Just because monitors have gotten bigger doesn’t mean we should jump into wide layouts all the time. See how these designs make use of narrower widths effectively.

This week on Friday Focus: excellent websites that happen to have fixed elements in them.

Welcome to the first Friday Focus of the year and the new decade! Here are some fantastically designed websites that should inspire you to be more daring and adventurous than ever starting right now. Ready?

This week, I’ve come across a lot of sites with sunbursts, a specific type of lighting that’s popular with not just the Web 2.0 look anymore. You decide if they’re crucial to the design or not.

Another dose of great sites with great illustrations that carry the design. Happy Friday the 13th Focus!

If last week we had clouds, this week we have planes! We’re keeping things up in the air this week on Friday Focus. (Still lots of clouds though.)

What is it about clouds that instantly transports us to a happy place? This week on Friday Focus, we’re featuring designs with white, fluffy clumps of water vapor in them.

This week on Friday Focus: websites featuring worlds that will fit right in your browser. It’s an interesting trend and a good exercise in 3D modeling and illustration.

This week on Friday Focus, we’re featuring light on dark sites with little to no use of color, just the neutral gray, brown, and black.

Design usually means arranging things in an orderly, meaningful manner, but this week we’re throwing that out of the window and going for chaotic and whimsical sites. Happy 4th of July weekend, everyone, and welcome to this week’s Friday Focus!

Backgrounds are so called for a reason. They’re meant to support and complement instead of attract and distract. This week’s featured sites, however, provide a whole other level of interactivity and usefulness to backgrounds. You decide if they’re a good idea or not. Either way, they’re interesting concepts that can only be executed on the Web, so, enjoy!

Don’t laugh! Don’t think it’s anything morbid, either! Let’s see how this week’s websites have made use of people’s heads as part of their designs.