First, read Joe Gillespie’s post Web Design as a Career over at WPDFD, he takes a stab at why this particular phrasing of the question is so hard to answer and talks about the many jobs that fall under the broad term ‘Web Designer’.

WetFeet.com gives a more generic description of the career path, but it’s a great place to start out and is geared towards the student or recent grad.

As for actual resources to help you on your way, Design Mentor Training has a great resource page specifically for Graphic and Web Design.  A traditional career research tool is a ‘job outlook‘ – you can look at employment trends, how the industry is growing, and salary ranges.

For more reading, About.com has a great collection of articles on professional web careers.

Finally, experience is key and freelancing is a great way to build up your portfolio and continue to develop your skills.  Check out The Monster List of Freelance Job Sites (2009) for where to go to find jobs.  A few of our favorites: Freelance Switch, ELance, and Guru.

A new shopping cart software, Interspire, is easy to use and comes with marketing tools to help you grow your online business.  We also added email newsletter and marketing service Big Response to the Online Marketing section.

Another addition is Vitamin – and with the tagline ‘nourishment to help the web grow’ its become a favorite new resource.  Last, but not least, is ButtonLand – where you can find a ton of website buttons for free!

That’s only a sampling – so head over to the dashboard and check out what you’ve been missing.

Screenalicio.us – Browse thousands of websites sorted by color.

Colour Lovers – Ratings on thousands of user submitted color palettes. They even have a feature to find stock photos that match a certain color.

Color Selection

Color Palette Selector – Color palette and blending selection tool.

Color Blender – Another excellent tool for color matching and blending.

Color Harmony Selector – Find color complements for your RGB colors.

ColourMod Dashboard Widget – Free Apple dashboard widget for color selection.

Color Resources

Color Code Matching Chart – If the color matching tools listed above aren’t your thing, try this chart instead. View and compare hundreds of colors at once. (Pantone, CMYK and RGB hex).

Official RGB Color Names – Listing of all of the named RGB colors.

Color Grabbers

Palette Grabber Firefox Extension – One-click to download a website’s colors to an Adobe, Flash or Paintshop palette.

PagePainter – Grab colors directly out of your web browser.

There are also a few new sites to spark inspiration!  Selected Web-Design is a great gallery style site that allows users to search by design feature – pretty handy, and Moluv.com offers a gallery of favorite sites as well as success tips and a submission feature.

Last but not least we’ve added DesignDump – a really great resource for graphic designers, and Joyoge.com – a new social media/bookmarking site specifically for design-related resources.

Enjoy! And be sure to check the dashboard often – we’re still constantly adding new stuff.

Font Articles

How to Apply Typographic Style to the Web – Listing of best practices for using type on the web.

CSS Font Reference Sheet – Reference sheet for using CSS.

Font Collections

1000s of Free Font – Enormous collection of free fonts.

Fonts for Flash – Collection of pixel and super pixel fonts designed to look clear in Flash at small sizes and low resolutions.

Pixel Fonts – Collection of pixel font for use with Flash.

Font Tools

TypeTester – Compare website font sizes and settings.

Font Styling Wizard – Choose your font settings, click a button and you’ve got your CSS font code.

What the Font? – Upload an image of a font and What The Font will help you figure out where it came from.

Bitfontmaker – Software to create your own font.

Lipsum – Lorem ipsum dummy text generator.

SitePoint CSS Tutorials – Sitepoint’s collection of useful CSS tutorials for advanced CSS users.

CSS Slicing Guide – Tutorial covering how to create a CSS structure by slicing a single image file.

Position is Everything – Analysis of common CSS bugs and instructions on how to fix them.

Floatutorial – Comprehensive tutorial on using float with CSS.

CSS Properties – Alphabetical listing of every CSS property.

glish CSS Layouts – Examples of some basic cross-browser CSS layouts.

DynamicDrive Code Library – Collection of submitted CSS code samples showing how to make good looking menus, forms, divs and more.

Web Design Library – Extensive library of CSS articles, tutorials and example code.

CSS Font Reference Sheet – Reference sheet for using CSS.