1. First, know your website, what is it about and what does it do. When I’ve got a general idea, I do this nice trick: I visit as many websites as I can, screenshot the ones whose design I like, and keep all these screenshots in a folder. Then go through them one by one. This comes in handy for step 2:
2. Get a paper and a pencil and sketch the layout. Your layout must contain at least 3 basic things, the header (an identication to the website), the navigation spot and a place for the main content to go. Here, you can get very creative, positioning your elements and giving them lovely shapes.
3. Then you can go to your favorite image editor and basically draw your website, here is the step where you choose the colors and everything else related to the design part. Because the step after this is XHTML and CSS – turning your website to reality.

Now, it’s time to share my own tips!

1. Backgrounds:
   Check out BG Patterns, it’s a simple tool to help you create nice textures that you repeat so you get a lovely background for your websites.
   Now, what I like to do is to go to the “image” tab and get rid of the picture by changing its “opacity” to 1%. Then go to the “canvas” tab, choose a texture and increase its opacity.
   You can try this with different colors, for example: #394157 #4d2c07 or #114d07, many colors that don’t look nice alone as a background will look very awesome as a texture.
   This is a great tool, you can constantly see the changes you make by clicking “Apply Background” located under your picture.
   If you don’t like textures, check out Stripe Generator, or Tartan Maker. Those tools are totally free and actually nice.
2. Watch out your color combination:
   Sometimes I see some color combinations and .. either feel sleepy because they’re boring, or worse, feel tortured because they’re ugly. Now I understand we all got our own personal taste, but there are some combinations even green aliens hate:
   
3. CSS Tips:
   • A background with two colors (click for better quality):
     
     or more:
     
     Let’s take the picture above as an example, what you do is basically create a big div (#colors, for example) that contains those small divs (#red, #orange, #yellow, etc). When styling the big div (#colors) the trick is to use: position:absoulte; and give it z-index:-1; (so our content will be positioned above it).
   • Watch out your margin and padding, just a quick reminder of the difference:
     
   • Always remember to set width and height for your divs if you want to float them correctly.
   • Also don’t forget that IE doesn’t recognize opacity:0.x; use filter:alpha(opacity=x0); instead.

Resources:
:. The trick mentioned above I learned it from here.

First, let’s talk about the GSM standard. The Global System for Mobile communications is the most commonly used standard for mobile phones. It provides services such as text messaging, GPRS, worldwide emergency number (112) – i.e if you ever get lost in Africa, get robbed or attacked by a wild African tiger, dial 112 to get some help. ;)

Pretty cool, huh? The services it provides. No wonder why it’s so popular.

So now that we know where SMS comes from, we can jump to the encoding it uses. What are your first guesses? Mine were: When I type in English, plain text gets encoded to ASCII, that’s 7-bits per character.
But, I could type in French for example and still get the same space (160 characters). How do you explain that? (Because we all know the regular ASCII table doesn’t cover those characters.)
Extended ASCII? Where I get 8 bits per one character? Umm, no that’s wrong.

The encoding GSM uses for their SMS is one of three: their default 7-bit character set, their 8-bit character set or UTF-16.
Here’s (~89% of) the table for the 7-bit alphabet:

No need to have 8 bits per character after all. Those French, German, shocked face (Ö), semi-N’s (Ñ) characters are saved as 7 bits. NICE!

Now for the Arabic (or Russian, Chinese, etc.) letters, UTF-16 is used, where I have 16 bits for one character, allowing space for only 70 characters to exist. To make sure let’s do some math:

1. If I use the GSM’s default 7-bit alphabet,  the space available for me is 160 characters, each character is 7 bit, so:
   160 * 7 =  1120 bits per one message.
2. Now if I type in Arabic, I’d be using the UTF-16 character set, I have a space of 70 characters, each character is 16 bits, so:
   70 * 16 = 1120 bits.

Makes sense that numbers match, right? For one message you’re allowed of only 1120 bits, fill them with whatever characters you want.

Now, I’m done here. Do you know how brutal African tigers can be? Don’t hesitate to be as brutal with your comments below: ;)

Links:
- The 7-bit alphabet table from GSM_03.38_specification.pdf
- Tiger picture from bbc.co.uk.