A few hastily written tips of my own:<p>- Respect the fold. Users do scroll more but they spend far more time above the fold than below.(<a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html</a>)<p>- Use a grid, then break it when you want to get people's attention.<p>- Don't be afraid of repetition, multiple CTAs on a page make it easier for users to take the next step.<p>- Typography is more than fonts, use scale and weight for contrast and heirachy (<a href="http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/hierarchy.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/hierarchy.htm</a>)<p>- Make the first click as easy as possible. The user should be able to see what's important on the page at a glance, and the required action should not be obstructed by unnecessary choices.<p>- Use Fireworks. It's got great workflow, asset management, vector tools and prototyping features. It plays nicely with Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash but is cheaper than any of them. (<a href="http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/08/7-reasons-why-i-choose-fireworks-over-photoshop/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/08/7-reasons-why-i-choo...</a>)
I like to get inspiration from magazines, books, art, music, and photography. Basically trying to get any creative inspiration away from the computer.<p>Jessica Hische sums it quite appropriately in her latest blog post: <a href="http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=756" rel="nofollow">http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=75...</a>
Thanks for tip 4 - I had completely underestimated the power of Compass. I started using it recently mainly because I wanted to use Blueprint and SASS. I missed all of the cool mixins that Compass adds.<p>If anyone from the Compass project is reading - improve your documentation!
What I'd really like to see is tips to make a webpage look "professional". I suspect you can take a great looking website, screw the colors up, mess around with the fonts, and even not design with a grid, and it will still look "professional". Am I not right about this?