Design & Development Digest : web design

Barriers to Engaging Web Design

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

For all intents and purposes, design is the most important part of a website when it comes to getting users to convert, and what matters more than that, right? Unfortunately, even on the most thoughtfully designed websites, there can be extraneous circumstances...(read more)

One-Directional Scrolling with Navigation that’s Sly (and Fly)

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:33:00 GMT

Navigation is a key element in any effective web design but often it plays only a secondary role. Sure, parallax websites completely weave navigation into the design experience but some might argue it’s, well, let’s just say a little over...(read more)

5 Exciting Web Design Headers for Sellers

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:25:00 GMT

The Web landscape is filled with hundreds of great brands, each of which has become successful over time for their own unique reasons. However, despite their success, it seems that the majority of the Web’s biggest and most recognizable brands tend...(read more)

Look Out Below! 15 Fabulous Footer Designs

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:51:00 GMT

One of the most literally overlooked aspects of website design are footers, the area at the very bottom of a page that provides information and links to other areas of the site or outside Web properties (such as social media profiles). All designers use...(read more)

CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:45:00 GMT

Responsive Web design (RWD) has taken the ‘Net by storm. RWD isn’t just trendy among designers, it’s useful to ensure a consistent user experience – something of increasing important with the diversity of screen sizes today. Fortunately...(read more)

Simplifiy Web Page Reviews Among Creative Teams

'Net Features : wm-designdev — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:23:00 GMT

It used to be that working collaboratively meant seemingly endless rounds of in-person meetings and an incessant need to keep in constant contact to ensure that everyone on your team was on the same page. Thanks to the Web and a slew of technological...(read more)

Get Fast, Free Access to Images with Foter

Michael Garrity — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:31:00 GMT

Picture this: You're a blogger, online journalist or Web developer in dire need of a great photo to really jazz up your latest piece of content or Web page. But finding the right one with access permissions is difficult and, depending on how Web-savvy you are, getting it uploaded to your site can be even harder.

Thankfully, we have Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to helping build a community of users to share content, usually photos and images, amongst one another. And now there is also Foter.com, a site that hosts more than 190 million Creative Commons images and provides them to content websites with fast and free access.

Users can find photos by using the site's search feature to look for specific tags or keywords, or by browsing their selection of categories, which includes everything from art and food to landscapes and music.

While the presence of hundreds of millions of Creative Commons-licensed images makes Foter.com an incredibly useful resource for Web developers and content publishers, the service's real selling point is its easy one-click insertion intentionally designed for convenience. After finding the perfect picture, users can re-size and position the image to best fit their Web page, and then they simply have to grab the image's embed code and paste it onto the site.

Images are also available for download.

Foter even has a WordPress plugin that helps developers utilize this stockpile of images in the creation of their sites and promotes the exact same functionality as Foter.com.

Try jquip for lighter weight code

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:53:00 GMT

Developers have welcomed new version of jQuery and jQuery mobile the past few weeks, but they are also being slowly introduced to another project worthy of their attention in jquip.

While many developers value the small size of jQuery (which is at just over 32KB), jquip or jQuery-in-Parts, is even smaller.

The core jquip.js is only 4.28KB (minified and gzipped) which is only 13% of the size of jQuery. The best part however is that jquip has 90% of the good parts of jQuery including the main $(selector), DOM traversal (eq, first, last, slick, prev, next, etc) and DOM modification methods (append, prepend, remove), and well as CSS class modification methods, event methods and utility functions. jquip also has a modular architecture so other jQuery facilities will be available as plugins which can be included as required.

With the push towards more nimble, lightweight code, jquip will likely be warmly embraced by developers interested in trimming the fat, particuarly in the age of smartphones.

Google’s Design Guidance for Instant Preview

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:10:00 GMT

Google has (fortunately) provided some guidance - although minimal - related to Web design with the release of Instant Preview today.

The development as was mentioned here makes great Web design imperative. Some of the suggestions Google has provided are open to interpretation and will surely initiate an immense amount of discussion moving forward.

While a good user experience should always be the focus of Web design, Google may just be forcing the hand of designers to keep distractions and extraneous content at a minimum. Site simplicity and message clarity are now of the utmost important courtesy of the introduction of Instant Previews.

Google is recommending avoiding interstitial pages, ad pop-ups and other elements that interfere with content as they will affect the preview and make screenshots less attractive. This should drive every single interactive media designer, media buyers and site owner over the virtual edge. Count on work-arounds (and perhaps an increase in cloaking) being released soon.

Perhaps most important in the short term is that some videos or Flash content in previews will appear as the dreaded “puzzle piece” icon or simply a black square. While Google is working on rendering these content types, perhaps it’s time you brush up on some HTML5.

Google has attempted to make it clear that Instant Previews does not change its search algorithm or how clicks are tracked. According to Google, “If a user clicks on the title of a result and visits your site, it will count as a normal click, regardless of whether the result was previewed.” Previewing a result, however, doesn't count as a click by itself.

If you are using the nosnippet meta tag on your pages (which will cause Google to not show a text snippet in its results) you may want to remove that as the tag will also not show previews.