web pages? What's your favorite font stack?

Unity in design is the proximity of elements to one another. The closer two elements are, the more related they are, and the farther apart they are, the less related they are. But even if you understand that in writing, it's much easier to see it through examples. This 5-part article will show you how to see unity in simple lists or blocks of text, unity with headlines, and a website banner before and after the principle of unity was applied to it. Basic Principles and Elements of Design

• How Unity Works in Design
• Learn More About Unity
• The Principles of Design
• The Elements of Design