If you're a web designer, a design agency, or somebody who works with websites, you know that you must keep yourself always up to date with the latest goings-on in the industry.

To that extent, what better way than following established web design blogs, which produce a constant stream of content. Yes, you may "use" a lot of time if you had to read all of that content - but it would be much more expensive for you if you had to fall behind.

Here's a list of the stuff you should follow.

(We've updated this list in , we removed blogs which are no longer updating or relevant and added new ones which have become popular since we first wrote this article, so that you can be sure that these are the latest and greatest!)

Now at CollectiveRay, we like makings things simple for everybody.

So rather than you having to get frustrated clicking through each and every blog, subscribe to their mailing list, RSS, Like their Facebook page, or follow their Twitter account or whatever way you prefer to keep yourself updated, we've made life things simple for you.

We've followed all of the RSS feeds of the below web design blogs, exported the OPML file and made it ready for you to import into your Feedly account or your favourite feed reader. Life couldn't be simpler we think ;-)

Back in the day when we had AstoundingWeb.org, founded by Glenn Davis, one of the very first web designers, you could easily check out on that site what was going on. Unfortunately, that site is now dead so you're going to have to look elsewhere to find your fix.

Download the file

Then import into your feed reader

Download and save the OPML file with our list. Now, open feedly.com and click on Organize at the bottom of the left-hand navigation menu. Click on “Import OPML” at the top of the page, then find the .opml file you downloaded from here. When you’re ready, click Import.

Now - rather than following all of them, may we recommend that you chop off a few which don't interest you - otherwise you're going to spend of time reading their awesome content :-)

If you like this, please do share it to your favorite community! Now on to the actual list!

This is the most popular and influential website if you are in or around this industry. If you're not reading a List Apart - don't call yourself a web designer.

One of the recent milestones in web design blogs history was the coining of the term "Responsive Web Design" which first appeared in an article by Ethan Marcotte on A List Apart.

Another staple in the industry - any time you run a google search that has anything to web design blogs or development you're most likely to come across Smashing Magazine.

Amongst others, their reading list is a list of essential things to read to keep yourself abreast with the latest developments.

If it's technical and related to web design or development, you'll be sure to find it on SitePoint.

An excellent resource for learning web-related technologies. We've also had the opportunity to feature David Attard, our Founder, on several blogs on SitePoint.

Web Designer Depot features a constant stream of great web design blogs. Definitely one of the biggest blogs currently, an excellent resource to keep handy.

Once again, we did have the opportunity to feature as a guest author on the blog, which should say something about both of us.

You can feel the awesomeness of a site when it doesn't care about a tagline.

If you insist on looking for a tag line, you'll find that CSS Tricks, "*May or may not contain any actual "CSS" or "Tricks". It should be a staple for any web designer. Plenty of awesome technical articles.

We've also written a few technical posts on this site too, one was about HTTP2, another about CDNs and a few more. As a guest author here too, we do think very highly of this blog too ;-)

Despite using one of the most clichéd taglines on the internet, Web Design Ledger is truly a website all web designers should be following.

Another essential on your reading list (and yes, we have contributed here too!)

CollectiveRay, previously DART Creations (the site you're hopefully on right now) is a site dedicated to creating actionable tutorials, tips, and tricks for WordPress, Joomla users, both web designers, and webmasters.

We make sure the stuff we do is easy to implement.

Keep an eye out for the plenty of tutorials, and actionable web design blogs we post, reviews of themes, plugins, hosting, and plenty of other stuff useful for anybody who works with websites.

We strive to be not just a web design blog, but a site aimed at creating actionable tips for people who work with websites.

The team behind the huge Envato marketplace also maintains Tuts+ - entrenched in the mission of Envato is helping people learn and earn online.

Tuts+ is an essential resource for tutorials and you definitely need this on your essential reading list. It also forms part of the bigger Tuts+ which encompasses plenty of other industries related to Envato.

With TNW being one of the most popular sites of the entire internet, you can only expect great stuff from their Design and Development section.

From web design trends, UI/UX best practices, and other design and development news, you'll find the hottest news at TNW Design and Development.

Now that we've seen the major players in the industry, let's look at some blogs and inspiration for designers and creatives.

CoDrops have an extremely popular weekly (or so) collective, which is essentially a roundup of great resources and inspirational items for web designers and other creatives.

Very very popular and very very useful, this blog is the place to get your fix from.

HongKiat as another huge resource when it comes to design, technology, and inspiration.

Designers, developers, techies, bloggers - all of them will find plenty of essential stuff on HongKiat.

Another essential graphics and design blog. The guys at DesignrFix want to evolve the art of design through sharing with the community - a thoughtful exchange of technique and inspiration.

Sidenote: I am in love with the name of this site. Something about it gets to me.

An online magazine for designers and developers, OXP shares tips, tutorials, tools, resources, and other articles on design and development.

CreativeBloq is an immensely popular blog that features plenty of articles every day.

It is great because when you get a creative block, you can visit Creative Block, to unblock it :-)

There's so much going on for creatives, designers, web designers, and anybody who's looking for any kind of design inspiration.

We love it, we follow it religiously and so should you.

TemplateMonster is mostly a templates company - however, they've got a great blog going on. It's not just about their own stuff too - they make sure they provide plenty of great stuff.

Sister-site to Web Designer Depot, the site is only a few months old but has experienced phenomenal growth. Very similar to Reddit in nature, you can just vote on links.

The good stuff bubbles to the top, so anything on the front page is the current essential news for web designers. If you are searching for a blog that simply bumps up the latest and greatest news, your search can stop right here.

FromUpNorth is an excellent site to get inspiration from.

If your mind is drawing a blank and you'd like to see some fresh design ideas, FromUpNorth will probably and very quickly satisfy that need. The site has now shifted and has become primarily a Pinterest set of boards, still excellent for design inspiration.

Next, on our essential reading list, we've got Noupe. Usually, you'll find one article a day on Noupe, but boy it's a very good one you can rest assured.

DesignShack, but its very name is focused on designers rather than web designers, but we're happy to speak about design too ... web designers are designers too!

Once again a wealth of resources is shared with the design community.

David Walsh is officially a Javascript consultant - but of course, his writing covers much much more than just Javascript.

Plenty of great posts and great web design blogs and Javascript development tricks.

Design is at the heart of Vandelay Design - of course, it's built into the name :)

Their tag line continues: "Through pixel perfect, beautifully crafted code, we write & create products that help educate and inspire."

Lots and lots of excellent resources, freebies, articles, deals, WordPress stuff, and lots more.

Swiss Miss is run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a designer par excellence.

She's founded several design studios and is an inspiration for many-a-designer.

Why Swiss Miss? Well take a wild guess - she grew up in Switzerland before moving to NYC. You can understand where she gets her minimalistic and perfect designs from...

Awwwards is one for your bookmarks, or wherever you use to save important resources. As a web designer needing inspiration, there's no better place to visit. This site creates competitions and rewards some of the best web design work on the internet.

Not exactly a normal site, it's mostly a gallery of awesome website designs. Of course, you're looking to get inspired, have a browse here.

You'll quickly find your mind exploding with fresh webdesign ideas.

Focused on providing ideas and inspirations for web creatives.

Besides excellent tutorials, the blog at Line25 provides great roundups of the good trendy stuff of the moment.

Design you trust - it's all in the name.

When you see a good design, you immediately and unconsciously can trust whoever is behind that design. This is a crucial element which a lot of people tend to forget about design, and why it should be given so much attention.

This site is a gallery of all kinds of designs which are so great - you can immediately trust them.

DesignModo is one of the blogs I come across very very often due to a very intelligent tactic they have. They run two of the most popular web design groups around. One on LinkedIn and one on Google+, so I frequently see their posts.

Not that it's a bad thing mind you.

They've got excellent posts about webdesigning, WordPress, BootStrap and so much more for web designers and developers.

If there is one Design focused site which you must follow, it's Fast.Co Design.

Just like A List Apart, it's essential staple reading for creatives and you'll plenty of influential, cutting-edge pieces.

Besides of course lots of daily stuff for designers - including of course web design blogs.

DesignTaxi is another of my favourite sources for design news, inspiration, creative thinking, source for great designer tools and in general an excellent source to keep up with the latest and greatest.

We only learned about DesignTaxi fairly recently, it has actually been quite a while now, because this article has been updated several times over the years - but we're really glad we did!

WP Engine is one of the largest vendors when it comes to WordPress hosting.

But being a top vendor, they also have excellent thought leadership articles when it comes to web design blogs and working with websites. They also sponsor several conferences in the industry and creates lots of awesome content for people like us.

Definitely keep them on your radar.

Not really a blog per se, it's a subreddit.

However, the upvoting Reddit mechanics ensure that anything which rises to the top is essential reading for web designers. It's very popular, one of the larger subreddits - so don't go pasting any crap.

You'll get downvoted very very quickly.

This great podcast by Joe Casabona, How I Built It, is a series of interviews with product owners and developers to see how they developed and built their specific products, from idea to execution.

Each week a guest talks about their process for launching and evolving the business over time, so that others can learn from their experiences, evolving on the good stuff and avoiding the mistakes others have done before them.

Who of us hasn't had a client from hell?

Those nightmare clients which you just wish that the earth opens up and they get swallowed back to the hell they came from. Rather than being a blog, this is a collection of horror stories of horrible designers.

Whilst serving as a laugh, they're lots of lessons to be learned. And when you just want to kick that client to kingdom come, instead head off to Clients From Hell and read a couple of stories.

It won't make the client vanish, but you just know that you're not alone - and hopefully, you'll actually find they are worse situations than yours ;-)

Another top vendor for WordPress hosting, Kinsta is a service we actually have featured and reviewed fairly recently. They have a service and a technology stack that has been optimized hard for speed and use the Google Cloud infrastructure to power their services, make their sites lightning fast.

But that's what this article is about. This is about web design blogs.

And these guys know their stuff when it comes to working with websites. Rather than just web design per se, Kinsta writes excellent long-form articles about working with websites which makes them an excellent solution provider for tough problems or the easiest way to fix things when developing or maintaining sites.

There's no shortage of places to get design inspiration.

Abduzeedo is another of those, where you'll find design inspiration roundups which are a must-see for the designer who wants to stay on top of trends and know what's the latest and greatest stuff around.

Oh, I do love the minimalistic design of this site so very much.

If you're a coder, you know that API's are one of the things you work with the most.

After quite a lot if the work you have to do is integrations with other systems. Programmable Web keeps you abreast with all the API news and trends.

They also feature great opinion pieces so a good one to keep an eye on.

Chris Spooner is a graphics designer who wants to help fuel your creative passion.

The articles on Spoon graphics fall under one of these categories, tutorials to help create awesome designs, freebies to be used in artworks and articles to share theory and inspiration from various creatives.

Amit Agarwal is a professional blogger from India, aka the founder of the Indian Blogger Revolution.

On Digital Inspiration you'll find how-to guides around getting the maximum advantage out of software tools, web technologies, and mobile apps.

Not strictly a design blog, but a good resource to keep handy.

Just like writers get writer's block, you might at times feel uninspired.

At those times, the best thing we like to do is browse through a number of great, inspiring web designs. These usually get our creative juices flowing. The Best Designs is an inspiration site that can push your creative process in various awesome directions.

Keep it on your inspirations list.

InstandShift is another popular community for web designers and developers. There's a lot of excellent posts about WordPress, Web Design, CSS, Tools, Tutorials, Fonts, Photography and so much more.

As with many of the large sites, you'll also find plenty of web design freebies.

Mostly focused on web design and development, CSS Author shares a wide variety of posts to help web designers and developers learn new skills.

You'll also find plenty of free graphic resources, something which is an excellent bonus.

Time for another vendor site, this time it's all about security. When it comes to designing websites, web designers have a responsibility to give their clients a website that is secure from the get-go.

This should be part of the actual service they provide to their clients, even if the client does not ask for it.

That's why we're pushing Sucuri, they are one of the thought-leaders when it comes to website security and you should be aware of what's going on in this sector.

SpeckyBoy, founded by Paul Andrew, started as the website for a freelance web designer.

As the popularity grew it evolved into a full-blown design magazine it is today. Paul is of course still an essential part of the blog as the Chief Editor.

Telepathy is a design agency, previously known as Digital Telepathy, that focuses on the user-experience and user-journey aspects of web design, which is very clear through the content of their blog.

As a web designer, UX should always be on your mind, so do keep these on your reading list.

eWebDesign is another source of the latest and greatest articles with the latest web news and articles from web design experts. Features stories and web design blogs, web development and tutorials.

It's actually a newsletter, so you get stuff directly into your inbox!

9 lessons is essentially a programming blog, but since web development is such a huge part of programming nowadays, that by it's very nature you're going to find plenty of web design programming tips on any programming blog.

It's also a tech blog, but of course, any web designer is a techy, so there's plenty of great stuff you'll be finding here.

If you've been around web design for a while, you know that freebies are quite a common thing. So much so, that a site such as Web Appers can exist to point out as many open source and free web resources as possible.

The great thing is that articles posted on Web Appers are a great resource too.

We've seen plenty of sites dedicated towards design inspiration - so here's another. Webneel is there mostly for inspiration so most posts are a nice collection of imagery and designs batched up together to inspire.

ALT is a web design and development agency based out of Birmingham. They share some great articles about this niche, and you can see some of their great work in the sector. A great partner agency if you're looking for one based out of the UK.

Much of the graphics and posts are there for inspiration.

Besides plenty of freebies, Designzzz features articles about Photoshop, photography, web design blogs and awesome tutorials.

One for the CSS junkies. CSS Mania is the most popular CSS showcase site - that's not very different from saying this is a website showcase.

Again, a very good site to watch out for innovative web designs.

Now that we've seen a bunch of sites for designers, it's time to look at a few good web development blogs.

Scotch.io is known for writing extensive articles about hot development topics.

You'll find their articles are an excellent reference when you're just starting to use a particular technology, framework or technique.

Keep them on your radar.

GitHub is, of course, the biggest repository of (open-) source code.

There's so much going on around GitHub for web developers and web designers. But not only is GitHub a repository of code. With such a large community around, the GitHub blog is also a place for making huge announcements.

So do keep an eye out for what's happening on GitHub and beyond.

Dzone is a programmer community made up of more than a million members.

Not strictly web design per se, but if you're a web designer, you'll find much useful stuff for you here.

TreeHouse makes a very bold statement, although we do tend to agree. Web design, development, and related skills are the heart of today's tech industries so if you acquire the skills to get in there, you will be able to change the world. Ok, enough of that for now.

Besides being a site where people can learn web design and development skills, the TreeHouse blog also features plenty of excellent resources for web developers and designers.

CodePen is, of course, a playground for your front-end testing and experiments.

Since it's all updated and rendered in real-time, it's great for developing your front-end here. Besides that of course, it's an awesome place to get inspiration or pieces of code for reuse within your projects (as long as it's permitted by the license).

Not really one of the prominent web design blogs, but for sure one to keep your eyes on.

We've been hearing quite a lot about the demise of Java recently.

But that's just the Java browser plugin which has been neglected for years. But there are other areas in which Java is thriving. One of them is the Android ecosystem - Java is the programming language powering millions of lines of Android apps code, Android core and Android in general.

So if you're a Java geek, stop by here.

In the mobile app world, there is Android and then there is iOS. Really and truly, they're the ecosystems you want to focus most (if not all) of your effort on.

If your core focus is iOS - ManiacDev should definitely be one to follow.

ManiacDev is not the only iOS site you need to keep on your radar. RayWenderlich is an established authority on iOS, so stay tuned.

You'll find much guidance and tutorials here.

JournalDev is another Java focused site. As with most Java focused sites, there's plenty of stuff Android related, which has become somewhat of the dominant reason to use Java, though there is still stuff about Java EE, Web Services, iOS and plenty of other great articles which are pumped out of the site constantly.

Of course, given the popularity of this CMS, it's now to include a number of WordPress must follow blogs - because web design sites will most times also focus on WP.

WordPress has a huge following on the web. The thousands of companies making a living via WP have helped create an ecosystem where WordPress resources are a-plenty. From best-selling themes such as the most-popular ever - Avada theme, to plugins which one MUST install, these sites cover it all!

There's no lack of websites featuring how to do stuff with WordPress. Besides amazing free templates, since 2009, they have recently shifted goals to provide excellent tutorials and collections of themes and plugins for stuff which is very popular with WordPress.

Plenty of easy, and excellent tutorials to follow. If you work with WordPress, you need to have 85ideas on your radar.

1st Web Designer is run by (in their own words) a great community of digital professionals.

Looking at the actual people, you'll find that between them there's an immense wealth of knowledge.

You'll be doing yourself a disservice if you do not have 1st Web Designer on your reading list of blogs for web designers.

WPMU are an authority when it comes to WordPress.

They've been around WordPress for a very long time, and you can rest assured that they've probably got an article (or ten) about any topic you might dream of related to WordPress. They publish excellent WordPress articles, which you'll be doing yourself a disfavor if you don't follow them.

Of course, they provide plenty of excellent WordPress plugins which are very mature. Incidentally, we also (used) to blog here ;-)

iThemes is a commercial company based around the WordPress ecosystem.

But that doesn't keep them from providing excellent content for WordPress. Granted, they will have a bit of a slant towards some of the products they sell, but that doesn't take anything away from the value of the articles.

And all things being said, most of their plugins provide excellent value, so it's a win either way.

Another mostly commercial company that provides excellent WordPress content.

They're also the authors of the excellent Divi 3.0 theme and PageBuilder plugin, so they've already made very significant (positive) dents in the WordPress ecosystem. Their blog provides plenty of web design and WordPress content, so another one to follow.

Again, their themes and plugins will also make your web design life much easier so another win for you.

WP Explorer is mostly about premium WordPress themes and plugins.

However, like most of the companies that provide commercial WordPress themes and plugins they also offer a wealth of knowledge via blogs and articles about WordPress.

They also feature a web design freebies section as part of the blog, together with a Coupons section, so you really should not be missing out on anything which these guys post :)

We like the tagline of this site because who isn't privy to every drink being on the house ;-) Joking apart, WPTavern is another influential and established WordPress site.

Why? Because after changing several owners, the site was acquired by Matt Mullenweg himself.

WP Mayor founded by Jean Galea (another guy from Malta like us) has grown significantly since the time it was launched in 2010 and has become quite the influence in the WordPress community. They've always wanted to help the WordPress community grew, and they grew with the community.

Today they are the website of choice for WordPress news, articles, WordPress hacks, WordPress plugin reviews and so much more.

The site is run by Jean, who incidentally seems to have followed a web design trajectory which is quite similar to that of David from CollectiveRay.

CodInWP is another of those blogs who we enjoy being subscribed to.

They are not a huge site, but they have grown and they are happy to share their growth stories with us. Why, because everybody can learn from each other, and why not learn from each other's mistakes?

And as with the recent transparency trend, you'll see a monthly transparency report from these guys.

Torque, run by people such as Marie Dodson was established at around the time of WordCamp San Francisco in July 2013. Since then it's been an established news site featuring all things WordPress.

Their newsletter and news will make sure you are kept abreast of current WP news making the rounds.

Chris Lema is a blogger, public speaker, product strategist and WordPress evangelist. Being a WordPress evangelist, you'll know that he knows his stuff.

Matt - the guy who founded and is still much involved in WordPress. He is, of course, a huge huge influencer so it's good to listen to what he has to say. A real blog in this industry you'll need to follow for sure!

Flywheel is mostly known for their Local WordPress development environment, but their web design blog is a great resource too. Anything from design tutorials, to in-depth WordPress articles, together with suck stuff as freebies or trends.

Don't let the name fool you. Although it is geared mostly towards novice WordPress users, the quality you'll find here in unparalleled. Syed founded the site with the mission to advance WordPress and bloggers who use it.

WPNewsify is the new site by Peter Nilsson, the previous owner of WPDailyThemes. He's putting the same effort he used to put into WPDailyThemes, so we're sure we'll soon see this growing into an excellent site, full of fantastic content. Stay tuned.

WPKube's basic premise is to "create amazing information to educate readers around anything and everything WordPress". With a mission like that, one can have a pretty good expectation of what one will get from the site.

The site is run by a great team of WordPress enthusiasts and provide all sorts of great content, from very WP specific to information that any growing small business should know.

Bob's mission is teaching in what he describes a "non-geeky" style. That's not something easy to do, when you're speaking about a lot of tech stuff, so if you are able to pull it, you're doing something very right.

He's been around WordPress for a while and is quite involved in the community. He's a very regular poster, so it's a good to keep an eye out for his content.

WPLift started in 2010 as a way to share WordPress tutorials and has grown exponentially since then.

Of course, with that growth comes responsibility and the power of influence so the content obviously became better and better over time. WPLift now reaches hundreds of thousands of WordPress users per month.

Reviews, tutorials, coupons, free themes, and plenty more, do come to your sights on what's posted here if you work or use WordPress.

Just like quite a few of the web design blogs on this list, Pippin's plugins develops and sells WordPress plugins for a living.

And as with the other WordPress plugin developers, we've listed, their experience with WordPress brings about with it a wealth of knowledge they're very willing to share with the rest of us.

Their blog is once again something you should be looking at as a reference to increase and improve your WordPress knowledge.

Bianca from wpmail.me does an excellent excellent job of finding all the latest and greatest news around the WPosphere.

We are on that mailing list because there's always stuff that you shouldn't be missing.

So far, we haven't addressed WordPress developers much on our list.

Of course, some of you are going to be doing professional WordPress development. Tom McFarlin is the guy to follow to get a good perspective on professional WordPress development. He speaks about WordPress but from a hardcore techy perspective.

Still, of course, very good insight and there's much you can learn here too.

DigWp is a site run by Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks together with Jeff Starr, both of whom have extensive WP experience.

DigWp is the home for the book, Digging into WordPress, because as the guys say, blogs and books are perfect complements to each other when learning web technologies. That's, of course, something we've all learned through experience.

Of course, the site's blog has lots of great WP snippets - all learned and shared through experience, so you bet on the stuff being VERY useful.

Many of the times we Google for stuff related to WordPress development, we come across an article from CatsWhoCode.

The reason, of course, is quite obvious, CatsWhoCode is one of the most popular web development blogs around, aimed mostly at people who create and maintain websites and it's no wonder we've added them to our webdesign websites list.

WPRoundTable does things a bit differently from the rest of the blogs here. It presents a Hangout on Air with web designers, developers or other people who are in the WordPress and web design industry. The format alone makes great, because you can listen and learn whilst working maybe?

We've already featured a number of sites you can look at when looking for inspiration. However, what if you wanted to look at WordPress sites specifically?

We love WP to the rescue - a showcase of excellent sites created using WordPress.

WPArena is another site that pumps out WordPress content on a very regular basis. Whether it's talk about themes, WordPress plugins, hacks to get things done in a certain way, or how to do stuff with WordPress, there's plenty of useful stuff you'll find here.

Besides your regular WordPress tips and tutorials, WPEka also has regular interviews with WordPress influencers such as Chris Lema, Syed Balkhi, and plenty of others. Another site which we're very happy to follow.

The mission of this blog is quite clear from the title of the blog. And really and truly this is part of the mission statement of this website. They want to make your life simpler if you use WordPress.

And to that effect, you'll find plenty of great tutorials that allow you to get the most out of WordPress, in a way that simplifies everything.

ThemeShaper are the Automattic Theme Team - how's that for a tongue twister? This is the blog of this team, established in 2010. Of course, the level of blogging coming out of this site is extremely high, such as one would expect from a team which is such an intrinsic part of WordPress.

Rather than a strict focus on WordPress, the idea of this blog is how to use WordPress to create, maintain, and drive forward a digital business (in most times powered by WordPress). Of course, being a podcast, the format of this blog is different than most of those featured on this blog.

But there's plenty of great advice, so if you're a designer working on helping people whose business focuses on their site, make sure you're following this blog.

Every designer should know all about search engine optimizations, so the next few items are SEO blogs to keep you updated about this niche.

In the world of web design, search engine optimization is a critical factor in the success of the site. That's why we have included search engine optimization blogs as part of our reading list.

Joost from Yoast had long established himself as an authority in SEO, particularly around WordPress.

Besides stuff around the Yoast Plugin, you'll find plenty of essential WordPress SEO tips and tricks, so you'll definitely be doing yourself (and your WordPress site) a favour to follow Yoast's feed.

When doing SEO, you have to make use of some tools. There are too many things you need to be aware of. Now you can either make use of free tools or else pay for a great single tool like ahrefs.

Not only is ahrefs and excellent SEO tool, but their blogs are also insanely awesome actionable SEO tips which you really must not miss.

Brian Dean of Backlinko has set himself apart as the authority of getting links for your site. You should not miss any of his posts. They happen only once every few weeks, but when they do you can rest assured they will be things you must know and follow.

Another good SEO tool, is most definitely MOZ.

Rand Fishkin is another authority on SEO, and if for nothing else you should read or listen in on Whiteboard Fridays.

This stuff that you should learn, Rand tackles it really really nicely.

If you work with websites you're very likely to be very affected by anything happening within the world of search engines.

And any news in the world of search engines and SEO and closely followed and fully analyzed the experts at SELand.

Highly recommended to follow to make sure you don't get caught unaware in the vortex which is a Google algorithm update ;-)

SEW is another of the main SEO and search engine focused sites which is essential to keep abreast of changes that have to do with search engines.

Of course, the niche is more than just search engines, but everything around this very crucial industry, PPC, local search, Social, Analytics, content and everything else in between.

Another influential site whose mission is to create best in the industry marketing guides. And of course since most web designers are going to have to be working with marketers, it's a good reference to keep handy.

I'm not particularly fond of black hat SEO techniques.

With black hat SEO it's a short success story until Google catches up in the cat and mouse game. Then again, Black Hat SEO forum contains more than just black hat techniques - there's a lot of great useful information about SEO in general, web design, marketing, link building and plenty of others.

You'll also want to keep abreast with black hat SEO, because in reality, you might be competing against these techniques too.

If you follow SEO you might know that the two primary ranking factors of SEO are links and content.

We've covered backlinks just a couple of places up, so now it's time for content. Simply put, if your content is not the greatest, it's not going to rank. Fortunately, if you follow QuickSprout, the influencer in content, you'll learn much about creating better content.

Do yourself a favour and watch out for what they suggest.

There's, of course, hundreds of great content focused sites ( we could do a whole list about them only) but we really really love the stuff from CopyBlogger.

Once again, if you work with websites you should know at least a bit about content marketing, so you'd be very nicely covered by CopyBlogger.

Last but not least, another site related to Search Engine Marketing. Barry Schwartz and his team do an excellent job on this site too.

Love our web design blogs to follow list?

We hope you'll find this list of web design blogs to follow useful. WE won't be taking many suggestions re new blogs because it would become a linkfest in the comments, but we'd be happy to take your suggestions by private email. Also, if you like this list, remember you can download the OPML file to add to feedly.

Last but not least - we would be really happy if you shared it with your favorite web design groups and with people who you think would love to learn great web design and web mastering stuff in general.

About the Author Author: David Attard Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dattard/ David Attard David has been working in or around the online / digital industry for the last 18 years. He has vast experience in the software and web design industries using WordPress, Joomla and niches surrounding them. As a digital consultant, his focus is on helping businesses get a competitive advantage using a combination of their website and digital platforms available today.