We all want or pages to load as fast as possible. But when we develop our site, time constraints may prevent us from properly designing it for speed. Here are a few tips that should help:
1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables
2. Don’t use images to display text
3. Call up decorative images through CSS
4. Use contextual selectors
5. Use shorthand CSS properties
6. Minimize white space, line returns and comment tags
7. Use relative call-ups
8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content
9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents
10. Use / at the end of directory links
For a more detailed explanantion read over this article (.pdf).
There are seven serious usability mistakes that most corporate websites commit. Interestly, these common errors are often products of sound principles that Web designers mistakenly apply:
1. Too Much Introductory Text on Your Landing Page
The worst kind of filler copy usually starts with, “Welcome to our site”, click on the blah, blah, etc. Telling people what to do on your site futile. The user will go where he or she feels like. People generally read very little on a website. Instead, users scan the page, picking out words that are relevant to them.
2. Not Showing What Your Site Offers to Users
Many sites are horrible at explicitly stating what they offer and how their services or products differ from those of their key competitors. Keep in mind that users will only spend a few seconds to scan teh site for what they need.
3. Using Gratuitous Animation and Graphics on a Site
The dirty secret among site owners is that they love to see cool animation and graphics, even though these don’t contain real content.
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Color theroy is a set of principles that enables the creation of harmonious color combinations via the comprehension of color relationships. Making things more complicated is the fact that color theory doesn’t take tints, tones and shades into account, instead it concerns itself solely with the base hues themselves.
There are significant psychological aspects to color; it’s a cultural signifier and can even affect mood. Much of this works on an entirely subconscious level. Marketing and design decisions have long been influenced by the psychology of color. Color schemes are picked for their subconscious significance or for positive associations with the intended audience.
At the most basic level, colors can be categorized by their attributes. Red-based colors are warm, while blues are cool. The use of neutral colors such as black, greys and whites, as well as some browns and beiges with the chosen palette limited to accent colors, can help to calm down a design, bringing greater harmony to the palette.
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I was given the responsibility at my current previous employer to create an internet radio show. This was of course based upon my vast experience in radio engineering and broadcasting which mainly consisted of listening to Howard Stern for years.
After hours of online research and calling a few vendors, I was able to purchase and setup the equipment, work with an online service provider to stream the live feed, and allow the radio show to do remotes as well.
The specific requirements for the radio show I created are probably a little different than what you would need for individual internet podcasting (with telephone interview callers), but this will give you an idea of what would ideally be required.
Internet Radio Show Requirements
1. Allow up to six ‘personalities’ to speak on microphones
2. Ability to play sound effects and/or pre-recorded commercials
3. Ability for listeners to call into the show
4. Stream the show ‘live’ on the internet on a web page
5. Enable the show to go on remote.
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Not only are users browsing your website looking for a reason to engage, but they are speaking to a coworker, watching TV, holding a conference call…you get the point. Internet users are notorious for multi-tasking and, in addition, there are many options out there for users to find the same information on your Web pages.
Increasingly, people are looking for past company or brand as a lone source of information. They are looking to competing websites, message boards, forums and each other.
So how do we compete and keep the users on our sites?
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Raw XML is rarely suitable for direct presentation, and frequently must be organized, or transformed, to suit the needs of a specific output device. The most widely used option for this is XSLT. Older techniques such DTD and Schemas can be used as well, but as discussed in my first post about XML, XSLT was specifically created for this and should be used when possible.
XSLT provides an effective procedure – a tree transformation process – for manipulating XML at the level of elements and attributes. A special-purpose language, XSLT has features that simplify that task of defining transformations of XML.
Here is the xml file (.xml) that is used throughout the explanations.
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In a recent article from Visual Studio Magazine, Rod Stephens wrote an article on how to write better code for yourself as well as other people who may view it. These tips can be applied to almost any programming language (JavaScript, .NET, PHP, etc.) so it is useful for any web developer.
“A computer does exactly what the code tells it to do and doesn’t care what the code looks like. At the same time, it’s easy to forget that you write code for people, not computers. Ultimately, you are satisfying the requirements of a user somewhere, not just writing text that will execute in a vacuum. In a development environment of any size, the code you write will be reviewed and or maintained by other people, so you need to make sure that you are clear about your intentions.”
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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is based on the same parent technology as HTML or XHTML. XML looks a lot like HTML, complete with tags, attributes and values. But rather that serving as a lagnguage just for creating web pages, XML is a language for creating other languages. You use XML to design your own custom markup language and then you use that language to format your own documents. Your custom markup language, officially called an XML application will contain tags that actually describe the data that they contain.
If a tag indentifies data, that data becomes available for other tasks. A software program can be designed to extract just the information that it needs, perhaps join it with data from another source, and finally output the resulting combination in another form for another purpose. Instead of being lost on an HTML-based web page, labeled information can be reused as often as neccessary.
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The most extensible of all browsers is Firefox, which now has over 1,000 extensions. These are almost all cross-platform, so they work on Macs and Linux machines as well as Windows. They include debugging consoles, syntax validators, cookie manipulators, accessibility tools, manuals, and measurement tools. Add to that extensions that can rewrite the pages and stylesheets you’re using and suddenly Firefox becomes by far the most developer-friendly of all the browsers available.
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Microsoft will be releasing Expression Studio, a set of web-design and graphics software that will try to compete with tools from Adobe. These products are Graphic Designer Expression Design, Interactive Designer Expression Blend, Expression Web and Expression Media
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