The world that surrounds the topic of Web Design is home to many debates and opinions on best practices or generally how things should and shouldn’t be done. While many of these opinions are accepted and taken on board by everyone, there are some that end up being split into two opposing camps. One camp will provide an expert opinion for one side of the argument, while the other contradicts with an equally valid argument. Let’s take a look at the five most popular debates; the ones that often end up developing into digital riots with opinions flying like arrows across the vast no-man’s land known as the comments section.

Should links open in a new window?

Camp one says:

Links to external sites should always open in new windows. There’s nothing more annoying than browsing a website, clicking a link and being whisked off to a totally new site, losing the page you wanted to revisit. Internal links should maintain the browser session in the current page, but anything that leaves the site should open in a new tab or window.

Camp two says:

As web designers we shouldn’t take the control away from the user. Whether a link needs opening in a new window is their choice. There’s nothing more annoying than a website taking control of my browser and opening a new tab or window for a link without my permission; if I wanted to open it in a new window, I’d do so! The problem only gets worse with inexperienced computer users, new windows break their trusty ‘back button’.

The mediator says:

In general, opening a new window should be avoided, but is recommended for some situations such as opening a help link in a shopping cart or opening a non-html document such as a PDF. To further aid the usability of your site, use a small icon to identify links that do open in a new window, or provide an options panel that’s configured with Javascript.

Further reading:

• Should Links Open In New Windows?
• Beware of Opening Links in a New Window”
• Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents

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Our sponsors Pixmac.com, are offering the chance to five of our readers to win a $199 subscription each to there marvelous microstock photo site service.

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For a chance to win this great prize all you have to do is state your Pixmac Nickname in the comments section below and describe how you are or are planning to use the images.

If you haven’t signed up to Pixmac as yet, and you want to enter this competition you will firstly need to signup, its free and you can do it here: Pixmac Registration.

And then come back here and submit your comment.
So, these are the simple steps to follow:

The winner will be chosen at random
The competition will run for the next 30 days and the eventual winners will be notified by email.

Good luck to everyone!

About Pixmac

Pixmac.com is the leader in microstock photo site services, with a monumentally huge 10 million+ stock photos and resources at there disposal, it is by far the leader in there field.

You can find almost any image you could dream of at Pixmac, from Valentine’s Day and spring photos to Easter stock photos. They also have classic royalty free pictures of business, people, animals or nature which can suit any of your advertising or professional presentation needs, as well as huge celebrity collections, Dreamstime images, Fotolia images, Corbis images and Image Source collections.

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Whether you are reading a printed magazine or a web article it is very rarely the content that draws you in at first, the hook is always the title or the headline. A well written and thought out title or headline are fundamental, it has to not only describe with very few words the articles content but also has to be formatted in a way that it draws the attention of your readers and is a seemingly must read – a difficult combination to achieve.

There are many ways of of making your headlines that little bit more distinctive, none are as important as choosing the correct font. Most fonts can be big and bold, but finding one with a little bit of character that helps emphasize and describe the title and the content can be difficult.

With that in mind, Peter Olexa from Fonts2u has put together this article of his top 20 beautiful, professional and distinctive free fonts you shouldn’t be missing from your font library.

01 Diavolo

02 Fertigo

03 Museo

04 Comfortaa

05 Raspoutine Demi Bold

06 Gauntlet Classic

07 DuePuntoZero

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We all love Javascript. With jQuery, it is now so easy to write really nice JavaScript effects. jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development

Creating right click with the help of jquery is real easy and can be implemented very quickly. While trying for my one of the project , I made one and sharing it today.

A design showcase is a website dedicated to seeking out the latest and greatest designs from the web, whether it’s a website, flash presentation or a piece of print work.

A showcase of the very best web designs from the last week

If you are a software manufacturer and you need a great design to represent your company and your products then you need to design an eye catching web layout.

In the previous posts this and this, I wrote about a Codeigniter Event Calendar. The problem with them was you can’t use it with javascript disabled. This time I added a link to a date. When you click the date where there are events, it will take you to a page showing all the event for that day. So you can use it with javascript disabled. Check it out.

A showcase of most outstanding and spectacular castle artworks from around the web.

If you use the Windows 7 operating system, you will find here useful wallpaper for your PC. Overall, I've compiled the best 30 Windows 7 wallpapers from deviantART community. I hope in this post you will find most perfect for your PC.

These are 100 beautiful and colorful vectors for design and inspiration. Free EPS Files for Floral Ornament backgrounds. I hope you find them useful and cool.

Amazing nature and wildlife photograhy. Roeselien Raimond is a passionate photographer – totally in love with animals & nature- who’d like to spend almost every minute of the day on photography.

Google has for many years doodled on their homepage. These doodles are decorative changes that Google makes to their cooperate logo to celebrate certain holidays and other world events. In keeping with the decade long tradition, Google has doodled Olympic events on their website to commemorate this special global event.

Beautiful portrait photography by Mehmet Turgut, creative fashion photographer, based in Turkey

If you're a movie fan I am sure you'll enjoy this collection of 20 beautiful movie/brand fonts. All these are free and I think they should be part of any designer's font library.

Amazing photos of beautiful women by creative fashion photographer Evan Romine.

As you know, new icon sets are published every day on various web design blogs. I have monitored many of these blogs a long time and I thought, therefore, show some of the best-looking icon sets I’ve seen recently. I hope you will like them.

Domestic Landscapes is an ongoing archive that includes hundreds of images, the product of more than ten years’ work by Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen.

Orlando wedding and engagement photographer. Leigh Taylor Photography is an award winning, natural light, on location photographer