This week, our favourites include resources to help you run an online store, get useful web design and development related information, manage and grow an online forum, find free vectors to use in your website’s design, and increase the usability of your site.

Get Elastic–The Ecommerce Blog

If you run an online store and you’re serious about ecommerce, then you need to visit Get Elastic, a blog entirely devoted to everything related to ecommerce.  This informative site is chock-full of in-depth and useful articles, tips, and news on merchandising, web design, email marketing, shopping cart abandonment, search engine optimization (SEO), customer service, usability, and much more!

tripwire magazine–handpicked goodies for Web Developers and Designers

If you’re a web designer or developer looking for inspiration, cheat sheets, tutorials, articles, and advice, then you need to check out tripwire magazine!  tripwire regularly publishes collections of useful tutorials on a range of different subjects, including Javascript, typography, icons, PhotoShop, and WordPress, making this site a great resource for novice and expert web designers and developers!

Community Spark–Buliding Online Communities

Running an online forum isn’t easy (it’s actually a lot harder than most people think), but Community Spark, a blog about building online communities, offers tons of articles and advice how to create and manage successful forums (as well as blogs, social networks, and chat sites).  Community Sparks can tell you how to optimise page titles in phpBB, deal with problematic members, make money from your online community, moderate forums effectively, and much more!

FreeVectors.net–Free Vector Art and Graphics

Incorporating vector elements into a website’s design is a great way to make it stand out from a sea of boring sites, and FreeVectors.net offers a large range of vectors for free!  All of the vectors on this site are free to use for personal purposes, and the majority of them can be used commercially (just be sure to check out the license details before you use a vector for commercial purposes).  Have some vectors that you created?  Submit them to FreeVectors.net for others to use!

Usability Post–Tips and insights into good design practices

This site isn’t your typical web design blog; instead of focusing on how websites look, Usability Post focuses on how websites work.  This is a fairly new site, so there isn’t a ton of content yet, but the limited amount of information on the site is really well written and useful.  This a great resource for information related to user experience, user interface, and browser compatibility.  Plus, unlike a lot of sites on usability, Usability Post is actually easy to navigate.  Kind of ironic, right?

Links to Our Favourite Blogs and Websites

Noupe>Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How -to
Six Revisions>18 Impressive Tutorials on Creating Vector Illustrations
Web Designer Wall>The Next Serif Trend
Pro Blog Design>30 Bad Practices of Web Designers
Designer Reviver>10 Tools for Quick & Effective Code Development